I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.

Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Ty. Sorry it was a grumpy warning :(

    From memory, it felt like the electrostatic discharge that used to happen whenever I was touching my car.

    That’s likely a valid comparison. Some parts of the tube might give you the same style of event as static electricity discharge when you touch them. Other parts would give you something more though :D so please don’t take this as a generalisation.

    Interestingly, the PC suffered no damage at all and didn’t blow its internal fuse, either.

    Fuses are OK as fire prevention devices, but mostly useless as electrocution prevention. They blow based off power draw and time. Many human-electric interactions don’t actually draw that much power or last that long when compared to normal circuit power draws & timescales.


  • WaterWaiver@aussie.zonetoRetroGaming@lemmy.worldBuilt to last
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    2 months ago

    Thankfully, it must have been all volts and no amps so I was OK, even though I let out quite the yelp. 😁

    Complete myth. Please don’t repeat this. It’s not even remotely close to a generalisation, it’s completely wrong and dangerous.

    (Sorry, pet peeve of mine. Have had family members happy to play with mains wires but terrified to touch car batteries for fear of death)

    100mA through someone can be harmless. 1mA through someone can be fatal. Lethal conditions occur under certain complex circumstances involving not just voltage/current, but frequency, exact waveforms, duration, contact points and the individual’s physical parameters (human skin resistance varies a LOT, it’s not an insignificant factor).

    The most commonly encountered electrical hazards involve 50/60Hz 120/230V mains and hand/foot dermal contacts. This is a lethal combination that can cause heart fibrillation. Even 5mA or 100VAC can cause this (sometimes you will see lower numbers cited, “it depends”). Death can occur a day later, see immediate medical attention if you believe you have been shocked by mains wiring.

    At very high frequencies our nervous system is not sensitive, so we can pass larger amounts of current or deal with higher voltages without much harm. I’ll still hedge this with “it depends”, you can get thermal burns (which if on the eyes includes blindness) and pathways through the body vary with contact points, changing the risks.

    Static electricity discharges can be crazily high voltages and currents (many amps, sometimes hundreds of amps). Yet they are not a hazard.

    The high voltages in your CRT will supply very high currents when applied to dermal contact points on the human body. This will likely induce involuntary muscle contraction. Prolonged contact could cause burns and unwanted chemical reactions to occur internally, but is unlikely to cause heart fibrillation because of the non-repeating DC nature and you would have to override your reflexes.


  • WaterWaiver@aussie.zonetoRetroGaming@lemmy.worldBuilt to last
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    2 months ago

    I was young and did not have access to soldering irons. So I bridged the two pins with aluminium foil and sticky tape.

    It would slowly peel off and my controller would suddenly stop working mid game. I couldn’t reboot the console because I couldn’t save (no VMUs). So I’d fix it live – I’d leave the screws out of the case, jiggle my fingers in there and fix it.

    This was fine, worked for most of a year. Until I killed the console by accidentally touching the controller PCB to another PCB whilst doing this fix. I still have the corpse somewhere, to this day I still feel awful about it.







  • WaterWaiver@aussie.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlmmmm tasty carbon
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    9 months ago

    I swear that I read that white lead oxide is water soluble, thus happily sticks to your fingers and then gets on your food. I must be misremembering.

    Maybe it was something about the solid lead object turning into an (oxide) powder that can then be easily ported as tiny particles on greasy hands? Hearsay science and safety information from me today :)


  • WaterWaiver@aussie.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlmmmm tasty carbon
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    9 months ago

    The fun thing about Pb is it’s relatively safe in pure form. Unfortunately the oxides that appear on its surface are water soluble and love entering our bodies.

    Just looked this up, apparently I’m completely wrong. Maybe I was thinking about lipid compatibility? Not sure now.



  • Bleepingcomputer’s title and article are very misleading, the presentation did NOT reveal a backdoor into an ESP32. It looks like Bleepingcomputer completely misunderstood what was presented (EDIT: and tarlogic isn’t helping with the first sentence on their site).

    Instead the presentation was about using an ESP32 as a tool to attack other devices. Additionally they discovered some undocumented commands that you can send from the ESP32 processor to the ESP32 radio peripheral that let you take control of it and potentially send some extra forms of traffic that could be useful. They did NOT present anything about the ESP32 bluetooth radio being externally attackable.

    Another perspective that might help: imagine you have a cheap bluetooth chipset that is open source and well documented. That would give you more than what the presentation just found. Would Bleepingcomputer then be reporting it’s a backdoor threatening millions of devices?