Hello, I am trying to get some advice from experienced electricians and engineer workers on what jobs could be a good fit for my experience and skill sets. As well as advice on how to do a better job picking work that won't screw me over.

I am a nationally certified (NOCTI) Electromechanical Engineer. I got mentally/emotionally chewed up and spit out after working as a maintenance technician for a couple years as a young 'n dumb kid right out of school. I have kept my electrical skills sharp enough to wire up my own offgrid solar DC systems. I remember enough theory to do calculations and read schematics. My maintenance days have me somewhat familiar with electrical wiring, air duct systems, mechanical drives, pneumatic/hydraulic systems, PLC automation, and repairing broken parts with all manner of tools. I enjoy the feelings of satisfaction and capability that comes from successfully putting together and maintaining an efficient functioning system.

But im kind of scared to get back into the career field knowing how dangerous it can be (Ive mainly worked on 480v systems) and how little money I was paid before. On one hand I feel like I should use my highly technical skills and further a real career. However on the other hand every company i’ve ever worked for has screwed me over with promised training that never happened, severely understaffed stressed out maintenance teams who didn’t have the time or energy to spend teaching a newbie, and OSHA violations so egregious the inspectors were surely bribed.

I guess im trying to ask where I went wrong. What job paths are a better use of my skills that isn't so mentally and physically taxing? What are some red flags to look out for? What is contracting work like? Should I try to get into a union? I really don’t know if I want to get back into this career field and I don’t know if I want to commit to a 2 year apprenticeship contract.

Im kind of an environment guy who cares about clean energy and would love to be helping out the planet a little through my work sometimes I fantasize about working on solar arrays and renewable energy stuff.

Im pretty good with computers and IT, I use linux daily, can ssh into a remote server, port forward, and have set up some local services on my own network. I am a main developer of an open source project decently familiar with the basics of programming in lua and commiting with git. A lot of the older guys have appreciated my help navigating companies old poorly organized intranets for schematic scans and work orders.

I am in my mid 20s, single and from the US but willing to travel.

Managed this rig up a homemade induction heater from a 10$ board off amazon +7$ cigarette plug terminal cable

Induction heater is for my dynavap, the commercial ones are quite expensive and I figured it would be a cheap and easy project to make one up

I made a quick YouTube video showing the IH off :)

The Orb

The spherical bong is the Orb V2. Its an extremely simple yet highly functional piece that has TWO female intakes connected to a matrix perc. This allows you to combine smoke or vapor from two different sources with one inhale.

The orb also comes with a female outtake, a 2' long whip, and an insertable mouthpiece which opens up many options for switching between mouthpiece, whip or even connect to another piece for further filtration such as the intake of a bong filled with ice. In this shot I have a custom made 3' long silicon whip one end has the smoked glass whip that comes with orb whip and other side is arizer whip mouthpiece.

The Air Max

The cylindrical black device in the top intake port is the Arizer Air Max, a well engineered electronic dry herb vaporizer. Essentially it is a miniature electric oven which bakes your herb to produce vapor. Vapor is healthier than smoke, taste better, and you get decarbed flower as a usable byproduct instead of ashes which is used for making edibles and other things. Electronic dry herb vaporizers excel at ease of use and precise temperature control.

The Arizer air max allows you to swap out the glass pieces. Instead of a mouthpiece I have a 14mm Water Pipe Adapter (WPA) inserted into it which allows it to connect to the larger top insert of the orb.

The Dynavap M+ 2023

The metallic stick in the smaller 10mm intake port is the Dynavap m+ 2023. It is also a dry herb vaporizer, but is instead heated through torch or induction heater. The Dynavap allows for complete vapor extraction of herb .1G of herb in a Dynavap cal fill the orb with milky white clouds. Its tip acts both as a mouthpiece and a built in 10mm WPA allowing it to be inserted into the smaller 10mm intake of the orb.

Im not really a political person but the one thing I do care about is pot. Which candidate is most supportive of federally legalizing or at least bumping down the schedule 4 drug status of pot.

I wanted to power my extreme with my powerststion directly since its a 20v DC device, however arizer doesn't make car adapters. So I got clever.

This setup makes good use of my power stations 100w USBC-PD charger port by utilizing a special USBC-PD to DC input cable that lets you manually select the voltage you want the charger to put out. This is necessary since the extremeq doesn't have the tech to communicate with the charger, so this device communicates in its stead.

USBC-PD 100W can put out 20vdc at 5a, the extremeq consumes 20vdc at 1-3a, comfortably below the spec limits.

This is an excellent way to power your extremeq and other similarly power rated desktops right from a dc system/ portable battery without the horrible inefficiency of converting to ac just to convert back to DC.

Smokey's Simple Guide To Search Engine Alternatives

This post was inspired by the surge in people mentioning the new Kagi Search engine on various Lemmy comments. I happen to be somewhat knowledgeable on the topic and wanted to tell everyone about some other alternative search engines available to them, as well as the difference between meta-search engines and true search engines. This guide was written with the average person in mind, I have done my best to avoid technical jargon and speak plainly in a way most should be able to understand without a background in IT.

Understanding Search Engines Vs. Meta-Search Engines

There are many alternative search engines floating around that people use, however most of them are meta search engines. Meaning that they are a kind of search result reseller, middle men to true search engines. They query the big engines for you and aggregate their results.

Examples of Meta-search engines:

Format: Meta Search Engine / Sourced True Engines (and a hyperlink to where I found that info)

Duckduckgo / Bing has some web crawling of it own but mostly relies on Bing

Ecosia / Bing + Google a portion of profit goes to tree planting

Kagi / Google, Mojeek, Yandex, Marginalia, Requires email signup, 10$/month for unlimited searches

SearXNG / Too many to list, basically all of them, configurable, Free & Open Source Software AGPL-3.0

Startpage / Google + Bing

4get / Google, Bing, Yandex, Mojeek, Marginalia, Wiby Open source software made by one person as an alternative to SearX

Swisscows / Bing

Qwant / Bing Relied on Bing most of its life but in 2019 started making moves to build up its own web crawlers and infrastructure putting it in a unique transitioning phase.

True Search Engines & The Realities Of Web-Crawling

As you can see, the vast majority of alternative search engines rely on some combination of Google and Bing. The reason for this is that the technology which powers search engines, web-crawling and indexing, are extremely computationally heavy, non-trivial things.

Powering a search engine requires costly enterprise computers. The more popular the service (as in the more people connecting to and using it per second) the more internet bandwidth and processing power is needed. It takes a lot of money to pay for power, maintenance, and development/security. At the scales of google and Bing who serve many millions of visitors each second, huge warehouses full of specialized computers known as data centers are needed.

This is a big financial ask for most companies interested in making a profit out of the gate, they determine its worth just paying Google and Bing for access to their enormous pre-existing infrastructure without the headaches of dealing with maintenance and security risk.

True Search engines

True search engines are honest search engines which are powered by their own internally owned and operated web-crawlers, indexers, and everything else that goes into making a search engine under the hood. They tend to be owned by big tech companies with the financial resources to afford huge arrays of computers to process and store all that information for millions of active users each second. The last two entries are unique exceptions we will discuss later.

Examples of True Search Engines:

Bing / Owned by Microsoft

Google / Owned by Google/Alphabet

Mojeek / Owned by Mojeek .LTD

Yandex / Owned by Yandex .INC

YaCy / Free & Open Source Software GPL-2.0, powered by peer to peer technology, created by Michael Christen,

Marginalia Search / Free & Open Source Software AGPL-3.0, developed by Marginalia/ Martin Rue

How Can Search Engines Be Free?

You may be wondering how any service can remain free if it needs to make a profit. Well, that is where altruistic computer hobbyist come in. The internet allows for knowledgeable tech savvy individuals to host their own public services on their own hardware capable of serving many thousands of visitors per second.

The financially well off hobbyist eats the very small hosting cost out of pocket. A thousand hobbyist running the same service all over the world allows the load to be distributed evenly and for people to choose the closest instances geographically for fastest connection speed. Users of these free public services are encouraged to donate directly to the individual operators if they can.

An important take away is that services don't need to make a profit if they aren't a product to a business. Sometimes people are happy to sacrifice a bit of their own resources for the betterment of thousands of others.

Companies that live and die by profit margins have to concern themselves with the choice of owning their own massive computer infrastructures or renting lots of access to someone elses. You and I just have to pay a few extra cents on an electric bill that month for a spare computer sitting in the basement running a public service + some time investment to get it all set up.

As Lemmy users, you should at least vaguely understand the power of a decentralized service spread out among many individually operated/maintained instances that can cooperate with each other. The benefit of spreading users across multiple instances helps prevent any one of them from exceeding the free/cheap allotment of API calls in the case of meta-search engines like SearXNG or being rate limited like 3rd party YouTube scrapers such as Invidious and Piped.

In the case of YaCy decentralization is also federated, all individual YaCy instances communicate with each other through peer-to-peer technology to act as one big collective web crawler and indexer.

SearXNG

I love SearXNG. I use it every day. So its the engine I want to impress on you the most. SearX/SearXNG is a free and open source, highly customizable, and self-hostable meta search engine. SearX instances act as a middle man, they query other search engines for you, stripping all their spyware ad crap and never having your connection touch their servers.

Here is a list of all public SearX instances, I personally prefer to use paulgo.io All SearX instances are configured different to index different engines. If one doesn't seem to give good results try a few others.

Did I mention it has bangs like DuckDuckGo? If you really need Google like for maps and business info just use !!g in the query.

Other Free As In Freedom Search Engines

Here is Marginalia Search a completely novel search engine written and hosted by one dude that aims to prioritize indexing lighter websites little to no JavaScript as these tend to be personal websites and homepages that have poor Search Engine Optimization (SEO) score which means the big search engines won't index them well. If you remember the internet of the early 2000s and want a nostalgia trip this ones for you. Its also open source and self-hostable.

Finally, YaCy is another completely novel search engine that uses peer-to-peer technology to power a big web-crawler which prioritizes indexes based off user queries and feedback. Everyone can download YaCy and devote a bit of their computing power to both run their own local instance and help out a collective search engine. Companies can also download YaCy and use it to index their private intranets.

They have a public instance available through a web portal. To be upfront, YaCy is not a great search engine for what most people usually want, which is quick and relevant information within the first few clicks. But, it is an interesting use of technology and what a true honest-to-god community-operated search engine looks like untainted by SEO scores or corporate money-making shenanigans.

Free As In Freedom, People vs Company Run Services

I personally trust some FOSS loving sysadmin that host social services for free out of altruism, who also accepts hosting donations, whos server is located on the other side of the planet, with my query info over Google/Alphabet any day. I have had several communications with Marginalia over several years now through the gemini protocol and small web, they are more than happy to talk over email. have a human conversation with your search engine provider thats just a knowledgeable every day Joe who genuinely believes in the project and freely dedicates their resources to it. Consider sending some cash their way to help with upkeep if you like the services they provide.

Self-Hosting For Maximum Privacy

Of course you have to trust the service provider with your information, and that their systems are secure and maintained. Trust is a big concern with every engine you use, because while they can promise to not log anything or sell your info for profit, they often provide no way of proving those claims to be true beyond 'just trust me bro'. The one thing I really liked about Kagi was that they went through a public security audit by an outside company that specializes in hacking your system to find vulnerabilities. They got a great result and shared it publically.

The other concern is that there is no way to be sure companies won't just change their policies slowly over time to creep in advertisements and other things they once set out to reject once they lure in a big enough user base and the greed for ever increasing profit margins to appease shareholders starts kicking in. Companies have been shown again and again to employ this slow-boiling-frog practice, beware.

Still, If you are absolutely concerned with privacy and knowledgeable with computers then self hosting FOSS software from your own instance is the best option to maintain control of your data.

Conclusion

I hope this has been informative to those who believe theres only a few options to pick from, and that you find something which works for you. During this difficult time when companies and advertisers are trying their hardest to squeeze us dry and reduce our basic human rights, we need to find ways to push back. To say no to subscriptions and ads and convenient services that don't treat us right. The internet started as something made by everyday people, to connect with each-other and exchange ideas. For fun and whimsy and enjoyment. Lets do our best to keep it that way.

From what I can gather this conflict as been going on a long time and the Hamas group has existed for a while too. Why are all the news cycles suddenly focusing on this the past few weeks?

I am doing research on best practices for my lithium batteries and lifepo4 powerstation. There's some conflicting opinions and variation for cycle numbers.

Will leaving my things plugged in at 100% hurt it more than constantly unplugging at 80% and replugging at 20%?

My current means of powering things is USB rechargable batteries. I have a about five of them that range between small 3000-5000mah ones to a big 20000mah interstate battery jump starter pack. Is there a device that lets me add all their power together into a centeral power source so I don't have to keep swapping them out?