@aard - eviltoast
  • 10 Posts
  • 598 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • You’re joking, but quite possibly he’d not even want to buy the one.

    The owner family is very reclusive after a kidnapping in the 70s - but we know at least that the founders were living relatively frugal.

    Ownership of Aldi is by a handful of “stiftungen” - and one of the more recent judicial squabbles in the family were of one side accusing the other trying to pull more money out of Aldi than necessary to live a non frugal livestyle.

    Don’t get me wrong - they’re billonaires, though probably quite limited liquid assets. But based on their behaviour they have a good chance to survive the revolution.




  • I’ve been using an Arm notebook with Windows for over a year now (not as main system, but development system for a customer project). I’m running a lot of x86 software (like Emacs) as a gcc port for Windows/Arm is being developed only now - with no problems. It integrates nicely into the native stuff - which is one area where you run into issues on the Mac: If you start a shell in rosetta it’s annoying to make calls to native arm binaries.

    The only issue I ran into were some drivers not available for Arm - emulation layer (unsurprisingly) just is for userland, not kernel drivers. Also x86 emulation isn’t working well if Windows is running in a virtual machine on MacOS - but supposedly that’ll be fixed in the upcoming Windows release.

    All of this only applies to Windows 11 - if for some reason you decide to run Windows 10 on Arm you’re in a world of pain.


  • Screen is another thing - but I can live with that, mostly - it’s a bit hard to find x86 notebooks with decent resolution (not talking retina style, just better than “1080p on a 14 inch display”). And while the screen itself is nice on the apples I’d prefer a lower resolution one if I can get a matte screen instead.

    But fact is that nobody wants to sell you a proper x86 notebook. It’s almost impossible to find something with more than 32GB of RAM, and while there are a few with more than 64GB they’re all xeon based monsters larger than 16", as far as I can tell can’t really be ordered, and have a price tag equal or larger to a full spec 14" mac book pro. And obviously you can’t really think about battery life with intels space heaters.

    It’s especially sad as current mobile Ryzen CPUs could very well compete with Apples ARM CPUs - the one thing Apple is better at is the absolute low power state, as soon as it has too actually do something the power (and TDP) curve is very close to mobile Ryzen. But pretty much every manufacturer fucks up the thermal design, or gimps it in other ways.








  • The space used by the smallest solar charger I’ve seen on Amazon seems to be similar to 6 or more batteries in the format the N900 was taking - so if you look at space, slow charging from solar charger, and reliance on sun conditions taking individual batteries seems to be the better option for a few days hike. It’s also easier to stow individual batteries to wherever you still have space left.