I've been seeing a lot about Sodium-ion just in the past week.
While they seem to have a huge advantage in being able to charge and discharge at some fairly eye-watering rates, the miserable energy density would seem to limit them to stationary applications, at least for now.
Perfect for backup power, load shifting, and other power-grid-tied applications though.
I too have an oddly specific one of these, which is tartare sauce.
I actively dislike all three of mayonnaise, gherkins, and capers. Mix 'em together though? Brilliant.
It can be a one-time setup.
Right up until your laptop gets its motherboard replaced and won't boot due to a MOK-signed module (in my case it was ZFS, which I needed for the machine to actually function).
At which point you
sudo mokutil --import /var/lib/shim-signed/mok/MOK.der (for Ubuntu derivatives and probably others), in case someone finds this post in the future.If you have a BIOS password, encrypted filesystem, and all the other moving parts that make having secure boot enabled actually a meaningful exercise, this is neither a fun, nor particularly quick process.
As for modules being signed automatically when built by DKMS, I've never had an issue with that.
To note: this appears to be a move from 5 years (standard, free) + 5 years (extended, paid) to 5+7. Users not paying Canonical aren't getting anything different as to with prior LTS releases.
Standard free support for 24.04 is still 2024-04 through 2029-06.
There definitely are vendors ignoring common sense and putting socket SP5 on desktop boards.
No argument about the price, I think list on these is something like $13k USD.
Their top-of-the-range Epyc 9684X has 1152MB :)
p is stored in the balls...
Specs look good for the price, and those machine work great with Linux (I'm using Ubuntu 22.04 on the slightly earlier 9310 right now).
The only slight downside of the 9315 is that the SSD is soldered to the motherboard. Make sure you back up your data regularly, because there might be no way to get anything off the machine if it breaks.
There's also something of a lack of IO; just one USB-C on each side (which is nice, because you can plug the charger into either side). But I have no issues with Bluetooth headphones, and monitors with USB-C have always worked great for plugging larger numbers of peripherals in.
It looks like it goes away (I went into the settings for one contact, where there's a toggle to switch back to SMS/MMS).
Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to change it back to RCS for that conversation now.
Also, on a more personal note: the baby blue background is ugly AF. Like actually just heinous. I'd rather it wasn't there, you get a perfectly good indicator RIGHT ABOVE THE TEXT INPUT FIELD what it's about to send.
I recently bought a Boox Palma, which is a phone-size Android device with a real E-Ink display.
It's not a phone (WiFi/Bluetooth only, no mobile radio), and with 4-bit greyscale it's definitely an adjustment to use with a lot of apps (it has per-app DPI & contrast controls to help), but they've done a lot of work on the refresh rate to make it feel responsive.
It even has midrange-phone specs (SD 6xx series CPU, 6GB RAM, 4Ah battery), with full Google Play, so it's a quite usable Android device overall. Like most modern E-Ink devices, has a CCT warm-to-cool frontlight, so great for night-time use.
Now would I want to use it as my only, everyday device (if it was a phone too)? Probably not. Could I? Almost certainly.
Colour E-Ink is still quite limited (in contrast, and resolution), but I expect the patents on that are quite a bit newer and we won't be seeing so much movement in that area so soon.
I'm more disturbed that the labelling on the box is in comic freaking sans.
Unfortunately what's shipping today seems it would offer maybe half that.
For the batteries that were announced this past week, a larger-than-refrigerator-sized cabinet held a capacity of around 15kWh.
Around half the energy density by mass of Lithium batteries, and in the order of a sixth of the density by volume.
Now if only we could come up with a system where your car could be charged while stopped at traffic lights, we might be onto a winner (:
Considering however that the price of sodium is around 1-2% that of lithium, I expect we will see significant R&D and those numbers quickly start to improve.