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posted by on Sunday April 19 2020, @03:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the economics dept.

So, COVID-19 (coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, whatever you call it) sucks a bit for your health but it turns out it sucks a lot for the economy. So we're extending any subscriptions that were going to expire before then out to June first (this may be extended a time or two depending on how well our savings hold up). Yeah, we know we're an extremely small cap entity and that's not going to make a whole lot of difference but it's something we felt we should do anyway for a couple reasons.

First, we as a corporation do not have paid employees. The only people we give money to are our hosts, our registrar, our CPA, and the revenooers. Which we're going to have to continue doing regardless and which we can currently afford to do for a month or two without dire risk of having to make infrastructure cutbacks. Putting money into us during this nonsense doesn't help much in directly putting food on someone's table or keeping jobs from going poof, so we'd prefer you guys put anything you were going to send us to work where it will help at least a tiny bit in keeping the businesses that your neighbors work at afloat. Which is to say, spend it locally.

Second, we're quite fond of the folks who've chosen to financially support the site and we don't want them to get dinged because of something that wasn't remotely their fault.

Now we're not shutting down the site's subscription functionality. If you feel a desire to contribute anyway, we're happy to oblige and we're not going to tell you that you can't. We're not the bosses of your wallets and it would mean extra work for me when I don't really have time to do much of anything code/admin-wise.

Also, we're only doing this automatically for current and new subscribers; we don't want to hit people who weren't interested with an unsolicited email about subscription expiration when we have to shut the extensions down. They may have quit subscribing or even frequenting the site and it's annoying as all get out to keep getting emails from sites you stopped doing business with on purpose. We're happy to handle it manually, though, if your subscription ended any time since the first of the year. Just drop a comment to this journal entry (NOT to THIS story!) and I'll take care of it as often as I have time (at least once a day).

That's all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled mix of discussion, debate, yelling at each other, and trolling.

(Oh, and you can still submit stories, too! Hint hint! --martyb)

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @07:48PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @07:48PM (#984885)

    So few post that I read at 0 or -1 just to have something to read. Tech stories tend to have even less post. Poly-turds stories always brings the most post. Esp. T-potus related.
    Just keep the porn-axx from posting and i can deal with the rest of the crap at -1.

    Anyway... thanks....

    PS. Anyone know of a ESP8266 based car battery charger? My google fu is not getting anything but Li-Ion PS for the MPU.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by NickM on Sunday April 19 2020, @08:14PM (2 children)

    by NickM (2867) on Sunday April 19 2020, @08:14PM (#984896) Journal
    Have a look at this https://www.electronicsforu.com/electronics-projects/arduino-controlled-automatic-battery-charger, [electronicsforu.com] it's arduino based but it should be easy to port the design to the ESP8266. The key thing to consider when charging lead batteries is gassing voltage, so don't exceed 14.2V when charging a standard 6 cells car battery. Also make sure that the battery is properly watered before charging it. The number come from memory and I validated them there https://www.powerstream.com/SLA.htm [powerstream.com] .
    --
    I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @01:07AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @01:07AM (#984977)

      Don't think it needs a whole Arduino, but I would like a solar charger for my car that has a regulator to avoid overcharging. It should include a temp sensor, since the correct float voltage for lead acid changes with temperature. That car sits a lot and like many newer cars will run it's own battery down in a couple of weeks.

      Because it's often cloudy here, I think I need a larger panel, so it will work when we're socked in, but then risk the overcharge on sunny days.