• 14 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • The 40AY is the second generation USB-C dock, if you pair it with a 135 W power supply it will charge at 95 W.

    As you say though, I also just figured it out: unlike the 40AY, the 40AV has two peripheral USB-C ports on the dock itself. Each of them can supply 5 V at 3 A, meaning the dock needs at least 65 W + 2*15 W, which exceeds the lower spec 90 W power supply. And because it likely makes no sense for Lenovo to create more power supplies with (seemingly) random wattages, they must have used the next largest which is 135 W.



  • I really wouldn’t get anything with a 6th gen core or older, you’re really gonna notice the age of those CPUs in day to day use.

    For 200 €, it’s possible to find T14/L14 Gen1 and Gen2 ThinkPads on used sites like Kleinanzeigen in Germany. the T14 is built a bit better, but usually also more expensive. The L14 has two RAM slots, the T14 has one slot and one “module” soldered. Then there’s also the T14s and L14s, which are a bit slimmer. Beware that all T14s models have fully soldered RAM, I’m not sure about the L14s.

    My recommendation would be to scour used sites and get an L14 Gen 2 with an i5 11th gen, 256 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM or better. It might take a few weeks of waiting, but at least in Germany it’s doable for 200 €. And an 11th gen i5 is going to run absolute laps around and i5 6th or i7 5th gen.







  • Basically, amps tell you how fast electricity is moving. If you have a certain amount of amps running through your body, it will kill you (I think technically no matter the voltage?).

    Why doesn’t every battery kill you? Electricity at low voltages doesn’t have enough “strength” to push through your body, as your (electrical) ressistance is very high. The higher the voltage, the higher ressistance it can overcome.

    So if you touch say 12 V, only very very few microamps will flow through your body, which doesn’t matter.
    When you touch 230 V, now the electricity is strong enough to push somewhere between 10 - 100 mA through your body, which will kill you.
    (No guarantees that the amperage numbers here are correct, but the scale should roughly work out I hope).

    It all boils down to $U = R \cdot I$ (Voltage = Ressistance * Current).

    If you want to learn more about the subject, ElectroBoom has some great videos.








  • I’ve been running an HP ProDesk 600 G4 mini (i5-8500T, 32 GB RAM) for a few years now and am very happy. I bought it with 8 or 16 GB RAM and a 256 GB M.2 for 140 €. It can fit one 2.5" SATA drive and two M.2 2280 drives. I have it running 24/7/365 with 2x2 TB M.2 SSDs and a 256 GB boot SSD and it usually uses around 7 Watts.

    If you want to go the HP route, ProDesk 600 and EliteDesk 800 have two M.2 slots, while the ProDesk 400 only has one.

    Alternatively, Lenovo and Dell also have similar formfactor PCs, but I don’t remember their names.

    Performance wise, the 8th gen i5 is more than fine for TrueNAS and 10-15 docker containers.