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Battery science is so interesting!
Warm-up: Apple Pencils
These are essentially impossible to repair. At $100 each, the first generation has little to no discernible dismantling points. The repair itself is like $25. There are no buttons, so the pencil automatically turns on whenever motion is detected. If you leave the pencil out for a long time, the battery drains. If you let the lithium-ion battery drain stay drained for too long, it’s kapoot. It’s dead.
Reddit - Found my Apple Pencil 2nd Gen…
Thankfully the smart people on Reddit have a pro-tip, where if you heat up the pencil and then charge it again, sometimes you can “re-activate” the chemistry inside the lithium-ion battery to coerce it to work as normal.
BIOS settings and Wake on Lan
I had to set up a weird system where I put a backup computer on a second network, then remote-desktop into that from my original location, and access a VPN through the second network. It’s a tough setup! Initially I was going to tailscale ⇒ wake on lan ⇒ parsec into it, but I got stuck because Parsec ports get blocked by the VPN.
Battery charging to only a certain level
It’s not ok to leave a laptop plugged in constantly. Having the battery at 100% constantly is bad - Li-ion batteries prefer being around 30-70%, colloquially. And if you are using the device at the same time, the minor drain on the battery will be instantly charged up again, doing this sort of “micro-charging” which is also bad for the battery.
A sign of a good laptop is one that will allow you to manually set a limit on the charge level, so you can have your laptop plugged in but not charging. Another one is if you can go into the BIOS settings and enable Wake on Lan, or wake on VLAN.
Wake on LAN
Ideally this works by having one internet-enabled smaller device, like a Raspberry Pi, which is always on (this is the intended mode for devices like this) and can therefor constantly “listen” for a trigger by the user (me). Upon triggering, it can send a magic packet through the local network that it’s connected to, and the Wake-on-LAN enabled device will be listening for only that specific packet over Ethernet, and will power on upon receiving this packet.
Basically, the Pi is like the power button that you can toggle over the internet as long as you’re connected to it somehow.
Some devices have wake on WLAN too! I haven’t tried it yet. Also all of this relies on having ethernet connections. Anyone have a network switch?
Network ports and VPNs
I typically use two pieces of software to operate my devices remotely - Parsec and Tailscale.
Tailscale
Tailscale is just a company that provides private VPNs free for personal use. It’s like a second, virtual “layer” of network connectivity that I imagine my devices are all on. There’s probably a better explanation for it.
It uses Wireguard under the hood, which then opens up a port on your network to communicate through.
Parsec
My friend said they used to use Parsec to play local-only multiplayer games with others during the COVID pandemic. Thus it has really great low-latency and resolution options. It’s like using a remote desktop. If you install it for all users on a computer, it’ll start up on boot, which is what I need in order to access my computers after waking them with WOL.
Parsec Connectivity Requirements
The Parsec application communicates with our backend via TCP, with our STUN server via UDP, and peer-to-peer with other Parsec hosts via UDP. All TCP traffic is encrypted and uses port 443, STUN UDP traffic uses port 3478, and the encrypted peer-to-peer UDP traffic uses port ranges specified in Parsec Settings or the configuration file.
VPN!
I need to get onto a VPN to access a separate remote machine. This one isn’t controlled by me, but I need to get work done on it. It’s tough, because turning on this VPN blocks both Tailscale and Parsec on the host device. So I lose control of the device with my typical methods of approach.
Teamviewer
I just needed something that would let me remotely access another screen without the ports that typically get blocked. Surprisingly, Teamviewer works great! I’ve only ever heard of it in scam contexts - like “Don’t allow a stranger to control your device with Teamviewer”. I think it was required for me to create an account though.
TeamViewer—The Digital Workplace Platform
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