Refurbishers on eBay

Ah, well, that limits things a bit then.

I have refined tastes when it comes to laptops, but I’m also cheap, so lightly used high end models are right up my alley. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any [brand new ones] I would stand behind that are in that price range other than maybe a Macbook Neo, but you specifically ruled out ARM (they’re also not supported by Ashai Linux yet, either).

Sorry.

Are you married to a new one?

I pretty much exclusively buy used ~3 year old Thinkpads which meet all of your specs. My last two were X1 carbons (7th gen and now a 9th gen). Each cost me about $450.

Interesting or useful?

I don’t think I have any really interesting ones, but the most useful one I have for people is “Always On”.

Basically when I see that tag, I can mentally prepare myself and roll my eyes before reading. Basically it’s for people who just do nothing but preach at you regardless of the topic being discussed. It’s…pretty useful.

Linemen are some crazy hard workin’ people … I hope their off days are filled with good whiskey and agreeable women or men as needed.

Definitely. In modern society, they’re right up there with firemen, paramedics, etc as far as “thank you for your service” goes.

When they’re working near me, I always offer them cold drinks or snacks. That’s something I started doing during the earlier mentioned two week outage when they finally got to our area. The temps were in the mid 90s, the air was swampy, and I was roasting in shorts and a t-shirt. They’re out there working in heavy protective gear. I appreciate them as much as I do not envy them which is a LOT.

rained like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock,

I absolutely love this brand new sentence. Or, at least that’s one I’ve never heard before.

Sustained straight-line high winds scare the bejeezus out of me. There was a derecho in my area many years ago. Didn’t seem too awful at the time and in the midst of it, but when it was over, we were without power in a heatwave for almost two weeks. Fun times.

Glad your electric co is on the ball.

Ever lived in a small town? Drama and gossip is fun

Yes, I have, and no it’s not. It’s just all there is except for high school football, making more kids, and the same drama and gossip but on Facebook. IMO that’s why small towns are so toxic once you get past the thin veneer of “small town charm”. Couldn’t wait to leave the one I grew up in.

And after re-reading OP’s opinion, I starting to see the parallels.

That’s really cool. Must have missed that post.

Is that reading from a rain gauge or rain barrel or what?

I’ve got 4x55 gallon rain barrels and have wanted to add a sensor so I could check how full they were from Home Assistant. So curious where you’re getting your graph data and if that’s something that might help me with mine.

Hank Hill, apparently.

I don’t use Facebook and use all the ad blockers, but apparently I’m still tracked by IP.

When my SO and I started dating, he hooked to my wifi one day and immediately started getting ads on Facebook for various lawn care products. He’d never had those come up before, lived in an apartment all his adult life, and has never searched for any kind of gardening supplies.

I, on the other hand, do have a lawn that I take care of and frequently shop for various landscaping stuff. But he gets the ads for them.

I feel like this is the kind of joke Frasier would have told Freddy when he was a kid.

Literally this.

Twice a year I fill in as DBA when our lady graybeard Oracle DBA takes vacation. This month is one of those times. Yay me.

For my org, it’s just the massive in-house developed line-of-business application that’s tightly coupled to Oracle that keeps us chained to it. It’s technical debt from top to bottom, and has been accumulating steadily since the early 2010s, but no one seems willing to start replacing it.

The new projects typically go with Postgres, MariaDB, or if all else fails, MSSQL. But the Oracle monster in the closet isn’t likely to leave any time soon.

The only tricky bit is forcing the Pi’s USB port into host mode by default. I thought the hub was defective but it worked when I put an OTG adapter into the micro USB port. The default auto detect behavior doesn’t work with this since it doesn’t connect to the OTG pin.

I had to edit /boot/firmware/config.txt and add under the [all] section:

[all]
dtoverlay=dwc2,dr_mode=host

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01K9IVUYM

I bought that earlier this year. Works great. Have two RTL-SDRs hooked into it along with a Meshtastic node. It mounts under the Pi Zero so you still have your headers available for other stuff.

Every time I play Skyrim:

“You are carrying too much to be able to run”

Inventory:

• …
• 30 “Solution of Strength” potions

Me: But I might need those later.

Lol, no. And if you were expecting something clever like a goat, sorry to disappoint lol. Just a basic battery-electric push mower that I’ve charged from solar panels all season.

Check back in 2-3 years when I (hope to) get an EV. I’m sure I’ll be crowing about it then 😆

In the mean time, would you like to hear about my solar powered lawn mower?

The usable south-facing roof area is full, unfortunately. I’ll have to do ground mount in the back yard and run a bunch of conduit if I want to add any more PV.

The 32 kWh of batteries are made of two 16 kWh batteries in parallel. Since this system is in lieu of a backup generator, I have it configured to only draw the batteries down to 50%. That leaves the bottom 16 kWH available for emergency use. Basically, for day to day usage, I treat the battery as being half the capacity it really is.

I’ve only been running this system for about 3 weeks now, but the batteries have been operating between 65% and 90% pretty consistently even running the A/C pretty heavily. They’ve been closer to low 60s this past week, but the wildfire smoke was choking out the sunlight Thursday and Friday.

about $0.06 USD/kWh

😭 The per-kilowatt hour rider fees on top of my base rate per kWh are way more than that lol.