It’s really messing with my sense of time realizing that Rosa Parks (2005) outlived John Ritter (2003).

Yeah, I should get one of those, lol, but I generally don’t need one since I do most of my work on the ground and near a table or bench or something. This is the first, and probably only, time I will ever be doing work on the roof. Plus, I was the only one home today so unless some religious proselytizers show up, no one would be in the fall zone.

We do, though it is a recent thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_named_heat_waves

I watched the whole series and did enjoy most of it, so keep that in mind because this is going to sound really, really critical.

Liked the premise but I feel like it just jumped the shark multiple times, kept going, and jumped the shark again every following season.

That said, yes, you’re right that it does explore some interesting topics, but the way they did and kept raising the stakes every season just kind of ruined it. So much of it was just completely implausible even by TV science standards.

Conceptually, my favorite season was the first because of the survival theme, though the teenage drama kind of annoyed me (granted, it was a YA show and I wasn’t exactly the target demographic. In practice, my favorite season was the one with ALLIE. It explored ethics in AI while being a bit of a mix of The Matrix and Invasion of the Body Snatcher with a touch of zombie movie. For better or worse, it also provided the backstory of much of the series.

Best character arc? Probably the authority guy from the beginning. Forget his name, but he looked like a young, store-brand Dustin Hoffman. Started out as the bureaucratic jerk, went through hell and stuck to his principles when refusing to take the ALLIE chip (and they even crucified him), and became one of the few level headed characters toward the end of the show.

Worst character arc? Probably a toss up between Clark and Octavia. It’s like their worst attributes got turned up to 11.

Favorite character overall? Raven. She was basically a live-action Gadget from “Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers”.

If we go by the logic in some media where the ghosts are bound to the house/property, they probably don’t want to be stuck somewhere that will eventually just dissolve in the rain.

That’s literally what Mitchell is ranting about. Like, the entire video is about how that is the correct phrase and “could care less” makes absolutely no sense.

I’m with David Mitchell, and the hill I will die on is hating the phrase “could care less”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

I run Synapse currently but last I looked at Conduit it wasn’t at feature parity with Synapse (granted, that has been a while). The other two I wouldn’t touch with a 50 foot pole because of their stupid-ass names.

If it’s a relatively recent laptop, it should be fine.

Many of them will let you set custom charge limits. If yours supports that, limit it to like 60% or thereabouts. Long enough that you can get some UPS use out of it but not full enough it’s ever gonna go spicy pillow on you.

If it won’t let you set a charge limit, they’ll still kind of float around full charge but not stay at 100% all the time. Even plugged in, mine will drop down from 100% to eventually 92% before it will start charging back to 100 again. That’s over the course of several days to a week.

If the laptop is older than about 2017 or so, or still has a removable battery, you might want to just take the battery out and use an external UPS as those typically don’t have the extra charge management features newer ones do.

To run them full time, you either want to remove the screen or “tent” them because a lot of heat is dissipated through the keyboard, and it’s normally expected to be open while running because of that. By “tent”, I mean open it halfway and put the screen facing down so it’s standing up and shaped like a tent.

This is approximately where it is in the print. Every time the head moves over any of those support bases, it sounds like nails on a chalkboard 😆

Weirdly, back in the dumb phone days, with T9 I could bang out texts way faster and more accurately so long as I wasn’t straying too far out of the dictionary. But it was super easy to add new words, and it would pick them up later.

Similar vibes:

A few years ago I decided to try the lithium-ion UPSs. I’m on my 3rd year with them, and I will never go back to lead acid. I’ve got one “classic” UPS that is still in good shape as long as you don’t try to run more than 100w from it, but when it goes, it goes.

These use the LiFePO4 batteries, and I get close to twice the runtime as my old ones, and they don’t drop from 80% to 10% like lead acids do. The battery chemistry is also good for about 10 years of daily cycling, so assuming the electronics hold out, they seem like they’ll last.

The only hiccup with the model I got is it doesn’t have a serial monitor connection, but you can probably fine plenty that have it.

Ugh, yeah. My “temporary” spinners that were an emergency upgrade became permanent when I went to buy the new ones and prices had skyrocketed. I’ve got one cold spare left, so hopefully there’s a price break in the near-ish future

I feel that.

Before I downsized, I was running 3x HP DL360 G6’s with dual Xenons and 96 GB RAM each. Way overkill for my needs but I got them cheap. Unfortunately, they and my air conditioner competed to see who could use the most electricity each month. 😆

The only thing I really lost in the scale down was the ability to spin up dev/test VMs for every little purpose. I’ve mostly just started using Docker containers for things like build environments.

Their Intel graphics work great for transcoding, but yeah, not much else. I’ve got Emby one one of them, and the QuickSync hardware acceleration works well even with multiple simultaneous streams.

Works pretty great as long as you keep your expectations realistic. Easy to upgrade and pretty reliable. Only annoying thing with any of those micro PCs is the cable management is a pain because of the power bricks. I got some USB-C PD adapters and Dell-style cables and that’s made a huge improvement.

About 220W on average with peaks around 280W. I’ve got 8 Optiplex micro PCs, 5 upcycled thin clients running smaller services, fiber ONT, another micro Optiplex as a router, a storage server, main switch, and a 5 port PoE switch for my 4 access points around the house.

Before I downsized everything to the USFF PCs, I was running 3 old enterprise rack servers that were about 220W each.

It’s currently running from solar from about 7am to 4pm with my small solar setup, but I’m in the process of installing a whole house PV system so hopefully will be 24/7 solar powered soon-ish.

I’ve been told that government auctions canbe a good source for cheap used PCs

Can confirm government surplus auctions or sales are a great source for cheap PCs and that they do get snatched up quickly (guilty!) The only other catch is they never come with hard or solid state drives. I’m assuming those just get pulled and destroyed.

Thanks, and yeah, it’s been fun putting that all together. Unfortunately I’m still learning FreeCAD so they’re not as integrated as I’d like yet, but as soon as I have time to hammer out a design, I hope to have all 3 of these and the UPS/power supply in a nice case.

Yep, running/charging it from solar is why I ended up getting that chonky 18650-based UPS board. It’s the only one I could find that could combine 5V input and battery without dropping out (battery kicks in immediately if solar insufficient and draws the difference between input and output and charges and powers simultaneously otherwise).