+1 for hybrids lol

I used to drive a lot of 4-bangers and remember having to do that with pretty much every one of them either to overtake another vehicle or even sometimes driving up a steep hill lol. The air conditioning just sucked so much power from those little engines.

Been driving a hybrid for 6 or 7 years now, which also has a little 4-cylinder engine, but the electric motor more than makes up for that. It’s got a dash display showing the electric motor/ICE power split, and when you punch the gas, you can see the electric motor doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Love it.

It’s so prevalent we can literally say “I’ll verb your noun” and it still gets the point across.

I’m looking to switch banks. Who do you bank with, and would you recommend them?

That’s a project I’m gonna have to move up in priority. And yep, house is from the 50s and the thermal mass of the block itself is basically the extent of the insulation. Plan is to have those foam insulation blocks installed but put siding over them rather than spackle.

One side effect of my PV install is that I have a lot of large, thick foam inserts that I have to get rid of. They’re very similar in size and material to those foam insulation blocks, so I may hang onto them and ask the contractors if they can use them. That’ll re-use something I’d otherwise be tossing out and also save some money on buying the foam panels, though I’m not sure how much those cost.

Yep!

That’s how I found out our 18 cu-ft refrigerator is normally very efficient at around 100 watts for cooling, but it goes into a 400w “defrost” cycle every 2 hours. I’ve found no way to turn that off and it doesn’t seem to be affected by the “energy saver” mode. I get why it does that since I remember old freezers completely encrusted with ice, but I also remember only having to run a manual defrost of them like once a month or so.

On the other hand, looking at our power bill is very comforting. I’m really concerned about the rate increases power companies are going to push through whether or not all the AI data centers come up.

I’ve wanted to have a PV system for a decade or more and finally decided to just do it. Battery prices and capacity were finally within reach, and I wanted to insulate myself from further electric rate increases. Rates have more than doubled in the last 5 years and there’s another rate increase working its way through the PSC (aka the “rubber stamp anything the utility companies want commission”) right now.

How’s the humidity in the UK? I can deal with the temps (to a degree, pun intended) but the 95% or higher humidity just makes it miserable here. A lot of times I can make do with just a dehumidifier, even if it slightly warms the room, just to make things less “sticky”.

Our houses are very energy efficient as designed for cold wet weather, so retain heat extremely well.

Different construction, but our house is block and works similarly. Great in winter but just soaks up and holds heat in the summer.

Ugh. Years ago I rented a house like that. Landlord’s fix was to permanently install a massive window A/C up there. It helped, true, but even running it full blast 24/7 the best it could keep the temp was low 80s. There wasn’t a door to close, unfortunately, so any cool air just sank down the stairwell to the 2nd floor.

We tried using that as the master bedroom for all of two weeks one year, and noped right out lol.

We can run the HVAC in fan only mode, and it doesn’t seem to help much for cooling with the windows open. Just moves the same air around unless there’s a breeze outside pushing outside air in/out.

We used to have a pair of window fans we put on opposite sides of the house, one pushing and one pulling, but those both failed in the last few years and we never replaced them (Why do window fans cost ~$60?! lol) Those worked great, so I guess I’m just gonna have to pay the ridiculous prices and replace them.

Careful what you wish for. My Bullshit Detector of Doom™ is predicting a push toward cloud gaming rather than optimizing anything.

Which tracks, sadly. Big tech has already hoarded up all the GPUs, RAM, and storage. I always hoped those would eventually trickle down to the secondhand market, either as they refresh hardware or when the stupid AI bubble finally bursts, but since they already have them, it would make sense to repurpose them for gaming and sell you a subscription. Because of course it would be a subscription.

Despite all these challenges and setbacks, Microsoft is still pursuing and pivoting towards cloud gaming and cross-platform gaming, Xbox Game Pass subscription, and is forgoing exclusivity to allow more players to join Xbox’s gaming endeavors, ranging from PCs, handhelds like the Rog Ally and Ally X, mobile devices, and even automobiles.

– https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-bets-on-cloud-and-cross-platform-future-for-Xbox-while-brushing-off-30-profit-margin-rumors.1191620.0.html

Twitter … got invaded by 4Chan mentally unstable losers and edgelords.

I mean, yeah? A mentally unstable edgelord loser bought the platform several years ago and remade it in his unstable, edgelord image. Every other complaint you have about Twitter is explained by that.

Nice! I bought the XBLA Perfect Dark remake and really liked it. The Github repo is just the wrapper so I’ll have to track down the actual assets, though.

Me, too, when I used to sell my old crap on eBay. I feel like it’s just common courtesy. Basically I’d go an hour before they closed and ship out all the orders for the day.

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.

She’s got an attorney and they’re trying to stop it based on that, but it just seems like everyone involved (edit: besides her) just doesn’t give a fuck.

It’s a lot like another commenter mentioned about eminent domain. It can be used for good (roads, fiber deployments, district heating, etc) but also for things not so good (data centers, etc).

I went out of my way to find a house that didn’t even have a vestigial HOA deed restriction, so I get that. But when a private citizen donates something to the local municipality, it’s pretty egregious to not honor those restrictions, especially for things that may take a while to develop.

I’d donate my share of my family’s farmland to build a park, but I wouldn’t sell it for all the money in the world to build a datacenter or landfill or anything else, really.

Even if they didn’t do her dirty, she wouldn’t. She donated it to the city and relinquished ownership of it. The expectation, even written into the deed, was that the land was to be used as a park, but they turned around and sold it multiple times. Despite the stipulation in the original deed to the parks and recreation department, the data center is still going forward.

The story is just such a tragedy all around.

Eh, yes and no.

A lot of friendships do start out based on proximity, convenience, etc but can grow into something deeper and lasting. Like, many of my friends in school growing up all had last names near mine in the alphabet. Two of those I still hang out with decades later.

When you leave college and go into the real world on your own, you find out which ones were built on convenience and which were lasting. I couldn’t tell you how many “friends” I had in college, but since graduating, I probably only keep in touch with about 10 of them regularly.

Reminds me of the saying “Relatives are who you were born into, family is who you choose”.

If I understand correctly:

“Ask” is for more open ended questions (The vague “what do you think about” posts like you mentioned). Posts that are asking for a simple / single answer are generally removed for not being open ended. The question is more for discussion.

Here you can ask things that are less open ended and/or are looking for a single or simple answer.