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 and then some. 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.

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.

Wait, what?? Those are a thing?

I’ve seen some rechargeable smoke detectors but never had a reason to trust those. Everything else has used the old school 9v.

If only 9 volts were that price, I’d stock up for the smoke detectors for the next 5 years.

For everything else, I bought a bunch of rechargeable AA and AAAs a while back and those have been great. Haven’t used a D battery in years and a C battery for decades. I assumed they stopped making C’s.

Photovoltaic / Solar power installation.

“Solar system” just sounds weird when I say it.

I finally pulled the trigger and bought/installed the PV system I’ve been wanting for 10+ years.

It was a good chunk of upfront money for something I feared would end up being a midlife crisis purchase*. I only have it partially installed (all DIY as time allows) but we’ve been running the whole house from it several days a week and have already seen significant savings on the electric bill (especially since the first week I had it hooked in was a heat wave).

*It’s not not a midlife crisis purchase, lol, but it’s also more useful than a sports car.

Sadly (and similarly anecdotally) yes.

Toggling airplane mode basically “turns off and on again” your phone’s network interfaces, resets the routing table, and, I think, flushes the DNS caches. I don’t have the problem so much with wi-fi unless I roam between my main and guest networks which use different DNS records for some of my self-hosted apps. (e.g. the “internal” DNS record gets resolved on main wifi, gets cached, and then is inaccessible on guest wifi until the cached record expires).

Mainly, I just toggle the cellular data since my primary issue is that sometimes calls/texts stop working without notice.

I try for at least 2 hours a day, excluding sleeping.

Usually that’s in the form of puttering around outside doing yardwork, working on whatever my summer/winter project is, and/or taking the dogs for a walk. It’s difficult in the winter but the other 3 seasons are pretty easy to keep the habit alive

However you choose to spend that offline time, I highly recommend a daily dose of it. Been doing that for a few years now, and my mental health has improved dramatically. The world isn’t nearly as horrible as social media makes it out to be.

Either the 3rd one or the least important one. Whichever causes me the most inconvenience.

Bonus “Mildly infuriating”:

Ask 4 bullet-point questions in an email, they only answer one of them and ignore the rest.

Definitely does, and it’s a beautiful city, but I never want to drive in it ever again lol.

Had to travel there 3 times for work. The first time I rented a car and immediately regretted it. The second and third times I demanded that management reimburse me for taxis instead of the car rental or I wouldn’t go lol.

Boston. IYKYK.

Yeah, please accept my downvote. If I wanted political “humor” I would unblock one of the many, many, many political meme communities this could have been posted in.

I hand wash them all with soap and water, but they all seem to lose their ability to shed off what I cook in them.

You need to oil them after washing them (wipe them down with a thin layer of vegetable oil or shortening).

Also, it may be time to reseason them if everything sticks even if you’re pre-heating it before adding the food. See: https://www.foodandwine.com/how-to-reseason-cast-iron-8600860

I let it be, even if the person is still alive. Anyone can “allege” anything against anyone. Plus, if the friend is a devout follower of someone genuinely controversial, then there’s already a good chance I’m not that close to them and would be cutting them out of my life anyway.

Yep. My house is block and brick and just soaks up heat all day and very slowly releases it at night. Unless there’s a 20-30 degree (F) difference, it just doesn’t cool down at all. It’s even worse when the night time temps don’t drop significantly until just an hour or two before dawn when it starts heating back up again.

That’s great in the winter since a sunny day can “store” heat for the night, but it’s miserable in the summer and you basically just have to pump it out with A/C.

From the main catbox page:

Files that were anonymously uploaded and have not been accessed in over 2 years will be removed. Read the blog post here for more info.

They already clean up automatically if no one accesses them.