Other than the alternate timeline Ed Begley Jr Odo from “Children of Time”, I dare say this is the happiest we ever see him.

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.

Probably a pretty common scenario, I’d guess. Apparently Scantron had an interesting business model where they basically rented the machines to the schools for free as long as they bought certain amounts of the official Scantron forms.

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

I run gemma4:26b in 16 GB of RAM. It’s slow on my test rig with only 2 GB VRAM but it should fit 16 GB VRAM fine. I have one of those AMD BC-250 crypto mining units setup as a gaming rig, but my plan was to also run ollama on it. gemma4:26b was the model I planned to make the default. I haven’t messed with it yet since I’m playing through my Steam catalog that was waiting for me to have a PC that could run them lol.

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

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

I don’t have that information, but I almost bought a Deck to use in such a manner. Figured it would be easier to carry around than my laptop since I pretty much just move from a docking station in my office to the docking station in my den (my org is BYOD since pretty much everything is through Citrix). Ultimately decided to just buy a smaller laptop (yay X1 Carbon).

Honestly, it just sounds like you’re mad at GabeN for having money.

Why would we want a subsidized Steam Machine?

Subsidization pretty much requires that the hardware be locked down and walled-gardened so the subsidy they put into it eventually pays off. The Steam Machine, currently, lets you install whatever OS you want and use it like a regular PC without locking you into the Steam ecosystem at all.

“Okay, so they should make a locked-down subsidized one and an unlocked full price one” someone might ask. That’s extra development and support work they have to put into it, and it would only be a matter of time before someone jailbreaks the subsidized one to work like the unlocked one.

Plus, you can make any capable PC a “Steam Machine” since they also give away Steam OS. My DIY Steam Machine runs Bazzite, but I was close to putting SteamOS on it. The only thing that made me choose Bazzite was that pretty much all of the patches and special module to support this former AMD crypto-mining card were already baked into Bazzite.

In my defense, I was very, very drunk. People would bring me shots of Wild Turkey to play their song, and I took a lot of requests that night (note: I took requests for free but they brought me shots anyway).

My thought process was basically “refuge in audacity” and that a soundtrack might snap them out of whatever drunken rage they were in. Psychology wasn’t my major if that puts things into perspective.

Not sure if this counts, but I used to DJ at local bars and events. One evening, some guys had a bit too much and got into a brawl, so I put on Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting”. People weren’t as amused as I thought they’d be.

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. And they basically rebooted the show in the last few seasons except with Space criminals replacing the grounders as the antagonists.

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 Snatchers 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. (Edit: Kane?) 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”.

Ooh, nice. I wasn’t aware there were softmods available for the 360 yet. I avoided modding it at all because I played a lot on XB Live and didn’t want to get it banned but since that’s shutdown, I may revisit the mod scene. Glad to know there’s a softmod. I did the MechAssault one on my OG Xbox and it opened up all kinds of doors.