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That's among my to do items in the next few years, along with solar power. I'm looking for some way to keep most of my existing hot water system intact. In theory it shouldn't be hard. The pipe for the hot water heating loop which gets heated by the oil furnace would instead be heated by a...

I'd say more likely most homes built in the last 40 years or so. That's when central air really started to take off. I'm pretty much the same. If I'm not moving around I can barely tolerate high 70s to about 80°F. If I'm active, 65 to 70 tops. I don't like doing yard work outside unless it's in...

Yeah, I saw that one, as well as the Midea U version. For me it's moot since I mounted all of our air conditioners through the wall. I like the idea of a unit that heats and cools but I'd still want one with inverter technology. The fridge I bought in late 2017 has that. It makes lots of sense...

Meanwhile my heat tolerance has always been close to zero ever since I was a kid. So far I've managed to get this far into June without turning on the A/C, but only because it's been a relatively cool June, with most days in the 70s. The few days in the mid 80s, plus one day in the mid 90s, were...

Are they going to cover your power costs for those servers? It probably costs a small fortune each day.

I didn't see the pics, either. I just saw text that was gibberish and assumed Doug's cat had walked across the keyboard. My last cat died last February but when I had cats that happened pretty often. Of course, I thought it was strange that some sequences of characters were repeated but I...

It's written in "cat" so we'll never know.

For me the idea of integrated graphics is a plus. The A10-7870K I'm using now is more than adequate for my needs. I love the idea of not needing a graphics card. The 5600G and 5700G have a much more powerful integrated graphics engine than my current APU. We're fast getting to the point where...

I might have stumbled upon a solution. The built-in cipher command has an option to erase free space on a drive. Just use cipher /w:C It normally does three passes, writing 00, FF, and random data. I stopped it after the first pass to limit drive writes. Looks like a big improvement over the...

It's an Asus Crossblade Ranger with an AMD A10-7870K APU. Here's a claim that it can be made to boot with an M.2 drive: https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?89472-A88X-support-NVME Honestly I'm not about to spend the money for hardware, plus the time, just to see if it works. For now the...

Unfortunately the MB doesn't support NVME, or any of the other faster SSD form factors. Even if I got an NVME card, the BIOS wouldn't be able to use it as a boot drive, only a storage drive.

I tend to keep anything which interests me indefinitely for the same reason. Eventually it's going to disappear from the Internet. Like I said, I probably have under 500 GB of unique data at this point. I remember back when a few GB of storage space was considered huge. You had to be selective...

OK, movies. That makes sense. You can never have too much space with movies. Yeah, fewer spindles is better. The heat is beneficial in winter but opposite in summers. It looks like it might be a hot June, too. I'll be dying until July 1 if it is. That's when I turn on my ACs. They get turned...

I just thought of something. Earlier I mentioned my Samsung 840 did the same thing until Samsung issued a firmware fix. Since these are enterprise drives it was likely assumed new data would be written to them often enough so the stored data wouldn't degrade enough to slow down reading.(hence no...

I guess with data which is important to you it's better to preemptively replace drives before they fail. What do you guys store anyway? I've had PCs since the mid 1990s but I probably have under 500 GB of unique data, not including OS and programs.

Regarding the number of hours, even for Doug's drives that probably wouldn't concern me unless they were in a very hot environment. My only HDD current still in regular service is the 2TB Samsung I bought in 2010. Still seems healthy according to the SMART data:

I don't think it is properly supporting trim for this particular drive. I'm still using Windows 7. I installed Smart Defrag 7.5 which has a trim and optimize option for SSDs. I ran it a few times daily. Now the HDTune results look like this: Still the big slowdown around 288 GB but the speeds...

I bought three of these back in 2016. I've had no issues with them except for the fact that reads become slower in parts of the drive where data hasn't been refreshed in a while. For example: For now my kludge for fixing this has been to defragment the drive. I use MyDefrag and the "System...

It sounds like that job is a keeper, and the boss really likes you. You definitely lucked out. I had a great boss on the last job I worked as an employee. The job itself wasn't that great. It was a taximeter repair shop. The pay was low. I really wasn't planning to stay there long term. The...

I'd be in the same boat myself if I had to get a lease. No steady paycheck type income. And no prior leases to use as references. That said, if your dancer friends make all this money they probably have nice bank accounts. Can't they use that as collateral for a lease? Me neither. It was hard...

I'll keep the tablet or Sprint phone options in mind. For now though I should be OK. The current situation is that my mother gets two checks a year for RMDs, and I get one. In addition to that there might be a very occasional small check from various class action lawsuits which we are sometimes...

No, I'm still in lock down. So long as my mother is alive traveling around isn't going to be possible. The issue here is that I can't deposit checks with the PC, only with the mobile app on a phone. I don't know why the bank doesn't let you use scanned images of the check so you don't need a...

I'm reading mixed results on whether banking apps will work. Since that would be my primary reason for upgrading then it might not even be worth my while. Also, if you install a custom ROM do you lose all your current apps and data? That would be a showstopper for me.

A few years ago I got my friend's old S5. I've been using it as a gadget, not a phone (i.e. no cell phone service). I can access the Internet via WiFi so it's fairly useful even without a phone contract. Anyway, one thing it's been great for is depositing checks from home. Unfortunately, first...

How do you even cool something like that? That's a space heater. Air cooling isn't going to work at those power levels.

That's the technical definition but I'll go with Lunar's definition if you want to define a generation as having similar values and characteristics. Those born in 1960 or later tend to be much more like generation X than like the boomers. The baby boomers became the hippies in the 1960s (whom I...

The kind that takes out people the US government deems "inconvenient". All joking aside, in my first year of college I was eating dinner in the dining hall by myself (as usual, BTW-didn't really make any friends) and had a strange person sit down across from me. Not a student. He started by...

As strange as it sounds, some people actually enjoy those things. My mother loved gardening. My brother loves remodeling projects. I liked doing all the concrete work in the yard (borders, paths, patio), even if was murder on my hands. Not thrilled about shoveling snow, but with climate change...

I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. This is coming from someone who last moved 43½ years ago when they had far less stuff (seriously, how much stuff do 15 year olds have?). As far as I'm concerned, my next move will be when they carry me out. The house is paid for, I have more than...

I'll probably do something like that after my mom passes. I honestly won't need the money, but I'll have more space than I need and would welcome the company. It'll also be nice helping out people who otherwise wouldn't have a place to live. The new normal may well be people staying with their...

Historically over the long term housing prices keep pace with inflation. Right now depending upon where you live they're as much as 5 times as high as they would be had they kept pace with inflation over the last 40 or 50 years. Long term that situation isn't sustainable. We're in a game of...

If they do nothing with Social Security, it'll mean a roughly 20 something percent cut in benefits around the time I start collecting. However, I doubt they would do an across the board cut. They'll probably cut the benefits of those getting large amounts by more so those at or under the poverty...

Unfortunately, people usually go in only one direction as they age. The biggest thing is she just lost any desire to walk in late 2017. She had a hematoma in the brain which they fixed. It may have affected her balance, among other things. The reason we put her in the hospital in late 2017 was...

In other news, I don't think I mentioned it here, but I retired in 2017. I've been taking care of my mother since about 2014. In 2017 my consulting gig ran out. There really wasn't anything on the horizon at that point anyway. Plus caring for my mother got more intensive, to the point I probably...

I'm one of them. Yes, I brush regularly. Unfortunately I have a sweet tooth. And for much of my life I haven't had the money to keep up with dental work. Cavities end up becoming root canals and crowns instead once I do have the money to go the dentist. And now the pandemic added a new wrinkle...

I've been in that exact position my entire life. Once I aged off my father's plan in college I had no health insurance. I'm a little less than 6 years away from Medicare. I was hoping Biden would lower the age to 55 or 60 but so far it doesn't look that way. We really need single payer in this...

Actually 2021 was 2020 part 2. Let's hope 2022 isn't 2020 part 3. I've actually given up hoping the new year will be better than the last one. At this point I'm just happy if it's not worse.

That's really the thing I missed the most when I went to 7. That and the fact some 16-bit Windows programs no longer ran under 7. In fact, running those programs is really the only time I boot into XP.

Right now I'm running an A10-7870K that's roughly 5 years old. I was running an Athlon XP3000 with Windows XP well into the 2010s. By that point it was well north of 10 years from state-of-the art. Any newer hardware should age even more gracefully given that processors have gotten faster than...

I doubt I'll have any software in the near future which requires 10 to run on. Also, if I upgrade to 10 don't I lose all my settings and software installations? Last thing I want to do is start over from scratch. My current setup can dual boot to XP. Haven't used XP in a while but I'm curious...

What ever happened to "Windows 10 was supposed to be the last version of Windows ever?" Still using 7 and I have zero desire or need to upgrade.

Actually, it's 31 one genders NY recognizes, not 32.

The big issue for me isn't what a person identifies as. It's the massive amount of confusion, and the constantly changing number of genders, which are the problem. I think NY state now recognizes something like 32 different genders. To try to remember who is what, and refer to them by whatever...

In other news, one of the rare times Trump does something that I actually find praiseworthy: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56424614

The gas prices have zip to do with Biden: https://news.yahoo.com/why-price-food-gas-creeping-221605331.html It's way too early in his Presidency for his policies to have any far-reaching effects like that. The future is electric cars anyway, so by 2030 gas prices will be moot for the majority...

This gives you a good idea of the rates to expect: https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-auto-loan-interest-rate They mention that a typical used car loan rate is 9.69%, which is pretty high if you ask me. Like I said, try to see if you can get something decent with whatever...

You might want to start your search here then: https://www.carfax.com/Used-Cars-Under-1000_f1 Better to just buy outright and get the least expensive car you can for now. I'm sure you can find something halfway decent for the amount of your down payment. Once you have steady work, if the car...

Owning a car is a great way to remain poor. Before you go out and spend all that money see what your needs really are. You might be able to get by with an e-bike, for example, especially if most of the time the only thing you're transporting is yourself. Or perhaps look at motorcycles if an...

My understanding with both SARS and MERS is that by the time a person is contagious they're already likely to be very sick, and therefore at home, not running around. The asymptomatic spread of covid-19 is what has caused it to spread far and wide. I'm guessing the various strains of common...

What I'm saying here is catching it and getting really sick from it are two different things. If the vaccines which are only 50% effective are still close to 100% effective preventing serious disease then we're much better off than now. That doesn't mean we just give up masks and social...