I’ve bought a number of raspberry pico chips abs a pack of generic esp32s over the last few years and every time I think I have enough as backups I suddenly find more uses for them! I have an old floor radio converted to act as a light/dimmer control, makeshift hvac control, and flip a night light (also made from a pico w) in the bedroom, another one in the living room in a little coffee table box using home assistants api over WiFi. I also have 3, soon to be four (adding some really fun electromagnet parts) to convert an old electric organ to a full virtual pipe organ. This project was what got me started, the “off the shelf” conversion kits looked like they were running off an esp32 ish and mcp23017’s and cost $1,500-2,000 for just the pcbs, no wiring and no speakers etc. doing it with the picos and a crap loads of doorbell wire $160+$600 for high quality speakers, and $260 for a touch screen and vesa arm. So complete project cost me $600 less than just the pcbs. The fourth one I was waiting for cheap used parts to appear on eBay, they are insanely expensive new ($30-50 each) and I need 56 of them. It’ll be a similar price saving at the end of the day!

Long ramble to say these chips are cheap and don’t take long to help make life more convenient, and sometimes way cheaper if the project was niche.

Every time I learn more about this it somehow gets more horrific.

They also reportedly blocked fire trucks from getting to the fire and are still tying up litigation claiming that they shouldn’t have to pay for the damage to the rest of the destroyed block from the resulting fire.

If you’re mainly using Bluetooth earbuds or other cheaper speakers there likely won’t be that much of a difference in perceived sound quality.

Out of curiosity is your nvme drive newer than your bios? I was having intermittent issues on FreeBSD with an nvme drive and it turned out to be due to old bios making the drive “glitch” and mess with zfs.

If you’re in the US, you may be eligible for mail pharmacies. Your insurance company may have one they prefer that is also cheaper than pharmacy. There’s also cost plus drugs which does mail order for pretty cheap on generics at least. Otherwise I’d say best bet is to talk to the pharmacist they may be able to finagle an adjustment to the timing if they call the insurer.

No kidding. It’s been infuriating to see stuff on Facebook again, and I don’t appreciate that it’s been the only way I’ve gotten people to buy used stuff we needed to get rid of to free up space.

It is an incredibly rewarding instrument! I rewired a conn 650 for midi to practice at home, but most of my practice and learning came from where I got lessons. Since they’re not exactly a portable instrument if you talk with an organist/music director if they don’t have an organist there’s a good chance they’ll let you practice on the church’s instrument.

I’ve played the trumpet for 27 years now, and have played the pipe organ for 3. Both of them professionally, and the issue with picking a favorite is there’s a ton of fantastic music!

On the trumpet I’d recommend a listen to Bugler’s Holiday, or Great Gate of Kiev. Possibly my favorite gig as an anecdote was an old Catholic Church in a poor part of the city. They had built an elevated stretch of subway what felt like inches from the church and the priest had to stop his homily every 5 minutes so the subway could go through. The organist ended with the Hallelujah Chorus and it might be the reason I have tinnitus but it was the most heavenly sounding space to play in!

On the organ, I played Schriener’s adaptation of Louis Vierne’s Maestoso in C. Straight from the get go it’s a fantastic piece to rattle the floors and wake up a church. I’d also recommend Scott’s arrangement of Hymn of the Cherubim as it is much softer and a good idea of the breadth the instrument can cover style wise.

Or Craigslist/Facebook marketplace/wherever your town congregates to. My town almost exclusively uses Facebook so I’ll log in long enough to post items when upgrading and usually am not the only one offering pretty cheap used gear there.

It’s insane how much trucks have skyrocketed in price! My wife’s job occasionally needs a truck so we had considered one as our second vehicle years ago and ended up figuring it was cheaper to own a car counting total cost of ownership unless we used the bed/hitch more than 3 times a week and that was at 40-50k… it’s like they’re allergic to money.

Even renting a house it’s in my lease I can’t use a window unit. Which sucks because our swamp cooler outputs into the living room in a way that makes it very difficult to get its air into the second bedroom.

For the tomatoes you might see if there’s canning groups on Facebook for your area? It takes a metric fuck-ton of tomatoes to make a can of sauce so they’d likely be able to use quite a bit of them.

cost plus drugs give me 90 day supply for about $45 of strattera without insurance, I’ve been using that since my health insurance has a carve out for mental health…

That is 10,000% people who don’t do creative work especially professionally. I am fine with gimp and darktable versus anything Adobe/paid but I also barely use them lol. I would be back off Linux in a heartbeat if I honestly couldn’t use something I needed even though I prefer it.

From my personal experience the bigotry towards non white non male folks in the industry can be pretty extreme, so off the very top of my head I can think of several ways a bombastic EO could inflame that worse. Not to mention I’d like my government to focus on fixing shit instead of meaningless performative bullshit

It’s already part of the federal commercial driver regulations too… so no. No they have not. The most they’ve seen is someone with a heavy accent and maybe broken English.

This might be overkill but I run an xrdp and just remote into it from any device. Tablet phone laptop etc with an rdp app. If you need it on the go you would also want something like tailscale or WireGuard as a vpn to access the computer while away from home

I stopped going to Kroger grocery stores mostly over price but honestly even if they lowered prices I wouldn’t go back specifically because of this feature. It’s more pleasant to shop at Walmart or Safeway as they don’t use this kind of system.

My apc unit has a standard battery that has a replacement from Duracell, which model(s) have proprietary batteries?