I don’t ever see myself disconnecting from the water company since I have to use sewer service and lack the space to install a septic system. Though I have been looking into plumbing in a grey water system to capture from sinks, showers, dishwasher, and the washing machine. Can do some simple filtering to re-use that for flushing or watering the lawn/garden.

I’ve got 4x55 gallon rain barrels for watering (they’re food grade but advised for non-potable water only). Definitely not enough to cover the household usage even if they were potable. I couldn’t imagine living without water service or a well on my property (not sure if a well would even be practical/possible here).

I’d love to be self-sufficient but not quite able to do so right now.

In this one, it’s all in the inverter. You just plug it into an outlet, and it can do up to 1000W (though 950 was the most I’ve ever gotten from 1.2 KW of PV coming in at ~90 volts).

You can have multiple inverters; they match the frequency and voltage of the incoming utility power and won’t output anything if there’s no utility power coming in (anti-islanding protection).

The only thing to be aware of is not over loading a circuit where you have them connected. I do have a dedicated circuit/outlet for that.

They’re useless if the power’s out, but I’m looking into something of a transfer switch to redirect the PV output from the grid-tie inverter to a regular one, but I haven’t gone too far down that path yet.

Edit: It’s the same principle that’s used in balcony solar

The only silver lining here is that it’s lit a fire under me to get my small grid-tie solar setup out of storage (haven’t installed it at my new house yet) and expand it.

When I had that running at my old house ($0.09/KWh), my 1.2 KW setup was only saving me about $7-10/mo at most, but at $0.29/KWh, I’m looking at about $27-30.

One particular spite house in Boston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinny_House_(Boston)#History

According to local legend, the structure was built as a “spite house” shortly after the Civil War:

… two brothers inherited land from their deceased father. While one brother was away serving in the military, the other built a large home, leaving the soldier only a shred of property that he felt certain was too tiny to build on. When the soldier returned, he found his inheritance depleted and built the narrow house to spite his brother by blocking the sunlight and ruining his view.

Another source states:

Not much is known about the city’s narrowest house. Legend has it that … its unnamed builder erected it to shut off air and light from the home of a hostile neighbor (also nameless) with whom he had a dispute. … Believed to have been built after 1874

Sadly never came up.

I generally dislike editorialized headlines (when used as post titles) but this is the exception. Nicely played.

Not sure about Android, but on iOS, when one scans a QR code it shows the web address on the screen that the user then taps on. For the average user, I doubt that they are going to question what the URL is before following through to the website.

Android does the same. The problem is most of those QR codes are encoded short links which tells you nothing about where they’re taking you.

https://short.link/au1034gha could take you to a PDF on the restaurant’s Wordpress site or it could take you to malware or somewhere else you really don’t want to go.

In that case, I blame the people generating the codes for using URL shorteners. My org uses them in flyers for the public, and I always have to chastise them and re-create the QR codes because they run the URL to our website through bit [dot] ly. 😡

I used to work with a guy who was a dead ringer for Bill Bailey both in appearance and personality.

Yeah, same.

I think the worst issue I’ve had was when I was using a chainsaw to cut up a fallen tree. Phone was in my pocket and a chunk of wood somehow made its way into its USB port and was such an absolute perfect fit that I almost never got it out of there lol.

Weird. Other than how it used to choke when there were conflicts (and all uploads stopped until that was fixed) I haven’t had any issues like that. Guess I’m just lucky.

I’ve been using some USB-C cords for 5 or 6 years now and the connectors are still going strong. They’re way more reliable than micro-USB which seemed to wear out after a few months.

Your go-to universal cord can charge your phone, earbuds, vape, notebook, video-converter, beatmachine, microphone, gamepad etc.

This has been life changing in all the best ways. The bonus is that power banks have kept up and most good ones support power delivery, which has been amazing for keeping my laptop powered when I’m working in the field.

I think my biggest gripe is the wildly varying feature sets of both cables and ports. I can understand e-marked cables for different wattages, but all cables should support video and all USB-C ports should at least indicate if it supports video output. I’ve spent way too long troubleshooting docks and portable monitors simply because I accidentally grabbed the wrong cable.

I’ve had pretty good experience with Nextcloud’s instant upload. The only time I’ve had it shit the bed was ages ago when it would occasionally get stuck on a conflict, but that hasn’t happened in a long time. Pretty much all of my image folders (camera/DCIM, Screenshots, Downloads) get synced. The only annoying thing was when apps would suddenly change where they download to and I’d have to reconfigure yet another sync folder, but I can’t really fault NC for that.

Mine is set to upload and keep a local copy and only do a one way sync (phone to NC). Not sure if that causes less issues than a 2 way sync or deleting the local copy after upload?

Hard to say. I’m not sure of the delivery radius that’s allowed here and whether rural food deserts would even be eligible or not. I was just mentioning that ordering (non-perishable) groceries online and having them shipped does have a legit and unfortunate use case.

Back when I lived 45 miles minutes from the closest grocery store, I’d order my non-perishables online and they’d usually come via UPS or FedEx.

This isn’t really the demographic they’re catering to but Food Deserts are a sad reality for many in the US. Being able to order staple food and have them delivered (even if it’s not same day) is often less painful than driving 30-50 miles to the closest grocery store.

You are more than welcome to come and harvest them from my lawn / garden lol. Just be sure to take the roots with you too.

I tried a true dumb phone but was breaking out my laptop too much for everyday tasks (dumb phones these days can do hotspot).

The flip phone I have runs Android 11, so I have the bare minimum necessary chat apps, email, GPS maps, and such. The main draw is that those work well enough, but anything more than that is possible but very frustrating. That’s kind of what the Minimal is about: e.g. yeah, you can watch YouTube videos on it, but you won’t want to.

Then, when the detox period is up and you’re fully off the addiction, you can get the standard phone back.

That’s kinda what I did. I used my flip like a true dumb phone for 30 days as a challenge and then un-dumbed it a little bit back to where only my basic needs were met and nothing more. I assumed I’d have rushed back to my old smartphone, but after breaking a bunch of habits, I found I didn’t really want to. Plus, I really missed T9 texting as weird as that sounds lol.

They Might Be Giants - Istanbul (Not Constantinople)