Oh that’s nice. I use the generic thermostat to control the pellet stove, but I didn’t know about this.

Invested / Endowed Value - Having already spent time and money to improve your status in the game, it’s difficult to throw it away.

Isn’t that every game? I can’t think of a single game, back to old Atari 2600 or arcade games, that doesn’t have this element. Many people are playing to see how far they can get, to beat the game.

Ah good. I didn’t realize it was two winters. So hopefully next year we’ll see more lightning bugs.

When I was growing up I remember seeing lightning bugs everywhere during the summer. As an adult, living less than 100 miles south of that, I see far fewer of them. It’s really disturbing. And, hey, it’s good for me because I have to do less yard work.

I left the leaves on our lawn last winter, and this year I saw even fewer lightning bugs. It might be kind of pointless for me to do that, because our yard backs up to a huge ravine that is completely unkept - leaves, trees, branches, etc., all fall there and are left there. So it might be like adding a few square feet to an already large area.

But …the birds. Huge flocks of black birds sometimes come by; there will sometimes be thousands of them. If I’m outside when they show up, it’s a cacophony of chirping, then when they take off you can hear the whoosh from all of them. It’s such a great sight. But… they’re digging under the leaves, so I wonder if they were getting the insects I was trying to help. :(

Same here. What especially irritated me was that even though I installed the .deb firefox and followed the directions to disable snap firefox, occasionally Ubuntu went ahead and reinstalled snap firefox for me.

Marylanders worship their flag too, but as far as I’m aware, there’s no pledge of Maryland.

Yeah, if nothing else, standing up after sitting for so long is a good idea, even if you don’t sing or whatever.

And I say this as someone that dislikes baseball, and only occasionally goes to games because my wife likes them.

Someone on reddit commented: “We tried that here in Germany. It didn’t work out so well.” That comment always sticks with me.

I recall our class getting a lecture in high school one time because we “rushed through it” and were being very disrespectful to the veterans who gave their lives for this country. Uh, okay…

I’m in a club that has the word “International” in the name. Yet they do the pledge of allegiance before meetings…Uh is it really “x Club, International”, or is it “x Club, Murica!”? Most of our non-US members were Canadian, so I always wondered what they were thinking. “Smile and nod, boys…smile and nod…” would be my guess.

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Brightline. That’s the new one that keeps clobbering idiot Floridian drivers that insist they can beat the train.

But that doesn’t hold a candle to Amtrak’s coverage.

I was on the phone with our ISP after our internet service went out. The rep asked me if the box had a green light on it - yes - then asked me to plug a light into the same outlet and confirm the power was on. I said, “Look, I understand you have to follow a script, but you literally just asked me to confirm the power light on the box was on. Clearly the power is working.”

Same ISP sends me an email whenever we have a power outage letting me know that our internet might not work when the power is out. (I’ve joked that this email arrives before the ceiling fans have come to a stop.) But when my internet goes down, they’re completely clueless. “Ohhhh it must be that your power is out even though we monitor that closely and aren’t showing a power outage right now!”

Because I didn’t know it existed until now. :) I’ll have to look into that, thanks.

This is a tough one. The problem with local only backups is, what if there’s a fire?

I use Amazon Glacier to store my pictures. It’s $0.0036 / GB per month, so I pay less than $2/month for ~535 GB of storage that I’m using right now. There is also a cost for downloading, but if I need it, I’m going to be happy to pay it (and the costs aren’t crazy). Uploads are free.

(The other problem with Glacier is that it’s not really an end-user-friendly experience, nor is it something easily automated. I use SimpleAmazonGlacierUploader, a Java program someone wrote, to do it. You can also upload to S3 and have it archive things to Glacier automatically - I’ve never tried this but it should work.)

I considered getting my brother or a friend to build two storage servers (with RAID5 or something) that we’d each keep at home, and just sync to each other. Good if you have a friend or family member willing to do it (or at least host your offsite box). Down sides: Cost to build it, time to build and maintain it, cost to replace things that break, plus cost for electricity. I’ve been using Glacier for many years, so by now maybe I would have spent less on that theoretical backup system, but I also did not have to worry about it.

With Tasmota on the S31, you can disable the ability to turn it off. I have a few set up that way to prevent them from being turned off.

Yeah, this isn’t an ADHD meme, this is a “normal human behavior” meme.

Yeah, unfortunately, I do not have access to the BIOS, nor can I install things on it - security restrictions. What you have done would have been a lot easier and more reliable though!

This was already asked and answered. Maybe read before replying.

I’m not sure if it’s a dock dock or a big hub. It’s a USB-C connection, so maybe the latter. It’s definitely not one of the old style with the proprietary connector.

Yeah, I’ve seen some used Dell ones cheap. But then I might want to use it for my personal non-Dell laptop, and who knows how that will work.

The one I have came from Amazon 3 years ago, and it has worked perfectly. We’ve been full-time work from home in those three years, so it has gotten a good bit of use.

Nice.