Okay so my brain is trash and I live on the internet: disposing of gasoline by randomly dumping it into someone’s car linked in my brain to the Strong Bad Email “New Hands” where he replaces one of his hands with a bucket. The first thing he thinks of to use his bucket hand for is “dumping oatmeal on stuff” and as he says this a turtle appears at his feet for him to dump oatmeal on.

I have a kind of strange property. Me and my parents live next door to each other (this corner of this city block has been in my family for nearly a century) and we’ve got a bunch of relatively small areas of grass. It would be nice to automate at least some of it, but robotic mowers either require burying a wire around the perimeter of the area they’re allowed in and have very dumb algorithms that make them somewhat inefficient, or they’re smarter but require satellite uplinks and proprietary services.

So I do still do it by hand.

Funnily enough, I was given typing tutor games as a kid, didn’t really spend much time with them, never really developed proficiency because as a 10 year old I didn’t have a reason to type in my life and Magic School Bus was more fun.

Fast forward a few years and MSN messenger was a major tool of teen social interaction. You could use it to hit on girls. Knowing what I knew from that typing tutor game, I started IMing friends. I can now touch type at 100WPM.

Edit to elaborate: I do rest my hands on the home row but I have several “bad” habits. I almost entirely use left shift, including for QAZ, I shift my whole hand over one, hold Shift with my little finger and type the letter with my ring finger. Depending on the word I’m typing, I strike the Y key with either index finger. Growing up, I had a Compaq Presario that came with a split space bar, the left half of the space bar was a duplicate backspace key, so to this day I still strike Space with only my right thumb.

Might let some smoke out of a fairly expensive battery bank if wired incorrectly though.

I could buy or make the right adapters, or snip the powerpoles off of the panel wires and install the correct MC4 connectors, and then have fewer connectors in the system.

The copper is perfectly fine. It’s just the color of the jackets. For a good 50cm, + is black and - is red. It’s bad juju. What’s the proper hoodoo for warding off the juju from incorrectly color coded power cables? Burning lavender? Changing the batteries in your smoke detectors?

I can confirm the Anker has reverse polarity protection on the DC input. It just didn’t do anything when I plugged a panel in wrong by trying the connectors as-is out of the box. It didn’t even bitch at me.

They’re talking about wrap kits in the neighborhood of $500.

That said, I think it’s dead in the water. They venn diagrammed too close to the sun; they tried to make a cheap electric truck that converts to an SUV. They’re coming in at about the price of a Chevy Bolt, with no stereo, with half the range, with bad aerodynamics. As a pickup truck, it’s weirdly small, like, smaller than an S10 single cab short box. It’s a pickup that’s an inch shorter than a 2 door Blazer. And it’s only rated to tow 1000 pounds. As an SUV, it’s a 2 door, 5 seat, 2 wheel drive, barren box that they’re hoping to entice you to buy with the promise of putting stickers on it.

There’s a lot about the concept I like, but I think they tried covering too many use cases with one vehicle and made it useless at basically anything. It’s too light duty to replace our aging fleet of S10s, Rangers and Tacomas. It doesn’t have the offroad capability of a Bronco or Wrangler. It’s got 2 doors so few are going to want to use it as a people mover. It’s too American for the kei truck weebs. Who’s gonna buy it?

One of the smartest aspects of the Slate truck, it’s intended to be wrapped after the fact, they didn’t bother with paint.

The one I used didn’t, and I’ve been warned against trying again with something different in case the chemicals react badly. Now, my drain isn’t entirely blocked, it’s just slow. So I think it’s clear. But think in one hand, shit in the other and see which fills up faster.

It’s a two-basin sink with integrated traps, so I’m just gonna not have breakfast this Saturday and disassemble and clean it.

I did name the server borg-cube and alias comply=‘sudo’ because I’m a child.

Lookout boys we got an adrenaline junkie among us.

Okay so BorgBackup is a CLI tool, I think for Linux and MacOS. There are GUI front-ends like Pika and Vorta.

Compared to Rsync, which makes a 1 to 1 copy of a section of your Unix file system and then makes incremental backups by hard linking unchanged files, Borg cuts your data into chunks, de-duplicates it (imagine you’ve got three Linux Mint install ISOs, there are probably hunks of them that are identical, it only stores one copy and makes note where it goes, saving space) compresses and encrypts it. Your thoroughly blenderized data is then stored in an archive, which can be on a remote server (the server has to run the borg software, and they communicate over SSH) or on locally mounted storage, I’m doing both.

It’s all spinning hard disks. I’ve spent three days watching gigabytes of data slowly drizzle into place. I’m boring, I swear.

I make it a few times a year. I bake bread for croutons from scratch the previous day, and then it takes a couple hours to make the soup itself. You cannot caramelize an onion quickly.

Roast beef also benefits from a temperature cycle. Something something gelatin, something something beef magic, something something moodoo.

In this case though I think the extra time it got simmering and reducing was also a factor.

A Gilette “Styler.” It’s okay for its price. It isn’t a scam.

I actually let my license expire, and didn’t manage to navigate the FCC’s smegma smear they call a website before the 2 year grace period was up, so I recently had to retake the tech test and I was issued a new callsign.

I don’t want to fuck around in my attic running feed line, I don’t want to snake cables through my car, all to talk to elderly republicans. I’m the only non-MAGA with a ham license in 4-land.

My 2m radio, an FT1900R by Yaesu has this in common with French nobility: It doesn’t survive a beheading. The control plate isn’t detachable on this radio.

Also, relocating the unit elsewhere in the truck wouldn’t help with power. It might help with feed line routing but not power routing.

My Icom 706Mkii does have a detachable head, but I’m not installing that in a vehicle. I’m…feeling pretty done with radio, tbh.

Leftover…steak?