https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2ZI04lF2L0

Hmm. I see what you mean. That’s an awfully blue blue.

My mental image was always tan or green or something.

The heck kind of paint job is that? Blue and gold?

searches

Huh. Apparently that was a legit British North African camouflage scheme. Totally unaware of that.

https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Matilda-II-actually-painted-blue-during-WWII-If-so-why

Was the Matilda II actually painted blue during WWII? If so, why

sort of….

In the early part of the North African campaign British armour was painted a mix of sand, slate grey and what I’d call sky blue (I think the official spec was silver grey but as a modeller I do find that the same shade of paint from two different modelling companies can be quite different…. online forums are full of modellers arguing about RAL numbers and how modern samples compare to original paint revealed during restoration of real vehicles! )

Its both a disruptive pattern which breaks up the distinctive tank shape and well chosen for blending in with the horizon (parts of the western desert are perfectly flat). The slate grey would fade to a paler blue making the tank appear more blue than sand over time. The same scheme was applied to many other vehicles.

considers

I guess, now that I think about it…most of the movies I’ve seen about the North Africa Campaign were in black and white, so…no way to know. Huh. TIL.

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2017/01/ibm-introduces-new-rainbow-logo-support-lgbtq-community/

IBM introduces new rainbow logo in support of the LGBTQ community

January 9, 2017, 5:00 pm EST

All of the letter openers I’ve used have been relatively blunt.

Huh. I had no idea that one would use an impact driver on Torx screws.

I kind of mentally associate Torx with (delicate) personal electronics and associate impact drivers with big, heavy pieces of hardware with rusty bolts.

neighbors’ dad insists on mowing their lawn at least twice a week, especially when I’m trying to enjoy my hammock.

Noise-cancelling headphones.

I wouldn’t be the best resource for more-elaborate stuff, like if you think that the thing is at serious risk of falling apart, sorry. I don’t do that much plumbing stuff myself; I’ve had to unclog drains.

You can get various types of flexible devices that you push down a drain. There are relatively-simple ones that are just basically a barbed plastic strip or flexible metal thing.

There’s a plumber’s snake, which can have a manual crank (or more-elaborate motorized ones).

In general, I’ve found that those are more-effective than liquid drain cleaners. A hardware store will carry them.

Be careful, if you’ve already poured drain cleaner down the thing, not to burn yourself with the substance.

EDIT: Oh, right. The WP article on the plumber’s snake makes a point that I’d forgotten about — one thing that you can do is use a toilet plunger on a sink, though I think most of us don’t normally think of doing so. I’ve successfully done that in the past too.

“Valerie Jackson”

https://www.lacrossetechnology.com/pages/sensor-finder

EDIT: IIRC, those things use button cells or something, so you might try replacing the battery first.

If I remember, those squared-off things aren’t actually cobblestones. I don’t remember what they’re called, though.

searches

Apparently “setts”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobblestone

Cobblestone is a natural building material based on cobble-sized stones, and is used for pavement roads, streets, and buildings. Setts, also called Belgian blocks, are often referred to as “cobbles”,[1] although a sett is distinct from a cobblestone by being quarried and shaped into a regular form, while cobblestones are naturally occurring rounded forms less uniform in size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(United_States_coin)

In late 2025, the Mint halted the production of pennies for circulation, largely due to cost.[8][9]

They’re antiques now! Can’t expend them on such mundane uses!

Apparently the original Easy-Bake Oven was 200W, then dropped to 100W, then moved to some sort of dedicated heating element.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy-Bake_Oven

The original Kenner Easy-Bake Oven was heated by two 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, one above the food tray and one below.

The idea was that the cake would bake more quickly and evenly if heated from both sides. Later models used only one bulb, leveraging convection from better interior heating dynamics to achieve the same results.

In 2011, the last version to use a 100-watt incandescent light bulb was replaced by a new version with a dedicated heating element, named the Easy-Bake Ultimate Oven. The replacement was due to the availability of alternatives to the incandescent light bulbs that heated previous versions of the Easy-Bake Oven.[23] It was feared that newer lamp requirements would render all models that used light bulbs as their heating elements obsolete because lamps would no longer be available. (The company never provided initial or replacement bulbs.)[24][25]

investigates

Looks like the heating-element-based variant is still 100W:

https://consumercare.hasbro.com/api/download/E6120_en-us

ELECTRICAL REQUIREMENTS:120 Volts AC only – 60 Hz. 100 Watts

If it was a kitchen outlet, it may have been a 20A (2400 watt) circui

Nah, this was a 15 amp circuit, though that’s a fair point.

Did it show you the combined wattage

It showed something like 2400W, IIRC, but the meter itself is only rated to something like 1900 W (well, VA), so it may not have been a perfectly-accurate reading.

goes back to try each independently, and both together

With both on, and the other load, it shows about 2300W in total load for the circuit.

There’s about 200W of other load on the circuit.

The heater alone — listed as being 800W, if I remember aright – bumps it up by 700W alone.

The kettle bumps it up by 1300W alone. So it might have been ~100W off at that point, but it was correct that it was over what the circuit could do.

I dunno how much power those things draw,

https://homegrail.com/how-many-watts-does-a-cpap-use/

Most CPAP machines range from 30–60 watts, with some using up to 150 watts. If you are using rechargeable batteries to charge your machine, you need to be aware of the power required to run it so your CPAP machine won’t shut down in the middle of the night.

UPC designed for a desktop computer

I wasn’t really aware of this until a few years ago, but UPSes aren’t really generally designed to keep computers running through power outages. Even today, most still have lead-acid batteries (which have limited energy density and don’t deal well with being deeply discharged many times).

They were really designed to solve two problems:

• In a power outage, being able to shut a computer down cleanly. That means time to save documents and — back in the 1980s and 1990s — shut down cleanly, to avoid filesystem corruption, when commonly-used filesystems could become corrupt through not shutting down cleanly. They also often came with functionality to automatically shut down the computer cleanly when the UPS’s battery was getting low, if a human had not yet done so.

• If a generator that automatically comes online in an outage is present, keeping the computer running until the generate giving it time to come online.

This means that UPSes tend to have a pretty decent inverter, can put out a lot of power…but generally can’t store a whole lot of power. They also are guaranteed to come online quickly; I believe that it’s typically in under 20 ms, a blip that a computer power supply can handle.

To grab a random UPS:

https://www.amazon.com/APC-SmartConnect-Interactive-Uninterruptible-SMC1500C/dp/B077Y62GSJ

That runs $529. It has a 900W inverter.

It uses this battery, which is lead-acid 11Ah 12Vdc (so 132 Wh).

To grab a random power station of about the same price:

https://www.amazon.com/BLUETTI-Portable-Station-Generator-Off-grid/dp/B095Y6ZTR1

That’s $500, has an 800W inverter, but has 716Wh of battery storage, about 5.4 times what the UPS does. It also has an LiFePo4 battery, which will last a lot longer in terms of cycles and dealing with deep discharge than a lead-acid battery.

I woke up because my CPAP stopped.

I understand that some people with CPAPs get lithium power station things specifically so that they don’t stop in an outage.

I gotta say that it’s really satisfying for that squeak or resistance to be gone. Running around the house with some oil or similar is pretty satisfying.