Hot and humid, again or still. 80F when I went to bed after passing 100F during the day. At least at the BOL there is a cool breeze off the lake. I expect today to be hot, humid, and overcast but clearing later. We’ll see. As long as we don’t get much rain during the day I’m ok.
Did a bunch of stuff on Friday to get ready. Most of it was shopping but also phone calls and ordering stuff. Even bought some stuff on amazon for delivery. We do live in the future.
Got to the BOL too late to do any work, the sun was setting as I pulled up. The mini excavator came with the wrong bucket for most of the work I’m doing and I can’t get it changed until at least Monday. I might have to re-order the work I want to get done. Or try to use what I’ve got.
That’s the plan for today. Get started and see if I can make it work, and if not, figure something else out.
That’s the kind of thing I’m generally good at, overcoming existing constraints to get what needs doing, done.
We’ll see how it goes.
For anyone not playing with big boy toys, stack something!
nick
The modern AMD equivalent would be the Ryzen 5 8500G on an AM5 motherboard. Your TDP would be very similar at 65 W, and a separate graphics card would not be necessary if the A10 integrated graphics currently meet your needs.
The 8500G can be configured with a TDP of 35W using the right motherboard, but, from what I’ve seen, that would come at the price of legacy connectors such as D-SUB and/or PS/2 keyboard/mouse port.
Just be aware that modern AMD cannot even boot Windows 7 without a core dump. The same is true for Intel. The situation is a giant pain in the a** created by Microsoft to force the issue of ending Windows 7.
You will be able to plug in the legacy drive and read it under Windows 11, but booting unlicensed is not possible.
If you need a laptop, buy a Lenovo ThinkPad T series.
I don’t think it is a secret where I work, and it isn’t Lenovo.
My personal Windows laptop is a T470 i5 which I’ve owned for eight years and would happily continue running if Redmond wasn’t insistent on ending Windows 10 support.
The T470 runs Linux really well, and I think Microsoft is making a mistake abandoning that much legacy hardware to make Hollywood happy with Windows 11.
The machines aren’t simply going to vanish.
DeSantis wants to run his wife to succeed him as Governor.
The property taxes would continue for schools in Florida, and the state’s homestead law is a ticking time bomb.
The tradeoff in Florida is the property insurance. Beyond homestead exemption games, the FL Legislature’s version of swimming naked is ignoring the property insurance market.
The Gecko doesn’t bundle in Florida. Neither does Flo. Both of them along with the other Capos running that racket exert tremendous political clout to keep it that way.
The irony is that Flo has a huge call center not far from where we lived in Florida, benefiting from the “cheap” labor.
Which reminds me – Tampa isn’t so cheap anymore. Neither is Texas.
The C suites might move to Texas, but the enthusiasm of the corporate drones would be limited once the reality of housing costs and relocation (typically there isn’t any now) sunk in.
My entire division at The Death Star, located next to Raymond James Stadium, were told to start packing for one of the company’s offices in New Jersey or Dallas or face termination. After voting unanimously (!) to tell management to get lost, the company arranged for outsourcing the tasks to Cap Gemini with everyone guaranteed employment for at least a year.
Friends who work on Wall Street believe that Cap Gemini is in the future for large parts of the workforce at my current employer, as the execs cannot move the stock price sufficiently to even cover the taxes from their share grants this year despite big numbers selling AI servers.
It is purely a coincidence that the last real CEO of the Death Star sits on the board of my current employer.
Pure coincidence.
77F this morning, with a light overcast. Delicious egg and bacon with a fresh bolillo (bread roll, like a sub sandwich roll but not as crunchy crust). Coffee is fresh ground Mr Peet dark roast, since I’m up here long enough this time to make it worth grinding some.
I do like cone filter coffee makers better than the flat basket “Mr Coffee” type machines. The water goes thru more bean, and the filter comes out of the machine cleanly.
Time to get to work.
I’ll start with some dirt moving I think. I need some practice first before working next to the house.
n
@gavin, glad to see I’m not the only one still running win7 on something. The last real OS with the user or customer needs as the design goal, instead of how it can best benefit MS. My main desktop is win8 which is mainly different in looks.
Anything after that was about maximizing MS ability to sell out the user.
The AI and spyware in win10 and 11 is just crazy. No way would I allow that inside a business.
n
added– plus I’ve got thousands of dollars worth of software and some hardware that runs fine on its contemporary OS but not on win10.
Ugh.
Big wall of smoke to the north over the Tehachapi’s this morning.
’tis the (fire) season.
For an older machine, just get a Crucial SSD or a Samsung if you find one one sale. I wouldn’t put more than $100 in it.
@nick, are you working alone, without helpers?
That doesn’t seem… prudent. At least an observer with a cell phone to call 911 if necessary.
I was in my mid 70s and ran a backhoe by myself daily for a couple of years. If the ground only has a mild slope he’ll be fine.
Exactly 3 years ago, I bought a pair of Evolve III netbooks from Microcenter, for $60 each. 1.1 GHz Celeron processor, Windows 10 Student edition, minimal memory.
I designated one for a homebrew settop box, and one for amateur radio. They are perfect for the radio thing, since they run on 12 volts and I can power them in the field with my battery pack. Their poor CPU/Memory performance is an acceptable tradeoff for weight, portability, and power.
I figured it was a good buy, because when MS cuts off W10, I can just go to Linux with no problems. 90% of my ham radio software runs on Linux. Everything except N3JFP logging software.
For one reason or another, I haven’t been using them, but I kept them plugged in and powered up in an airconditioned environment.
I recently started building electronics kits again, and noticed that the one labled “Settop” isn’t laying flat on the workbench. It’s all wavy and bulgy and the touchpad is popping off the keyboard. Not good.
I can’t really cry about the loss of a $60 computer, but I’m sad to see it go.
Businesses have their own spyware to install so a Windows 11 corporate drone laptop tends to be a different experience than a consumer model, even running Win 11 Pro on a retail machine.
My work laptop is an i7 vPro with 32 GB RAM. The fan runs all of the time but I don’t see any ads or prompts to update from Redmond.
The system is busy doing … something.
I am in a similar situation, having upgraded the Mac to an M4, and the Win10 laptop to the Beekink Win11 mini.
If I partition the 1TB Beelink drive to (2x)500GB I can put Fedora on one partition and keep Win11 on the other (for some legacy code), and be down to 2 computers for the first time in decades.
Which means 3 laptops, 2 mini’s, and 2 desktops (just in the house here) to dispose of. And another (2x) 27″ HD monitors.
It is tempting to keep some of it for backup use, but it’s been years since I lost a computer w/o warning and modern full backups are pretty astounding.
I wouldn’t run modern Linux on less than 4 GB RAM with the GUI.
My “road” laptop is about as low as I would go with 4 GB RAM and a “Pentium” N3700.
CentOS/RHEL 6 32 bit is a good choice for older systems with less than 4 GB, but I wouldn’t try it on anything more than 20 years old.
It has 4GB memory and a 64 gig SSD.
@lpdbw
Is it easy to open up the netbook? I would see about removing the battery and just run the machine plugged in all the time.
If the Celeron is a rebadged 64 bit Atom, Fedora should be fine.
Check “cat /proc/cpuinfo” and nook for an ‘N’ prefixed to a number in the CPU name.
Give it 8 GB physical swap if you can, however. Fedora has zRAM swap, but that’s voodoo IMHO.
The climate nuts told us it would be a hellishly hot summer. When May, and then July were wet and cold, they said – wait, we meant August! Yeah, that’s it, August will roast us all!
Currently 12C (53F) and raining. I may light a fire.
What irritates me, is that these idiots (and the press that panders to them) never publish a retraction, never say “mea culpa”, never admit that their models are just plain wrong. The scientific method says: when your predictions are consistently wrong, your theory has been invalidated.
I’m actually grumbling, because I want some summer weather.
All models are wrong. Some are useful.
Because I am an idiot, I decided to install iPadOS 26 Beta again on my iPad Pro (M4). I noticed right away that last time I selected “Developer” instead of “Public” Beta. Oof. 26 is running fine now, so I put it on my iPad Mini and it is also running fine. End of idiot statement.
I also reinstalled “XSearch” on the iPad so I can put a prompt in the browser bar and use Perplexity, Grok, and ChatGPT for searches. I really recommend using Perplexity for research.
I just finished reading Grieg Beck’s book “Europa”. A sci-fi/horror novel. I like his stuff. I got interested in how to get to Europa. I used AI search, as above, with: “assume I have a spaceship that can accelerate at 1G (like The Expanse), how long would it take to get to Europa?” Grok and Chat had the best answers since they used “Relativistic Rocket Equations” for the answer. They all even assumed a turn around half way and decelerating.
Grok:
Perplexity had about 5 days
Chat had about 17 days
They vary on assumptions of when the trip started. They used Python for calculations.
Crucial. I bought a Samsung SSD for my “road” laptop recently, and the drive ran much hotter than the drive it replaced with Micron flash memory.
I pulled the Samsung after about a day and sent it back to Newegg.
It’s all wavy and bulgy and the touchpad is popping off the keyboard.
– what Tony said above, it sounds like a failed battery.
Taking a lunch and cool down break. Work is going ok. I am a bit rusty but not as much as I thought with running the machines. I’ve mostly been on the miniex this morning. Time to run the trackloader for a while. It rained just enough to make the clay slippery.
back at it.
n
(at some point my buddy will drop by, until then, I’m just working alone. It’s the front yard which is relatively flat. No sketchy one track partly off the concrete pad and ready to roll down the hill into the lake work this time around.)
Whelp. I ordered the exercise equipment. It should be ready to pick-up Wednesday to Friday. They’ll send a message when it arrives. No tax. Free shipping.
I don’t expect to regain my eight pack abs. I don’t intend to work that hard plus I’m not 35 anymore. I’ll be happy to flatten the area below my belly button and generally get into better shape.
The credit card plays games. I play back. See, they give 1.5% cashback. That takes $10.70 off of the price. It’s not much but it beats a sharp stick in the eye. They have another game too. Spend at least $500 in each of June, July, and August to get an extra $10 back in each month. Do so for all three months and get an extra $10. So, $40 total. All in all I’ll have $150+ in cashback to redeem when the bill comes due. That beats a mere $50 off by opening a Home Depot credit card.
Heck, I was going to have the floors done anyway. And buy groceries and gas for the truck. Dropping $500 is stupid easy now a days. {nowadays ? ]
Besides. I want to hit the HEB in Marble Falls for a chunk of blue cheese. The Burnet store sells only crumbles which are sort of messy to eat. And Walmart for a couple of things. I don’t need anything worth a trip to Marble Falls very much since Tractor Supply opened here. I mean, four miles or so for cat and dog chow or sixteen miles each way? Duh.
I need to buy a new gas can and two cycle oil anyway.
>>If you need a laptop, buy a Lenovo ThinkPad T series.
What he said… And check the Lenovo Outlet site for good deals on like new certified refurbished units…
Here’s to The Kamel’s new book winning the mid-terms for the Redumblicans!
Here’s to The Kamel’s new book winning a Pulitzer and NYT #1 Best Seller! (Hint, no one will probably read it and those that try, will quit halfway through!).
Rookie. I have two credit cards I acquited that gave me $150.00 if I spent $500.00 in the first month. I did, got the rebate, and never used the cards again. BofA and USAA. To quote Elvis, Thank you, thank you very much.
I’m here. I learn stuff. I try to learn stuff anyway.
I did get a USAA offer the other day for a card. No cash back, no annual fee, 11% interest. Patriotic as hell. Nice! Delete. I don’t carry balances on my two cards. The interest rate is irrelevant. Come back with something like 2% cashback…..
Wait. Are you secretly telling us you were on the OJ jury? Yeah, if the glove don’t fit you must acquit.
Spell check, what can it not mess up?
It’s August 2nd. Today’s high has hit 84F. Kind of humid feeling. Warm enough outside that dangly things dangle as they should and yer not sweating with sweat running down your legs. The a/c isn’t running enough to make my toes cold.
I’ll take it.. 84 vs 104.
The Republicans will ignore the book.
Cutie Pie (Hannity) might get a show or two out of it.
Always check the main site first for clearance deals, and pay attention to the introduction date of the hardware on both sites.
100F, 15mph, 7%RH, and smoky. Ugh.
Too hot to work outside, tired of working inside, bah.
Climate alarmists are halfway there: all are wrong but none are useful.
“Most Hilarious Reaction to Trump Admin’s EPA’s repealing the CO2 Endangerment Finding: Dem Congressman Sean Casten: ‘Trump will have been responsible for more deaths than Stalin, Mao & Hitler combined’”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/08/02/most-hilarious-reaction-to-trump-admins-epas-repealing-the-co2-endangerment-finding-dem-congressman-sean-casten-trump-will-have-been-responsible-for-more-deaths-than-stali/
“US Rep Sean Casten of Illinois (D) on DOE report: “This is anti-scientific, immoral, and economically irresponsible. I say this without hyperbole – when the history of this era is written, Donald Trump will have been responsible for more deaths than Stalin, Mao and Hitler combined.””
“Casten added: “Millions, if not billions will die if we don’t address climate change; some will survive but if rivers keep moving, coasts keep eroding, fires keep burning we will be forced to become migratory. That is a choice.””
I am getting really tired of these crazy climate wannabe people. None of their wild prognostications are ever true yet they keep on coming up with more.
We got two inches of rain this afternoon yet they claim that we will never get rain in the summer again in Texas. Absolutely freaking crazy people.
All models are wrong. Some are useful.
My chemical process simulator benchmarks very closely with reality. And then my customers do crazy things with it that it was never designed for.
See also: cucumbers and shower heads
Someone once stated that in the areas of interest the equations used in climate modeling are linear, or at best parabolic, and could be run at least 100 times faster if that near-linearity was taken into account. Or on a grid 3x finer in each dimension.
Never checked to see if that was true.
Most people probably think these are direct physics models, DNS and such, but they are parameterized up the yazoo.
I did exactly that. Staples had a WD Blue 1TB SSD for 99.99, so I got that. Now the part I hate; Install, upgrade, applications, data files. I would just mirror the drive except it’s been at least 6 or 7 years since installation. Time to clean it up.
Also, thanks all for suggestions. They all pushed the direction of this outcome.
It’s been a couple of years but the WD drive imaging slash cloning slash mirroring software was freaking flawless. YMMV of course. But I was very impressed. All my stuff and the OS were now on a new harddrive.
Trippy.
Worked until sundown and then a bit more. I lost three hours of work when I broke the main water line coming into the house. Got it fixed, but it’ll break again someday.
I’ve got the grade and excavation for the new walkway roughed in. I’ll check it tomorrow in the light, make any changes, and install the weed barrier and edging.
Found an old drain, probably for gutters. Found the old gas line. It’s long disconnected. The part I found was 4 foot long and had 3 repairs.
I’ve got a huge pile of dirt. If I’m putting in 15 yd3 of crush, I need to take out 15 yd3 of dirt. I’ll use it with the other piles to fill and level part of the side yard.
Ran a load of laundry now that the water is back on. Had a shower because I was soaked to the skin. Only 80F at the moment, but the sun came out and the wind stopped blowing for a while and it was HOT.
Think I’ll get a book and have a tiny little fire on the dock. Too early for good shortwave.
n
Horrors! We’ve only got one more night of viewing of NCIS before we exhaust Netflix.
We’ll be ending season 17 tomorrow night, and Netflix doesn’t stream any later seasons.
There are 5 more seasons not counting spinoffs, prequels, or Tony & Ziva.
Whatever shall we do?
Tomorrow during the day I will do some research.
I have a dumb question.
My phone gets two and sometimes three bars of signal in the house. I have a metal roof. It’s enough. Even when I tether the phone. Hold that thought about tethering because that also powers and charges the phone.
For the last couple of months I have the usual signal strength. And suddenly no service. Now with a brand new phone, same thing.
What is common? The battery.
No wait. Listen. It’s like a car battery. The dome lights are bright. The radio works. But crank the key to start and you just get the ratcheting click noise. Attach a volt meter. 12 volts. A bit of load and a bit over 10 volts, enough for the radio. Hit the starter and you have maybe 8 volts.
I think my phone’s battery is acting the same way. Because sitting around looking handsome and cute and pretty is a light load. Searching for signal is more load. But when I make a phone call I have no problem once I connect.. It’s like everything in the background is shut down… because it is a phone.
The neighbor has a newish Samsung. Maybe 8 months old. Sure has a pretty screen…. She’s had zero problems with her phone having no service. Her house is maybe 1500 feet max from here as the crow flies. We are both on Verizon. I don’t know what kind of plan she is on. I don’t think Verizon filters service provision by payment plans. But we’re talking about a part of the Ma Bell Borg.
Anyway. While my battery does last 5 days with minimum usage and it looks good. It does seem to puke like an old car battery dropping to 8 volts when you try to crank the engine. AKA. searching for signal.
Am I crazy retarded here?
I have a brand new battery. I wanted to save it for a few months. But tonight it goes on the charger and the into the phone tomorrow. If the no signal thing goes away my bad car battery theory is proven as true. If not, well, I don’t know.
Thoughts?
All of NCIS (and other CBS shows, including current seasons) are now on the Paramount Plus streaming network. Included as part of Amazon Prime subscription. Lots of good stuff on Amazon Prime; especially older shows. I’ve been addicted to “How It’s Made”, and currently binging “Rockford Files”.
You dumbass. Totally said with the spirit of “I’ve done that” and I’m laughing too. I can hear Jenny laughing up in Alaska.
I was drilling a post hole and thought I hit a spring. Which would be super duper awesome. It was very exciting. I hit one of my water pipes. What a mess to patch.
Please tell more about “old drain, probably for gutters”. Rain gutters going away from the house to where? Something like a water meter box with a grate for a lid?
https://youtu.be/BH72ZaVbGW4?list=PLi0uEsEOS9ouW_aj0GYyQStOG4H_VbWfT&t=6472
;P
That’s what I’m afraid of. I’ve installed, uninstalled, upgraded or reinstalled so many things, including Windows updates, development IDEs, office suites, browsers and random tools and applications that I’m expecting the poor machine to have a mental breakdown if I just try to swap it onto another drive. This install needs to be nuked from orbit, just to be sure. I might consider other OS options at this point, if the mood takes me, but I would really like to have the original Win7 user experience back.
That said, my ‘final build’ machine is planned to be a monster with enough RAM, CPU and drive space to run a hypervisor and multiple VMs for the various OSs I like to fiddle with, like OS2 and BeOS. Yes, I like the really niche stuff.
I feel that. The other day I managed to break my alternator while it was out of the truck to facilitate a power steering hose replacement.
>>
Always check the main site first for clearance deals, and pay attention to the introduction date of the hardware on both sites.
Also check the “Gen” (Generation) Number, the higher the better (newer model). IIRC they recently released Gen 7 ThinkPads.
>>Rookie. I have two credit cards I acquited that gave me $150.00 if I spent $500.00 in the first month. I did, got the rebate, and never used the cards again. BofA and USAA. To quote Elvis, Thank you, thank you very much.
Junior. “…and never used the cards again.”
Sooner or later the issuer will discover your continued non-usage of the cards and will, without asking, close the accounts, potentially negatively impacting your credit score. Put a reminder in your calendar to use any unused cards once every three months to keep them from getting closed.
“I was Wrong – Green Europe is Building at Least One US Scale AI”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/08/02/i-was-wrong-green-europe-is-building-at-least-one-asian-scale-ai/
“A 230MW AI campus to be powered by Norwegian Hydro has been announced – but competition for electricity and rising prices are already causing political unrest.”
Um, people are getting unhappy about the amount of electricity that all of these new AI data centers are using. This will get worse, way worse.
Wait, the AI data centers are using all of our water too. “Texas AI centers guzzle 463 million gallons, now residents are asked to cut back on showers”
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/texas-ai-data-centers-water-usage-texas-ai-centers-guzzle-463-million-gallons-now-residents-are-asked-to-cut-back-on-showers-ai-news/articleshow/122983253.cms
Please tell more about “old drain, probably for gutters”. Rain gutters going away from the house to where? Something like a water meter box with a grate for a lid?
– I think old boy had a garden area against the house, and the gutters dumped into it. There was some sort of grate in a low spot, in the corner between two of the walls. The grate is long gone, and the rest of the 4″ pipe is too. I think it just went to daylight on the edge of the property, but it got ripped out when we put a new septic tank in that area. I didn’t realize there was still some buried. None of the joints were glued so the main part of it must have just pulled out when we dug for the tank. I was worried until I realized it was completely full of dirt, and was only 4 ft long.
I found a lot of buried infrastructure the hard way when I first started digging on the property. I still think I might have a separate septic system and tank for the RV pad, and I might do a little digging since I have the machine, if I have time.
——-
Had a nice night on the dock. It’s a different experience with book in hand than just sitting and listening to the radio. Still nicer than sitting inside, but definitely not as connected to the outdoors.
Time to get to bed, more work awaits.
n