I didn’t see anyone link to the original!

Brain and brain! What is brain?!

Wasn’t he on some sort of advisory committee during Trump’s first term? My memory is that they disbanded basically because it was a waste of time, for obvious reasons. Let me search…

Yes, he was.

I kind of like having that layer of someone who knows what they’re doing. House purchasing and selling isn’t something we do often, so a knowledgeable person seems like a reasonable investment. Same reason you shouldn’t be your own lawyer.

I do have some qualms about how they get paid. The commission I pay my own agent doesn’t really even bother me that much, although they’re obviously incentivized to get us to buy the most expensive home we can afford. But the commission that the seller pays to the agent for the purchasers disturbs the hell out of me - it’s a pretty clear conflict of interest.

We had a “Buyers Agent” for our last purchase - this is someone that only does buying; they do not sell homes. The idea being there’s less conflict of interest because they’re not trying to sell you a home they have listed (the company he owned did not list homes at all). Great idea, but they still take the commission from the seller, so it’s not perfect. We worked with another agent from a different company for selling the old house.

My 56k modem was internal, so not much to look at.

But the Hayes…

I still have a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 here. Aluminum case and all. It’s a work of art.

A useless work of art. But still…

Spicey, the man who got fired because SNL mocked him. Melissa McCarthy with that motorized podium was amazing. It was almost too good, because it killed the golden calf that would have given them a ton of material.

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.

I run it on my Debian server that uses my 15 TB RAID5 array as storage. (When I built it, 15 TB drives were a dream…now I have a 12 TB drive in my desktop computer that serves as backup to the array.)

I mainly serve it out to the client on our DirectTV streaming device. Works fine, other than I wish the intro skip plugin would be able to give me the option to skip on that client (the only way it works on the Android client is to have it skip automatically).

I have an old S9 right here on my desk. I cracked the screen, and took it to one of those screen replacement places, and he asked if I had insurance. I told him I didn’t, and he said, wellllllll it’s going to be a lot more expensive than you think to replace this screen.

That wraparound screen they had was basically also the frame of the phone - you’re not so much replacing the screen as you are moving the rest of the components to a new phone body. I wasn’t sold on value of that wraparound screen in the first place; this didn’t improve my opinion of it.

We put a plastic screen protector on it and a new case, and I used it for a few months until we were ready to upgrade phones.

Yeah…when I got the first IDE drive, it was like, “Wait, I don’t need to low level format it?”

“Oh what a mess we weave when we amiss interleave!”

Anyone else remember having to set interleave on an RLL hard drive? “First you have to low-level format…”

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.

My work one, yes. They want us to shut it down every night. I just suspend my personal laptop though.