Posts tagged with "personal"

Two surprisingly impactful home office upgrades: rollerblade-style chair wheels that glide on carpet and hard floors, and replacement arm rests that make an old chair feel new.

All T480 upgrades complete: 64GB RAM, 4TB NVMe, WiFi 6E, IR camera, backlit keyboard, and 72Wh extended battery. A used laptop that now outperforms what I could buy new at twice the price.

Upgrading from a 2016 ThinkPad T460p to a used T480 for $670 all-in: 64GB RAM, 4TB NVMe, WiFi 6E, and a GPU capable of running LLM models.

Resurrecting a technical blog after seven years away — migrating old WordPress archives, Google Blogger posts, and 1990s DarkMagic.org content into a new Jekyll site on GitHub Pages.

I did something completely different. I didn’t boot my laptop the entire Thanksgiving weekend.

I went to the beach, ate steamed oysters, grabbed several gallons of water, spent time with my wife, filtered the water, watched television, and boiled the water to get sea salt. I now have a nice little container of sea salt flakes from my favorite beach and a salt slurry.

I read a couple of web pages on doing this and most of what they say is common sense. Filter the water to clean out the sand and other impurities. Boiling is recommended to kill off any nasty organisms. Getting the water from a beach that is not polluted is recommended. Also do not collect just after a rain. The resulting salt is a mixture of salt flakes similar to kosher salt and crystals like the fancy salt mills use. I may take the salt slurry and add a bit of water and put in a shallow pan to crystallize so it is nicer looking.

I’m considering making some of this into Christmas presents to family who like our little beach cottage.

Now that was something completely different.

I bought new cell phones (Motorola Razor v3) for the whole family and I’ve just gotten them connected to my laptop. I’m trying to get my calendar and contact list on Gmail to download to it. The MPT (Motorola Phone Tools) lets you tie Outlook or Lotus Notes to your phone. The 5th gen video ipod has a tool to convert Gmail Calendar into your iPod. That might be an interesting place to start. It would be nice to tie the calendar together for the whole family on our phones.

The phone itself is actually quite a powerful little toy. The mobile java is an interesting environment.