Dells IME just suck. YMMV. Compared to the T480 it’s more portable and lighter.

The Carbox X1 Gen7 is probably a decent choice, but it will depend on the specs - get at least an i5, and max out the RAM to 16GB - you can’t add it later, so make sure to buy one with the 16GB.

The sales people are cons, but the idea has merit but not to make money. You’re probably not going to rent it out for a profit.

Where it has merit is if you do the research and understand specifically that the concept can work for you, and take the timeshare off someone else in the secondary market it can save you a lot of money, but only in specific situations.

There are good and bad systems and locations. You want to optimize on those.

You also have to be someone who will go on week long trips multiple times a year and have a life that let’s you either lock the dates in firm 9 months to 13 months out (depending on system) or can go in 30 days or less to what opens up last minute.

And you have to want to go to resort locations like Myrtle Beach, Orlando, Las Vegas, Smoky Mountains, Hawaii, Breckenridge, Branson, Williamsburg or California.

Oh, and you’ll want to be ok with 3 star locations without daily maid service.

The upside is you can often stay in 2 bedroom suites with full kitchen and laundry with pools and hot tubs and arcades and mini golf in various amazing locations for about 1,800 dollars a week or less. Sometimes much less. If you’re comparing 2 hotel rooms at today’s prices that can be very cheap for 7 days. The average say Hampton Inn is close to 200 a night per room, so at the higher end of 1,800 you’re still 1k less for the week.

And I’ve hit sales in the less demanding seasons for as little as $550 for the week. But of course if you’re looking at Hawaii in season you might be at the higher end of 4k for a week cash, and technically the sky is the limit. This is where knowledge and planning comes in because you can pay for a week in say Florida for 1,600 every year, but trade that week with one that in Hawaii that goes for 4,000 much of the time. You just have to beat everyone else to the trade which is what the planning is for.

I am not a salesman just a so far happy “owner” going on a lot of trips this way by “sams clubbing” my vacations and paying ahead for some.

If you do want to learn realistic costs and nuts and bolts - tugbbs.com can teach you a lot for free.

I mean people also say you’ll grow up from being a liberal so lol. I presume it has a lot to do with why you have a particular political position and if you’ve actually thought it out at all.

I find it fascinating that you have no preference between the candidates. Do you really think it won’t matter which wins?

I hoped so in 2016,but then we saw what happened after that.

I think we all have some things that we either don’t talk about to maintain relationships. Of course usually thats respected by both sides.

Do they care that you call them out? Do you dislike doing it? If neither happens it can be useful for people to realize they’re not necessarily holding a position that “everyone does”. It’s useful to be taken out of your bubble I think, and to see “regular people” can have different positions, and maybe try and understand why they do. It might change someone’s mind.

If course if they or you get worked up by the discussion and no one is getting anything out of it, no one is even ‘agree to disagree’ and it’s just causing everyone stress… Then you need to clearly lay out that you don’t like those sorts of comments.

If they ignore you, then you need to decide how much you want the relationship. You could say “I’m serious about these comments. If you don’t want to stop then you need to decide how much you want to see or interact with me. Because I am willing to just avoid these discussions, but I will not keep hearing these comments, and will stop coming.”

Idk the Republicans seem to really want fascism.

I don’t know how important this is to users of Vivaldi, and I don’t know how good Vivaldi can make their blocker by middle of next year, but this may force me to Firefox. Or maybe someone makes a local proxy like in the old days to do ad blocking Idk.

I think it’s more the cloud being the issue here. Such an obvious and large and valuable target. Of course Microsoft also isn’t that secure historically.

Probably just so you don’t accidentally waste time unknowingly rereading a book.

If youtu.be premium is actually ad free (and I can still run sponsor block) I can see paying for it. I get a lot of value out of it and can’t really justify doing a lot of work to avoid paying.

Usenet is hurt a lot by takedown notices unfortunately. So lots of older popular stuff doesn’t work. That said, things like Anime or something that isn’t given a takedown seem to be on there about forever. The server speed is a benefit for sure.

It’s fascinating how normies will figure out a VPN to use shitty social media but not figure out more open systems or alternative sites.

Windows post 7 was and remains annoying and getting worse all the time. So I wanted an OS without telemetry and one that I could control the updates on. I also work with Linux a lot at work. I use Alma 9 for a LTS release. Don’t have to mess with it much.

I have found that you usually have to go to a specialist forum or the like and spend a few months reading it and asking questions etc. Rarely has a community steered me wrong. However they also usually point to expensive or specialty products. Mass market is usually mediocre at best.

Sometimes though there are deals like Harbor Freight hand tools or their higher end power tools.

It’s also the anti commodity stuff IP has been allowing. If Hershey makes crap chocolate, there is little stopping you from buying Lidnt say. But if Microsoft makes a bad OS, there’s a lot stopping you from using Linux or whatever.

What’s worse is stuff like DRM and computers getting into equipment that otherwise you could use any of a bevy of products for. Think ink cartridges.

Then there’s the secret formulas like for transmission fluid now where say Honda says in the manual you have to get Honda fluid for it to keep working. Idk if it’s actually true, but I l’m loathe to do the 8k USD experiment with my transmission.

You’d think the government could mandate standards but we don’t have stuff like that.

I am in NY upstate but travel around the east coast semi frequently, and was kinda thinking about online options too.

This seems like something the optimize charging tool could manage though. Starting the day at 90 percent or 80 percent or whatever is crazy to me - why am I going backwards to needing to babysit my phone when it’s charging, and why would anyone want to charge their phone when they want to be using it vs when they’re asleep?

Testing the Jellyfin photos thing out now. I don’t know if it’s working right, but when I first looked at it the issue was I thought it seemed very video focused. I guess otherwise I’m learning docker after all.

Fair enough, last time I tried docker, which was a long time ago, I had all sorts of issues with permissions and persistence. I guess it’s probably better now.