Misc

[unicornduke]

Yesterday morning it was -17 with no wind, the coldest it got here. I put towels around doors and windows if they felt drafty and closed all the curtains on others. I also pushed the heat up overnight that night since normally it goes down to 58 but I felt perhaps the house was struggling to stay warm and it would be better if the heat was running most of the night at a higher temperature. Mara got lots of short walks and did try to walk on snow yesterday morning. I had to rescue her when her feets got too cold. She also got 15 minute blocks of balcony time before I made her come inside.

My computer has abruptly decided it is on it's last legs by having what I suspect is battery problems. It decided that the AC adapter is not the right type and it isn't charging at all although it is holding at current battery level. I have an extra adapter so I'll try that but I think that's mostly prolonging the inevitable so I need to do some research on decent laptops. I do play video games (minecraft, deep space galactic, valheim so not super hard on a computer but need some power) so it'll need a dedicated graphics card and a decent processor but otherwise I don't really care. I've also got a chunk of cashback on my credit card that I've been saving for this purpose so my budget it around $1200, which is more than I would be able to do without the cashback. Given how good computer stuff if, I expect to be able to get a decent laptop for that price.

From the team retreat, they had a ton of eggs leftover so I took home two 18 packs of eggs and used almost all of them up making a triple batch of pastry cream and a double batch of eclairs. I've got a lot of egg whites left from the pastry cream so I'm going to make fancy meringue ice cream with them this afternoon. My bread making has been a great success using the sandwich bread recipe from America's Test Kitchen book of gluten free recipes. I need to let it rise for 2-3 hours but that's because the house is cold. I've been making two at a time and I've started sticking one in the basement freezer for the summer. Gluten free bread is now $8 a loaf in the store so I'm getting serious about my bread making. Especially now that I started using my flour mill again. It had been stored for a while but I ground a bunch of sorghum that I grew a couple years ago and white rice.

Comments

[graydon]

There are some fancier baking establishments that have specific bread-rising refrigerators and take twenty to forty hours per rise. (Same sort of place that has misting systems in the ovens.) Works really well for things like pure-rye sourdough just in a regular refrigerator, but that does neither of us any good.

That is a lot of eggs!

I have no specific advice about laptops; last one I bought was in 2016, which is an age of the world in laptop terms. The generic advice is buy a commercial, rather than consumer, offering. (Business Dell, ThinkPad branded Lenovo, etc.) Those tend to be significantly more robust. (Aka, look for a three-year warranty.)

[unicornduke]

My laptop is from 2017 so it's done pretty well and I have a pretty good record with them. Dell seems to have battery and power issues that kill the laptops I've had but it's always around the 5 year mark so I'm not that bothered. I think I'm going with a Dell G15 Gaming Laptop which seem to be solid for most stuff with the only complaint being short battery life which is not something I'm worried about since I'm always near an outlet. I briefly considered a desktop but given I use my laptop in my bed, on a stool near the tv in my room, in the living room, at my parents, and only occasionally at my desk, a desktop doesn't really make sense for me.

[graydon]

2017 is (counts on fingers) is getting on for seven laptop half-lives, so yes, that's doing pretty well!

Good to have a choice made, and yeah, desktop makes sense if you like having the One Computer Place and not so much otherwise.

[ranunculus]

I've bought two computers recently that were in that general price range. One was an Asus gaming computer and one a LG GRAM. I could care less about gaming but I wanted a large screen size. Both computers had a 15.5 to 16" screen.
The Asus was interesting. It had some funny glitches in it, probably from the Linux distribution I used and from dual booting it. Lovely graphics card though, I could see it really well, crisp, clear not prone to glare. Really fast and loads of memory. Got the Asus just about a year ago. M broke the screen sometime in November and it has been a nightmare getting it repaired. Screen was specialized, and just changing the screen didn't fix it (it should have). It had to go back to the manufacturer for repair and is STILL in the shop.
Got the LG at Costco in Dec. Didn't bother dual booting, just loaded Linux. Did have to have the shop disable something in Bios, put there by Windows, that prevented Linux from installing. All happy now. The machine is insanely lightweight. The battery is correspondingly lightweight. The battery is not exactly bad, but not great. The screen is fine, but nowhere near the quality of the one in the ailing Asus. Performance has been rock solid. Would I buy either one again? Yes, but the Asus was really clearly a better machine and the prices were about the same. Of course the Asus weighed at least twice as much, probably more. A lot better battery life though. Oh, and don't break the screen.

[unicornduke]

Neat! It's amazing how many good laptops there are out on the market these days, it seems like there's lots of options and they're all pretty good for most stuff.

I'll do my best not to break the screen haha