Several times in my own electronics and many times in secondhand items. The potassium hydroxide electrolyte never quite evaporates and seeps under the crevices, requiring a full disassembly to prevent further corrosion.

Worst offenders are the pesky little alkaline button cells. Every alkaline cell inevitably evolves hydrogen gas as the electrochemical reaction proceeds and in those tiny canisters, the gas very quickly has nowhere to go but out along with the cell’s guts. The secret is to get the silver oxide versions, same voltage, a bit pricier, but far less leakage.

I guess the silver lining to the declining popularity of AA and AAA powered devices is that I can finally afford to use only Ni-MH or primary lithium cells in all of my devices. Those chemistries are mostly immune to leaking.

Limited variety, hit-or-miss playback, and Youtube hasn’t quite enshittified enough for me to quit.

I would mirror my videos to PeerTube if I were to create content. Alas, I am merely a consumer.

Buy a plot of land with a nice view and construct one of those nifty passive houses. Also get my teeth and knees fixed, put together a nice home lab, and go travelling. Split the surplus between retirement savings and donating to causes I find worthy.

Once every 2 or 3 years back when I was buying the stinky cheap ones. My current Pixel, however, is approaching 5 years strong. No good reason to buy a new one at this point, maybe until the GrapheneOS Motorola comes out since I don’t do anything computationally intensive on my phone.

Perfected a recipe using mostly fresh ingredients to replicate my favorite overpriced frozen microwave meal

Groceries, gaming, looking at various niche hobby sites that I only check on a weekly basis

I’d go see my closest family and open up the vintage wines we’d been saving for later

Desktop: Librewolf, Chromium as a fallback

Mobile: Vanadium on devices with GOS; adblocking via DNS. Cromite for my secondary phone and degoogled but not GOS tablet.

What I like to call temporal horror vacui. Some things are easy to start, they do require some periodic checking, but are otherwise passive. So I’ll start a 3d print, get water boiling on the stove, or start running an offline backup. Then my mind is bothered that those are such “empty”, “unproductive” tasks, and so reactively fills in the gaps with things I’ve been procrastinating like dishes, meal prep, planning, etc.

Also body doubling. For emails, I have a good friend at work who also massively struggles with them, so every now and then, we make a commitment to each other and for an hour or two, both sweep through our inboxes, with a bit of commiseration along the way.

Anyway, it’s still a struggle that makes me wonder about seeking an ADHD evaluation … next month maybe.

On that note, I still laugh when I recall this story of some college student blackout drunk at a party, friends came up to her to ask if she needed help, while trying to emphatically shake her head ‘no’, projectile vomited and the violent motion of her head made the vomit cover everything in the room.

I use it to generate little bash and python scripts for mundane tasks, random ideas I don’t have a good starting point for, or boilerplate code I don’t have the energy to write manually. Or also to decipher cryptic error messages and logs. Nothing that I publish though, just all testing and personal scripts.

I do this with models running locally on my gpu. 14B parameters is surprisingly decent and fast enough for a 16 GB slot-powered workstation model.

For fun, since the model is local, I also toss in some excerpts of my writing, see what it can glean from my style and vocabulary, something I’d never do with an LLM hosted by someone else for obvious reasons.

Astronaut. Or a trucker. A mad scientist, after my first science class.

I haven’t become any of the above (yet)

Phone: 316 Desktop: 294 Laptop: 79

You could say I’m making use of all the ram I’ve installed

Habit. And I’ve become good at finding outfits that look nice and are just as comfortable as ones that look more casual.

They like to say we are doing better than ever because the the numbers and technology are great. Yeah, I might not be starving, but what’s the dignity in a rising tide of techno-feudalism and serfdom? And the technology that, in another society, could have freed us from long hours is instead being used by the ruling class to further exploit us.

Imagining if trusted computing became legally enshrined and windows was the gateway to the internet. Would keep my use of it to a minimum, perhaps to fulfill work obligations, do taxes, pay bills, etc. and save anything that didn’t need the internet for another machine running Linux. I’d also consequently make much greater use of my hoarded media and ebooks.

The hospital gifted me mine

Used mini PCs, Chromeboxes, or laptops (the kind with removable batteries). As long as GPIO pins are not needed, most things can be replicated with minimal effort on Debian amd64. And when I do need GPIO, I can usually get away with an Arduino.

No, I was fortunate enough to pick up a bunch of decommissioned Celeron mini PCs from work. I run a NAS with media server on one, pi-hole on another, and a test server on a third. I meant to make things accessible from outside with VPN, but was too lazy.