Refurbishers on eBay

Ah, well, that limits things a bit then.

I have refined tastes when it comes to laptops, but I’m also cheap, so lightly used high end models are right up my alley. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any [brand new ones] I would stand behind that are in that price range other than maybe a Macbook Neo, but you specifically ruled out ARM (they’re also not supported by Ashai Linux yet, either).

Sorry.

Are you married to a new one?

I pretty much exclusively buy used ~3 year old Thinkpads which meet all of your specs and then some. My last two were X1 carbons (7th gen and now a 9th gen). Each cost me about $450.

Interesting or useful?

I don’t think I have any really interesting ones, but the most useful one I have for people is “Always On”.

Basically when I see that tag, I can mentally prepare myself and roll my eyes before reading. Basically it’s for people who just do nothing but preach at you regardless of the topic being discussed. It’s…pretty useful.

Ever lived in a small town? Drama and gossip is fun

Yes, I have, and no it’s not. It’s just all there is except for high school football, making more kids, and the same drama and gossip but on Facebook. IMO that’s why small towns are so toxic once you get past the thin veneer of “small town charm”. Couldn’t wait to leave the one I grew up in.

And after re-reading OP’s opinion, I starting to see the parallels.

Hank Hill, apparently.

I don’t use Facebook and use all the ad blockers, but apparently I’m still tracked by IP.

When my SO and I started dating, he hooked to my wifi one day and immediately started getting ads on Facebook for various lawn care products. He’d never had those come up before, lived in an apartment all his adult life, and has never searched for any kind of gardening supplies.

I, on the other hand, do have a lawn that I take care of and frequently shop for various landscaping stuff. But he gets the ads for them.

I feel like this is the kind of joke Frasier would have told Freddy when he was a kid.

Wait, what?? Those are a thing?

I’ve seen some rechargeable smoke detectors but never had a reason to trust those. Everything else has used the old school 9v.

I read the punchline as “Frasier: In Space!” and would watch that.

If only 9 volts were that price, I’d stock up for the smoke detectors for the next 5 years.

For everything else, I bought a bunch of rechargeable AA and AAAs a while back and those have been great. Haven’t used a D battery in years and a C battery for decades. I assumed they stopped making C’s.

(Jealous Scotty noises)

Check this out: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/20/old-ssds-find-new-life-as-game-cartridges/

Just saw it on Hack a Day and remembered this post. It’s using old SSDs instead of SD cards but is basically what you’re describing.

And they’re using auto launch scripts like I mentioned in my first comment and a whitelist to address security.

Every time I play Skyrim:

“You are carrying too much to be able to run”

Inventory:

• …
• 30 “Solution of Strength” potions

Me: But I might need those later.

Riker could have gone for a real power move in the last panel:

“That was a compliment, Doctor. You’re the beard here. And yes”.

Lol, no. And if you were expecting something clever like a goat, sorry to disappoint lol. Just a basic battery-electric push mower that I’ve charged from solar panels all season.

Check back in 2-3 years when I (hope to) get an EV. I’m sure I’ll be crowing about it then 😆

In the mean time, would you like to hear about my solar powered lawn mower?

The usable south-facing roof area is full, unfortunately. I’ll have to do ground mount in the back yard and run a bunch of conduit if I want to add any more PV.

The 32 kWh of batteries are made of two 16 kWh batteries in parallel. Since this system is in lieu of a backup generator, I have it configured to only draw the batteries down to 50%. That leaves the bottom 16 kWH available for emergency use. Basically, for day to day usage, I treat the battery as being half the capacity it really is.

I’ve only been running this system for about 3 weeks now, but the batteries have been operating between 65% and 90% pretty consistently even running the A/C pretty heavily. They’ve been closer to low 60s this past week, but the wildfire smoke was choking out the sunlight Thursday and Friday.

about $0.06 USD/kWh

😭 The per-kilowatt hour rider fees on top of my base rate per kWh are way more than that lol.

Lol, def can become an obsession. First hand experience there.

I’ve wanted a whole house PV system for a long time, and this is just me finally getting around to making it happen. SO and I were talking about getting a backup generator installed, but that would have been about $7,000 for something that would only get used two or three times a year since our power doesn’t go out often (we have no heat or ability to cook when the power goes out, and it’s always in the dead of winter when we lose power). The PV system I sketched out was about $9.000, but in addition to covering us during outages, we could use it daily to reduce electric bill so, unlike the generator, this would pay for itself over time.

SO finally came around to my way of thinking, so here we are lol. My limiting factor is usable roof area. Of the roof that’s south facing, only about 14x20 feet of it is suitable for mounting panels. There’s a west-facing gable, but it’s blocked most of the time by a tree. The east-facing side of the gable is available, but it’s pretty much always foggy in the mornings here, so it wouldn’t add much to the system.

Unless I build a ground mount setup in the back yard, we’re pretty much at the limit of how many panels I can buy. I’m kind of glad for that because otherwise I’d just keep buying them.

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