ja27

One solution I've seen is to carry a Raspberry Pi, especially a Zero, and connect to that from the iPad via WiFi or USB-C. Can even VNC to it for a full desktop experience. Pretty portable and low-power.

It's missing paid holidays which are probably 8-10 per year so almost $4k more employee benefit.

Two weeks of vacation is kind of minimal. I'd figure at least three.

Health insurance varies a lot. For me it's a whole family and my last salaried job paid our deductible if we used it so it was easily a $20k benefit for us over being self-employed.

My rule of thumb has been that I need about 70% more as self-employed to be at the equivalent pay.

On the other hand, I've made a ton of extra over salaried employees during 60+ hour week crunch times.

Not exactly but I've been mashed, crushed, cut, scraped, shocked (static), etc. many times by the FIRST robotics team robot I mentored as code ran haywire.

I grabbed a used X270 right before lockdown here. I’d intended to get one for vacation as a “beater” laptop for vacation instead of my MBP. Wound up using it a lot around the house, porch, and yard. Less worried about rain and dust with it. Some light gaming works well too. Plenty of life left in it.

So much that I picked up an X220 on a deal. 10 years old and still pretty swift with an SSD and enough RAM.

I mostly use Apple Books (formerly iBooks) for this. Can highlight, add text notes, and bookmark pages. Syncs those and reading progress across devices. Also somewhat works for PDF books. Sometimes the sync screws up but mostly works.

Google Books can also do this and notes go to an associated Google Doc.

I use mine a lot but have had to do two rounds of replacements due to hardware issues. The battery life is unsurprisingly short (right about 4 hours now) which only comes up on looong calls without a break.

They'd still be on my maybe top 5 list for recent purchases.

I really wonder how many performance cores they could pack in a Mac Mini before the thermals broke.

Apparently as many buckets, totes, or even plastic bags as they can fit in the trunk :(

Here in Florida, there's always a run on gas as tropical storms approach. Just everyone making sure they have a full tank at the same time is a big strain on the supply but there are a lot of people with generators and 5-10 five gallon cans.

When the first Raspberry Pi came out, I remember digging up benchmarks and - if I remember correctly - the $35 Pi was at least 4x faster than the SparcStation 20's we all fought to get neural net training time on in our grad school lab.

When we had someone in for an interview, I'd often circle back and ask the office admin (that also covered reception) what she thought of them. It was pretty informative and eliminated a few candidates.

I've seen someone give the advice of responding to crude sexist "jokes" by asking them to explain it then explain the explanation. Just keep insisting that you don't get it and don't understand why it's funny and see how deep you can get them to dig before they get it.

A few things that help get me moving:

- Make a pretty fine-grained list of tasks that are likely 10-30 minutes

- Put my task list on an index card or whiteboard

- Maybe use a Pomodoro timer

- Change my physical environment - take a laptop outside, kitchen table, bed (or in olden times, McDonalds, library, mall food court, etc.)

- Overload on caffeine and sugary snacks

- Crank up some loud, angry-ish music

- Dangle a reward for myself (If I ship this app today, I can order another keyboard)

- Grind out a code kata on Codewars or somewhere else

- Before I quit for the day, lay out the first task or two for the morning

- Take a shower

- Take a walk

In the mid 80s, my high school used a similar setup on a TRS-80 with I think 8 serial terminals for their COBOL classes, replacing a Burroughs minicomputer with an actual cardpunch and card reader. It was cool hitting college already knowing vi, a shell, and how to write crap to other student's ttys.

There's about a 50% chance I won't even click a link when I see it's to medium.com.

For visual line-of-sight flight, it's helpful to have different color LEDs on the front and rear so you can tell which way it's pointed. Certainly sounds like a photographer job.

I'd previously used AirServer for this. I don't remember bad quality but had a little lag and they got bit by some OS compatibility for a while.

https://www.airserver.com/Mac

My 2 cents:

Avoid competing with 20-somethings coming out of local coding bootcamps. Here there are multiple groups churning out React + (node or ruby on rails) web devs. Just learning Angular instead would set you apart.

Pick one thing and focus on it. It can be so exciting to learn a bunch of new things but you will end up spread too thin to be of much value. Now that "one thing" can be a full stack of a couple technologies, but pick one of each and specialize in it.

Don't be too niche for your market. If you're in a small market, there may not be a lot of demand for machine learning or rust. A solid .NET dev is likely more employable. Look at open job postings and use them to build up a list of common needs there.

There's a pattern I've seen a number of people successfully follow. Find a somewhat newer technology with good potential value in your market. Learn it. Blog about what you learn. Develop a talk about it and give it a couple of times (Meetup groups are usually desperate for speakers). Produce a video of your talk, either from an in-person event when we can again or one from your desk environment. Start pinging publishers about writing a chapter or reviewing a book on your chosen tech. If possible, get your name on a book cover, even if it's with other authors. From then on, you are "Zero Balance, author of 'Getting Started With Golang Embeds'". Even if you're applying for jobs that aren't closely related, you project a lot more authority than the average coder.

Around makerspaces, mesh networking plans rank slightly above perpetual motion machines. It's not impossible but there are substantial challenges. Ask any ham involved in packet radio for the past 40 years.

Back around 2006, I did a crash project on IBM 4690 OS. At some point I got into the included editor and by the second time I hit control-K, it all started coming back to me.

That project also had to use 16 bit small memory model which brought me back to the ancient Turbo Pascal / C days.

Buy a $25 Visa gift card, spend $20-ish of it elsewhere, and use that for the account. They may post a charge of $1 or so to initially confirm the card.

(I've had success with this in the past but apparently results can vary - some services may block a prepaid card)

I'm still waiting but I keep coming close to grabbing a totally fanless M1 Air.

But for my day-to-day use, even with barely leaving the house, a 15-16" display is much better for me. I would appreciate the speed and other features of the next-gen machines but the real deciding factor is the display. Sure, I would use it on my 27" 4K monitor a lot, but I like moving around even if it's just to the porch or couch, and my use of machines with 12-14" has felt fairly cramped when doing actual dev work.

I know the M1 MBP's fan is apparently very, very quiet but if I were recording podcasts, I'd be really tempted to go totally fanless with the Air. No noise, no vents to block, no dust build-up, true all-day battery life, no &#(* touch bar, and relatively cheap.

A huge factor for waiting is if you want to run multiple external displays. The M1 MBP and MBA can only drive the internal display and one external. I personally like one big display but if you need that multi-monitor life, you need to wait (or get the M1 Mini or use a DisplayLink adapter).

My 15" 2015 MBP was the best bang-for-the-buck Mac I've owned. Got it used (to avoid getting a butterfly keyboard MBP), almost max CPU, max RAM, swapped in an NVMe SSD and a semi-permanent microSD card.

I love my 16" MBP but wasn't blown away by the upgrade. Touchbar is meh and mostly in my way. Speakers are a big win. Keyboard is a tossup but at least I avoided the butterfly era. Everything else is just noticeably better but not a "wow" better. My biggest annoyance is fan noise when attached to a monitor. Running at native panel resolution seems to help.

I'm looking forward to the 16" class M1.

I've seen the same claim about obscure mobile apps.

Despite my daily driver being my i9 16" MacBook Pro, I've started falling for the Thinkpads. Had a couple E-series before but right as the pandemic started I grabbed a used i5 X270. Swapped in a 1080 IPS screen, an SSD, and eventually 16GB of RAM so I'm at about $500 for a machine that can do everything I _need_. Charges with IBM chargers or USB-C. Has enough ports. Can run macOS in VirtualBox and I've even built iOS apps on it. Handles light gaming. Matte screen. Cheap enough that I'm not paranoid about damaging it.

Yeah the used market prices crept up, probably due to families buying up laptops for online school students, but you can still catch bargains.

Unfortunately much past the X280/T480 generation and you stop being able to upgrade things yourself. It's like I see in the used Mac Mini market where there are a ton of otherwise useful machines from 2014 but they're crippled with 4GB of non-upgradable RAM.

2 years ago I went from a 2011 MBP to a used i7 2015 15" MBP and it was a great machine. I liked the ports and it was really handy to stash a 400GB microSD in the slot for more space. I upgraded the stock SSD to an NVMe and it really made a difference.

I went to the i9 16" MBP a year ago and yeah it's new and shiny and faster but not a world-changer. Managing to skip the butterfly keyboard was the big win. The better speakers are surprisingly the best feature upgrade from the 2015 to 2019.

Except for the lure of the M1 Macs, a used i7 15" 2015 MacBook Pro is probably the best bang for the buck in the Apple world.

Quick-n-dirty log level:

    debug && printf("counter: %d\n", i);

My makerspace has done a program with Title 1 schools, Girl Scouts, etc. where we give kids a Pi with keyboard, mouse, display and teach them a little electronics, coding, etc. The biggest learned lesson has been that many of them do not have internet access at home other than via a smartphone. So we started loading the Pi's with as much free educational content as we could.

Is it discontinued yet?

There's a Classico pasta sauce line that uses jars molded with Atlas Mason on them and fit Mason jar lids but are not designed to be reused for canning. Just for marketing.

Lays Stax come in an equivalent all-plastic tube and it's insane how much plastic that is compared to a bag of regular chips. The other one that bothers me is the larger Crystal Light packets which come in a very sturdy plastic container that's at least five times bigger than it needs to be. Even the generic knock-offs at ALDI come in a similar plastic container. Why not cardboard?

Here, a good bit of our trash is burned and used to generate electricity before the ash is buried, so I feel a bit less guilty about single-use plastics but it's still not good. I'm sure plenty of our recycling stream ends up there too, either due to contamination or lack of buyers for it.

Yeah I've been licensed for 25+ years and I'm still one of the younger hams here.

I was never really into random rag-chews / chats on repeaters or HF. I did a lot of public service - disaster relief and helping with fundraising walks/rides - but that's mostly dried up here. Still some room for hams to serve in other disaster roles.

Been doing a lot with SDRs but outside of ham radio.