IDK man, I bought a 10 pack of cheap thumb drives on Amazon a year ago, just big enough for giving to friends full of files or installing Linux or whatever. They were microcenter brand… Not high quality.

The other day I used the last two, took them to work. Went to buy another pack? More than double the price I paid last week.

Yeah yeah it’s flash, not HDDs. I don’t think it matters. Everyone is riding the “computer get more expensive” train. And once the price goes up, it doesn’t come back down.

We’re boned.

Oh for sure, do what you want to do. I’m just saying, while everyone has their opinions, some people like to follow the crowd of popular opinion, and the crowd is moving away from Ubuntu. Maybe not everyone knows that 🤷‍♂️

Ubuntu has kind of fallen out of favor with a lot of people, myself included. It used to be my go to, then I went mint, now I run fedora Bluefin.

High current draw, something like a rak or T114 is better. Heck there’s probably even better cheaper options these days, but anything esp32 based isn’t gonna be it.

Exactly this.

I am likewise a long time Debian user, different flavors, on and off. Played with Arch a little. Never touched fedora.

Installed Bluefin on my main laptop almost a year ago, haven’t looked back. The stability is exactly what I was looking for. It just works, and protects me from myself.

But still my proxmox is full of mostly Debian servers, I still value a traditional install.

But you better believe that when my buddy asked for help with Windows 10 EOL, one of the options I gave him was Linux. He was curious, we went over pros and cons, now he’s running Bluefin too.

They got away with it. I bought the part months ago after bodging a fix on the stock connector. By time the bodge failed, the return window closed. It was $5 so unfortunately not worth my time fighting it.

My headlight connector got a little melty, just enough to get loose and stop working, just wore out I suppose.

I bought one on Amazon, along with new bulbs, installed it, and within an hour the new connector had catastrophically melted and shorted out enough to blow the fuse.

I should’ve known, the wire felt cheap, copper clad aluminum. But I thought it would be fine, it’s just a headlight 🤷‍♂️

Now I’ve got a replacement from the local auto parts. So far so good.

V3 is esp32, bad for solar unfortunately

Like this one?

Or this one?

This. Though theoretically you could do it without CGNAT, maybe some type of complex vlan arrangement? I’m not sure, I’m not a networkologist.

I do know that I just got fiber down my road from a smaller company, still a big multi state company, but not Comcast or charter big. I called them because I was worried about CGNAT for my self hosting. The salesman didn’t know what I was talking about, which is disappointing but not surprising. But they forwarded me to the tech guys, who also claimed to not know what I was talking about… Which was either a downright lie, or they were idiots, either way it’s very concerning.

The price was right though, $5 cheaper per month, for 10 times faster download, and 30 times faster upload. So I gave it a shot. Thankfully I’m not behind a CGNAT, yet 🤞

Finally set up my proxmox server, been procrastinating for a year. Thought on a whim, “I’m only using 2 of my 4 slots, and I could benefit from a bit more RAM. It’s DDR4, can’t be that expensive”.

Yeah… It was that expensive. More expensive than when I bought the stuff originally when this computer was new.

Wow, are you me? Haha also circuit stuff, woodworking when I was a kid, piano I never play, just got my first sewing machine a few months ago.

Add in fpv drones, ham radio, meshtastic, homelab, enthusiast grade flashlights, longboarding, snowboarding, wake surfing, backpacking, flipperzero, LINUX! Lol you can run out of time and money pretty quickly.

But, do all these things just a little, and it’s good.

Do you really never ever touch your stuff anymore? Or just nowhere near as much as you did?

Because for me, I still sometimes, rarely, but sometimes, utilize the skills I gained. I don’t go hard on any single one of those things anymore, but I’m glad that I did, or at least I tell myself I am. Now when I go backpacking, I know I have the best flashlight for the job. When I play with meshtastic, my ham radio skills tell me my antenna placement is optimal. When we were sending a care package to a sick friend, we thought of a funny inside joke to reference, so I dusted off the 3D printer and printed up a couple trinkets that were perfectly matched to the joke. When I decided to set up my homelab, my previous love of Linux made it easier to set up proxmox. When I wanted to use my camp chair at the beach, I was able to sew a sheet to stretch between the feet to support me on the sand.

It’s up to you what you wanna do. But I don’t view my hobby jumping as a bad thing. So long as I keep the spending more or less in check, who cares? I’m having fun, learning skills, and those skills can come in handy.

Other people are sometimes jealous of my ability to learn and enjoy so many things. I’m able to help them when they get started later, because I have an approximate knowledge of many things 😂

I say go for it 😁

Lots of comments here, plenty of information for you. I’ll add to the pile that I started playing with my buddies stock ender 3, fought it often, lots of tweaking and configuring.

Then I got my own ender 3v2, and fought it less, but still needs tinkering. Usually though I can fire it up and print small stuff without touching it. I print infrequently these days, so the procedure usually involves wiping the dust off the bed first. But it works well enough for my needs.

I tend to get into hobbies for awhile and then back off, so I’m glad I didn’t spend more. And really, while $300 is a lot of money in many ways, in some ways it’s not so much. I’m glad I have a printer, it is occasionally highly useful. But I’m glad I don’t have a $600-1000 printer. Personally 🤷‍♂️ but that’s just me.

That’s my fault for jumping in without researching lol.

Now I see why PETG isn’t as popular.

I needed something with more heat resistance than ABS but I didn’t want to go through the work of making an enclosure

Classic