I tried looking into mini fridges last year for my meds in case of a power / fridge failure and…all the ones I found had crap reliability. Sorry!
Oooh, I don’t know the difference in prices, but this could work as well with a small yeti cooler. Always keep some frozen bottles of water on hand and in case of power failure put medicine plus frozen water bottles into the yeti. Aren’t they supposed to keep things cold for like, a week?
I missed your question above, but my friends have a van for camping and they have a fridge they are really happy with. They also have an extra that I use in their guest house when I visit in the Summer. The brand is Engel and it can be a fridge or freezer. I believe it is compatible with 12V or 24 V. I have no idea how expensive they are, but they’ve had them for a long time and haven’t had any issues.
What temp range does the insulin need to stay at? They make these tiny fridges for skincare stuff that are around $30-$50. Would something like that work?
Does anyone use ibotta here? I have honey. I found this, which is driving me crazy as an editor, but I’d like to know if you have a preference and if so, which one/why? Thanks!
I have’t managed to get past the first paragraph, much less read the thing. Too many years writing/editing! What does "…it is somewhat skeptical that people to see cashback software or applications.
Say what? People tend to view the cashback software skeptically? Oookay. Anyway, it pulled me out of the article.
The only conclusion I see here is that they promote impulse buying and so aren’t frugal, considered choices.
I don’t have personal experience but some RV fridges run on propane. Very easy to keep a tank of that around.
With the number of phishing attacks and cyber scams reported each day, it is somewhat skeptical that people come to see cashback software or applications.
=
There have been lots of phishing attacks and cyber scams lately. As a result, shoppers have started to view cash-back apps with skepticism.
Has anyone ever used a website to rent camping equipment? Like this:
Experiences?
So bitcoin mining is that someone figured out a way to get a bunch of people to invest a lot of time and energy into setting up computer systems that are specialized for doing certain types of math.
Could this computing power be repurposed later for someone who wanted to break cryptography on a small or broad scale (for good or evil)? Or would you just use zombie computers? (are those still a thing?)
It just really seems like a sf or comic book plot point. And I don’t know how to ask Google.
Someone tell me what’s reasonable/expected to give as a wedding gift now that I’m rich (aka not in grad school). We are flying across the country so I don’t want to spend $$$ but I also feel kind of cheap giving something like $50.
Context: these people have rich family so there’s a loooot of le cruset etc on the registry
Except for family, I just spend what I’m comfortable with. And even with family, we’re the “poor” ones, so I get what I can afford.
Last time, for family, what I bought was $200 worth of gift cards. The bride, my niece, wouldn’t tell me the address to mail the gift, so I gave them to friends who were down on their luck.
I had just flown across the country for a funeral, about 2 weeks before she told us in 10 days. . I just couldn’t swing another cross-country trip plus hotel room. So, we didn’t go.
With more warning? Yes, I would have gone, cross country, hotel room and car rental. But we’d just spent $2,000 getting me from New England to LA for an unexpected funeral. I’d returned about not long before she told us she was getting married, in LA.
Yep, I got there too.
I get annoyed when I have to edit something to understand it at all, and it isn’t work… I think it was probably translated. And they tried, but…
I’ve used Algonquin outfitters! For others in my group, and for bits I don’t have. They are awesome. You could compare it to the nearby outfitting companies?
In my (mostly upper- middle class) circle in HCOL regions, wedding gifts are roughly $150-200 per couple (single friends tend to give ~$100).
Yep. $115-150ish is about the going rate for a dinner plate for wedding guests these days 🫣
i basically don’t give wedding presents because I’m a monster. So ya know.
So, probably with way more info than any sane person wants, I can think of a couple factors that might affect this offhand:
#1–Actual hardware involved
If the fictional hacker is repurposing an individual’s mining setup, there’s a good chance that they’re looking at cpus/gpus, and those can be used for pretty much anything they’ve got the compute power to support (although maybe assume it’s not a bitcoin rig in that case, because short of free power cpu/gpu bitcoin rigs haven’t made money for a while). But if the hacker wants to repurpose a serious mining setup, particularly a serious bitcoin mining setup, they’re looking at asics, and by definition those aren’t repurposable so it’s pretty much a dead end. ASIC stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit and the specific part is very literal–you can find articles online about old bitcoin mining rigs being used as heaters because that’s about the only thing they’re good for when their bitcoin mining days are done. I suspect there are asic options for most of the other profitable coins too (being application specific makes them very fast and efficient for that application so even if the hardware itself is more expensive they’ve got the capbility to recoup the cost), but I’ve never looked so I can’t swear to it.
(For what it’s worth, while it is possible that something might make asics repurposeable in the future, it would basically involve moving wires that can’t even be seen without an electron microscope. We can do that on computer chips today if the wire is in the right place, but it’s very much a single-wire targeted-change kind of thing in a specialized lab, not rewriting the entire chip–the kind of things that can be rewritten are called FPGAs/field-programmable gate arrays, and that’s a whole other mess that I’m not getting into )
#2–Energy cost and/or how detectable the hacker wants to be
Leaving aside the normal options for tracing networked computers, mining rigs eat power. With respect to individual rigs, the couple guys I know who were still mining at the end of last year (not bitcoin) tracked their energy usage down to the penny, and even the guy in a six-person household saw a noticeable change when he had his rig running. That might pass unnoticed in a neighborhood unless someone went looking, although I suspect with enough machines the power company would notice and law enforcement might (?) be able to access that kind of info too, and a large scale operation is definitely going to draw attention. A hacker on the ‘for good’ side might not care assuming they’ve got some means to pay for it, but someone on the ‘less good’ side would probably care a lot and be a lot happier putting the job off onto other people’s computers.
Anyway, probably plenty of other factors I’m not considering, but those are the first couple that come to mind.
I actually saw those in my search (and was like ??? I had no idea people did this ) It just has to stay refrigerated, so like, ~35 degrees I suppose. Normal refrigeration temps. You can actually leave insulin out for some time and it doesn’t like self destruct or anything, but it’s better to always keep it refrigerated.
Ooh, that is an interesting idea! If I hadn’t just bought a battery backup and solar panel I might go for that, but since I did, I can just use something that is 12V or 110AC powered, since (I think) the battery has both (I should check, haha).
Dedicated RV/camping brands are $$$! But supposedly good, this is the kind of info I was hoping someone might have! I will check that brand! I was looking at Dometic, but they are so $$$ and I just don’t know.
I was thinking of just going with AstroAI, which is not a dedicated camping/RV brand and which doesn’t show up in the “best of” lists, but I have an inexpensive air compressor for my tires (usually have to fill them in the spring when they get low because of the temp change) and it has worked well, and their stuff is pretty well regarded in general? The one thing I can tell is that the ones with compressors work better than the thermoelectric ones (though they are more $$$).
I guess I am thinking now that if I got a slightly bigger one than “necessary” (like bigger than a tiny mini fridge), if we lose power for more than a half a day (more like when, because it will happen sooner or later) if it is in the summer then I can pack it full of the more expensive food from my fridge/freezer and get some savings there. There’s one around $200 that might work fine and is 23L. Just have to make sur it doesn’t pull more power than the battery can support. Two summers ago we lost power for 5 days and we had to throw out so much food. Probably like $500 worth of food. We brought some to a friend’s house who had a generator, but they only had so much space in their fridge/freezer, so we only saved the most expensive stuff. At least this way I would be able to save some things, plus keep the insulin safe. Plus I will still have cream for coffee, which is as we all know the most important thing in a power outage.