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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • To run a heater or ac, you need a significant generator. I have been looking at battery systems and to run an existing residential ac, its like 10k and you need two inverters. Where I am, the power failures have been minimal and manageable (30 minute intervals every couple months) The exception was Hurricane Beryl and we were out of power for 3 days. I intermittently ran a generator for our fridge and the neighbors to charge stuff but even running a window unit was not an option on our 5000w generator. It burned maybe 2 gallons of gas?

    Running an electric central air heater is also essentially out of the question. With a gas heater, you just need to run the fan and not heat the elements.

    Despite the health risks, that is why we still use. Gas water heaters, gas furnaces, gas dryers, and a gas stove in our house. I want the fallback of running stuff without power. The grid is also shitty to the point (in some areas) that it fried my uncles induction stove, fridge, and ovens even living in a major city.

    That also wouldn’t have helped during the winter storm in Austin because the gas supply basically froze and lost pressure so those folks were really hurting.

    I think the big built in generators run 15k plus and run off natural gas. I did learn that they also require a maintenance subscription (because of course they do) and thats like 2k a year iirc.


  • Check your homeowners insurance cost and property taxes before you start talking about how cheap houses are in Texas. It can run $18k/year in insurance and another 10k in property taxes for a $400k house… If you put 80k down on a $400k house, the mortgage is roughly $2100/month in principle and interest, plus another $933ish per month for Property taxes($5000/year), insurance($5000/year), and hoa fees($1200/year). Your housing cost is ~$3k/month. Property taxes go up every year on top of that. They are limited to a 10%/year increase but historically, that translates to basically a guaranteed 10%/year increase, especially in the last 10 years. Insurance premiums have more than doubled in the last 10 years as well.





  • I bought the Emby lifetime license about 2 years ago when the plex remote streaming stuff first started getting talked about. It coincided with my server refresh so it ended up working out. I have been really happy with Emby so far.

    One thing to note is that music streaming on remote devices is WAY better on plex, Emby behaves more like a mapped network drive running over the internet to a local music player that then forgets your position on pause or when you move away from the remote app/device whereas Plex is actually functional as a modern music player. I keep a local copy of my music library on my phone anyways and okay through Gonemad so it is a non-issue for me but Emby should work better than it does in that case.

    Plex also allows/provides “live” tv (with ads) which can be nice if you are into that, and there is the “free” streaming library too which Emby doesn’t offer. I’ll keep plex around for those features but non-of my stuff is/will be hosted on Plex.












  • The WD devices also offer very limited long term support. The MyBook Live had a software exploit found a couple years after launch that allowed remote access to your files and enabled third parties to wipe your drives. Wd said “wow, that sucks, here is a $15 coupon for a new one. No, we aren’t gonna patch it. Buy a new one” I will never buy another wd device except for the raw discs.