20) Yard waste bags
1) Ingenious large folding plastic dingus that holds the bags open*
1) Leaf rake
My landlord is recovering from shoulder reconstruction surgery, so he's unable to do much in the way of manual labor. Right now he's away on a well-deserved vacation with his kids & grandkids, so I decided to surprise him and clean up the yard around our building for winter (if it ever arrives, that is).
EIGHT HOURS later, most of my appendages are now malfunctioning in various ways. But it'll be worth it to see the look on his face when he gets back.
*Seriously: I'd like to buy an expensive dinner for whoever invented this thing.
1) Ingenious large folding plastic dingus that holds the bags open*
1) Leaf rake
My landlord is recovering from shoulder reconstruction surgery, so he's unable to do much in the way of manual labor. Right now he's away on a well-deserved vacation with his kids & grandkids, so I decided to surprise him and clean up the yard around our building for winter (if it ever arrives, that is).
EIGHT HOURS later, most of my appendages are now malfunctioning in various ways. But it'll be worth it to see the look on his face when he gets back.
*Seriously: I'd like to buy an expensive dinner for whoever invented this thing.
Crossword puzzle compilations for a friend.
Pair of 30A 4-pin twist-lock connectors. I am getting (did not buy) a bigger generator. I had already wired everything 30A, except the plug to the old genset was 20A. Now I need a 30A end, and an adapter in case the 30A genset fails and I must fall-back.
Pair of 30A 4-pin twist-lock connectors. I am getting (did not buy) a bigger generator. I had already wired everything 30A, except the plug to the old genset was 20A. Now I need a 30A end, and an adapter in case the 30A genset fails and I must fall-back.
A video card for this PC. A cheap $79 card is fine since I don't play games.
The PC has functioned fine for several years without any video card at all. The video from the CPU, an older i5-4670K has been sufficient....until I got the 4K TV. The on board video will play 4K video, but there is some frame rate slowdown or dropped frames on dense video making playback a bit choppy. Still, I have used it for over a year this way.
I got a cheap phone on Thanksgiving that takes 4K video and 1080 at 60 FPS video. The PC's on board video absolutely chokes on 1080 @ 60 FPS, which it what I used for the grandkids Christmas show.
The PC has functioned fine for several years without any video card at all. The video from the CPU, an older i5-4670K has been sufficient....until I got the 4K TV. The on board video will play 4K video, but there is some frame rate slowdown or dropped frames on dense video making playback a bit choppy. Still, I have used it for over a year this way.
I got a cheap phone on Thanksgiving that takes 4K video and 1080 at 60 FPS video. The PC's on board video absolutely chokes on 1080 @ 60 FPS, which it what I used for the grandkids Christmas show.
Went through that exact scenario with the video stuff last year or so. New card can do dual 4K monitors @60 Hz, and the fans don't even come on, which is nice.
You may discover some HDMI cables can struggle a bit at this bitrate, throwing the occasional "sparklies" on the screen. I had this problem, so I came up with this:
If your 4K TV is an LED backlit model, it may be designed to switch off the backlight during a full-black scene, as most recent models seem to do. You can use this feature to test your cables. Just use some graphics program to make a .bmp or .gif of a large black rectangle - (make sure RGB is 0,0,0). Display on your 4K monitor as fullscreen, scaling to fill completely if necessary. Make sure there are no borders or other info on the screen - just all black.
If all is well, your monitor's backlight will switch off while displaying this. If your HDMI cable is misbehaving at all, you'll see the backlight switch on & off randomly as the sparkle errors occur. You might see the sparkles too, of course, but they're hard to catch sometimes - the backlight switching is way easier to observe.
Of course you don't need a $75.00 Demon Cable to fix this. When it happened to me, I just unplugged my cheap HDMI cable and exchanged it with another equally cheap one from the closet. The backlight now stays fully off during the above test.
All of my stuff is of the extreme budget variety. I have two 4K TV's used as computer monitors, neither is hooked up to an antenna or cable.
The 43 inch Hisense came from Sam's club last year in a pre black Friday sale for $229. It gets some colors wrong, especially flesh tones, but it's not noticeable unless you are a critical viewer, or know what to look for. The PC had dual monitors, the other is a Hisense 1080 TV from Walmart 2 years ago $149. I often have a few dozen files open at once when doing a PCB layout, so I need room to spread them out.
The other PC had 2 X 1080 TV's but I got a 40 inch Samsung 4 K for $299 on black Friday. It is used for dual monitor DAW work which does fine on the internal PC video, but I plan on doing some video editing on it long term, so I'll be looking for a video card for it someday.
I have a bunch of HDMI cables, but all are of the cheap variety. The only time I noticed any weirdness was when I tried to run a 4K TV on a 12 foot cable. I moved the PC to use the 4K on a 6 foot cable, and things look good, I'll have to try the black test....don't know if either TV kills the backlight on black though. The Samsung does feature HDR, so it should.
The 43 inch Hisense came from Sam's club last year in a pre black Friday sale for $229. It gets some colors wrong, especially flesh tones, but it's not noticeable unless you are a critical viewer, or know what to look for. The PC had dual monitors, the other is a Hisense 1080 TV from Walmart 2 years ago $149. I often have a few dozen files open at once when doing a PCB layout, so I need room to spread them out.
The other PC had 2 X 1080 TV's but I got a 40 inch Samsung 4 K for $299 on black Friday. It is used for dual monitor DAW work which does fine on the internal PC video, but I plan on doing some video editing on it long term, so I'll be looking for a video card for it someday.
I have a bunch of HDMI cables, but all are of the cheap variety. The only time I noticed any weirdness was when I tried to run a 4K TV on a 12 foot cable. I moved the PC to use the 4K on a 6 foot cable, and things look good, I'll have to try the black test....don't know if either TV kills the backlight on black though. The Samsung does feature HDR, so it should.
Conspicuous consumption! I read your post on a ten year old Panasonic 42" plasma. Weighs about 120 lbs but still works and looks great. Never going back to a 24" monitor.
Today's buys: 12 x 0.01uF FT-1 600 volt Teflon caps and 2 x Raytheon 6bl7s for a line stage on the bench.
Me too, although one of them also has a set of rabbit ears on it. (I ditched cable TV several years ago.)
The curved-screen models are a genuine advantage for computer use, since you're always seated inside the radius. Unfortunately they seem to be fading away in the general market, where longer viewing distances make the curve feature less useful (or even a hindrance).