A) If it’s on a high balcony that people might be passing below, I’d really prefer it to be attached with something a bit more substantial than zip ties… If sun exposure degrades the zip ties and then a sudden breeze causes a panel to detach, it could cause pretty serious injury to someone below.

B) There’s also a potential electrical public safety issue here. If the apartment building maintenance crew shuts off power in order to work on the electrical system, is there anything to prevent these panels from backfeeding into the apartment’s electrical system, making some of the wires still live? Likewise, if the power company has to shut off power to do power line maintenance, is there anything that prevents these panels from backfeeding into the power lines when they’re supposed to be disconnected and safe to work on? (Grid power transformers will work in reverse, increasing the (probably) 120V from the solar panels into much more dangerous transmission voltages in the kilovolts. At extremely low amperage, but could still be quite dangerous to unsuspecting linemen.)

C) There’s also a third potential safety issue. Household electrical outlets (and the wiring for them) are only intended to carry 15 or 20 amps, depending on the type. Normally if you exceed that, then a breaker will trip or a fuse will blow, protecting you from overloading the building’s wiring and potentially causing a fire. But if this plug-in solar system is connected on the same circuit as any other outlets, the other outlets in the circuit could potentially draw more than the rated current because they’re drawing some of that current from the solar system, which doesn’t go through the breaker. An electrical load that was just the right amount of ‘too high’, if connected to the same circuit as the solar panels, could potentially draw too much amperage through the wires, causing them to heat up and start a fire without the breakers or fuses being able to protect you. In an apartment building, that’s especially dangerous, as the person who installed the solar isn’t only endangering themselves, but potentially also endangering everyone who lives in the building. (The higher the power output of the solar system, the more dangerous this becomes. A mere 220W system probably isn’t adding enough amperage to seriously exceed the safety margin … probably … but it’s still best not to risk it.)

I’m all for installing your own solar panels, even in an apartment, but please – do it safely!

Attach it with something stronger and more reliable than zip ties. Ensure there’s a system in place to prevent backfeeding in event of a power outage. Ensure that a plug-in solar system is plugged into its own dedicated circuit, not sharing the circuit with anything else.*

*It would be okay to plug multiple plug-in solar systems to the same circuit, as long as the total power output of all the systems combined is less than ~1800W. And even if you exceed that, the worst thing that will happen is that the breaker trips or the fuse blows. Just make sure they’re not sharing the same circuit with any electrical loads.

Formatting?

None of them are elderly or very young.

Why?

Can’t sign in to xitter. Username already taken.

Oops, you missed the cave and now you’ve just invented Middle Earth’s fastest possible way to return the Ring to Sauron.

And non-commercial distros?

I read this as minimum wage needing to be higher, not snow shoveling wages needing to be lower.

Anything is an infinitely higher percentage than zero. That’s how math works. Don’t know what you’re trying to get at with that.

And $30/hr doesn’t even seem all that high for a high-cost-of-living area like NY.

No! Money is only supposed to be hoarded, so you can watch red line go up.

Yep. And most damning, a lot of my image viewing or editing apps don’t like the webp format.

and the fps fell to a crawl and i couldn’t really move my head to see stuff breaking and falling unfortunately

Huh… Didn’t have that issue on my hardware, which made it a lot more enjoyable, I guess. Maybe try again at some point if you’ve ever got a significant hardware upgrade.

(And, honestly, the missions are kind of a pain a lot of times. It’s actually more of a heist and getaway game when you play the missions. I mostly just wanted to play it in sandbox mode and destroy stuff.)

Have you looked at Teardown?

Haven’t tried the Space Age expansion yet, so not sure what to expect there on time commitment.

Massive increase in time commitment there.

You still start the same way, but now launching a rocket isn’t the end of the game … it’s just the end of the first act. Now you also build orbiting space stations and interplanetary spaceships (which require launching dozens of rockets to build), so you can go colonize 4 more planets, each with their own new challenges and new resources to gather and exploit. Each one of those can easily take just as much time to colonize as your original planet, if not more. You’ll need to build autonomous spaceships to regularly ferry supplies and finished products around the solar system to where they’re needed. Then finally build a big, badass spaceship capable of reaching the edge of the solar system, and that is the new win condition.

After playing Space Age, the original Factorio game seems like just a tutorial level.

Cyberpunk is an awesome game now, years after its release.

It was rough and buggy at release, but now it’s everything it should have been from the beginning. (I prefer to play on PC so I can have the mod that turns some people into furries, though!)

That’s the tricky part, innit?

A few good options:

A) Set up your backup/restore procedures immediately after setting up your fresh new system. And then immediately test them to see if you can successfully restore, before you’ve done anything important on the new system that you can’t afford to lose. If the restoration completely fails, no biggie. You just have to start over on setting up your fresh new system.

B) Attempt to restore your backup to a different system, not your primary one. You’ll need a second set of hardware to do that, but if you’ve got the hardware lying around, it’s a great way to test your restore procedure. If you’re upgrading your hardware anyway, it could be a good time to do this test – use your backup restoration procedure to move your data to the new hardware. (As an extra bonus, this doesn’t require any downtime on the primary system.)

C) Simulate a complete hard drive failure and replacement by replacing your primary system’s drive(s) with a blank new one. If the backup restoration fails, you should (fingers crossed) be able to just plug the old hard drive back in and everything will go back to how it was before your test.

D) Have multiple backups and multiple restore plans, and just hope to fuck that at least one of them actually works during your testing.

Option A can only be done if you’re proactive about it and do it at the right time.

Options B and C require extra hardware, but are probably the best choice if you have the hardware or can afford it.

And Option D will always have at least a tiny amount of risk associated with it.

Haven’t had the full experience until you get stuck on Aquilo because you ran out of a resource that’s not naturally occurring there and don’t have enough left to launch another rocket … so now you’re stuck on a frozen-over Aquilo while trying to remotely operate your ships and factories on other planets to make a new supply run for you.

Do you know how to transfer the files back if your OS has completely failed?

Verifying the files are there in your backup is only, like 10% of verifying that it’s a real, usable backup.

The important question is: can you successfully restore those files from the backup? Can you successfully put them back where they’re supposed to be after losing your primary copy?