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What's This?

Kurt Weiske's other blog.

Retro tech enthusiast, photgrapher, and systems guy.

Blogging like it's 1999. Static blog generation, talking tech...

Links
my bbs
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Thu, 19 Jun 2025

"Return to Industry"

I've read articles chronicling Microsoft's latest round of layoffs. The headline reads "Microsoft to axe "thousands" of its sales staff".

Microsoft is continuing to "focus on building high-performing teams and increasing our agility by reducing layers with fewer managers"

I suppose that's better when they reported that hundreds were "returned to industry", as reported by Microsoft's Ministry of good.speak.

posted at: 10:00 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 31 May 2025

No EV

I tried, I gave up. I bought a BMW I3 in 2023, while I was working from home. I installed a 20 amp 208 circuit in my carport, so I could charge my car at home, and all was well.

I started commuting a couple of days a week, a long commute - 75 miles each way. That was just enough for me to need to charge to get home. At first, I tried public chargers - roughly half of the chargers I tried failed to start charging, were broken, or in one case, the charger snapped off one of the plugs at the end of the car port, which is about a $3000 part!

I did love the car, it was efficient, quirky, well engineered. Surprisingly roomy for 4 people, albeit with front-opening rear doors.

I got sick of range anxiety, worrying about not having a spare tire, and wanting something with more room and bought a hybrid gas vehicle. Now I don't have to obsess over range, my electric bill will go down, and so far my best gas mileage was 52 MPG in freeway driving.

posted at: 08:42 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 21 Mar 2025

Dead Flex

My Fitbit Flex 2 died after 10 years of use. Looking at the options out there, I miss old tech like that.

The interface is 5 LEDs and it notified through a series of 5 colored LEDs and vibrations. Subtle, discrete, and it didn't demand your attention unless it needed it.

I don't need a touch-screen wrist-sized tablet, I want an adjunct that enhances my phone.

posted at: 16:42 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 21 Feb 2025

Kindle Downloads

I read that Amazon is removing the ability to download books to your PC - after 2/26/2025 you'll only be able to download to your Kindle over wifi.

I spent last night sorting through 800+ kindle books on the web page and downloaded most of them to my computer, then imported them into Calibre - my ebook manager.

I'll probably look for non-DRM ebooks moving forward, there are some other ebooks in the space now. While I'm using the Kindle app on my iPhone and a physical Kindle, it might be nice to look at a third-party reader. I've seen a couple of F/OSS Android e-book readers that look interesting.

posted at: 10:27 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 01 Feb 2025

Global Switch Day

It's global switch day, a day to consider switching from siloed, private, for-profit networks to open networks.

I'm already on Mastodon through tilde.zone, have a lemmy account through sdf, started playing with pixelfed, hadn't heard of friendica. I've got some time and and empty house on a rainy day, think I'll start playing with federated, open networks.

To be quite frank, I need to stop doom-scrolling Twitter for my mental health.

posted at: 10:05 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 13 Jan 2025

enn eff ess

Woops! I've created the last several VMs in my proxmox cluster on an NFS share instead of locally. Surprisingly, nothing broke.

posted at: 17:44 | path: | permanent link to this entry