Don’t expect to be blown away, e-ink tech moves very slowly. Most of what’s changed since then is probably improved responsiveness, while maintaining similar levels of sharpness and contrast, and the introductions of other players into the market, such as those based on android.

Which kobo did you use? If it’s one of the color ones, it’s going to be much more grey than B&W e-readers due to the extra color filter layer. All the color e-readers have this drawback and rely on the front light to improve contrast.

If you don’t need color, just go with the latest gen of a black and white reader, which should be using Carta 1300 I believe, with the software you’d like. Could also go with an older generation if you want to save a few bucks, such as carta 1200, all you would sacrifice is a bit of contrast and some responsiveness.

Yeah, my story is purely anecdotal, plenty of people have died from downed lines, especially instantaneous failures in high weather events. just not in my limited experience. Just want to give some counterpoints as the failure cases can be silent but deadly to the general public, unlike most other underground utilities.

One point for above ground is that it is far easier to know when it’s damaged to the point of being unsafe for the general public and much simpler and quicker to repair. For underground, you don’t know that until there is a failure that causes outages or someone/something gets hurt.

While I have seen numerous downed power lines, I have not know anything actual hurt by them. On the other hand, I have known multiple dogs who’ve died stepping on top of electrified access points while out for walks. While this is purely anecdotal, it’s not black and white either.

Other underground utilities have more obvious failure signs to the public (smells, flooding, water damage etc) and generally have minimal short term consequences while electrical faults tend to go unnoticed until a significant failure event (i.e. power goes out or something gets killed). Our town has hundreds of reported natural gas leaks, that is take years to fix while pole repairs tend to happen within an hour of being reported with police standing by until the crew shows up.

Underground lines, when damaged can also be dangerous. I’ve known of multiple dogs in may area who’ve died instantly just stepping on top utility access points that become electrified due to damaged underground lines. For overhead lines, if it’s not down, it’s generally not a safety hazard to the general public and if it is down, vast majority know to steer well clear of them and report the damage.

Should also check to make sure you don’t have any utilities buried in the path you want to trench. Many localities will have a number you can call and they will tell the various utility providers to flag any buried infrastructure they may have in the area.

100m is probably fine but you are at the limit of the spec. If you don’t want to deal with re-running the line if you do end up have transmission issues, fibre is better.

Probably worth double checking local regulations but most don’t care about low power lines like Ethernet. Definitely put it in a conduit though, to both protect it and make any future modifications easier. Should also cover it with a layer of different medium, such as sand, so you know when you are near it if you do need to dig it up again.

They can nest in pretty much any nook they can fit into, especially if it came with a tasty mouse snack. Doubt they would spend much time in your house though as they tend to roam their territory rather than stick around to a particular spot.

Possibly a stoat? They are long like a ferret and pretty prevalent.

Manual grinders are a great budget option, they punch well above their weight, comparable to electric grinders that are 2-3x the price. I’ve been happy with my 1Zpresso X-Ultra for pour overs. While it can do espresso, it’s quite a bit more work when you get that fine in grind size.

For espresso, I was able to get a Timemore 078s at a discount that I’ve been happy with it though there are a lot of options these days for electric grinders in the $300-$800 price range.

As a quick hack, you can also pair a manual grinder with a cordless screwdriver/drill. Just go easy on the power as it shouldn’t take all that much to match or exceed hand power.

Cost doesn’t seem to matter with return fraud. I recently received a “new” $6 item that had its contents replaced with a $4 item and then taped shut. Seriously, who wastes their time on this stuff?

I could be wrong but it seems like a lot of their big name games are exclusive to their subscription service. I suspect this thing will be a brick in a couple years when the company goes under and services shut down.

At this price point, just get a switch and have access to a massive library of games, with quite a few encouraging active play.

Should be compatible with proton, from FAQ:

How do I play the game on my Steam Deck? You can download the game from our website, add it as a non-steam game in Steam then run it with proton. (We recommend newer versions of Proton)

Republicans have been foaming at the mouth about these elections for the past several months and are taking every opportunity they can to cast democrats as “stupid, crazy, communists”. From what I can tell, this is just a more mild form of it, disguising it as public education. There was no reason for him to even mention these races but he did so anyways, likely to stoke controversy.

There is nothing here indicating that people were actually calling about the NYC mayor or Virginia governor races, but just elections in general. The politician is the one who mentioned these races, likely to throw shade on the opposite party.

Local elections are extremely common off cycle and they tend to be poorly advertised unless elections commissions and other organizations actually put effort into them. Often times, the first time many people see a ballot for such elections is on Election Day.

Yup, that’s very true just pointing out that it’s not completely stupid that people might think they might have an election today, since it’s the default day such things occur, and contact a representative about it. Ideally, we should be encouraging people to take part in the civic process instead of casting derision on them with various snarky comments, which is what this politician did and what most comments here are doing.

There are thousands of jurisdictions in the U.S., with plenty of elections going on, beyond the big ones in the news. My city always has something to vote on each year so I’m not surprised about some people thinking they are missing out on something. I’m actually surprised there aren’t any elections going on in Kentucky, do they have all city/town/county elections sync’d up with state/national races?

It’s tricky to make a recommendation as pretty much all the home lab stuff that people typically run can be done so on a potato, which is why RPis are so popular.

An N100 would definitely be a step up from the pis and meet your stated needs. They are super popular, in a multitude of formfactors so should be able to find something you like. But you may get the itch to upgrade further if you expect to expand or experiment extensively. Like any hobby, it’s generally easy to justify to yourself that you need to get that “next cool/better/faster/prettier thing” so such an itch may be unavoidable no matter what you get.

Instead of worrying about performance, as pretty much any modern miniPC should outclass a Pi, take a look at the specific form factors that are available. Do they have the expansion, networking you need? Can you stick this thing somewhere out of the way and not worry about it taking too much space or making too much noise? Are you comfortable with their level of support/warranty? Expect garbage/non-existent support from most of the miniPC specialty brands out there, which includes minisforum which I recommended in another comment. If you outgrow it, are you comfortable with it being e-waste/have a means of repurposing it?

While N100 is great for what it is, especially at a $200 budget, it can be limiting with its fairly small core/thread count if you expand beyond a handful of applications.

OP mentioned tinkering with multiple Linux flavors. A higher end cpu, with more cores and threads, would allow them to virtualize multiple instances on top of whatever other workloads they have and potentially not break a sweat while the N100 could struggle. While such an upgrade would be more expensive, price for performance will likely be significantly better if you can make use of it.

I’ve had good experience with the Minisforum MS-01, while it’s more than your $200 mentioned, it’s been worth every penny. Plenty of power for most homelabs and lots of nice features for future proofing (10gb, Ethernet, plenty of storage options, small but still usable pcie expansion slot) in a small form factor.

I’ve pretty much retired all my RPis at this point and my old Synology NAS is now just storage only with the MS-01 doing all the actual work.

Really don’t have a reason to migrate away from it for many years unless it died. Even then, you can create a promox cluster with them trivially to provide some redundancy.

They also have the a1 and a2 options for AMD but the a1 doesn’t have the same feature set and a2 is pretty expensive if you don’t need the extra power.

It’s what turns it from a children’s book into a horror story