It’s as simple as getting the EU site and privacy policy when you connect from an EU IP. These systems are typically not as rigid as you might expect and the only friction might be around things like payment processing or things like that.

I get relatively uncensored internet access through UK/Ireland servers. This law and this type of law completely terrifies me.

I do have an oversized battery buffer. Most people are discouraged from cooking or using any resistive load on the batteries, but I opted to invest in a bigger battery backup specifically to be able to do that, it’s why I said 85%+ and not like 40%. The battery buffer really is the point of this system, having 24/7 electricity in my home that I can pull over 20 amperes out of at the drop of a hat is without a question the most decadent luxury I have ever experienced. That’s not something I can just hook up to my house.

If I reconnect the grid-charging circuit, it is more than enough in the winter months nowadays (the grid was down more often in 2020-2023). But that gets really expensive, and relying on the grid is not wise.

If I use the secondary (mafia) grid more frequently (as I did in 2020-2023 out of necessity) I can pull a tiny amount of amps at an extortionate kWh rate, that’s enough to keep things like the fridge and lights and the water pump running. But turn on one hot plate or accidentally use the microwave, turn on the heater to the wrong setting (or the AC to the right setting but at the wrong time) and you have to cover up to get to the freezing street to switch the breaker back on. Sounds obnoxious? Well pre-solar that was the only option for 12+ hours of the day. I remember going down to flip the breaker over twenty times one day as a kid.

Let’s not get into the water situation. I just spent a weekend grappling with neighbors and floater valves.

They don’t, my current machine is a Maingear branded one that someone painstakingly hauled over from the US, and my potential new one would be an XMG branded machine, shipped at significant expense from the EU.

I’m in the armpit of the Middle East, I don’t have a local reseller, and even if I did, they’d want $1,000 more than just going through the pain of buying from overseas, alongside a blood sacrifice and the soul of my firstborn child, and a slap across my face for the insolence of asking.

I might be the wrong person to answer in this community since I daily drive Windows, but my Tongfang has been a dream and I’m thinking of buying a new one.

Although in OP’s case I’d probably still be looking for the cliche used Thinkpad. Unbeatable.

I live in a country with abhorrently unreliable electricity.

Even now that I have solar and even if I mostly (85%+) cook on a plug-in resistance hob and electric oven, gas is just unbeatable as a backup during the winter. No sun? Grid down? Milk boiled over and got into the hob’s thermostat? Need to cook more than one pot at a time? Israel decided to bomb a fucking residential substation for no reason again? Power company operator decided to accidentally pull an epic prank and route the wrong voltage to everyone’s house, frying a whole town’s fridges, during a year when people couldn’t afford to replace them (I can’t find an English article to link but I promise this happened)? No problemo

I also got a plug-in induction infrared plate and while it is pretty much magical it also makes my inverter shit itself uncontrollably (all my LED lights flicker and it makes an uncomfortable noise) so I really only use it when the ”good” grid is on (the bad one can’t handle it, the good one is the one from the prank above).

You can pry my backup butane from my cold dead hands. I replace the tank less than once a year, it’s fine. Not everyone who wants this option to stay is a regressive cultist.

As someone who VPNs into the EU specifically for the privacy laws, this is troubling. I do wonder what my next move should be. I’d hate to lose my Steam account in particular.

To be fair, I do this at work and while I get funny looks I do get complicated ideas across better when I can provide visual aid.

Frankly I need to improve my MS Paint skills. I need to get my mouse handwriting up to at least 70% of the Khan Academy guy’s level.

sufficient performance > sufficient beauty > power usage > max beauty > max performance

This is basically alien to me. I think it has to be game specific.

Euro Truck Simulator? Beauty is more important than performance, unless playing it on my handheld, in which case I can knock the FPS limiter down to 40 and crank the settings down

Satisfactory? Performance over everything.

Granted most of the games I play are older (so I don’t need to choose) or CPU-bound simulation games (Raising the graphics doesn’t make it run meaningfully slower if your CPU is the bottleneck).

Although I must also point out that I think the current trend of “fidelity=beauty” is ridiculous. I recently played INFRA, a game built in Source, and while the fidelity was clearly “outdated”, the game looked fantastic.

Plugging my system into a Kill A Watt was enlightening.

Laptop gaming is a harsh but educational mistress re: power consumption (even when it’s plugged in), I’ll tell you that. All the heat you generate is right in front of your face, as is all the airflow (and noise) needed to wick it away.

Honestly I’d love to see more of this. Wheels and panels as well, not just gamepads. I’ve always wished for fully assignable controller support where the icon and HUDs etc change, ETS2 is looks so much better now that the icons don’t flicker twice per second because of my hodgepodge DS4Windows control scheme anymore. And with multi-button combinations and stuff making more things doable from the controller.

I do kind of wish Steam Input was a separate piece of software though, sort of like Xpadder back in the day. Some kind of open button-mapping standard with an API and everything.

The standard resistor values are a bit weird at first but when you’re in the zone and you start getting used to what they usually are you start becoming relatively decent at making an educated guess for what the values should be. The actual IRL values are predictably defined and you start remembering the possible options over time.

Someone’s probably made a program that can do it for you though. My own shitty circuits are all built from standard example circuits so I haven’t had to think about this stuff often. Or like I’ll mix and match them illogically in a pinch (on the breadboard) and figure it out later (I don’t build the final circuit lol). Or of course, the venerable using-a-potentiometer-exactly-where-you-shouldn’t technique, which is one of the pillars of modern engineering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceratothoa_oestroides

Geographically given where I am, it’s probably this one

Seems like a similar species is common where I am.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceratothoa_oestroides

Horrifying. Thanks for the link, although to be honest I probably could have googled “fish tongue parasite isopod” at some point in the past decade+.

Interesting that the Wikipedia page has photos that wouldn’t have rang the bell for me, the one I remember was exactly like the one in the post.

Edit: the article describes a habitat that is pretty far from me, this was in Lebanon in the eastern Mediterranean over a decade ago. Could be a similar species.

A foundational memory for me was a fish dissection in middle school in which we respectfully sliced the innards of one of these bad boys only to find this exact parasite inside. All the other groups just had a fish to dissect, but we also took a supercurricular lab detour to dissect that other thing too, as my classmates from other groups gathered around with real curiosity.

Frankly haven’t thought much of it in years. Would be cool to know what this is actually called.

Boy have I got news for you.

Look up the Zizians.

(Ok they’re only a tangential offshoot of people who maybe really like the Basilisk thought experiment and mostly don’t believe it. But hey. It’s underway!)

I can’t place why, but the thought of used enterprise SSDs still sketches me out more than HDDs. Maybe it’s just that I only ever think of RAID in terms of hard drives, paired with a decade+ of hearing about SSD reliability issues, which are very different from the more familiar problems HDDs can have.

The power and noise difference makes it more appealing to me, moreso than the speed, personally. Maybe when consumer bottom-barrel SSDs get a little better I could be convinced into RAIDing a bunch of them and hoping one cold spare is enough.

EDIT: I can acquire new ~200$ 4TB Orico branded drives where I am relatively easily. Hm.

Ah, I’ve never looked into what hardware is actually available at the consumer level. That is a lot of money to move a video signal from one place to another.

FWIW I just looked at the AliExpress-tier options and they are much cheaper, but I don’t know about latency situation even if they do hit advertised bandwidth.

I didn’t even know HDMI cables went up to 15m for the copper version.

Again, I just mean literally running Ethernet cables into standard conduits, terminating them, and sticking a HDMI over Ethernet box on either side. In order not to modify the conduits. I don’t know what the bandwidth is for that kind of solution. I’m not presenting it as the only and best option.

Your solution is cool. My own conduits are surrounded on four sides by concrete, so pulling connectors through is something that I only have to do very very rarely. And more often than not I find myself having to change one thing to wireless or use something that can make use of multiplexing just so I can free up a bit of space in there to do something else.

My own network is still an absolutely atrocious 200kB/s DSL through decaying, water-damaged copper lines. And those aren’t going through conduits, those have had concrete poured right over them. Over the 2x1mm thick flat two-strand “cable” that was obsolete when the building was built decades ago. RJ11. Plastic sheath that disintegrates into asbestos or some shit when exposed to sunlight. I’m not describing an ideal data transmission environment here.

Makes sense. I just meant standard conduit, Ethernet cable straight through the conduit. Not into the home network.

I’ve pulled connectors through odd gaps, I know how it is.

I know everyone’s needs are different (I’m in Third World Nowhere, where building codes don’t exist and our solutions are limited by unusual practical circumstances), but isn’t HDMI-over-Ethernet a thing? I don’t know if I’d trust a 3D printed part with keeping water out in the long run