Technology

​​​​​​Running my weather station and media server on a Mini PC. Beelink's Mini PC and those like it are the future.

A few months ago, I purchased the Beelink U59 Pro Mini PC with only a few reviews available at the time. Despite being a longtime Windows and Linux PC I've been skeptical of the mini PC market  in general and have avoided making a purchase in the past. So much skepticism that my first introduction to this small form factor was last year's purchase of an Apple Mac Mini M1 despite not being a huge fan of the macOS operating system. Luckily, this Beelink Mini PC has convinced me that "small is better" for Windows and Linux as well.

A year ago I purchased for home use Apple's Mac Mini M1 with 512 GB SSD built into the computer. Coming more from a Windows and Linux background, it wasn't the operating system or Apple services that lured me to make the purchase but instead its small footprint in both size and presence. While the Mac Mini is a neat computer on its own, there are a couple tradeoffs. The negatives include fewer ports and the lack of ability to upgrade both memory and internal storage. I was afraid to turn this around, I was looking at unattractive cables to external devices spread across my desktop making that "small footprint" no more. Luckily, I looked and found a more elegant solution with my purchase of the newly released Qwiizlab UH25 SE USB C Hub.

Like most office workers, two years ago at the start of the pandemic my employer moved our non-operational staff from the office to the home. Although my wife and son initially had to work remotely too, they didn't stay long and have since then returned to work and school. Yet, here I still sit the only human being at home for eight hours a day.

Despite being busy because I'm working the family has come to expect during my breaks from my workday to be that person to do an extra load of laundry, vacuum the floor, start the dishwasher, or let the dog out.  The argument goes now that now I'm essentially a stay at home Dad that doesn't have the commute time to and from work...I can use that extra hour in the day doing family chores. Mind you, I'm still putting in eight hours of work for the office and my break times away from work computer need to be limited to 5 to 10 minutes. That's not much time to get the expected or unexpected tasks done at home. I'm grateful that I don't do all the housework manually thanks to robotic vacuum cleaners.

For the past couple years I've had an obsession with battery-powered cordless tools. While I've bought a number of cordless power tools and even a cordless snow blower...what has been missing in my garage is an all-battery lawn mower.  For the past couple years, I've had my eyes on the EGO Power+ 56V Lithium-Ion Self-Propelled Mower.

It's no secret that I am a science fiction fan. When dating my wife, one of our first kisses was from me becoming overjoyed after I found out she stayed up too late the previous night watching a "dumb movie" on the SciFi channel. In my book, a girl willing to lose some sleep watching science fiction on TV was a girl worth dating.

A few weeks ago during my visit to the local Home Depot, I came across the Ryobi RM480E, an all-battery powered electric riding lawn mower. Ryobi claims that you'll get up to 2 hours of run time or cut up to 2 acres on a single charge. This quiet, smooth battery powered riding mower houses three high-torque brushless motors to support the mower's blades and drivetrain.  The RM480E's uses four 12V lead acid batteries instead of lithium-ion which given the choice  and given the size of the mower  so they're not lithium).

The mower itself has a 38 in. cutting width with a 12-position deck height adjustment. Cutting height ranges from a minimum measured at 1.5 inches to a maximum of 4.5 inches. The mower is capable of cutting in three modes: side-discharge, mulching, and bagging.

I don't think I want to do this anymore...

After three or four decades of being immersed in the digital lifestyle and blogging on a continual basis for 15 years, I found myself puking at the idea of spending more time in front of the computer outside of work. It's not that I don't still like technology and content management, but I didn't recognize until it was too late that the lack of topic diversity would eventually lead me to digital burnout. To fix this, I seriously tried not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In the end that's exactly what I did.

Spring brought to South Dakota plenty of rain. The lawns are green, the flowers are in full bloom, and it seems we can't go beyond a couple days without a rain shower or thunderstorm. While water is usually plenty for my city, we do things smart around here and restrict water usage for our lawns year round. It's not uncommon in my part of the country to see the weather pattern quickly change from wet to dry. What once was green can turn brown in a hurry.

My Blossom Sprinkler Controller has arrived! For home owners with a water sprinkler system, you no longer have to be stuck with the expensive but dumb irrigation controllers that was originally installed at your house. There is a new generation of "smart" sprinkler systems arriving on the scene, including those created by Rachio and Blossom. The Blossom controller self-programs based on real-time weather data and gives you control of your schedule right from your phone. Once the controller understands the vegetation, layout of your yard, and the weather it should do the thinking for you when deciding how much to water should be used. The company claims that because their controller is "smarter" than conventional controllers (and hopefully smarter than me), I can expect to save up to 30% on my water bill.

After spending most of my years years in grade school working hard on experimental science fair projects and not receiving a ribbon, I finally gave up and wrote a "non-experimental" paper on the history of computers in the eighth grade. Despite the paper being weak even for eighth grade standards, I finally won a ribbon (third place) in the school science fair. Remember, this was the early 1980's and everyone was still fascinated with the then new concept of computers entering "everyday" life. Why am I going down memory lane? Well I came across an article on the 60th anniversary of ENIAC  [via news.com, broken link] the "first" computer built which of course was mentioned in that paper of mine some 25 years ago.