hot shower, hot laptop
hot shower
Because
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I have copious amounts of water here, and
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the weekenders left
I decided to take a hot shower. I put a couple gallons in the solar shower bag and left in the sun for a few hours. The water was actually a little too hot for comfort, but there was a brisk breeze that was a bit chilly.
The actual shower took about 3/4gal; after I finished the formal showering I just stood there and let the rest run over me. Small pleasures!
hot laptop
My daily driver laptop is a previous-generation refurb Chromebook, which I use because its power consumption is laughably low at 16w. But I also have a real laptop (debian linux) for heavy lifting, compiling, media editing and playing Minecraft. It’s an old business-class Dell Latitude which apparently cost $4,000 when new. I bought it off eBay for $120 shipped, IIRC, and doubled RAM to 16BG. Also slipped in a half-gig SSD drive a couple year ago.
It’s a beast, but tends to overheat and shut down when used hard at ambient temps above 77F. I did some reading and it appears the thermal paste between the CPU and cooling gear was substandard and/or poorly applied. Since it’s not my main PC I basically just avoided the issue, but I did order some well-reviewed thermal paste off Amazon.
Today I finally pulled the cover off, removed the old paste and applied the new. I stress-tested with Minecraft at 78F and it didn’t get squirrelly, so hopefully it’s fixed. I have some CBSRMT tapes I want to digitize and edit, which will push the CPU around a bit. We’ll see.