Sol Gris Lobo

I would never pay money for a redbox. if you ask politely and are very very persistent (i.e. annoying) they will let you take it away

here's my dad and i taking it away

luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).

the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.

there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.

if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.

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Obsidian advertises itself as a note-taking or journaling program which is basically what it is. If you're a programmer, it may look very similar to Visual Studio Code in design language. It has some cool features like the ability to link notes between each other which can help for formulating thoughts and keeping track of what you're writing.

It also has a robust plugin system accessible from settings, and you can add images to keep better track of the important things in life. obsidian is cross-platform and works on phones and such too

2. syncthing

you should be using syncthing for many things in your life. go to the downloads page and download the windows setup, the macos bundle, or install it through your package manager if you're on linux; there's an app called Mobius Sync on iOS that I can vouch does work, but you'll need to pay for it after the first 20MB which is stupid. Android's Syncthing-Fork works great.

After you install it you'll be brought to a webpage; ignore the stuff in my screenshot. As I said, you should be using syncthing! I do, often!

While you're at this, find another device you'd like to share files between and install a version of Syncthing on there too. Once that's done, you can click the "Add Remote Device" button here and link the clients together. You'll see a big string of numbers under the Device ID section which you can click which should facilitate this easy.

Syncthing is very helpful for game saves, I've used it before to share music files between my PC and my phone, and to tie it back with Obsidian, it can be used to easily share your Obsidian notes across platforms. A very nice thing about Obsidian is the fact that its save structure is very basic, just folders and markdown files.

"Doesn't Obsidian have a paid tier for syncing files?" Yes, but you don't need to use it. If you'd like to, you can. Syncthing works fine, and it always will.

Unfortunately DDR4 is at the end of its lifecycle and at the same time that the above was happening the RAM manufacturers announced the end of production for DDR4; besides that DDR5 has been the standard for new production machines for years so DDR4 is only going to be helpful for people with devices at least a few years old.

That same part is currently twice the cost:

For a while I've been thinking about maxing out my machine at 40GB; when I was looking at doing that a year or two ago it was definitely under $100 (I think it was $60-80???), now a 32GB DDR4 DIMM for my laptop is $250:

With its basket! It comes with two of them