This is very insightful, thank you

I’d have to check my logs, but it was something like spring or early summer. Honestly though the solar cycle has a much larger effect on propagation, and right now we’re near solar maximum so things are really hopping. At the beginning of COVID we were just starting to come out of solar minimum.

I haven’t been super active lately, so I can’t comment on how often you’d be able to make contact. But with some coordination it’s definitely doable. Especially if you get some decent metal in the air.

You still have US citizenship? You might be able to do your testing in the USA over zoom and use a reciprocal license, though I haven’t looked deeply into it.

I had a similar but very different experience. At the beginning of COVID my buddy and I got our ham radio licenses.

One of my earliest contacts was a guy in Japan, over 6000 miles away! Nothing between us but some wire strung up in a tree, and a couple of radios. Using the ionosphere to bounce our signals around the world.

So. Stinking. Awesome.

I’ve been hooked ever since.

It’s funny because it’s almost the opposite of your story, you were using the amazing new technology and infrastructure to make the trip. These days we take that very infrastructure for granted.

It’s fun to try doing it with as little infrastructure as possible!

As I understand it, there’s a range of sizes that are problematic, from small to micro to nano and beyond.

The problem is the more plastic we make, and the smaller it starts, the easier it is for it to get worn down into smaller and smaller bits that become more problematic for us.

One of the problems with all the macro plastics in the ocean is that that as they get churned up and baked in the UV from the sun, smaller and smaller bits break off and become part of the… Everything.

Micro plastics are so prevalent that they can’t even do proper studies on how harmful it might be to us, because there are no control groups that have no plastics inside their bodies to compare against. Even babies in the womb have plastic in them. You have plastic in you right now, almost a 100% guarantee.

There’s probably more to it than that even, but that’s my understanding of it.

Yeah the extremeRate kit! I bought it but haven’t installed it yet. I don’t actually have a problem with the buttons as is, but it fell like an interesting change to make

That’s fair, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it lol

Not that it does you much good now, but you might’ve had a bad fan. My unit is a preorder one, and the fan wasn’t broken, but it was just… Noticable, when it was on. It wasn’t enough for me to say it was broken or anything, but I could just tell when it was running, especially at full speed.

It didn’t bother me, because I was like wow this game is really pushing the Deck hard, I can really hear the fan. Etc etc.

Well after a few months of hard use the fan developed a click, it was a bad bearing or something. You could make it go away by tapping it.

Anywho to make a long story short, after getting a replacement that was DOA, and then getting a second replacement. The new fan was noticeably quiet. So quiet that I thought I had another DOA. But no, it was working perfectly. I just didn’t realize how bad the original fan was.

So now I have a very quiet Deck, and I’m quite happy about it 😁

It’s funny because I was at a point where I wasn’t playing games at all really, not on my big PC, phone, or anywhere.

I had pre-ordered the steam deck for my wife, and she used it a bit but when TotK came out that took all her attention playing on switch.

I had poked around on the deck, played a few games, but didn’t love using a controller instead of mouse and keyboard.

Then we had a gig where we had to sit in a car for 8 hours, and she convinced me to try playing horizon ZD. I had never played it, but I ended up really liking it. And the convenience of having it on the deck was great! I ended up playing it all the time, and beating it, and now I’m emulating BotW, playing it for the first time, and enjoying it.

Now I’ve gone full crazy, I’m emulating a couple dozen games, got a bunch of others installed and waiting. I upgraded my SSD to 2tb, replaced my fan, and am eyeballing that clear back with RGB.

My advice, if you can afford it, get it and just see what you think. You might like it!

Or, if you don’t like it, you can resell it. The value of these things seems to stay reasonably high. Though I imagine we might see a drop in price with the flood of LCD models about to hit the market.

So frustrating at times! Some of the harder puzzles are ridiculously convoluted

I just did this with this exact drive as well, so far so good 👍

Spotify maybe, I’ve never used it. And Google Play music used to be the best for this, but YouTube music has me stuck in a loop of my last 10 or 20 songs and I hate it.

If I’m listening to some techno, and I change gears to old school country/bluegrass for awhile, then, YouTube will never ever recommend techno to me again. Not unless I manually remember some of my favorite songs, search for them, and retrain it that I like techno. But then of course country slowly dies. God forbid I mix in hard rock, punk rock, or rap. It just confuses it more.

And it’s not just a genre problem, even within a genre of repeats the same dozen or two songs every time I open the app.

It’s not just me, I have a family plan and my brothers have both separately complained to me about the algorithms being worse than Google Play music, which is what we used to use.

I literally created a playlist called YouTube music sucks, where I save my most liked songs, so I can reseed the algorithm when I want a change of tunes. I need the playlist because I have a terrible memory and can’t remember all the songs I’ve liked.

Why don’t I change? Because I’m cheap, and it’s bundled with YouTube premium for the whole family. And it has no right to be as bad as it is. I keep thinking they’re gonna fix it, but I guess maybe people like being spoon fed their last 20 liked songs?