The (almost) 10-year old 27" Thunderbolt display finally died.

Well, it didn't really die.

The Thunderbolt connector had gotten impossibly flaky. If I looked at it wrong, the monitor glitched or disonnected.

It was dead enough that I wasn't going to deal with it.

It involved this morass of adapters …

See {filename}/blog/2014/03/2014_03_20-shiny_new_macbook_pro.rst

At the time (2014), the 8Gb machine was way more than adequate for all my needs as a writer.

Enter bloat.

Mac OS Catalina has essentially filled this machine to the breaking point. Six short years is the lifespan. Things (generally) work, but …

Wunderbar. A whole bunch of nicely integrated data collection modules. I prefer to hack around with Arduino. I'm not sure why -- perhaps it's the lure of building approximately from scratch. But this is very cool. No soldering. Just start gathering data. I have a half-built Arduino-based device to measure the …

Just a safety note for folks who use a lot of electricity. In the winter, you might have computers and space heaters. Or you might (like me) live "off the grid". We use an inverter with a transfer relay to switch between battery power and grid power. Recently, we had …

Check out this picture.

http://www.petapixel.com/2011/12/27/what-5mb-of-storage-looked-like-in-1956/

December 11th, the electric power went out here in the northeast, and stayed out until late on the 14th.

We have gas heat, gas cooking. But the furnace wouldn't run without AC power. So, I now have a favorite electrical appliance -- the blower on my furnace.:Apple-tab-span:``

Here's my strategy …