I gave it a very short search back when it broke last year. I went with the cheapest way to get it back up and running which was just convert it to a desktop. She never goes anywhere with a laptop in the first place so there was no need to make it portable again.

She’s retired and just used it to surf the web. A Chromebook would work perfectly for her if she was not dead set of having Excel for her recipes and bill tracking.

I did not want to deal with the remote IT support of it all, so I plugged in a mouse/keyboard and a second monitor to make it more like a desktop PC setup, lol.

This happened on a decent spec’d HP laptop I bought my mom a couple years back. No easy way to repair without ordering new hinges that were impossible to find and the PC repair shop quoted over $500 repair on a $700 laptop when it was new.

Now she just leaves the laptop open in the 180 degree position with the laptop being held into a stand & bungie cord strapped to it to prevent it from falling foward. It is now a desktop PC and no longer a laptop.

Ahh. Thank you for the info! I too was in that group who did not know! Can’t wait to see what the final picture comes out as!

For those not in the know, what is Canvas? I do not recall seeing this last year.

Oh c’mon! Why must every damn thing have AI crammed into it?? At this point I miss my first StarTac flip phone…

Absolutely. I have used this model specifically since at least 2006 or so. I have been using this model so long I have to readjust back to the non ergo layout every time I just type in my laptop when it is undocked. Not looking forward to the day this keyboard dies on me.

Keyboard is keyboard as far as I am concerned. I’m using an old Microsoft Ergo 4000 V1 that I got probably 10 years ago. I have used this same keyboard on a Windows 10/11 install, multiple bare metal Linux installs and a MacBook Pro.

The only issue is the Command key as I recall on the MacBook but that can be remapped if I remember correctly.

Thank you for the recommendation. I’ll give this one a shot. I think I tried it a few years back so it is time to try it again.

I love Home Assistant and have been using it for years. It just keeps getting better and better over time! With so many new features added all the time I have just started blowing away my entire VM of it and recreating from scratch to see what’s new. It’s a good problem to have!

Blue Iris in the other hand… just give me a damn version that runs on Linux natively and not some Wine bullshit.

I have also noticed it seems harder to find stuff on Google now. My pet theory is that it is the building in of AI to search (Bing Chat anyone?) that is affecting Google search results. Lately, I have been going to Bard & ChatGPT to do searches but treat it more as a jumping off point to help point the direction of where or how to search.

Not perfect, but just a method I’ve been playing with for the past month off & on.

I do have to be cognitive of bending over after swallowing something because I can feel it trying to make it’s way back up.

For about a year, I used a husband pillow behind my pillow so I would sleep upright. Eventually, I figured out what works best for my body which is basically just make sure I don’t eat at least 2 hours before bed.

Other than that, the fundoplication takes care of preventing stomach contents from coming back. Here’s a quick video!

https://www.mayoclinic.org/fundoplication/vid-20084708

Never hurts to get checked. See about having an enscopy performed and they can check it out. Another procedure is called a Esophageal Manometry. They put a thin tube up your nose and down your throat and make you swallow fluids to measure how well your esophagus squeezes or in my case, they said it spasmed and basically doesn’t respond as it hood.

I wish you the best.

I see what you did there and I am disgusted to say I love you for it. :D

First Dr visit was sometime in 2018 with surgery in Q2 2019’ish. I would have been 37’ish when symptoms first started coming on.

From what I’ve read, only 1 in 200,000 have it so it took multiple Dr’s to finally find one who said to me, “I was just at a convention last month and heard a talk about a condition like yours and just happens one of the top Dr’s on achalasia lives here in our city.” Few months later and I was scheduled for surgery and it’s been worlds better post-surgery. :)

It definitely affects my life every day with what I can & cannot eat (bread is a nightmare) but I take it in stride and drinks copius amounts of water with every meal.

Achalasia. My esophagus does not squeeze food/liquid and it gets stuck in my esophagus. Since the nerves in the esophagus are dead (paraphrasing of course) this then causes the top stomach sphincter to not know food/liquid is coming and to open up. Instead, (pre-surgery) food/liquid piles up on top of the stomach and I would have to hope the sphincter would open up and let food in. I had times where I could not swallow water as it would just sit at the entrance waiting to be let in & would have to force myself to vomit as it started to hurt.

Post-surgery (heller myotomy with fundoplication) my esophagus is effectively a slip & slide and I rely on gravity to be able to get food down my esophagus and into my stomach. The top stomach sphincter has now been cut open and never closes anymore. They then stitch part of the top stomach lobe to the sphincter/ esophagus junction area to prevent stomach acid from backwashing.

Even if space travel for the masses occurred during my lifetime, I will never be able to go to space because I rely on gravity to get food to pass through my esophagus.

Why not just arrange rows 5, 10 & 15 to be rows 1, 2 & 3 and freeze the top three rows? If needed, move then back to 5, 10 & 15 after you’re done or leave them.

Sprinkle catnip all over a neighbor you don’t like (the owner?) yard.