Geoffrey Morrison’s “Why That Cheap Used Windows 10 Laptop Is Actually a Terrible Deal” March 17, 2026 article in CNET (1) was, in my opinion, a terrible idea in itself. Here is why. These older laptops that may not run Windows 11 are still good machines that can do really useful work. I have one, and use it every day. As far as I’m concerned, Windows died with Windows 7, and that’s been a while ago.

I have a great little 12 inch Dell  Latitude 3190 that I bought on eBay for $75. Super travel machine. As far as I could tell, it was brand new when it arrived. It came with Windows 11 installed. I have no doubt that it would have been an absolute dog had I set it up on Win 11. I popped out the Win SSD untried, slipped in a new one, and installed Linux Mint. These older machines are great. You can do that! It’s YOUR computer, not Microsoft’s. Linux Mint, like many other Linux distributions, comes with everything you need to do serious work. The Win 11 SSD will go back into the 3190 if I pass it on to someone who doesn’t get it. And that’s who Morrison’’s article is directed to.

We don’t want to let obsolescence be declared by the people who sell us hardware and software. That’s a bit suspicious. We can define obsolescence ourselves when our tools won’t work for us anymore. Not when the merchants decide they need more money.

So, my advice is to think again before tossing that perfectly good and familiar machine you have or that cheap Windows 10 machine you are looking at and at least take a look at an alternative that will help reduce e-waste, save you money that Microsoft does not need, and enhance your technology independence. It’s really getting easy.

That Cheap Used Windows 10 Laptop Is Actually A Great Deal — if you ask me.

-George

1. https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/dont-buy-a-refurbished-or-used-windows-10-computer/

Our last ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicle went away this week (March 17, 2026). It was replaced by a small electric car that does not care too much about the Orange Felon’s illegal wars or crackpot energy policies.  There shall be no more fossil fuel vehicles at the Legacy House, where all lawn and garden power tools are electric, as well.

It occurs to me that the rising cost of gasoline and Diesel might actually be doing some good in terms of converting vehicles to electric power in opposition to Trump’s own drill-baby-drill policy. Albeit at the horrendous human costs of dead soldiers’ and innocents’ lives and degradation of the general quality of life for all in the Persian Gulf region. But, higher energy costs, for whatever reason, do present a force for change.

Here at the Legacy House, we spent $48 last year on power from our local utility. All the rest, for heating, cooling, and transportation, was derived from our solar panels. So, to Dear Leader, shine-baby-shine.

-George

1. https://muchado.us/wp-admin/post.php?post=67

I have not been posting a lot recently (obviously). But I do need to update the Mulberry House project. The house has been a happy home for about a year. The technology is working as planned, and we have had no major issues.

The front view (north) shows the xeriscape yard, no grass, all mulch. We are saving energy and water here. Except for the required grass parkway, irrigation is drip. All irrigation is managed by a weather smart controller. Behind the black fence is a raised bed garden that produces vegetables for the owner. There are two paperbark maples in the front yard that grew from seedlings found under trees at the owner’s previous home.

The solar panels on the south roof of the garage are presently providing about 50% of the all-electric home’s energy requirements. The owner has begun a project to add 10 additional panels on the south roof of the main house before solar incentives disappear. That should take the building up to about 75-80% solar. If a decision is made to go further, that will require panels on the west roof or batteries. Something to ponder. Maybe later.

-George

Zero Energy Ready (1) home number 3 is well under way (11/25/2023).

This home, called The Mulberry House, is based upon the building we erected about 2 years ago (2). We made some changes. The house roof on this project is 8 inch SIP, about R-32 (3). The earlier building had a truss roof. The house walls are 6 inch SIP, about R-24. The 3 stall garage has conventional 2×6 walls and a scissor truss roof to provide overhead storage space. We enlarged the kitchen and owner’s bathroom. Ceilings are raised a bit, and the front porch is deeper and higher. Heating and cooling will be Mitsubishi air-sourced heat pump with a central air-handler. Water heating will also be by heat pump. Just as we did before. Results have been great. The roof will be metal, and the south garage roof surface will support 24 PV solar panels.

Mulberry will be all electric, no fossil fuels used on this site. It is something we can do. In fact, it’s easy to do. When our governments fail to do what must be done to address our environmental crisis, we must do it ourselves, one small effort at a time. I can assure you that neighbors in the know will see the difference in operating costs, and that alone will result in more projects like this.

-George

1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/zero-energy-ready-home-program
2. https://muchado.us/2026/03/13/second-high-performance-home-project/
3. https://www.sips.org/what-are-sips

“Last year, I had a life-changing experience at 90 years old. I went to space, after decades of playing an iconic science-fiction character who was exploring the universe. I thought I would experience a deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration.

“I was absolutely wrong. The strongest feeling, that dominated everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.

“I understood, in the clearest possible way, that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting so starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

“This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realized that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside. I did my share in popularizing the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is and will stay our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.”

-William Shatner, actor

https://www.facebook.com/revolutionaryNatives

6/30/2023

“Hidden code in hundreds of models of Gigabyte motherboards invisibly and insecurely downloads programs—a feature ripe for abuse, researchers say.” (1)

This sounds just like the same story I wrote here nearly two years ago (6/22/2023 as I write) about Apple. (2) Except now, we find that a popular motherboard maker is imbedding internet access code in the boot-up software that lets their boards start and run, in motherboards that people use to try to get away from commercial and governmental surveilance by building their own secure machines.

It’s not that this was unpredictable. There has always been a security issue with closed source boot firmware. It has never been fundamentally trustworthy, but a foundation of sand upon which to try to erect a safe and secure computing structure. Gigabyte’s present problem is just one real material example of what is really going on. What other computer builders and chip makers are doing or not doing, we can only guess. How it can be misused, we don’t know. Is it intentional and malicious, or just crappy code? It would be great to see the code and make sure our computers, unlike my MacBook of three years ago, are really ours. And it is absolutely necessary that the computer owner at least has a kill switch on any such code, or else, it’s not their machine.

Well, we can look at some boot-up code. Open source boot-up software is available from coreboot (3). I recently bought a refurbished Lenovo T440p laptop from Minifree Ltd (4) that uses coreboot in a product it calls Libreboot. Some builders include a coreboot option, the StarLite MK IV, for example (5). My experience with Libreboot has been good.

-George

1. https://www.wired.com/story/gigabyte-motherboard-firmware-backdoor/
2. https://muchado.us/2026/03/13/iprivacy/
3. https://www.coreboot.org/
4. https://minifree.org/
5. https://us.starlabs.systems/collections/laptops/products/starlite?variant=33046352166971

I just (1/22/23) ordered “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America”. I saw a picture of a Ukranian soldier reading the book in a foxhole (posted by the author on Telegram).

The Goodreads reviews of conservative readers were pretty bad (a reciprocal indicator of potential value for me), and I figure the soldier has a much better perspective from which to judge the validity of Snyder’s claims about Putin’s unhinged genocidal goals than the author’s detractors. Those factors make me think this might be worth some time, so off I go.

-George

Our three-year-old Legacy House just had a solar PV upgrade. We added 19 panels on the house to make about 100% of our energy. Net metering, no batteries (yet).

Public access to PV information is at https://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/pv/public_systems/gReL1525541/stats?preview=1. Recent numbers will show the bump in production.

his “old farmhouse” is anything but. It’s an all-electric ultra-high-performance SIPS building for the next generation.

Say thanks, kids.

-George

Today (7/9/2022) I ran across two videos , one by Jennifer Lawrence (1), and one by Michael Douglas (2) for RepresentUs (3). They were done in 2019. They are great. I don’t know why I have not seen them before. I’m guessing I’m not the only one in the dark.

I’ve been trying to avoid politics here because it has become so irrational and hateful, but this blog is about doing things, and RepresentUs is trying to help us do something this country really needs. The USA is no longer a democracy, if it ever was one. I’ve known that for quite some time. But it’s much worse today than it was not very many years ago. At the federal level we elect our only truly representative legislative body (The House of Representatives) from gerrymandered districts that thwart the popular will. The Senate, though elected, is not representative of the people by design. And, the Supreme Court has become a third appointed legislative body.

RepresentUs has a proposed Anti-Corruption Act that touches almost every political worry bead that I’ve massaged for the last 25 years (4). I’m not going to say much more about it here, but I encourage everyone to check out the links below.

We are in serious trouble, and RepresentUs is showing us how to get out.

It’s something we can do. Really.

-George

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TfQij4aQq1k
2. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tGQgcHMIq1g&feature=youtu.be
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepresentUs
4. https://anticorruptionact.org/whats-in-the-act/

The first 12 month’s energy consumption and cost numbers are tallied. While I was a little disappointed with the raw percentage solar, the projected annual cost came in below that expected for the house. The HERS (1) estimate was $950, and we ended up at $1058.67. But — (and BIG but) that annual cost includes one year of driving our electric car. Because the HERS calculations on our basis document do not include a car, as nearly as I can figure we are doing better than expected on total building energy usage, which I really thought we would. The data is below:

The spreadsheet above shows that winter energy consumption is higher, and that central Ohio is a cloudy place during fall and winter. No big surprise on either point. We had originally planned for 24 solar panels, and that might have been a better choice, but we thought we’d wait and see how things panned out. I think we’ll wait another year before putting panels on the main house (just on the garage, now). If we do that we’ll probably go to 28.

We have made some other little changes that may show up in the next 12 months. The hybrid water heater has recently been switched from hybrid operation to heat pump only operation. We see no difference in hot water availability, and that should reduce power use. We have also switched to a renewable power generation supplier. That lowered supply costs a bit and makes us totally renewable.

-George

1. https://energystar.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/212109957-What-is-a-HERS-rating-