jgradyc

The lenovo 310s ideacenter is $329 now, but the sneak peek of their black friday sale shows it dropping to $209. The ad shows it at $209, but it's still $329 on the Lenovo website. I don't know when the price drops take effect. Note that it does not include a monitor, keyboard or mouse, but that's pretty common for desktops. https://www.bfads.net/stores/lenovo/ads/black-friday/page-18

Walmart has 3-4 Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse combo kits from $19 to $29. It's a decent brand. Some of these might not be at your local Walmart, but you can order them on Walmart's website to be delivered to you at home or to pick up at your local Walmart. I like Walmart because returns are no-questions-asked. You just plug in the tiny USB receiver into an empty USB port and both the mouse and keyboard connect automatically.

By the way, you can buy a wireless keyboard and mouse combo kit for $30 at Walmart. It comes with a tiny USB wireless receiver that you just plug into one of your USB ports. It's plug and play. No set up required.

hipower, BestBuy is a good place to compare computers. The staff is not on commission so there is no high pressure sales tactics. They are knowledgeable and very helpful. Data storage and backup is a personal choice. I have a 256GB SSD drive on my Samsung laptop and a 128GB SSD on my wife's HP laptop. To backup files and provide additional storage, we share a Dropbox Pro account with 1TB of storage. When I save a file on my laptop, it automatically saves in the cloud in my Dropbox account and then syncs to my wife's laptop... all in less than 3 seconds. It also backs up my phone's photos. I can access any of my files (or my wife's files) from my phone using the Dropbox app. Dropbox Pro is $99/year.

In addition to watching Dell for deals, check out BestBuy. Last year, the Samsung Spin 7 13.3" 2-1 laptop, normally $899, was on sale for $599. I missed the sale, but I found a returned unit a month later in their Open Box, Certified category for $599. One other point to consider is display resolution and the desktop's resolution. My neighbor has a 24" monitor, but the pixelation would drive me nuts if I had to use it regularly. Before I buy a laptop, I open a document in its word processor and see if the fonts look spidery. That's a deal killer for me.

Regardless of your choice of laptop, all in one, or desktop, I'd suggest an SSD drive. Boot time, long a nemesis of windows PCs, is under 20 seconds for me and that includes entering my PIN. If I didn't use a password, it would be under 15 seconds. Windows also needs about 4GB of RAM. A 124GB SSD should be large enough unless you're storing a lot of videos and audio files. I haven't used a desktop in 10 years, so I can't provide a recommendation. I have thought of adding a 24" monitor to my laptop, but for me, setting the "Scale and Layout" for fonts and icons to 175% works fine on my 13" Samsung laptop.

I'll probably be unable to withstand the temptation to buy something in online the holiday sales. Who would you recommend for inexpensive transfers in Nashville, preferably on the west side of town?

Thanks for starting this thread. I was just thinking how a Hot Deals! thread would be fun over the holidays.

We have a ground hog that occasionally scoots under our deck when we go outside. A few minutes later, he'll poke his head out and look around. The entertainment value of watching this little guy waddle/run across our yard far exceeds any entertainment value I'd get from shooting him.

If by proficient, you mean be able to move the safety to "fire," shoulder the weapon, and aim. She can do that. She shot rifles and shotguns growing up decades ago. I can let her borrow my AR to see how she likes it. As for the 686 or the GP100, I can't handle either pistol well because I have small hands. Her hands are smaller than mine.

I'm the OP. I'd like to update this thread with more information. Life happened so she forgot about this until now, but now she's interested again. The woman lives alone and is 61 with arthritic thumbs, but otherwise in good health. I'm going to suggest that she buy three guns. An EDC, a house/car gun if she needs to go into the backyard and doesn't want to scare neighbors, and a SHTF home invasion gun. Money isn't a big consideration. She's wealthy. For the home invasion gun, I plan to recommend a short-barreled carbine or an AR pistol with a Sig brace. The EDC gun would be something she could carry and the car/home gun would be something she could keep in a clip-on holster under her sofa or similar when she didn't have quick access to her EDC. I'd recommend she keep the carbine by her bedside. We'd probably go to Royal Range in Bellevue so she could handle a few different handguns. For EDC, I'm going to recommend a belly band, since she never wears pants with a belt. Oh, and of course, a HCP class and permit. What are your suggestions? What am I missing?

Thanks, everyone. The problem was on my end. I have a 13" laptop so I set the master screen display at 175%. When I reduced it to 150%, the Unread Content button reappeared. It also reappears when I reduce screen size to 90% just on TGO. I'll use this as my solution because I can see the tiny fonts on most webpages better when the display is set at 175%.

I'm no longer seeing a button to go to "Unread Content," or whatever it was called. That was the first button I clicked on to see what I'd missed since my last visit. Is it still there somewhere and I'm just not finding it?

The built in sight sounds interesting. I'd like to see it. The red dot mount seems odd on a compact EDC gun. It could snag on clothing so it seems to be counterproductive to the primary purpose of the gun.

I just got a deal on audible to buy the Alex Fletcher Boxset (Books 1-5) for one Audible credit. I have some spare credits and the overall ratings are great, but there are several negative comments by gun buffs about either firearm inaccuracies or that the narrative/hero is too anti-gun. I thought I'd ask here if anyone has read book 1 The Jakarta Pandemic and whether you'd recommend it or not.

I've asked around. No one knows the story on how he managed to stay lost for two days. He was very lucky to be found. He was at least a mile outside the grid search area and he was not in a clearing. A couple on an ATV were searching and just happened to see him waving his t shirt. He was outside the park and nearly in the middle of the wilderness area. He was extremely lucky to be found. One thing that could have cost his life was the poor description as "an avid hiker" given by his wife/family. That led to erroneous assumptions by me and the rest of the rescue team that he had at least some rudimentary wilderness knowledge.

Beaman Park is surprisingly large. It has a larger area uncrossed by roads than the Cheatham Wildlife Management Area. It's an irregular rectangle about 2.5x6 miles at its widest points. I see how someone could get lost there. From the ridgetops, on hill top looks pretty much like the other. What I don't understand is how anyone could stay lost in that area for two days. I was there with the search both days. After being lost overnight, wouldn't common sense make you recognize that picking any direction any walking that way would take you out of the park eventually? Also, he crossed a logging road and a high tension power line right of way to get to were he was found. Following either in either direction would have taken him to a well traveled road. I've asked park officials and they are equally puzzled. It would be good to get the story out so others could avoid similar mistakes.

It just occurred to me that when this happens again, a call should go out to all drone owners to overfly the area. If you could figure out a way for the drone to make enough noise to be heard on the ground, (maybe a small beeping device?) a lost hiker could hear it and try to attract its attention. One experienced drone operator could cover the area of 20-30 searchers on foot.

According to what family members told us, he was known to go off trail to explore. Beaman Park only has trails in the NE quadrant. The rest of the park is undeveloped. There are some paths being developed that aren't open to the public yet. If I were to guess, he took one of those paths, ran short on time, and decided to bushwhack back to the main trail, but he went in the wrong direction. Once you're into the park, one hill top looks pretty much the same. Once on a hill top, it's hard to see even the other hill tops because of the thick foliage.

If he was found where I was told by one of the rescue officers, it was west of the park very close to Little Marrowbone Road. To get there, he would have had to cross a high tension power line tract. You'd think someone would think, "That power line has to go SOMEWHERE. I'll just follow it." I guess he must have just mentally shut down or worrying so much about others worrying about him that he couldn't rationalize a strategy to get out of the forest.

I run the trails at Beaman Park often. It's about 2 and a half by 6 miles at it's widest points with no roads and no trails in the western section, which is where he was found. Surprisingly, Beaman Park has a larger sectional area with no roads than the Cheatham Wildlife Management Area, which is bigger but has a lot of bisecting dirt roads. That said, I groused at another volunteer as we were leaving that "avid hiker" was a poor description. There was never a time when he was more than an hour's hike from Little Marrowbone Road by going more or less north. On the west side of the park, following any creek bed downstream would have taken him to the same road in an hour... two hours if he had the misfortune of starting at the east end of the park.

I'm just decompressing after bushwhacking up and down hills in Beaman Park (Nashville) to find a hiker who had been lost for two days. Amazingly, he was found uninjured this morning, but there are some important safety lessons to be learned, especially for those of us who spend time hiking in the woods. He left his phone in the car, left the trail, and got lost. He was found by ATV riders searching their land that borders on Beaman Park. Beaman Park is big... about 2.5 miles wide and nearly 5 miles long in places, but there is still no excuse to get lost for two days. Here's my thoughts and advice. Please feel free to add to this list. Carry your phone. Turn it off if you must, but carry it! Let someone know where you're hiking. Share your location with someone. My phone's location is shared on my wife's phone so if I fall and I'm unconscious, she can see my location on her phone. Know how to tell direction by using the sun and the time of day... or the stars. Know the boundaries of your wilderness. Even if you're hopelessly lost in Beaman Park, heading north will bring you to Little Marrowbone Road in an hour or two. Follow the streams downhill. Streams eventually reach valleys and valleys mean houses. People who have no sense of direction, leave their phones in the car, and can't navigate shouldn't leave marked trails. Sorry to rant. I'm glad he's been found unhurt, but this was over a hundred volunteers and a thousand manhours of searching.

We keep a dust buster ready and just suck them up. It hasn't been too bad so far, only a few a day. Stink bugs are a relatively new occurrence where I live in just west of Nashville. When the Asian beetles (aka lady bugs) swarm, we've had 10,000 in a day. We only had a few hundred last year. They (Asian beetles) swarm the first warm day after the first freeze.

I just finished 48 Hours by William Forstchen, author of One Second After. It's a pre-apocalypse book about the last 48 hours before a massive solar flare might hit earth, resulting in an extinction event. It's an outstanding premise, but the plot doesn't live up to the promise. If you're interested in prepping or survivalist books, this isn't a good book. It about how the head of security at a civilian bunker reacts as martial law is established and government bureaucrats try to take over the facility. I enjoy prepping and survivalist books because I can sometimes learn something useful, but this book had none of those aspects. Plus, the hero's rationale for who gets to come into the bunker seems unrealistic. Readers familiar with One Second After and One Year After will see some character similarities.

I'm still waiting to hear from Coleman Tractor. I dropped it off to be fixed two weeks ago! It broke because the spindle had obviously cracked a year or more in the past. I could tell because there was rust on part of the break and fresh metal on other parts of the crack. I was mowing on a hillside and the stress on the downhill side was apparently enough to make it crack the rest of the way. Why did it crack a year or more ago? I don't know. Maybe there was a hairline flaw in the metal.