Not sure how much this will help you, but my house is heated by electric wall heaters like this with unit-mounted thermostats. I recently installed a real thermostat for the one in the main room, by using this relay that I wired with a three wire 24 volt off the shelf loom like this that I bought by the foot from the closest to me store. You could use a smart thermostat unlike me. I used this site for help but mine is 120v. That link, tho, is for a 240v and may be more helpful.

Importantly, I have a background in electric (DC) and access to folks with household electric.

Anyway, what you want isn’t hard and can be done safely and easily. But if you are not an electrician, it is best to us a contractor. My heat is on a dedicated circuit, yours should be, too.

Best wishes and be warm!

I’m not sure how to feel about this, either, haha. But both my sister and I are 40+ and she has not had a computer for at least 10 years. Smartphone only.

You’re a little off on our ages, but your point still stands 🙂 What is behind that statement is me seeing him talk about these things for so long. He was messing with OS/2 and some Linux stuff before Windows came out, but completely quit after about 1993. He would, however, talk about it.

He was the first of us to get a smartphone (Apple) and did a lot of tinkering with it then, but quit. I personally have been using Linux OSes for 20 years and even gave an old desktop of mine to fiddle with 10 years ago, which he loved!

He wants to do this stuff but has trouble starting his own projects. He has spent time with my phone, my computers, etc. If I lived closer this would be a great way to spend time together since we don’t have a whole lot in common.

The reality is he is the nerdy kid who learned programming on punch cards and switched to that field in the 60s as soon as he learned what a computer was. He has always wanted to do “gadgety” things. He does have some dispensable income. I have enjoyed hearing him talk about this new nettop and the shenanigans he gets into with it! So much better than discussing the weather.

It’s been a long time since I used Ubuntu, but at the time I did I recall running into issues keeping too many old kernels. They were stored in a fixed space folder (or maybe partition?) that was like 100MB and sometimes wouldn’t clear out automatically, so I remember this. May not be relevant now, but if it is, space in the storage folder is the limiting factor so you would need to change that. If it IS a partition, then you would need to deal with all that is involved with that.

edited to add that my current OS only stores three or four as well. I have never really dived into it.

My elderly, former programmer father is one. Too bad it took him 30 years after first trying but he is up and running now for about three months 😁️ Now to get him off the Apple phone and into an alt android OS…

I am US based, so maybe not relevant, but is it a good replacement for Merlin?

Does this have maps of it’s own?

I use this, it’s pretty great! Not really a replacement for the stock app, but I use a non-stock OS so it doesn’t matter to me. It is more like messaging before GIFs and whatnot, but not hard to figure those things out if you want them.

Ya, it works! But it is very much like a phone interface on the computer. Maybe not perfect but it exists.

I have been following along here, trying to learn what I can to be an informed buyer for when I try to get into this. Today I learned I have already made an informed purchase 🙂 I want to reprogram my unit just to see if I can change what it does in a loss-of-power event.

Thanks for sharing!

@someamateur@sh.itjust.works @ook@discuss.tchncs.de @infeeeee@lemmy.zip

Thanks for the tips and discussion! Fdroid was incredibly slow to work with, but I have installed osmand with some additions and found that it can possibly replace Gaia. It has a photo layer option and many other things that ate helpful. I will need to spend more time with it, but I feel good about it!

Thanks for pushing me in this direction.

I am using websocket and don’t see a large battery drain. Am I missing something by not setting up unified push?

Thanks for the encouragement! The one person is a key player in that network so maybe! Hard to fight with the apple folks.

That sounds great! So far, after five years, I have won a single person. Even back when Signal worked as a more regular messenger. Happy for you 🙂

I have accepted no RCS. I miss some of the features, sure, but until I can get more than one person to use something like signal I’ll stick with insecure SMS thru a FOSS provider I guess.

What about swappa? I just replaced my 3a with a 7a. I would consider donating it to the cause but had thought about doing something with it.

I was a little skeptical and just looked at NFPA codes (USA) and they don’t seem to care about placement elevation, only type of rooms and heating sources. I didn’t read all 68 pages, only what seemed relevant, so maybe I missed some discussion.

My experience is very dated, but I bought a used windows Asus laptop in 2013 and put Ubuntu on it and experienced no problems. I had been using Linux for a long time, so maybe I remember this with rose glasses, but it was very straight forward. Also an integrated GPU, but of the 2013 era. I think the laptop was a 2012 model.

Config isn’t hard, it just takes time 🙂

Thanks! Currently I am using Mint, and it looks like secure boot is disabled.

Thanks for your replies ❤️

Maybe, but what about units supplied by a Linux builder? My last computer was a windows machine I installed Linux on, but that was before this I think. It shipped with windows 7.