I’ve been on Linux desktop (Mint) for over a decade now. My company uses O365 for email, as did the organization before them.

I use Thunderbird with several add-ons: Mailbox Alert, Owl for Exchange (paid), Provider for Exchange ActiveSync, and TbSync. I honestly couldn’t tell you which one or ones I find most useful - it’s been so long since I’ve installed them, I don’t remember which addon provides which functionality. My most recent install was Owl, for calendaring and because things got a wee bit fucky with O365 servers for a week or two last year. I have Thunderbird set to collect addresses when I reply to users. You can have it query AD for contacts, I think, but it tends to be a wee bit slow.

On my Android phone, I use the default Google Calendar app, and the Gmail app to query O365.

I don’t have anywhere to discuss reality TV bullshit now :( Reddit was good for that. I just want to know if Charity sent the right guy home tonight and I haven’t found a community for that yet.

Our pandemic project was doing our own hardwood floors. It was our second time installing hardwood floors, and it was much easier in our 20s than in our 30s, believe me.

I used my Chevy Bolt to take 1,000sqft of carpet and old oak to the dump. It took several trips, yes, but that was partially reflective of how quickly we were willing and able to work.

If you have the money, the Pixel Stand is fantastic. My Pixel 3’s charge port broke, and at the time the wireless chargers available weren’t quite as fast as the Stand, IIRC. I found one on Amazon Warehouse for like $10 more than other wireless chargers.

You can set it up to do stuff, but my favorite feature is that it has my phone act as a photo frame while charging. I selected an album to choose photos from and it shows me pictures of my kid all day, 10/10.

If you ever break or have surgery on any part of your arm, you’ll be very happy to have that cape in the winter. I have a couple from when I broke my wrist and used them again when I had shoulder surgery.

A PVC pipe cap.

I was making a lightsaber for my kid, and bought a length of clear PVC from Home Depot. (I know, they have bad politics, but Lowe’s didn’t carry clear PVC.) My local store didn’t have any clear PVC or clear accessories in stock, so I had to place an order for shipping, so I got a couple things “just in case” for the build. One of those was a pipe cap.

Didn’t end up using the pipe cap, because lightsabers don’t have that sort of end. It now sits at my desk as a teeny tiny trash can. Bits of thread from sewing, nail clippings, tags I clip off of shirts, a lot of things fit in the teeny tiny trash can. When it’s full, I empty it into the trash, but for a rather small pipe cap, it holds quite a bit of small trash.

Amazon recently removed a filter I used heavily - the “Sold by” filter. When searching for most things, I’d filter on “Sold by: Amazondotcom”, and that would weed out all the junk by the keyboard-smash sellers. I’m really bummed that they removed that filter.