Depending on the internal temperature curve I may need to change cook temps in the pit, which I can do remotely. I also monitor the curve to determine when to spray and wrap, and other activities, depending on what is smoking.
You make some good points.
I live a mile and a half from the ocean and run my smoker for long periods. It's really nice to monitor and change the temp while I'm drinking the beer you refer to from the sand. I make a few quick runs back up the hill to tend to things, but mostly I'm free to be elsewhere for the 12-ish hours the smoker is running. It's really nice, not a hard requirement, but really convenient.
I pack a couple of extra reusable grocery bags and put heavy stuff in them, then hang them from the stands as close to the ground as I can get without them touching the ground. Also, try to set up your screen where it's protected from the wind, any amount of breeze is going to be distracting.
The projector I have came with a remote and a full Google TV that plugs into one of the HDMI ports. Sometimes I plug in my game console, or cast to it from my phone, it's really flexible.
I recommend a laser projector since they tend to be brighter and you don't have to worry about the light source burning out. Outdoor movie nights have to compete with ambient light no matter how dark it is outside. You'll also probably be projecting into a suboptimal surface, so the extra brightness helps. Here's what I have, it's small and works great for our outdoor showings:
Hook that up to WiFi and a Bluetooth speaker and you're money.
For a screen I use possibly the cheapest projection screen I could find, then I hang it using two movable tripods which I think are normally used for backgrounds like at school picture day. Something like this:
https://www.adorama.com/fpbs10.html
Everything packs up into a medium sized bag, and can run on one of those big cooler sized battery banks when we're car camping.
These are commonly called "combination guns". Usually you get 2 different calibers, typically one shotgun and one in a rifle caliber. They were used in hunts where you'd encounter different types of game (requiring different calibers) or one type of game at different distances (imagine shooting relatively far at a large animal and using a rifle, then it turns and runs towards you so you can quickly switch to a shotgun with a slug load).
Often these are called "drilling" guns, with the rifle caliber in the middle. This one is fairly unique given the number of barrels, and that they all look like shotgun calibers. My guess the big one is probably a 10 gauge in the middle.
I usually associate these types of guns with African large game hunts, and British or German manufacturers.
These are pretty rare nowadays, they're crazy heavy and modern loads can compensate for the shortcomings old loads encountered.
Pro is free for personal use for up to 5 machines. Is there a problem with activating it?
In the US we call that style of grill a Santa Maria, a style popularized in central California, I believe by the Spanish colonists.
LA native here, I've also traveled a lot, including to Chicago.
If we're talking about food, then I think there are two or three legitimate complaints about LA.
LA is huge and spread out. If you want to get the "best" of whatever genre of food I guarantee we have it. But throw in geography and traffic and you're talking about driving an hour or more to get it. This is fun once in awhile, but it gets tiresome. Chicago and NYC definitely have a leg up on us for accessibility, mostly due to density.
High end fine dining is a weak spot for us. We've recently started climbing up the Michelin list, but NYC and Chicago also have us beat in this category. Conversely, how often do you want to drop $500 on a meal? Michelin stars are great, but that's not how most of us eat when we go out, so they're sort of overrated.
We don't do cheese like the Midwest, I'm convinced no one does. Do not order curds or poutine here, you're going to be disappointed.
IMO we excel in the $ to $$ price range. Food trucks and random planchas on the street will turn out food that blows your mind, and they're literally everywhere. We also do well in the organic/healthy and locally grown categories.
Also how do you microwave water? It takes ages to get water to boil in there and can explode.
Uh, I don't use a microwave but this doesn't sound correct. My wife boils one mug of water in about 2.5 minutes in the microwave. And I'm curious to see a citation for a microwave safe mug (no metal bits or decorations) full of water exploding in the microwave.
bitwarden became proprietary a while ago
I'm interested in hearing more about this. I recall there being a mixup in packaging and people asked a bunch of questions about licensing. But as far as I can tell the client and server code is still available as open source (under various licenses) and the repos are frequently updated.
This is an honest question, I promise. I haven't found anything that points to regular users being pushed to anything proprietary, and no new discussions since late 2024.
I guess it depends on what you consider passable.
It's loud enough on 25% to disturb my neighbors, it's clear and defined enough for me to watch normally and hear everything at 7%. There's no observable delay, and the installation is clean enough to make my wife happy. It wasn't cheap, but I wouldn't consider it expensive.
Teed off at 7am at my local course. The last bit of morning fog had nearly burned off and there wasn't a cloud in the sky.
My driver wasn't behaving and I had to deal with hitting hooks all day. I hit exactly zero fairways with driver, but still managed to shoot 78, so the rest of my game was working well.
The weather was great, I went for a nice 18 hole walk, and I carded a decent score, not a bad morning.
This is the view from the 6th hole black tees (one up from the copper tips) at Pechanga near Murrieta California. From the coppers the carry over the 4 bunkers to the folks in the fairway is 366 yards, but with the elevation change it plays more like 280.
The course was stunning, no two holes are alike, and the greens are fairly severe with slopes and speed.
Again, you make some great points, especially about profit motive and lack of strong consumer rights.
When I'm not going old school with my stick burner I run a Yoder YS640S with a Fireboard controller. The Yoder is an extremely high quality pellet smoker which given proper maintenance will last longer than I'll be alive. It and the Fireboard are designed, built, and shipped from the US (where I live), which is also nice. I don't know exactly how Fireboard runs their cloud services, but from looking at the privacy policy and sniffing the unit's traffic (a few years ago) it looks like Google Cloud and Analytics. They also disclose that if you use the Fireboard outside of the US, that your data will be stored and processed in the US, which is interesting, but may be misleading.
Fireboard is an interesting company, they started out by making temperature monitors and blowers for retrofitting into home built smokers, which I think is pretty cool.
I had a fire unrelated to my smoker which destroyed the smart bits of the Yoder, and both Yoder and Fireboard customer support were excellent to work with to help me rebuild my smoker.
I'm not stanning for either of these companies, perhaps just explaining why I've opted to make some tradeoffs for the convenience this particular product offers.
Yes. I'm primarily looking at internal temp curves. Sometimes that prompts a simple pit temp change, sometimes it means I need to interact with the contents like spraying or wrapping. I've cooked often enough on this unit to know what the contents look like and how they react to smoke given the internal and pit temp curves.
Generally speaking I agree with your take on garbage consumer products being designed to extract money from the consumer before crapping out early and being thrown away. I think I've done well to select the products I have to keep that from being the reality with my pellet smoker.