Over the last few weeks I’ve been making the horrifying leap from PHP5 to PHP8. I knew it was going to be a lot of work to upgrade all my various scripts and web pages but I’m nearing the end, just have some random CLI scripts still failing that I have to work through.

I’ve been making a big push this year to get all my servers caught up to supported operating system levels. Debian will truly run forever even when it really shouldn’t. I was happy to finally get my mail servers modernized last month. The old code I had relied on for managing spam scanning and such had been abandoned but I finally discovered rspamd which replaced everything plus does so much more. The first couple weeks saw an awful lot of server emails being marked as spam while I trained the new system, seems to be settling in nicely now though, and I created some new spam-trap mailboxes and sprinkled the addresses around several web pages. Nice to see their activity picking up again.

You might try ordering from ebay. I find a lot of vendors sell there, and at least you know you’re actually getting the product from the person you ordered from, rather than a box randomly stuffed with “similar” products from all sellers.

Bah, you give up too easily! I say we can do better than rock-bottom, I’m waiting for the stock to go negative.

This article doesn’t really touch on the biggest issue of getting into an EV - the price tag. I mean, $26k to get into an entry-level model? I paid $11k for my SUV, and the only reason I could afford that was due to a pay-out from the company that totaled my previous vehicle. Show me a used EV with towing and storage capacity more in the range of $6k that I can expect to drive for twenty years with basic maintenance and you might get me interested.

Beyond that, they claim that an EV is cheaper to maintain over the years? OK I’ve been driving my used SUV for 15 years now and I’ve spent less than a grand on replacing parts (not including stuff like tires that are going to be replaced on any vehicle). My previous vehicle was driven for 24 years and cost even less to maintain because it didn’t have 4WD. It looks like within these time periods I would have expected to replace EV batteries several times (most estimates put battery lifetime between 8-15 years), and how much would that have cost? I understand that most people can’t be bothered to learn how to perform even the most basic maintenance tasks and believe that you need to buy a new car every 5 years, but I would like to see realistic maintenance estimates for those of us who don’t treat our vehicles like a piece of disposable tupperware.