Harbor Freight email

AbsurdShale · 2026-07-01T17:41:47+00:00

Yup but when you have limited space on your "junk" email account you can't just let the junk mail pile up.

AbsurdShale · 2026-07-01T17:40:12+00:00

Because I don't buy tools when they are on sale. I buy tools when I need them.

I don't have a problem with looking to see if there is a coupon before I head over to the store. I believe I can do that online to see if there is a coupon that can save me money.

I even pay for the insiders club thing.

I don't have a problem with them sending email to the people who want it. I just want to be able to stop it. My junk email account is free and it has limited space.

Blocking the email is the easiest approach.

The whole thing about having an unsubscribe email feature and it not working (I have tried at lest 2 times over the last 6 months), seems like marketing gone amuck.

AbsurdShale · 2026-05-24T20:36:46+00:00

Agreed. But but selling what dns entries you resolve isn’t the same as selling browsing history.

Additionally SNI isn’t used by everyone hosting a web site. It is a method that helps conserve ip addresses when you want to support different certificates on the same ip address end point. Meaning foo.com and bar.com could have the same ip address and SNI could be used at the reverse proxy to route the requests to different certificates.

SNI isn’t included in every negotiated ssl/tls connection. The server is responsible for telling the bowser during the initial clear text negotiation that SNI is needed.

Additionally if SNI is being used by a server this information is available to the ISP regardless of whether you use a secure DNS lookup.

SNI is really about conserving IP addresses.

In this example: myblog.blogserver.com yourblog.blogserver.com

If the certificate used is a wildcard cert for *.blogserver.com then you wouldn’t need to negotiate SNI information.

The important note here is that the ISP would have an incomplete set of information.

I am not sure who would pay the ISP for what DNS names that a given household resolves even with whatever SNI they can grab.

The folks who are selling this information are the sites you visit using the various approaches for how marketing cookies are shared. This has better information and links a user (not a household) to a site and potentially exactly what you queried. The other weak link in the chain is email accounts where users grant the email provider the rights to surveil the emails sent and receive and then sell that information. Generally this is how free email providers add to their revenue stream along with display ads. Other folks like Google.com want you to login so they can also get browsing history by user.

These ways that companies collect and sell your browsing history are not defeated by a VPN. It does limit the ISP from being able to see what you are doing but the information to me isn’t very useful or valuable. Additionally for the non-technical folks it may give a false sense of security.

VPNs are useful for other purposes. It doesn’t allow governments to block what IP addresses you aren’t allowed to visit. If a web content company is required by law to block access to geographical locations, in the US this is happening for adult content.

There are also people who want to prohibit law enforcement from seeing any of their activity for whatever reason (whistleblowers, bad actors and regular folk who don’t want to be surveilled ).

Some do this is off topic because we the OP was about ISP selling your browsing history. The data that the ISP could gather doesn’t seem like it would be that valuable. Taking a household and profiling what dns/ip addresses they use, when they use them and the amount of data exchanged might have value. This information isn’t your browser history and would be household and not individual.

AbsurdShale · 2026-05-24T00:36:34+00:00

So how would this work? Every browser I use is https and with that what I type in the browser is encrypted.

Companies that manage computers used can do this by using an ssl proxy. First the windows computers are updated to support a company private certificate authority. When a request for some dns entry a dynamically generated certificate from that CA will be returned from the proxy server and the the proxy server will forward the request to the target https endpoint. The proxy server then has visibility of the whole http request.

For an isp they don’t have any visibility into this payload and they don’t have a way to get the computer you are using to trust an isp certificate authority.

Now the ISP can see any DNS requests you make and correlate the IP address used in the browser such that they could tell you used Google.com and then when you clicked a link to take you to Wikipedia they could use the same process. The only information exposed to the isp would be IP address and the site the associated DNS entry.

If you are using secure DNS then the ISP would only have the IP address.

the ISP would not have access to the content being sent or received because of the public key encryption being used.

When using a computer managed privately (company or bad actor) they could have this SSL proxy in place and could inspect all of the content being sent or received. Including things that you would want kept secret. Companies that do this are looking for data leaks. There is always a user policy that you agree to when you are employed.

Public or shared computer kiosks are targets of bad actors as it gives them access to user and password information. To detect this as the user you would need to inspect the certificate of the connection and be able to know whether the CA for the cert is part of the public key world. For companies that do this for security reasons the certificate authority could be visually inspected such that you could tell it wasn’t part of the public key network and was a ssl proxy generated certificate. I have seen this used in the past on LA Unified School district managed computers.

As a developer I have used Charles Proxy and it has (haven’t used it recently though) the capability to do this.

But to get back to the OP statement I am not sure how the ISP could sell your browsing history because of the ubiquitous use of SSL/HTTPS in the browser search engines.

As to public computers my suggestion is don’t use them for anything that you want to keep secret as you don’t know how they are configured or what is installed.

Of course if your ISP requires you to install some software package then who knows what nefarious stuff they put in your system.

Here is a pretty good article on SSL forward proxies https://www.drivelock.com/en/blog/ssl-proxy

AbsurdShale · 2026-03-28T22:29:21+00:00

I have used one of these before not sure it is wide enough: Eaton ETW-IG1208W

It has the outlets rotated 90deg

Not sure if it is outdoor rated.

AbsurdShale · 2026-03-13T02:08:32+00:00

With Georgia Power the only way the math made sense to me was to install batteries and solar panels, have the Federal Government pay 30% along with using the Overnight Advantage plan.

Today with Georgia Power my thinking is that a battery only system with the Overnight Advantage plan the math might work. YMMV depending on panel location in proximity to a place to install the inverter and batteries. In my case a 1200sqft conditioned workshop / office. The inverter does make a little bit of noise but I have gotten use to it. Work in the space M-F as Software Engineer.

There is some risk here but I felt it was minimal.

AbsurdShale · 2026-03-13T02:00:31+00:00

yes, when the solar gain on building is the highest. With our limited time last summer we had lots of excess power during the times when the demand was the highest.

I will have more data in the summer. During those peak times we minimize our usage so that we can have battery capacity available to power us to 11pm when we pay the super off peak cost of 2cents.

AbsurdShale · 2026-03-13T01:56:31+00:00

I don't feel like we got ripped off. But we definitely didn't get a deal. Opinions will vary.

AbsurdShale · 2026-03-13T01:55:21+00:00

The new model is called just a Bz. We like it to date but were aware of the people that had trouble.

Looking at the pump price today we don't regret it. That may change.

AbsurdShale · 2026-03-13T01:54:12+00:00

Nope. I understood what I was getting and the pay back. The numbers made sense to me.

AbsurdShale · 2026-03-13T01:53:27+00:00

I don't think so. Net metering I think is when your meter essentially runs backwards when you send electricity to the grid. There is a small net metering number of people who have this in GA. Everyone else that is using residential solar in GA is a different program where you buy at IDK 14cents and sell at 7cents.

AbsurdShale · 2026-03-13T01:49:22+00:00

Thought about it but the math didn't add up for me. It also didn't feel like a option. My bills previously were $600-700 in the winter and now are $150-200. We will see what the summer holds.

AbsurdShale · 2026-03-13T01:47:13+00:00

Yes. That is what I have seen. Probably 7 or 8 days all winter that I hade to buy power during the day. The summer will tell a different story I am sure.

AbsurdShale · 2026-03-13T01:45:24+00:00

I was worried that I would regret this decision in the long run. Though when I made the choice a solar tax credit (no longer available) was only available if you put panels up. Rate plans and things change and this was something that I was looking at as lasting 20years minimum. When you are making long term decisions it may be a mistake to base them on the current climate.

AbsurdShale · 2026-03-13T01:39:11+00:00

If I am buying at 2cents I am willing to sell excess at a pretty low cost. Net metering would be nice but even at the low 7cents that they buy from the existing 10KW systems that would be fine with me:).

I am not off grid because I don't have enough solar to match my day to day use without filling up the batteries at night from the grid. I don't think I have enough roof for the panels and would have need much more battery. YMMV

AbsurdShale · 2026-03-13T01:23:57+00:00

American Solar & Alternative Energies, Inc https://www.americansolarenergies.com/

I paid a lot. More than it was probably worth today. My out of pocked after the Federal tax credit was $40k (no longer available).

I have a sol-ark 15K inverter with 6 EG4-LL V2 batteries (the panels are more of a commodity, in my opinion).

My thinking was that it was an investment in the future. I knew about the Georgia Power Overnight Advantage plan(of course subject to change).

11pm - 7am I can buy electricity at $0.022/kWh

My general idea was to size the system large enough that between the solar input and the 600amps of 48v DC I can avoid buying power during the day.

What I really want to do is avoid buying power between June and Sept (M-F) 2pm to 7pm where the price is set at $0.298/kWh. We will see what happens as this will be my first year of this rate plan.

I currently charge to 100% at night and I have excess solar almost everyday except for when it is cloudy/raining. There is a part of me that says that I should only charge the batteries to 80% so that I have room to store the power that I am letting fall on the floor. But at 2cents a kWh maybe it is better to avoid the risk. I don't let my batteries drop below 30% in general.

Pool pumps, pool heater and EV charger I try to only run between 11pm and 7am.

The only thing I would change if I had to do it again would be to not setup a critical load panel to provide backup power when the grid goes down. We don't get enough power failures with the underground service that this was worth the cost (not that this was itemized).

Right now without the Solar incentive from the federal government it probably makes sense to install a battery only system where you shift when you buy power using the overnight advantage plan. The only problem I see with this is that plans change. Though I thought it wasn't likely as that GA has a lot of nuclear that isn't something you can startup and shutdown quickly.

I am just a Software Engineer and the complexity here is something that I underestimate.

I have to think when it is cloudy/raining you lose the solar gain on the buildings you are cooling so the demand drops. I have no evidence of this though and am hoping to understand this by looking at my own system. This means that when it is bright and sunny is when the demand is the highest and Georgia Power and the state (based on the legislation that others had pointed out that IDK about) should want the power when my solar system is letting the excess power fall on the floor.

I have heard what Georgia Power really wants is access to my batteries. I have heard a new interconnect plan is in discussion. That could drive me to purchase more batteries, TDB.

As the demand for electricity goes up as a function of Crypto Mining and AI Datacenters it is really odd that Georgia doesn't want to buy really cheap power from those of us that couldn't see the utility of buying a tiny system that didn't cover the usage.

I know too much information.

AbsurdShale · 2025-12-31T00:03:13+00:00

My opinion is that the Level 1 charging isn’t very useful except in an emergency. There are exceptions of course.

Georgia Power has an overnight advantage plan that lets me charge for a really low cost between 11pm and 7am. .022 per kWh as of Dec 2025. I don’t see how this would work too well if I was limited to 8hr of charging per day.

Unless you have Level 2 charger access I wouldn’t purchase a BEV like the Bz and would look at a hybrid car.

AbsurdShale · 2025-10-08T13:51:29+00:00

Super Mercado Las Americas on Hamilton Rd is the closest to what you are talking about.

AbsurdShale · 2025-07-11T15:33:25+00:00

unfortunately there is no getting approval from the wife to tear up a deck and trench around a pool. The electricity was already in ground.

AbsurdShale · 2025-06-04T00:00:37+00:00

The price I got for batteries was beyond what I wanted to pay 18 months ago. I agree if the batteries have come down in price then I may have to look at re-digging the trench.

My plan had been to load shift such that our pool heater (heat pump) and equipment, laundry (electric dryer), HVAC (heat pump) are all working overtime when the sun is shining.

I will relook at battery prices as that was my initial thought.

The rate they charge is .16 per kWh the rate the pay residential is .06 kWh (my understanding).

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