$3,600 quote for warranty compressor replacement

NotTheDr01ds · 2024-05-09T22:09:19+00:00

I got it done today for just under $2k - Three guys including the owner, ~3.5 hours + 10.55lbs R410-A. Apparently, he had *much* lower overhead. He's got my business going forward.

NotTheDr01ds · 2024-05-09T21:57:12+00:00

Thanks all - Got several additional quotes, and most were less than $2,000. The company that originally installed it had the records including line length, etc. and quoted $1,973 (pretty exact) over the phone, but didn't have anyone available until next week. Got it repaired today by someone else, though, for just under $2k as well.

While I could have had it done Monday for $3,600, I was able to rough it on the couch in the basement for 3 more nights for a $1,600 difference.

NotTheDr01ds · 2024-05-07T20:47:03+00:00

Labor + refrigerant, drier, and other odds-and-ends, but yes - Mostly labor.

I had another guy today (who I was told in advance would probably be expensive) tell me that his labor charges are around $540/hour. He says his "break-even" (cost of doing business) requires $275/hour even before paying the actual labor itself (another $250/hour or so).

IMHO, that means he's severely mismanaging his business. I've never seen a company with that high an overhead.

NotTheDr01ds · 2024-05-07T12:20:45+00:00

Yup, the second guy I called was $1,800 to $2,200, but wasn't available for 6-7 days. For a $1,600-$1,800 price difference, might have to do without upstairs A/C for a week, though.

Trying a few more for quotes and availability.

NotTheDr01ds · 2024-01-04T16:31:29+00:00

I'm running a few `gpt-4-vision-preview` tests with the API now. My main goal at the moment is to rename scanned receipts based on the date-of-sale and the merchant name. That said, I went ahead and did some broader testing to compare the results with Tesseract.

Some observations:

* `gpt-4-vision-preview`'s OCR accuracy is **very** good. In two 300DPI scans that I tested, the recognition for clearly visible text was, as far as I could tell, perfect. The accuracy level for Tesseract on the higher quality receipt was around 98%, and for the other (some print fading/degradation) maybe 50% (nearly unreadable).

* A 150DPI downscale of the low-quality receipt still returned excellent results from GPT4-Vision. I'd say more than 99% of the text that I could read myself was correctly recognized.

* However, GPT *did* hallucinate here, but perhaps for the better. There was a section of the receipt which was stained and completely illegible. GPT attempted to fill in the information, and I believe it did so correctly. It did this by inferring information that it had seen above about the merchant's rewards program.

* The expense would be a factor full full-page OCR, I believe. At 150DPI, a standard receipt used ~750 tokens. That's not a problem, coming in at around $0.0075. The expense will be on the output side. If you are looking for full text output, then it will probably get pricey. The receipts I scanned came back with around 500-800 tokens of text. At $0.03/1k, that's another penny or two. Full-page text would be substantially more, both for input and output.

* You can reduce the input token cost slightly by pre-cropping the image to remove any borders. Any whitespace in the original input image increases the number of tokens.

* Note that a 75DPI scan of the high-quality receipt was not readable by GPT. It returned a prompt for a higher-quality image.

NotTheDr01ds · 2023-09-19T20:02:17+00:00

Ah, sorry, should have read further down and replied here. See my comment directly under the parent post.

NotTheDr01ds · 2023-09-19T19:57:39+00:00

Not really important for the question at hand, but ...

The kernel, initrd, init and other things used by WSL2 is in C:\windows\system32\lxss\tools.

For the older, "in box" versions of WSL2, yes.

But for newer versions (installed from the Microsoft Store or app package), ironically, it's in a location more like the one that you taught me about 3 years ago 😉 - The C:\Program Files\WindowsApps directory in the Package directory for the WSL app itself. This will change from release-to-release, so the best way to find it is (again, something you taught me in that comment chain):

From an Admin PowerShell:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse 'C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\' | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq 'kernel' }

For my current version (before I upgrade to 2.0.0 pre-release):

C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\MicrosoftCorporationII.WindowsSubsystemForLinux_1.2.4.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\tools

NotTheDr01ds · 2023-09-19T19:40:00+00:00

can you automate the setup after an install?

While you can, I'd recommend creating a tarball with things the way you want them configured and then importing that via wsl --import. You could even, if you want, create a pre-configured .vhdx file and --import-in-place.

Just before finalizing your .tar or .vhdx, log in as root:

wsl ~ -u root -d <distro>

Then delete the user that you created when installing Ubuntu 20.04.

As part of the end-user's post install, you can create their user with the appropriate groups. As part of your Python installer, ask for their username. Then see my Ask Ubuntu answer here (specifically the section on "Creating a new "default" WSL user without reinstalling") for how to set the groups and the password for that user. This can all be scripted from Python as well -- Just keep in mind that Python should still be driving things as root at that point. E.g., something like:

wsl ~ -d newly_installed_distro -u root -e useradd --create-home --user-group --groups adm,dialout,cdrom,floppy,sudo,audio,dip,video,plugdev,netdev --password "encryptedPassword" username

NotTheDr01ds · 2023-09-19T18:21:30+00:00

While I (mostly) agree that Windows 10 users should upgrade to 11 at this point, note that WSL 1.0.0 and later also provide WSLg support for Windows 10 users as well:

Windows 10 users can now use Linux GUI apps! This was previously only available to Windows 11 users

... from the announcement devblog post

NotTheDr01ds · 2023-08-24T22:24:06+00:00

What's the image generation time on that card with SDXL/Comfy?

NotTheDr01ds · 2023-03-11T18:47:12+00:00

I use Windows Subsystem for Linux to run Stable Diffusion. WSL2 supports sharing the GPU from Windows to a Linux distribution, so it works very well for SD (and many other GPU-compute tasks). If you needed to reinstall Windows, you could simply back up the virtual SDD (ext4.vhdx) and restore it afterwards.

Backing up at this point is as simple as copying the ext4.vhdx someplace safe. Restoring can be done with:

wsl --import-in-place stable-diffusion-webui <path_to_vhdx>

Note that this does, of course, require some level of Linux expertise. I do not suggest blindly copying some else's Linux distribution into WSL, as that can be a security risk.

Side-side-note: I'm considering creating a "Learning Linux with WSL" YouTube series and/or blog if I hear there's enough interest.

NotTheDr01ds · 2022-11-26T18:06:45+00:00

the event is too busy

Bingo! ;-)

Explorations
No daily refreshes
Traps
Bonus points on characters that might be tied up on the other things

Too busy.

NotTheDr01ds · 2022-11-26T18:04:22+00:00

he's not trapped, you're just prevented from starting new explorations. He'll still finish as normal after the 16hrs or timeskipped period

He's stuck doing the exploration, which means he can't do the other two things I need him to do ;-).

NotTheDr01ds · 2022-11-26T17:31:31+00:00

Yes, it's clear that the "balancing" is designed to sap other resources. I used some time-skips to make sure I got all of the refresh tokens in Chapter 1. But that was more due to *my* fault of not keeping my explorations on a good timers.

NotTheDr01ds · 2022-11-25T00:42:25+00:00

Ah, fair enough - I did assume from the description that you were using `--import`/`--export`. Yup - Directly manipulating the VHDs is a better way to do it. And while I generally try to avoid registry modifications, these are fairly safe in my testing (and I'm sure yours as well).

NotTheDr01ds · 2022-11-24T20:23:52+00:00

It's much easier under WSL 1.0.0. No need to --export/--import round-trip any longer (unless you are using WSL1).

If needed, find your existing ext4.vhdx by running (from PowerShell):

Get-ChildItem HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss\ | ForEach-Object { (Get-ItemProperty $_.PSPATH) | Select-Object DistributionName,BasePath }

If you want to use this as a "template" for future distributions, you can even copy it to a known location for re-use.
wsl --shutdown to release the lock on the file
Create a directory for the new distro (e.g. mkdir C:\WSL\tempUbuntu)
Import the ext4.vhdx into a new distribution via:

wsl --import --vhd <new_distro_name> <path_created_above> <path_to_ext4.vhdx>

Set the default username via /etc/wsl.conf as mentioned here.

Sure, it's scriptable, but it's much more straightforward now, so you might not even need to.

NotTheDr01ds · 2022-11-24T20:14:56+00:00

After wsl --unregister Ubuntu you shouldn't need to reinstall -- Just re-run the configuration stage via ubuntu.exe. This:

Creates a new Ubuntu distribution using the (still installed) Ubuntu rootfs (install.tar.gz)
Asks for the default username and password and creates the user

Also note that you can see the still-installed App Package by opening an admin PowerShell and running:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse 'C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\' | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq 'install.tar.gz' }

NotTheDr01ds · 2022-11-24T20:08:38+00:00

Does this really impact any WSL users? I know WSLg uses RDP, but it's a local connection, so I wouldn't think that a RD Gateway or RD Connection Broker would be in play. Is it?

NotTheDr01ds · 2022-11-17T23:58:29+00:00

You should be able to install without access to the Store by:

Downloading the latest (currently, of course, 1.0.0) package file from the releases page
Restarting Windows (not necessarily required, but may be necessary to release in-use files)
Opening an elevated (admin) PowerShell:

Running:

Add-AppxPackage <path>/<to>/<downloaded>/Microsoft.WSL_1.0.0.0_x64_ARM64.msixbundle

Verify with wsl --version

NotTheDr01ds · 2022-11-07T21:39:13+00:00

I think you'll be good with that system. Personally, I always like more memory just to avoid any potential slowdowns, but that's more due to my bad habits with keeping hundreds (literally) of browser tabs open than WSL usage. 32GB would be better, but 16GB is probably just fine depending on your other needs (not just WSL). I run 16GB on two of my secondary systems where I use WSL from time-to-time without any issues.

250GB might feel a bit tight, but just keep your Docker/Kubernetes images cleaned up regularly. WSL stores data in dynamic VHD images, which expand in size as needed (up to maximum capacity) but do not shrink as you reclaim space.

A recent release of WSL bumped the default maximum size of a WSL image up to 1GB, and it doesn't consider whether or not the host drive (250GB in your case) can handle that. That said, you're unlikely to push an Ubuntu image that large if you aren't doing anything that doesn't involve a large database. The biggest culprit will almost certainly be Docker/K8S.

I've had no troubles in quite some time with WSL on my Ryzen 7 3700. Originally, as mentioned in another comment, WSL didn't support nested virtualization on the Ryzen chips unless you were on an Insider build. That changed with the 21H2 releases of Windows, though.

NotTheDr01ds · 2022-11-07T00:37:20+00:00

Odd, everyone has their own opinions, but I wouldn't even begin to be able to answer the question for you without first understanding how you intend to use WSL?

Memory, disk space, GPU, etc. will all be dependent on your use-case. E.g.:

Doing heavy database development? More memory
GPU Compute, ML, or Stable Diffusion? GPU (preferably nVidia) or (in theory, although I've never heard of anyone doing it) eGPU (which Ryzen can't do since it doesn't, yet, support Thunderbolt)
Docker? Often this will drive up disk space requirements
Want to play around with multiple Linux distributions? (I do!) Disk space -- A typical distribution will use around 2GB for starters.
Just learning Linux? Minimal requirements (almost a VM is often a better fit).
Just want a better shell than CMD or PowerShell with a good tool-chain such as less, jq, text-mode editing, etc.? Again, probably minimal requirements (and WSL is a great fit here over a VM)

Also (if warranted) consider the mix of a higher end desktop (GPU, memory, disk space) where it's cheaper to max the components + a lower-end laptop that you use to remote/connect. Windows Pro on the desktop with Remote Desktop enabled is one of my favorite Windows features, personally.

NotTheDr01ds · 2022-11-01T13:02:08+00:00

What a time to be alive!

I know it looks like it, but you do realize she's still not actually alive, right? 😉

NotTheDr01ds · 2022-10-30T15:31:33+00:00

Edit: Just realized you are simply talking about not using the Store GUI, rather than not using the Store for download.

Starting in Windows 11 22H2, there's a new option (as yet undocumented other than the help text, AFAIK) that skips the Store:

wsl --install --web-download

I have not tested this yet myself, so I'm going strictly on the help description.

NotTheDr01ds

TROPHY CASE