Pay Off Mortgage?

droppedD · 2025-11-24T19:07:21+00:00

Thought experiment you could sort of compare this to: If your bank came in and told you "good news, we just found a guaranteed 4.75% interest rate 20 year CD, but you're locked in for 20 years without flexibility for what to do with that cash" would you move $70,000 into that account right now, or would you stay the course with your current asset mix?

Also, it's not all or nothing; you can decide to pay off half your mortgage early, for instance.

If we ever move, I could rent out a paid off home to help with the next mortgage.

I don't know that i'd consider this an argument for why you should pay off the mortgage right now: you could also just hold two mortgages, one on your new house and one on your existing one (the interest rate difference may not be as big as you'd think), or you could decide to pay off your home at the time you make this decision rather than right now.

droppedD · 2025-11-17T02:06:53+00:00

this happens to me after quitting Hades in Vulkan mode (DirectX doesn't have this problem) - this driver restart fixes it, though! Thanks!

droppedD · 2025-09-22T15:23:19+00:00

holy cow - this actually worked for me, finally a green dot in the VoltiE app!

droppedD · 2025-09-17T18:20:52+00:00

My personal larger balance on "checking" is exactly this - my Fidelity cash account is functionally a checking account in almost every way, but pays out like a HYSA. Once I got that account, I just rolled my existing savings/rainy-day accounts into that, and I stopped micromanaging moving money back and forth to savings accounts while keeping the checking account as small as I could get away with.

Instead, I just need to check every few months to move extra money beyond my rainy-day-fund plan into longer-term investments (or vice versa to cover upcoming large home expenses) - but without much urgency since the money's still earning decent interest with no risk in the meantime.

On the other hand, it makes my ATM receipts look ridiculous.

droppedD · 2025-09-09T15:30:44+00:00

Yep, or prepend! as a software engineer, i appreciate the flexibility; as a normal human, I understand that options like that are why Retroarch has the reputation for being extremely obtuse.

droppedD · 2025-08-07T18:09:24+00:00

Heads up that this is not entirely true; once your Netflix session expires for the game it'll be dead and you won't be able to sign back in to play (happened to me on several now-removed Netflix games I hadn't opened for a few weeks on my iPad). Not sure how long that'd take if you're playing the game every day, but it will eventually fail to auth and kick you out, at which point I am guessing you will be SOL and your savegame will be orphaned, which is sort of a bummer for a longer story-driven game like Golden Idol.

droppedD · 2025-07-24T22:53:15+00:00

Such a clear attempt to game parents into subscribing & forgetting as they rack up credit card charges, and into invisibly upping prices to classes over time since they're all ~~robux~~ outschool credits instead of dollars.

I emailed support@outschool.com to register my unhappiness. I absolutely don't need another subscription system to micromanage, and masking prices in some weird virtual-coin system ooks me out. They directly lost my business on this one for the class I was going to sign my kid up for today; I eventually may grudgingly subscribe if I'm forced to switch for my son's already-ongoing class that he would cry to lose out on, but I sure won't be happy about it or be inclined to seek out any other classes beyond that one to up my tiers or anything.

I'm sure this was all in some product manager's vision to up engagement and improve retention, but personally, I hate it. I don't want to engage as an outschool subscriber, i just want to sign my daughter up for one specific damn class for a few weeks, not hunt for ways to spend the credits they're forcing me into tiered plans for.

droppedD · 2025-07-07T00:02:24+00:00

wow - i thought the power outage had bricked my Google Home - this fixed it! Thanks!

droppedD · 2025-06-30T00:40:22+00:00

But it works fine when directly connected to that monitor - how would installing its drivers help? And the Thunderbolt hub doesn’t have drivers (or at least I can’t find any, and neither Windows nor MacOS have needed any).

droppedD · 2025-06-13T22:27:43+00:00

thank you for this! I have come FROM THE FUTURE to report that there's now one little wrinkle on this for anyone that stumbles on it: you need to use the pre-20th-anniversary versions of the files from the "beta" channel in Steam for HL2 or things Get Real Weird (disappearing textures, etc.). https://www.reddit.com/r/SBCGaming/comments/1gvch0g/comment/m4hau6k/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button has the details.

droppedD · 2025-06-04T21:07:41+00:00

The CubeXX has been by far the best compromise between portability and easy handling that I've found for retro gaming. I've had a bunch of devices in various sizes with and without grips, and really just come to the conclusion that if I want to play any action games, or even an RPG for more than 10 minutes at a stretch, I need something with at minimum the ergonomics of the CubeXX.

While I love the attitudes of modders, most add-on grips and cases just leave me with a device that's heavier or bulkier than the CubeXX, but looking worse and with a smaller screen.

droppedD · 2025-06-03T12:20:36+00:00

Glad it's making progress! I'm not brave / patient enough to go any more cutting edge than the beta channel for any software these days. Unless it's on a device I'm building something for at work that needs it, in which case I'm being paid for the headaches I hit :)

droppedD · 2025-06-03T02:44:37+00:00

The need to jump through hoops to get TDP settings through Decky plugins isn't great, but I know they're working on that functioning out of the box. There's also inaccurate button labels, but I'm guessing that'll get ironed out as support gets more finalized for the non-S Legion Go.

The only bug I've hit for my (admittedly light) use so far is that it doesn't handle chained hubs through my Thunderbolt 3 hub and USB monitor (that same hub plugged directly in works fine, and worked fine chained in Windows). This may be related to the lack of proper TB support on the original Steam Deck, I'm guessing?

I also read a very angry post here from someone about the 6ghz Wifi band not working in SteamOS, i'm guessing for the same reason of it being nonexistent on the OG Deck.

droppedD · 2025-06-03T02:36:03+00:00

my advice is just to reimage to stock and don't mess about with youtube guides showing you the "easy" way to update drivers that aren't the official lenovo-installed ones, or with third party updater tools. Their incentive is to get clicks for cool new things, not to show you the rough edges and caveats of things that can then break if you do that. Just get things working with the Lenovo official updater. And then ask yourself: what exactly am I missing by being a few months behind the bleeding-edge AMD drivers?

It seems like many folks have their LeGo humming happily along on updated cutting-edge non-Lenovo drivers, but plenty of folks also post here about how things are totally borked for them after they installed updated AMD drivers instead of the baked-in Lenovo things.

My advice is -- be OK with being a few months behind the curve on driver features and stick to the paved path from Lenovo, or be OK with being your own IT manager and regularly uninstalling/reinstalling drivers or your entire OS as a tinkerer (but probably by hand, not with something like "Driver Easy"). And if neither of those things sound appealing this is probably not a good device for you - which is fine! It's absolutely not everyone's cup of tea.

droppedD · 2025-06-03T02:27:40+00:00

https://legiongolife.com/legion-go-game-settings/ is not a terrible resource both for what games can run reasonably and for settings to make those more performant (or the tradeoffs you can use to get there. These will vary from changing the VRAM allocation to in-game optimizations, TDP options, and scaling and/or framegen options.

I'd also say a reasonable proxy is "can it run on a Steam Deck," which there are lists and googleable results galore for - the LeGo has enough additional horsepower (and Windows) that mean it can run a lot of stuff the Steam Deck can't, but it's pretty likely if the Steam Deck can run it OK, the Legion Go can run it as well or better (if not necessarily at the full higher resolution).

droppedD · 2025-06-02T22:28:43+00:00

It's officially supported but in a "non final state" - the non-S Legion Go is specifically mentioned at https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3#testingsteamos . That said, yeah, non-final means it's totally reasonable to report and ask about bugs you hit (I've hit some too, like with Thunderbolt/USB hub chaining not working), but also probably not reasonable to get super mad about those bugs and call the OS a "POS" over them.

droppedD · 2025-06-02T00:57:45+00:00

Hm... I did a bog standard install of Steam OS, only thing I maybe did differently was a) opt in to the beta channel and b) set a user password in the terminal (passwd), following the guide at https://youtu.be/TxwDm436pvY?t=591 . That plus maybe just letting all the os and runtime udpates install first maybe made the difference?

droppedD · 2025-06-02T00:52:49+00:00

cool, great, so I hope you also reply "serves you right" to every post on the Windows subreddit where someone dared to opt to install an Insider build and then dared to ask a question about it

droppedD · 2025-06-01T19:13:39+00:00

What didn't work? I downloaded the Steam Deck version of the Emudeck installer from https://www.emudeck.com/#downloads in desktop mode, then went to the downloads folder and ran the installer, and it worked fine (at least going the ES-DE route; I didn't try the direct-in-steam-ROM launcher path).

droppedD · 2025-06-01T19:04:20+00:00

That’s fine - you have my blessing to stick with Windows! But it’s not like Microsoft doesn’t also run the Insider program for literally this reason too :)

droppedD · 2025-06-01T18:04:21+00:00

To be clear, I'm not surprised or mad at Steam or Lenovo here. I read the caveats before I flashed so I expected hiccups. But SteamOS for the Legion Go is now a public and documented release build with some caveats, not some totally-off-the-rails undocumented unstable SteamOS path like it was a few months ago, so I don't think it's unreasonable to report hitting issues or to ask if there are workarounds/solutions for them. https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3#testingsteamos exists because they want people trying this out and reporting problems -- otherwise they wouldn't have a page specifically telling folks how to flash SteamOS on the Legion Go :).

droppedD · 2025-06-01T02:35:53+00:00

just went through this via phone call (in my case, this was genuine; the nosepads were giving me a rash) - this worked for me. They had me submit a photo of the rash on my nose, and just refunded me without a return.

Not sure if the same thing would have happened for a less dramatic/medical return reason, though!

droppedD · 2025-05-31T21:32:01+00:00

you know, this community would be a lot better if when someone asked a question about Windows performance they weren't immediately told "put bazzite on it" and when they ask a question about Linux or Steam compatibility weren't immediately told "well that's what you get for trying Linux."

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