M$FT increased 365 student monthly charges from $7 to nearly $20 per month automatically to cover CoPilot for 2026. Evidently did not inform the college about this. Just sent yearly charges for nearly $200 to gob-smacked parents. We canceled the next day. WTF M$FT.
They say you will get refunded in you cancel within 30 days of the yearly charge. We did so, but I am wondering if M$FT simply and reliably does the refund. Or will I need to spend hours on the phone talking to a M$FT AI Customer Rep trying to get what is promised. Sincerely... I would appreciate others experience. I could do a charge-back in the next few days if the "promised, easy route" is not available. TIA, RF
My kid needed Windows and Office for school. I went through the pain of installing the system for her while avoiding creating a Microsoft account. As for Office, I bought a perpetual license. I believe these are the last months while these two options are still available.
Daughter in the Material Science Phd progam at major state university with "world class" MS program. Vast majority of her peers are from abroad. Met some. All were the nicest, smartest folks you have ever met. I guess a benefit is that the probability of them leaving may help to increase the teamwork aspect in the program. But that is a guess. Great group of folks who hopefully might help change the world. Went to the recent Phd presentation where recent Phd graduates were honored. Let me tell you... hard to describe how inspiring these folks are. (MS is a pretty hard subject, with amazing applications. You may be thanking one guy who recently got his Phd should you ever get cancer.) Glad our universities welcome talent not demographics. HTH, RF.
I get so frustrated with the damn "are you a human" checks for Google search. My default search tool from Brave. I had gotten in the habit of searching quickly for something while reading a web page, etc. Worked find for years. Now some days I get results directly. Many days, though, I am getting 2-3-4 prompts. Getting pretty used to jumping over to Edge to do my searches now. On Starlink in a rural spot. Not sure why Google has flagged me. Do not care I guess. Should probably set my Brave default to Bing, but I do find Google's AI summaries helpful. Just not enough to do a bunch of "find the bicycle" "find the bus" "find the traffic light" captchas. One less Google search customer is not a concern of theirs methinks.
Often, the "are you a human" checks, are to force people to turn off privacy protections, so that they can clearly fingerprint their potential customers. When they sell your information or spy on you, they may want to make sure they have properly identified the target.
Welp Gemini got me. Using G3 to improve what I write, generate specific images, and use NotebookLM to dive into some research materials. Tried to do a bit each day with my free credits, but hit the limit too often. G2.5 was not nearly as useful. So I upgraded my baselevel Google workspace plan. Recently spoke to someone who is also using G3 a lot with good results. YMMV re: G3, but Google hooked me, and now I pay more. However I think it is worth it for what I do. G3 is my helpful, nerdy work mate. I never plan to use agenic AI. Not using ChatGPT much if any at all anymore. Sorry Sam.
I use a bank of eight Noctuas to vent from the rooom with our wood stove to the main hall. Then use more units with two sets of Noctuas ganged to move from the hall to various remote rooms. Been using them for more years than I can remember. Silent, never failed yet. It has been great vs. using house fans (my initial approach). BTW: Our local thrift store has a huge amount of various DC power supplies from donations. I sift thru them to find the right volts/amp combo needed for the ganged units, and generally spend about a dollar per supply. HTH, RF.
Appreciate any thoughts you all have re: this post.
For years I have been using Noctua NF-P14 fans to circulate air in house to distribute heat in the winter from our wood stove. E.g. cut holes in the walls, and circulate remote rooms using the fans. Has worked great, and the Noctuas have been rock solid.
Recently a daughter moved into a really nice apartment close to a major university/freeway where she will live for the number of years it takes to get a Phd. I got concerned about tire dust. So I am about to start building a really nice air DIY air filter using eight Noctua NF-P14s (about 1000 cfm). XMas present.
I really wanted to use merv-13, but got quite worried about air flow restrictions, plus cost to replace (assume monthly). Instead I went with two 12x24 Carter reusable electrostatic merv-8 filters. I use Carter filters on my house blower, and really like them (just washed them... scary how much junk is in household air). Also, I got the 12x24 direct from Carter for a very low price as they were returns. Note: This is NOT a low cost project, but I just got scared re: merv-13 so went with what I know.
Anyway, the final product will NOT be like this guy's DIY. I will use my somewhat decent woodworking skills to fashion a good looking standing "lamp like" appliance that should look good in most living rooms. I am thinking of going with knotless cedar as I really like working with cedar, and there are some mills here in NW WA where one can go to get such wood (not a HomeDepot specialty).
My question is whether an electrostatic merv-8 filter would do well with tire dust. I am not looking to create "clean room" conditions in the apartment. Just get rid of some of the bad stuff. I am very weak re: understanding filters, mervs, etc. APPRECIATE any insights. Thx, RF
To make a nice air purifier, you want to deliver clean air at some respectable rate, where “clean air” is a notional amount of completely pure air, and you want this to work for all particle sizes. If you move 1000cfm (that’s a whole lot BTW) through a filter that removes 60% of the worst-case particles, that’s 600cfm of clean air.
At some point I found a nice chart, IIRC from the EPA, showing the efficiency plotted vs particle sizes for a variety of filters. IIRC the filters generally split into two categories: those with decent efficiency all the way down to zero microns and those with very poor efficiency at small sizes. IIRC the split was around MERV 12. Obviously your filter is not the filter in the chart.
So I would go with MERV 13 or even a bit higher. Also, keep in mind that pressure drop is related to the velocity of air through the filter, so a physically larger filter will have lower pressure drop at the same flow rate. But the need to replace a filter is related to collected gunk per unit area, so doubling your filter area will cost twice as much but last twice as long and will use less power and run quieter.
Also, electrostatic filters can lose their charge from exposure to various contaminants.
edit: it was the chart here, also mentioned down thread.
Portable Air Cleaners, Furnace, and HVAC Filters. 3ed. EPA 402-F-09-002
And I remembered a bit wrong. Even MERV 10 will pick up the smallest particles, but MERV 8 may miss some. But for good performance at the most penetrating size, you want MERV 12-ish. For a single-pass filter (filtering outdoor air as it enters), you want much higher - MERV 16 or even HEPA or near-HEPA, if you want acceptable performance against potentially nasty outdoor conditions due to wildfire or nasty human particle sources.
Thanks. However note that the site dropped electrostatic filters to simplify things. My understanding is that for non-static-affected particles merv-13 would obviously out perform merv-8 for smaller particles. However the promise of electrostatics is that the materials in the filters create a e-stat field that makes them more efficient re: particles like dust. Certainly the two electrostatic merv-8 filters on my hvac blower capture A LOT of dust (fine particles). Since you clean them in a bathtub by filling the tub and washing the filters thru them, I can attest that there is A LOT of really fine particulates being captured.
The lead line for this article pretty much reflects the reason for my post: "The air purifier marketplace is an apt metaphor for how a particle must feel while being trapped in a filter - at every turn there's a new acronym or regulatory agency or purifier type."
Are you talking about an electrostatic precipitator (metal plates with a power supply) or an electrostatic filter (fibers with a surface charge)? Electrostatic precipitators are neat, but there are basically no standards for them and they’re not cheap to operate. For charged fibers, I see no a priori reason to expect amazing performance or to expect them to remain charged after a bath. If they met MERV 13 standards, they would say so.
In any case, if you see lots of gunk, that’s not the hard-to-filter stuff. I can say, as the proud owner of a monstrous HEPA filter with a dirt cheap noting-special MERV 8 pre filter and an utterly boring metal louver before that, all continuously collecting outsize air, the louver gets a bit gunky, the MERV 8 filter turns black after a while, and the HEPA filter is indistinguishable from brand new. This whole system replaced an older “ISO ePM1” (yes, the manufacturer conveniently forgot the number after that, but it’s MUCH higher spec than MERV 8), and the indoor air quality as measured by a little particle sensor suggested that the ePM1 filter missed about 50% of the outdoor PM2.5, whereas the new system produces air that measures zero across all particle sizes. And that ePM1 filter did a fine job of turning black :)
Get a particle counter and test your system!
P.S. the HEPA system uses less power and will cost less to operate over time because it is HUGE but has the same flow rate.
A deep merv-13 with a lot of pleats can have a very reasonable pressure drop - you just have to shop a little more carefully.
I would stick with merv-13 because you'll get solid performance across a lot of things you might want to remove, from viruses to general pm2.5 and things like volatilized cooking oil. Clean air is awesome and tire dust isn't the only thing that's annoying.
I agree completely re: mev-13 == optimal solution. But the word "pragmatic" hits me hard. Merv-13 when new/clean start out with pretty restrictive flow. They catch a lot of particles so restriction increases rapidly. At some point the CFM loss means the filter is much less optimal. All the studies I read used new filters, smoke-filled rooms, a day's treatment. It is obviously impractical and very, very expensive to replace a merv-13 filter every few days. There are no reusable merv-13 filters that I could find. If there is a study about merv-13 effectiveness over 30 days vs. merv-8 I would love to see it. I would love to use merv-13, but just cannot get my head around how it is a practical, affordable solution across years and years of use, and let's say a month between filter renewal. Let me know if you have good insights as I am pretty worn out researching this. Thx, RF
I've been down this rabbit hole for a while now and sadly can't seem to find the article about the filtrete vs others, but there's been some people who tested the 'load' on these furnace filters and the Filtrete filters far exceeded everyone else in terms of airflow as the filters loaded up.
Re: Filter costs - stock up when costco has them on sale, which seems like every few months. They've got Filtrete 2500 (merv 14) for 3 filters for ~$35 if I remember correctly. I use them in my CR boxes and those I built for family (which I give them with a 3 pack of new filters and also instruct them to refill during costco sales)
I built one for a local stray cat rescue where it literally sits in the middle of the living space for 10+ cats, it's 4 months now since they started using it and the filters look quite dirty but the air flow is surprisingly still very good. (4x Noctua NF-F12 iPPC 3000 fans and 4x 16"x25"x1" Filtrete 2500 filters)
Here's some info re: which merv levels work best with various fan combinations (looks like if you're going to go with higher merv you'll need the static pressure to be able to continue to pull through them with any reasonable airflow once they're getting loaded up with stuff) - https://www.cleanairkits.com/blogs/news/what-happens-to-cadr...
I ran a corsi-rosenthal box 24/7 for a year during covid with 4 merv-13 filters and the airflow stayed pretty good. Depends of course - we don't have pets and were running the HVAC filter full time also so it was a pretty clean environment. I would bet that the lack of a pre-filter would kill things fast if you had pet hair or lots of dust. But I suspect 6 months is totally reasonable from a "provides effective filtration" perspective.
Remember that as the filter starts to get dirty, its filtration effectiveness actually increases, though the airflow rate drops. CADR will drop but less than just watching airflow would predict.
Not just the ads. They are likely tracking your location, and drive events. These can be sold to your insurance company who may adjust your rates, or even drop you if they consider your driving patterns to be risky. When we got our Ford Maverick, first thing I did was disable this. Kudos to Ford for making this easy.
Downside is that we got a recall notice about the software for the backup camera needing an update. I scheduled an appointment, and it took over 3 hours. Asked the service guy why it was taking so long to flash to software, and he said our system needed an update because we had not enabled over-the-air connection with Ford which allows this to be done in the background. Evidently the download speed for this was incredibly slow according to the SG, so it took over two hours before our Mav was current, and they could apply the backup camera fix. Note: I was very suspicious about this claim. I thought it was more likely we were being purposely held captive in the service waiting area -- which has a big screen constantly running Ford ads. I guess that is OK. I had my Kindle, and was into a great book at the time, so I actually was not too put out.
I highly doubt the overworked service center employees were wasting your time, they probably were just as annoyed as you were that your car was sitting in a service bay longer than expected.
Do you really think that a dealership would tie up a service bay to keep you captive?
Service is where dealers make their money. You’re convinced that manufacturers will sell data to insurance companies yet believe that dealers will sacrifice hours of profit. That doesn’t work out.
We were not in the service bay. Our Maverick was outside. The Service Guy said they had to download the update to their servers. From there it was a quick trip to the service bay for the updates. That is the reason I had asked in the first place. I could see the Mav outside. Not blaming the SG. I am sure it as not the Dealership, but someone at Ford Corporate??? Not so sure.
Also: I made sure we were the first appointment, arriving at 7:45am for my 8am reservation. Soon another guy was behind me. One thing I have learned it to always schedule "the first time in the AM" if you do not need immediate service.
Edit: In retrospect, they had turned on the OTA system in the Mav. So maybe when the SG said it was downloading, I thought "to a server" but maybe it was directly to the Mav. As I noted, was not a big issue. Still not using the OTA features.
The dealer is paid per job for warrentee work so they still want you out quick.
even for non warrantee service they are generally paid based on how long the job is expected to take not how long it takes them. The only reason to not hurryitoo much is they warrantee their own work and so if you bring it back that costs them.
I have had a FOSS web app for learning arithmetic for quite a few years. I occasionally review it, and make changes. Each year Chrome and Safari both nip at the edges of what allows a PWA to be OK. No one really cares until one has to write documentation helping folks install the PWA and avoid issues that did not affect the PWA a few years ago. I mean really, are Tim and Sundar really that afraid ?? I guess so. They have dozens of millions on the line. Capitalism... gotta luv it.
Hmm, I'm making a site and I planned on using a PWA for the app experience instead of a native app. Am I setting up for a bad time? I'm not too worried about the installation hurdle, my potential early adopters are motivated and smart.
They say you will get refunded in you cancel within 30 days of the yearly charge. We did so, but I am wondering if M$FT simply and reliably does the refund. Or will I need to spend hours on the phone talking to a M$FT AI Customer Rep trying to get what is promised. Sincerely... I would appreciate others experience. I could do a charge-back in the next few days if the "promised, easy route" is not available. TIA, RF
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