There’s really not much to it. The ebike battery just sits in an empty space in the housing and is the same voltage (36v-40v) as the original packs (just bigger). I padded it with some upcycled packing styrofoam to keep it in place and cushioned.

I’d have to take it apart to get pictures, but in a nutshell:

I cut the positive lead off of the original battery socket and spliced it to a XT-90 connector. I left the original ground connected to the socket and also spliced it to the XT-90. That left the ground and the yellow “data” wire going to the original socket. I drilled a hole in the mower housing to bring out the barrel socket for the charging input.

I only disconnected the positive from the original battery socket for 3 reasons:

1. The mower will only stay running if it detects an OEM pack, and the data wire and ground are needed to trick the motor controller. I have to leave my old/dead OEM pack in the battery bay. I was going to pull the board out of the dead pack, but this works well enough so haven’t bothered.
2. I don’t want to parallel the OEM pack and the ebike battery for safety reasons. In theory, I could have extra capacity that way but the batteries aren’t the same chemistry, capacity, or charge level.
3. If I ever want to return it to a stock config, I just have to solder one wire back.

And this is the mower itself (stock photo). The batteries are interchangeable with other tools, and are far too small for the mower. They draw about 2C (twice the capacity) so that’s 10 amps from a 5 amp-hour pack and that’s pretty rough on them. With the 10 amp-hour ebike battery, that’s only 1C so I get both better runtime and less wear and tear.

Technically speaking, I invented vaping.

In high school economics class, we had to invent a fake product, fill out patent applications, do focus groups, make a commercial and print ads, and do all the other stuff you’d normally do if you were a real company (except we submitted paperwork to the teacher, obviously, and not the USPTO).

My group’s product was a weight-loss product called “FlavorAir” (“Anorexia Fast” didn’t test well with our focus groups). It was a spray device that misted flavored air into your mouth to satiate cravings (our product prop was just breath spray). We advertised flavors like gravy, turkey dinner, mint chocolate ice cream, banana mint, and several others.

This was in the early 00’s and predates vaping by many years. I should be rich.

RamNode for all but one of them. They’re not the best, but they’ve been solid for years.

Does the VPS provider that runs part of my self-hosted infrastructure count? I’ve happily paid one of them for almost 14 years now.

I honestly think that’s my last online service other than a couple Patreons for music.

I haven’t had time to build out or promote the community, so there’s only one post right now, but this would be perfect for !totallylookslike@dubvee.org if you had a side-by-side image.

That was a super fun truck to drive when it wasn’t breaking down on me, lol.

Best of luck, and hope you have fun. I definitely did.

I get that. But considering how many times I’ve needed a reasonably sized truck lately, I’d at least think twice lol.

At least working on them is fun. Despite the money pit it turned out to be, I did enjoy the time I spent tinkering with it and getting it going.

Hood stayed attached, thankfully, but was a total loss. Thankfully there were plenty of donors at the local scrapyard.

Here’s the bastard the day before the brake line broke and the last time everything was working and I gave up on it:

I had the '96 Chevy S-10 version of that but basically same truck and same shade of green. That truck hated me. Fix one thing, another thing broke. After replacing the cylinder head, fuel pump, fuel line, slave cylinder, hood and windshield*, alternator, and a random electrical gremlin or ten, it ran like a dream for like two weeks. Then the brake line burst and I finally just sold the thing. The guy who bought it from me fixed the brake line and drove it for like 6 or 7 years with no problems.

Called it the POS-10.

*Hood latch broke driving down the highway and slammed the hood back into the windshield at 55 mph. Fun!

You can also POST AS A GUEST TO THE FEDIVERSE without signing up.

Oh, dear lord. As if we don’t have enough spam and drive-by trolls as it is.

Yeah. On the surface it seems like it would be a positive. But in practice, it shields people from criticism of their behavior.

Yeah, yeah, “use your words” and all that, but some comments are just so brain-dead or trollish that they’re not worth a response, and even a downvote is expending far more effort than the comment is worth. So the person who made it sees 3 upvotes but not the 50 downvotes, so their takeaway is that “wow, 3 people liked my braindead comment” rather than everyone except 3 people hated it.

I get the appeal of disabling downvotes, but if I say something stupid, I wanna know.

The mother plant is always special. Even with a black thumb they’re usually pretty easy to care for. Here’s hoping it lives another 37 years.

Pothoses are pretty resilient and easy to propagate if even a small part of them is still alive. Glad yours is bouncing back. One of mine is from a cutting from my grandmother’s pothos. Hers doesn’t have any sentimental value, but I laugh because I know she most likely prop-lifted it from Lowes or Walmart or somewhere 😀

That’s basically me. Wake me when it’s time to:

• Eat
• Hand out gifts
• Go home

Added :) I also disabled the “Create Post” button if the community is on a defederated instance even though, technically, you can still post to your instance’s local copy (it just won’t federate).

Edit: This only works one way. i.e. it can only know if your instance is defederated from the community’s. If the community’s instance is defederated from yours, there will be no indicator because there’s no way to do it without a remote lookup which is both unreliable and inefficient at scale.

You mean like if there’s a community called !cats@example.com and your home instance no longer federates with the instance example.com?

If so, I’ll add that to Tesseract as it sounds useful.

Two in the same vein:

1. Someone once assumed that I used a code prettier by asking for my .prettierrc. Nope. I just write pretty code and was legit offended at that.
2. Multiple times I’ve been called an AI because I (checks notes) write out my thoughts in full sentences.

There’s been worse, but I’m quick to block, and I don’t dwell on things. It’s actually pretty easy when you step back and think about the kind of person who would go online make personal attacks like that. Once you have that mental image, you quickly realize you don’t give a flying fuck what that person has to say about anything.

In my city, they just keep paving over the old asphalt, so the manhole covers are like 6 inches deep in some places. Hitting one of those in my sedan is not pleasant.

Dude! Awesome! On all fronts, awesome.