Cool! From HP! The robot only costs $1,500 but a two pack of extra sharpies for it costs $48,000. Before you can use it, you must install 5 petabytes of HP drivers.
Weirdly it turns out to be cheaper/faster than paying a human being to do the same thing in use cases where you have large concrete slabs with complex walls/casework layout
Agreed! In the US there is a company that does this but they don’t have a nationwide presence: https://www.rentawreck.com/. Also in Iceland there is “Sad Car” which was great for kicking around.
In the 90s, RentAWreck at least used to be part of an operation called FixAWreck who did low cost auto repairs. I used them shortly after I'd moved and had an excellent time with the two sub-compacts they gave me while my car was in their shop.
When did you rent with SADCars? I did once in 2014, and cheaply got some small old manual beater, which was just perfect.
But I think they've "pivoted" to just another rental company since then. Looking at their website and Google maps reviews the cars now look new, and indistinguishable from what you'd get from Eurocar, Hertz etc.
I had to turn down the first car due to non-functioning wipers and a broken door handle.
Ended up with a Subaru Forester that had definitely seen a lot of miles and had its share of minor issues, but was a beast in the surprise blizzard.
Shame if they pivoted but their office was a pain to deal with and last thing you want after a red-eye is to be worried about the car maybe not actually working properly. Decided next time we'd just rent from a more established brand.
From their FAQ:
> However, we decided to use the name to make it more memorable as our cars used to be older in the beginning but it's been many years since we stopped using old cars and now all our cars are new, or one or two years old
"It depends": Beanstalk is a bit like training wheels with regards to auto scaling, load balancing, and high availability. If you/your team are new to those concepts as applied on AWS, then EB can make it a lot faster to get a solid environment up and running.
Downsides are that failing deploys can get wound around the axle pretty easily and you can be sitting around for 30 minutes waiting for everything to go green so you can try again.
Also check out AWS copilot on ECS as another, perhaps more current, form of training wheels.
You might be on to something. I work remote... Already in a small mountain town but in my new-ish neighborhood the houses are crowded together. We've considered buying more remote land but the zoning codes in most CO counties require you to finish a building in 1 year and prohibit RVs until a house is finished (to deter people from doing exactly what we would do: parking an RV on your 10 acres). So: if we could rent a similar setup once in a while for a month or two that would have great appeal. However in my situation I would NOT want other cabins, bathrooms, or firepits any closer than 300 or 400 feet away. If I want to hear my neighbors while i'm coding I can just stay at home.
Overall I think you might be on to something. I have a nice set of bose noise cancelling headphones but I don't like to wear them for the entire day.
My particular challenge: my home office is pretty quiet except when my extremely high-pitched-voice retired lady neighbor is scratching around in her garden while bossing her henpecked husband around. In that case she is just on the other side of my exterior wall and is basically 9 feet away. I've tried to deal with it by putting some small bluetooth speakers against the window but, as you pointed out, that music has to be pretty loud to drown out her whine.
If your solution would help in this scenario you would have a customer!
Good concern. We won't be doing any "hundreds of hours" solution. We've been married over 30 years so we're a pretty good team - naturally I wouldn't do it without both of us thinking it was a great idea.
