Minneapolis is in a river valley (the Mississippi River). From an airplane at cruising altitude the area will look fairly flat, but down at ground level there is a ton of 50-100 foot undulation. The elevation of your antenna is probably far more important than the quality of your antenna.
Fun: if you’ve got Apple Maps (I’m sure Android has this as well), ask for walking directions from Minneapolis to something 35-40 miles away. I chose “Elko New Market” - 36 miles from downtown. Click on the walking details and you can see the elevation change. You’re going from around 800 feet above sea level to 1100 feet above sea level, a difference of ~300 feet. But the total change over the course of the walk is nearly 4000 feet!
“No problem, as a non-employee you are hereby confined to your cabin except to use the head, and you can eat in the galley but you have to pay for your meals, they cost $100 and will be deducted from your final paycheck. If you have a negative balance when we dock at a port in around 3 months, you must pay immediately or we will send the debt to collections. Have a nice day”
Maybe you want to read up on how things work at sea?
There was an article in some source (sorry, I forget which) that interviewed a person somewhere in the Southeast US that has been paid to remove a dozen or two of them. It had some photos of the inside of the machine. You should look for it!
The host locations are pissed off that the machines are sitting there taking up space and using electricity. They certainly aren't going to be happy with someone opening it up and making a mess. Or potentially creating some sort of additional liability for them.
But if you show up with a van or a large truck, they'd probably pay you money to take the whole thing off their hands. And you can tear it apart in your own garage.
> I think honestly the best solution really is to just use a stock PC and forget all of this crap.
I used to do that, with a Linux HTPC and Plex. I eventually switched to the physical AppleTV device, with all the content on a surplus Mac mini connected to the home network. It's just less work to maintain. On the old setup, it always worked perfectly whenever I was around and had plenty of time to tinker with things. It only ever had problems when I was at the office, very busy, and the kids wanted to watch some show I had digitized from our DVD collection. Granted, the problems were always small and easily fixed, but they were disruptive because of the circumstance.
I've never had that happen to me with the Apple setup. Yeah, you've got to at least partially buy into their ecosystem. But they don't force you to go all in if you don't want to.
My neighbor is a FedEx pilot. Based on the stories I've heard the pilots probably used very colorful language in the cockpit but were screaming for the sheer joy of finally getting to do something exciting now that they've retired from the Air Force or Navy. That's what the "Thank you" to ATC was for.
It seems so ludicrous that I want to ask if you’re sure you don’t have them, based on my experience of never having lived in an expensive home or actually buying appliances.
But then again, I’m sure you are right. Perhaps this is an easy tell - check to see if the oven has convection features. If so, the house was built for living, if not it was intended for flipping.
Fun: if you’ve got Apple Maps (I’m sure Android has this as well), ask for walking directions from Minneapolis to something 35-40 miles away. I chose “Elko New Market” - 36 miles from downtown. Click on the walking details and you can see the elevation change. You’re going from around 800 feet above sea level to 1100 feet above sea level, a difference of ~300 feet. But the total change over the course of the walk is nearly 4000 feet!