If you can afford it see if Eaton has a smaller tower UPS suitable for you.

Have been using it since late 90s, stopped using it with the shutdown of SixXs as there still were no viable native options in pretty all my infra locations. Recently started using it again as I finally have an ISP providing proper v6.

Funny thing is that the only reason I’ve found *arrs a few years ago was Netflix deciding to be stupid, making me look at how I can manage my local library better nowadays.

Performance of the snapdragons is roughly that of an i7 from a decade ago - so yes, it’s a good machine for office tasks and light development, but in no way suitable for gaming. That’s not a Windows problem, though, just the hardware is not suitable for that.

I’ve been using an Arm notebook with Windows for over a year now (not as main system, but development system for a customer project). I’m running a lot of x86 software (like Emacs) as a gcc port for Windows/Arm is being developed only now - with no problems. It integrates nicely into the native stuff - which is one area where you run into issues on the Mac: If you start a shell in rosetta it’s annoying to make calls to native arm binaries.

The only issue I ran into were some drivers not available for Arm - emulation layer (unsurprisingly) just is for userland, not kernel drivers. Also x86 emulation isn’t working well if Windows is running in a virtual machine on MacOS - but supposedly that’ll be fixed in the upcoming Windows release.

All of this only applies to Windows 11 - if for some reason you decide to run Windows 10 on Arm you’re in a world of pain.

Windows 11 has pretty good x86 emulation, both 32 and 64bit - imo better than what macos does with rosetta. Windows 10 for arm is just a pretty broken tech preview, though.

The problem is - is it just a mass storage device? Or is it maybe also a USB keyboard that will try to enter some payload? Or maybe it even contains a radio, and can communicate with an attacker nearby?

You can’t tell from the outside which protocols a USB device implements.

You can fit all of that functionality into the space of a USB-A plug - so if it is a thumbdrive you have way more space to work with than you ever need.

At minimum restrict your computer to only loading mass storage drivers - but as you quite likely habe USB input devices it is just a lot easier to investigate such a device on something like a raspberry pi.

Paid and FOSS are not mutually exclusive. You can always build packages yourself if you don’t want to pay. A well executed implementation might allow some projects to drop or reduce their play store efforts.

x230 with x220 keyboard also is pretty nice - but unfortunately no longer suitable as main notebook. As nothing useful came out of lenovo after that, others are even worse, nobody has a decent trackpoint and sensible amount of RAM only exist for macs I ended up with one of those for work few months ago.

Pretty much same here - I kept an x230 alive until I had to accept earlier this year that it just is bad for overall productivity, and ended up getting a macbook. None of the newer thinkpads are good - and they’re still one of the less bad manufacturers.

There’s also enough stuff I don’t like about the mac - but the current keyboard is one of the better notebook keyboards available right now, and if you want long battery life, lots of RAM and a lot of CPU power available in a compact device they’re the only manufacturer currently offering that.

It helps not having a computer with specs from a decade ago.

If your install is using LVM (which anything installed over a bit more than a decade should be) you can set up the new second drive as a RAID with a missing device, add it as additional PV, use pvmove to move all PEs to the RAID, remove the old PV, and now add that disk to the RAID.

No OS updates, unless promised at release. Some security updates, though. They’re GPL violators, and don’t release kernel sources, which makes 3rd party OS images harder.

Devices are generally easily repairable,they sell spares, and their support also sends you parts during warranty period if you ask - I just received a new battery for my titan slim.

I just mentioned that because google drive links are one of the very few things I’m opening in chrome - and they’re the only site where I need a 3rd party cookie exemption for.

They probably couldn’t get google drive to work without 3rd party cookies.

The annoying aspect from somebody with decades of IT experience is - what should happen is that crowdstrike gets sued into oblivion, and people responsible for buying that shit should have an epihpany and properly look at how they are doing their infra.

But will happen is that they’ll just buy a new crwodstrike product that promises to mitigate the fallout of them fucking up again.

It’s already in the name - XDG stands for X Desktop Group (nowadays freedesktop), which works on interoperability for desktop environments. In a pure shell environment (or even if you’re not running a full desktop) none of the XDG variables are defined, and especially in shell environments the default fallbacks specified by XDG are not necessarily what the operator would expect.

Probably half the entries in that list are not GUI apps, and XDG doesn’t apply (though some still support it). For some others there (like emacs) XDG is used if it exists.

I’m fine with that. I don’t want to talk with people - I just want an email address to write to.

Don’t have links anymore, but few months ago I came across some startup trying to sell AI that watches your production environment and automatically optimizes queries for you.

It is just a matter of time until we see first AI induced large data loss.