You want a business laptop. Most of them are designed to be repairable and have parts readily available. They are also a lot more durable than the junk you find in the stores. The only downside is they are not good for gaming, but you can always pick one with Thunderbolt/USB 4 and use an eGPU. Just make sure the port has all 4 PCIe lanes connected.

It’s probably running a proxy server so the company can sell your internet connection to the AI scrapers.

I’ve never tried it, but you can use UNetbootin to do that.

The oldest seeded torrent just turned 23 years old a week ago.

It would even make a decent living room gaming PC. The 3050Ti won’t run the modern AAA junk, but it will handle most indie games and a lot of older games.

Pressed discs last for decades, but they still fail and should be backed up. I’ve never heard of anyone wanting to keep the DRM before though.

That’s perfectly fine. The only issue is that it may limit performance on some laptops.

There’s a hole in the screen where the front camera is. The screen corners are also about as round as a 1950s TV. That’s very annoying when apps are not aware of it and things get cut off.

If your Eneloops are failing that much, they are either being over discharged or something is wrong with your charger.

All of my Eneloops have been much more reliable than lithium ion batteries.

It can work as long as the phone has an option to limit the battery charge to 80% or less. Keeping the battery fully charged for an extended amount of time will damage it and may even cause it to puff up.

Setting a BIOS password doesn’t really do much good. Someone can just unplug the CMOS battery and the password will be cleared. Even if it was stored in flash, it could be removed by erasing it with a flash programmer and flashing a new BIOS.

You still have to be careful on Linux. Some windows malware can run on Wine. Don’t open any .exe, .com, .bat, .lnk or .reg files.

Watch out for files with two extensions. Some_movie.mkv.exe is guaranteed to be malware. That’s done to trick windows users since the file extension is hidden by default for some stupid reason.

I never used netflix either. Their DRM won’t let me watch in 1080p because I’m not using a spyware infested browser and OS. Back when they had a good selection, my internet was too slow to stream HD video anyways.

I have a thermal receipt printer that I use for printing the WiFi QR codes. I wrote a simple Python script using the escpos library.

ISO 8601 is another good one.

Starlink has supported IPv6 for years. You have to put their router in bypass mode and connect your own to open ports in the firewall though. They delegate a /56 prefix and it’s stable. Mine hasn’t changed in over 3 years. Since my cell carrier also provides IPv6, I can access my SFTP server remotely without dealing with any NAT.

They will get a lot more valuable when the new ones are all locked down and won’t let you print any parts to fix your stuff.

Fortnite intentionally blocks Linux users. It will not run without their windows only rootkit.

To reduce the heat, look for a newer, more energy efficient computer. The i5-6500 is a 10 year old, 65 watt CPU. That’s probably not the best to run in a small closet without ventilation.

I don’t stream anything. If I want to watch something, I will download it. The downloads for the shows I watch are all automated so I don’t have to do anything except click play.

When I go on a trip, I just load up my laptop and phone with whatever I want to watch. That way I don’t have to deal with an unreliable or non existent internet connection. Good luck streaming anything over the WiFi in an airplane. There’s barely enough bandwidth for audio unless they have Starlink.