With my N900 I used to travel with 6 to 10 charged batteries to have a few days of runtime. Things got better now with powerbanks - but for something like hiking just carrying a few spares would still be smaller and lighter.

Currently my mk4 is printing pretty much 24/7 with IS profiles. I'm applying some lubricant roughly once per week - sometimes I notice the printer starts making strange noises, mostly I notice when rods have zero residue between prints, and just add a bit.

One fascinating example is one owner that replaced the DC barrel jack with a USB-C port, so they could utilize USB-PD for external power.

Oddly enough that's also an example for bad design in that notebook: The barrel jack is soldered in. With a module that is plugged into the board that'd be significantly easier to replace - and also provide strain relief for power jack abuse. All my old thinkpads were trivial to move to USB-C PD because they use a separate power jack with attached cable.

The transparent bottom also isn't very functional - it is pretty annoying to remove and put back, due to the large amount of screws required. For a notebook designed for tinkering I'd have wanted some kind of quick release for that. Also annoying is the lack of USB ports on the board - there's enough space to integrate a USB hub, but just doing that on the board and providing extra ports would've been way more sensible.

The CPU module also is a bit of a mixed bag - it pretty much is designed for the first module they developed, and later modules don't have full support for the existing ports. I was expecting that, though - many projects trying to offer that kind of modular upgrade path run into that sooner or later, and for that kind of small project with all its teething problems 'sooner' was to be expected. It still is very interesting for some prototyping needs - but that's mostly companies or very dedicated hackers, not the average linux user.

It starts with them only doing initial talks about buying their hardware for a project with you for a 7-figure payment, and doesn't improve from there.

Enterprise SSDs are certified to retain data without power for 3 months. That's extremely conservative - but I wouldn't push it to more than about two years.

For workstation there hasn't been a need to use VMWare for over a decade now, if you're on Linux. Server side, if you needed live migration you had a reason to stick with VMWare - but that also should've been solved about a decade ago. Pretty much the only two excuses for still using VMWare infrastructure are "it's old infra, and we don't really have the time to migrate away from it" or "our ops team is too incompetent to handle anything else"

I'm still angry at nvidia for buying their remains, and not doing anything useful with it.

3dfx had multi GPU support back then, it took quite a while afterwards until somebody else tried that.

There's a lot of enterprise stuff that only ships as binaries. I had some fun in the late 00s trying to find the most recent distribution still shipping packages for egcs as that was the only compiler supported by the Lotus Domino SDK.

(For the younger ones here: There was some disagreement about gcc development, which resulted in the egcs fork. It got merged back into mainline gcc by he late 90s already, though)

At the time when the Loki ports happened it was a great thing - before that you pretty much had doom and quake available. Nowadays things are better with steam, but it's quite likely that we'll see some stuff break there in a few years as well, at least for older games.

Wie sprichst du China aus?

The trick is to always keep roughly a year worth of corn stored, and only sell off the excess.

After the initial 'getting the base running' I usually pay merchants that accept it in corn, up to the amount where they end up giving me all their silver on top of what I wanted to buy.

Spotify pissed me off with some billing or API thing (don't even remember the details) back in 2012, so I cancelled and never looked back. From what I'm reading now and then things is just getting worse and worse - and I have no clue why people (especially paying ones) are sticking with it.

I just recently got my flipper - was buying some long range nfc stuff, and noticed they had that in stock, so decided it is cheap enough to just get it and figure out later what it is about.

I'm very pleasantly surprised - sturdy hardware, well polished software, and very good documentation. It is just a great thing to always have in your pocket - digital companion to the swiss army knife I always carry.

I have a lot of more powerful specialized equipment - which pretty much everything in the article is. But most of that isn't really suitable enough to always have it with me - not versatile enough, or limited options without attached computer. flipper is great to just have a look around - and to know what to bring next time, if there's something interesting to investigate further.

edit after having it a bit longer: The versatility of the flipper is still unique, and makes it a pocket knife you just want to carry - but it shows problems on specialist use, probably mainly because it still is a relatively new device. If there's a chance I want to interact with HF NFC I went back to carrying my proxmark (rdv4 with bluetooth addon, small HF only antenna) as well - can read/dump more card types, and has less bugs for card emulation. I still use the flipper to get a first impression, though - it just has the better standalone UI.

A big problem of the proxmark is the need to recompile the firmware for different standalone modes - to make that less painful on the road I've now added packages of git head for Tumbleweed on OBS which contain all possible standalone firmwares for PM3 generic and RDv4 with and without bluetooth.