That idle power consumption doesn’t seem right. That’s less than a Raspberry Pi.

The Thinkpads are typically quite easy to work on. Lenovo’s consumer grade laptops are mostly disposable junk though.

It looks like the B10 dongle I used is not available anymore. I can’t seem to find any other USB dongles that support Aptx LL and Linux. There are several that plug into a headphone jack though.

As long as the PC isn’t being connected to the internet, there’s no reason you can’t just keep running an old kernel.

Unfortunately all of the flexible screens are soft and easy to scratch. I don’t think they will ever be practical.

Banking can be done in person at the bank. Games and media can be pirated.

Any headphones that support Aptx LL will have a low latency when used with a hardware dongle. I have a pair of 1Mii E700 headphones and a 1Mii B10 dongle. The latency is barely noticeable and the dongle shows up as a sound card in Linux with no configuration needed. The headphones will connect to a phone, but will have the typical bluetooth latency.

That’s a big reduction in VRAM usage, but how much processing power does it take to decompress the textures? It’s worthless if it tanks the frame rate. The lower end GPUs that would benefit the most from this aren’t going to have a lot of processing power to spare.

Software algorithms should not be patentable.

I used to run RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi 1 and it was able to play most of the SNES games I tried. Of course that was with no shaders or upscaling.

VPNs are good for torrenting without getting nasty letters from your ISP. Self hosted VPNs are good for securely accessing your home network remotely.

Because websites and browsers have gotten way more bloated. If you don’t need a web browser, you can get by with a lot less RAM.

They aren’t trying, they already did it. ATSC 3 broadcasts are encrypted in a lot of cities in the US. The FCC should have never allowed that.

The server version requires 1.5 GB of RAM. That’s still rather bloated considering Debian only requires 512 MB.

I would just get some direct burial ethernet cable, drill a couple of holes and install an access point in the office. WiFi repeaters can be unreliable, especially if there are already a lot of WiFi networks in your area.

Those will jam radio reception for your whole neighborhood. They should be illegal.

Just don’t allow the students to have their phones when taking tests. They could be left in another room out of bluetooth range or be put in a faraday cage to block the bluetooth signals.

Optar would be a much better choice than QR codes if you want to store lots of data on microfiche. It stores about 200 kB per page.

What do you expect when the AI is trained on reddit posts?

I’ve got a Rigol DS-1054 and the serial decoding is terrible. It can capture 24 million sample points, but it will only decode from the few hundred points that are displayed on the screen. That means it will only decode a few bytes of data. I don’t know if any of their newer models have gotten any better.

Definitely get a 4 channel scope. The extra channels will come in handy even if you think you don’t need them. The digital channels tend to be less useful. The 16 channels you get on a scope are not enough to probe a parallel bus, but way more than you need for serial. I would rather use a USB logic analyzer. It’s easier to work on a PC with a big monitor and the ability to write your own protocol decoders if needed.