An alkaline AA may have more capacity, but the LiPo has lower internal resistance and it’s electrolyte is flammable. The worst the alkaline would do it shorted or punctured is get warm and poop out KOH.

I have an HL-2270DW and the toner low light comes on well before prints start washing out. Fortunately the toner life is tracked by a plastic gear on the cartridge, and it takes just a minute to roll it back. When it does run out, good third party replacements are under $20.

Other than niche Keysight gear that’s has three layers of nameplates because it’s '90s vintage NOS, LXI and USB-TMC have replaced GPIB.

Like that time Keurig used a very special shade of orange on the lid of their pods as DRM?

Applying power by itself doesn’t keep SSDs from degrading like DRAM though. It’s up to the manufacturer to design scrubbing into the controller to correct errors on infrequently accessed data before it’s too far gone.

Plasma 6 and Wayland are working great under Tumbleweed for me on my 2-in-1 laptop, but there’s still no usable virtual keyboard package like Maliit in Factory.

That’s why many modern SoCs have a smaller core for realtime in addition to larger application processors. TI Sitara (Beaglebone) has 2 fast custom arch coprocessors for IO with access to most pins and the ability to DMA into the AP’s address space. All Raspberry Pis up through Pi4 run a proprietary ThreadX runtime on a graphics processor (VPU) to handle bootstrapping the ARM APs, housekeeping, and a large part of the IO.

Scratch machine to test Ansible playbooks for maintaining and restoring your other servers.

I got one of those ten years ago when they came out. It was a little ugly but it was snappy and could go for a couple of days on a charge. I can’t say the same for any of the WearOS watches I had since then.

Except for that time it was CPE-1704-TKS

Real heads ctrl-[

Maybe it’s this classic from The Onion?

That’s exactly what they are, but instead of connecting to a VAX at the other end of a modem they talk to a shell attached to a pseudo terminal device on the same machine.

25 years ago I worked at a university computer lab that was Windows-heavy because Dell wouldn’t stop donating PCs. However we didn’t have enough UNIX workstations as we had to pay for Sun / HP / IBM out of pocket. Converting them to Linux workstations would be nice because the Dells had more grunt than the aging RISC workstations.

I proposed to switch a few desks worth to Debian and was given the go-ahead. After a few days learning how to preseed an installation image and getting a PXE server going I had 8 machines running CDE just like the AIX and HP/UX boxes. Users that didn’t need one of the commercial engineering applications tied to one OS or another didn’t notice any difference between the free (now as in both speech and beer) Dells and the proprietary workstations.

A couple of months after we got the pilot rolling, the university’s IT director came to check it out and told me we’re on the “lunatic fringe” for deploying an OS developed by volunteers, but otherwise offered approval as long as we could maintain security and availability.

Now every student in our local school district gets issued a Chromebook running Linux under the hood. Who’s the lunatic now?

If I couldn’t wear fuzzy socks and sweaters at work I’d just quit.

There should be a setting in BIOS for sleep state that lets you choose between “Windows sleep” and “Linux sleep”. I know I have to set that to “Linux sleep” on my P14s gen 2 AMD or it wakes up immediately after going to sleep. Updating BIOS and the other firmwares might help too.

However I have a gen 7 from work running Windows that often fails to wake up from sleep or hibernation, and I have to resort to poking the reset button to get it to respond. Coworkers report similar troubles so I think it may be a cursed model.

That said, I’m running OpenSuSE Tumbleweed KDE on my P14s and an X1 gen 5. Everything works smooth out if the box on both machines except for the fingerprint sensor on the gen 5 which doesn’t have mainline fprintd support in any distro.

I never used Itanium, but I’m guessing that the Alpha workstations also ran x86 code faster than the Itaniums. fx!32 was one of DEC’s marvels that they completely forgot to market.

Similar, but not the same. The biggest difference of course is that the MIPS ISA is still commercially licensed while RISC-V’s ISA is open.

Tumbleweed is boring, and that’s why it’s wonderful.

Nah. The current license holder for MIPS announced its death a couple of years ago.

RISC-V is the new hotness.