What kind of crops are you going to grow at 125°? That’s still within OP’s specification of triple digits and with temps getting hotter we’re likely to see a lot more of this happening within our lifetime.

Oh I have a pretty good idea about that… But I was actually referring to the fact that Trump’s platform was the first thing attacked after he bombed the country. Yeah it would be great if we had a government that was focused on letting the various agencies do their jobs rather than dismantling everything that keeps us safe and healthy.

When they’re talking about “poorly secured US networks”, they’re referring to Truth Social, right?

Now if only Sony would get their shit together and start making a compact version of the Xperia line again.

Yes! One of my most favorite Johnny Depp roles.

That’s a good point, although flashing does help to grab attention, but it can also be annoying when the person is driving with their foot on the brake pedal.

Wow that’s got to be almost worthless. As you say, it just takes some idiot with a load obscuring the vehicle lights and suddenly nobody behind them knows what’s going on. What’s next, are we going to make tail lights optional?

Does your state not require good lights on the trailers? I just built a new trailer last year, I was required to have full working brake and turn signals along with running lights, but I went the extra step and included more brake/turn lights on the front and rear of the fenders, along with reverse lights plus four marker lights along each side. Trailers are hard enough to see, I didn’t want to make it harder for anyone by just sticking with the bare minimum.

I suspect a lot of that has to do with the entitled way people are driving these days. If you leave a car length gap, some kid will wrecklessly attempt to cram their way in because your lane momentarily moved slightly faster.

I suspect because there’s no consistency in the brightness of vehicle lights. But that’s one of the reasons why I think an incremental light bar would be better, there’s no variation between vehicles. You could even make it more informative by flashing the whole bar when you first brake, so someone behind you can more easily see how much of the bar is being lit up.

That could probably be implemented in most existing vehicles, and at least it would provide more information.

They don’t want to admit they’ve been screwing us over even though we all know it’s happening. All these companies could have rolled out suitable internet speeds a decade earlier but they would rather limit everyone to the lowest common denominator so they don’t have to admit just how terrible their equipment is in most locations.

I’ve gotta say, having city-owned fiber is great, folks here don’t have to wait weeks for Comcast to send out a tech who conveniently never shows up on the scheduled day, and customer service actually has a clue what they’re talking about. This is how a public service should operate.

I would say cable TV coax has quite a lot more capacity than what the providers let on. In my city they offered up to 50mbps at over $100/month. Then they lost their lawsuit trying to prevent the city from installing its own fiber network and suddenly the cable company decided they could offer 150mbps for around $75/month (with no equipment changes). Once the fiber network started becoming operational (offering 1gbps bidirectional for$50/month) the cable company decided they’re better also offer gigabit connection speeds, but once again they simply flipped a switch to increase your bandwidth. This capability has been in place for quite some time, they just didn’t want to offer it and their illegal “monopoly” gave them no incentive to provide competitive speeds.

*I say “monopoly” even though we technically also have DSL available in town. However when I asked one of the techs why DSL couldn’t give me more than 896kps upload speed, I was told that the cable company had an arrangement with them which prevented the DSL from providing the speeds needed by businesses. After the lawsuit that broke up the state-wide bans on other providers, this practice was exposed and also broken up, so now the telco is able to max out their DSL speeds.

I still think rear signaling could be improved dramatically by using a wide third-brake light to show the intensity of braking.

For example – I have seen some aftermarket turn signals which are bars the width of the vehicle, and show a “moving” signal starting in the center and then progressing towards the outer edge of the vehicle.

So now take that idea for brake. When you barely have your foot on the brake pedal, it would light a couple lights in the center of your brake signal. Press a little harder and now it’s lighting up 1/4 of the lights from the center towards the outside edge of the vehicle. And when you’re pressing the brake pedal to the floor, all of the lights are lit up from the center to the outside edges of the vehicle. The harder you press on the pedal, the more lights are illuminated.

Now you have an immediate indication of just how hard the person in front of you is braking. With the normal on/off brake signals, you don’t know what’s happening until moments later as you determine how fast you are approaching that car. They could be casually slowing, or they could be locking up their wheels for an accident in front of them.

And never forget about the I-D ten T error.

Yikes, that sucks… but at least Linux is still usable.

If you want stability, you probably can’t beat Debian, and you should be fairly used to the backend by now. I suspect the stylus use is just going to be figuring out what package provided your current access to it.

Before you wipe the laptop, I would recommend finding a command to list all the installed packages, then at least you’ll have a reference to what was in place before. And if possible, maybe grab a backup of the /etc folder (or whatever might still be accessible) so you can reference the current configs on various packages to recreate whatever doesn’t work by default.

There are a number of lightweight desktops you can choose from. I personally like Mate, but maybe you can play around with others on the new system and purge the ones you don’t like. And while you’re swapping drives, check the memory slots, maybe you can drop another 8GB stick in there to give the whole system a boost.

You might check if a simple CPU upgrade would get you there. I previously ran some 2005 Poweredge servers that came with a Pentium D processor, and it cost me something like $8 from ebay to upgrade to a Xeon and start running KVM.

Keep an eye out for people trashing perfectly good desktop machines because Windows 10 is being retired.

If you want a server that “does it all” then you would need to get the most decked-out top of the line server available… Obviously that is unrealistic, so as others have mentioned, knowing WHAT you want to run is required to even begin to make a guess at what you will need.

Meanwhile here’s what I suggest – Grab any desktop machine you can find to get yourself started. Load up an OS, and start adding services. Maybe you want to run a personal web server, a file server, or something more extensive like Nextcloud? Get those things installed, and see how it runs. At some point you will start seeing performance issues, and this tells you when it’s time to upgrade to something with more capability. You may simply need more memory or a better CPU, in which case you can get the parts, or you may need to really step up to something with dual-CPU or internal RAID. You might also consider splitting services between multiple desktop machines, for instance having one dedicated NAS and another running Nextcloud. Your personal setup will dictate what works best for you, but the best way to learn these things is to just dive in with whatever hardware you can get ahold of (especially when it’s free), and use that as your baseline for any upgrades.

My current desktop came from a co-worker, but you can also put the word out to family and friends that you’re interested in their old machines. Most people are happy to give them away because otherwise it costs them money to dispose of electronics. If nothing else, you could post on Nextdoor or a local Facebook page that you’re looking for a Win10 machine that would otherwise be trashed.

Older machines also mean dirt-cheap upgrades. The desktop I have came with a Celeron cpu. I dropped in an i7 for $10 from ebay, and recently upgraded it to 24GB of ram with sticks I had pulled from other free systems. When you switch to Linux you’re not wasting horsepower on Microsoft spyware crap, so this machine does just fine for my needs (although I’m also not trying to play games).