Funny you should mention that, here’s a complete opposite solution.
My laptop (Thinkpad from 2020) keyboard has failed, so it’s off for repair. (Last time I had a warrant, on-site meant on site because it was genuine IBM maintenance, but now it’s some rubbish third party called “flex” and anything harder than tweaking BIOS settings needs it sent away). So that’s ongoing.
And so I realise that hey, the older machines aren’t really up to full time use any more.
here is a new “desktop” machine which is a mini PC, decent CPU and memory and built-in graphics. And the poor thing, it’s safe now, it will never have to run Windows again.
I’ve purchased 2 mini PCs for my daughters. Honestly, it’s hard to justify doing a hardware refresh on my gaming desktop tower. $1k to re-spec my gaming PC to be able to play modern games… or… throw $400 at a mini PC that’ll limp me down the road for another few years.
At the moment you can stream the graphics for a price that is far cheaper than a current GPU. I have not tried it on my other laptop that has no gpu whatsoever but I assume it would work with that hardware as well. And while I am not playing any modern games I can just cancel the service.
I have 2 NUCs from Intel but those are pretty expensive and I am not sure how available they might be. One I am running has headless homeserver with Ubuntu, the other is a neglected desktop also running Ubuntu. They were easy to install.
Work has continued to be available through all this, because I have been vigorously resisting pressure to go cloudy. (Diverse, yes. But my own servers that I run myself.)
Work’s parent org was taken offline by both the Microsoft outage (inside + outside) and today’s (outside).
Finally upgraded my phone from an old iPhone 6S to a still-old-but-not-quite-as-old iPhone 13 Mini. Apps were starting to drop support for my old model, and once Slack stops working it felt like I couldn’t get away with it much longer.
The advantage of this is that I can now access this forum on my phone again after Discourse dropped support for older browsers. Still slightly annoyed at having to upgrade but glad to have access on my phone back.
My 13 Mini was the first iPhone I bought, switching over from Android. It’s still working beautifully and I hope continues to do so for years, since I haven’t seen a viable alternative on the market.
Not sure if this should go in the technology-can-be-awful thread, but I suppose it fits, because it’s systems trumping simple interactions:
Today I contacted Rakuten to ask why the SIM card we have isn’t working, and they say it’s because the company contracted to deliver the SIM card haven’t notified them that it has been delivered. Apparently, me telling them that I got the SIM card yesterday, and it’s in the phone I’m contacting them with, isn’t good enough. Got to wait for that delivery notification.
The place I work for has set up an internal LLM system which offers various models and some preconfigured apps like “chat with document”. So nice.
I’ve been “chatting” with a horrible 31 page document which has numbered headings 9 levels deep… this is so much more comfortable.
Yesterday I had it help me write project documentation among others it was able to generate example data from schema definitions that it would have taken me … a lot more time and getting annoyed to produce.
There was part of a YouTube video/podcast that really resonated with me recently. As I happen to have DaVinci Resolve on my computer, I’ve spent a bit of time today figuring out the workflow for “YouTube video to reel with subtitles”.
For no real reason other than I wanted to play with DaVinci Resolve a bit. Probably won’t even post it on social media.
