One thing that would be useful to understand is the distinction between CMR and SMR
I got a nice deal on the x280 and am happy with it, was also looking at the various X1 carbon. Two criteria I had were I wanted USB-C charging (since I have those chargers around and they can handle these laptops) and a single battery (eg. the T470s I have from work is nice but it has two small capacity batteries that each cost the same to replace as the full size single ones in the carbon and x280). One thing to keep in mind is some of the earlier X1 carbon don't support NVME SSD (I think it started with 5th gen?)
Edit: another thing to consider is soldered RAM. Part of why my x280 was cheap was it's only 8gb and can't be upgraded. Since you're looking at lighter weight things and using FOSS (and perhaps open to tinkering with things like ZRAM) that might be a useful aspect to focus on because there is probably a glut of such machines given how memory inefficient things are lately with every trivial app running a whole browser engine. OTOH, depending how many tabs you tend to have open and how many electron apps you tend to keep floating around, 8gb might start to feel cramped. Especially if you think you might want some VMs around.
More detail / similar concepts if you're not a video person: https://www.centerforbuilding.org/blog/we-we-cant-build-family-sized-apartments-in-north-america
Next time I look for a small laptop to have handy one thing I'm going to be sure to prioritise is: how much battery does it use while suspended? I'd really like to not need to have it switch to hibernate after 30m of sleep or w/e and ideally just plug it in overnight like a phone.
Thanks, cancelled for now. I'll keep an eye out for ways to contribute as we get more organised.
Big fan of that one, been using it for years.
Do you know about the one for healthcare on the 25th?
They published this in Popular Mechanics in 1912, we've been ignoring this for a long time:
The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year,” the article reads. “When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
Also, this Wikipedia article has a good summary on the overall arc of our understanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science
The app, in the scenario where we're trusting the author/store, is only part of the surface to the extent it's exposed to a potentially malicious payload. eg. a trusted solitaire game using a vulnerable API doesn't exacerbate that vulnerability because it doesn't expose it to untrusted input whereas a PDF viewer would because the PDF could be coming from anywhere...
Really appreciate you taking the time to write that. I have a sense of most of that ("defense in depth" and "threat model" are good lenses to think about such things through for sure!) but what I was trying to get a better grasp on was how much risk from automated attack was a normal person without worries of an "advanced persistent threat" taking on by using a device past EOL. Like you say, "Quantifying how much of a difference it makes is not trivial" so I feel less conflicted to know that you're comfortable with your dad taking that risk.
I would think that the main thing at stake for a typical user isn't just browsing history or email though but rather identity theft since a successful attacker can use the device to get through 2FA.
Thanks, that's a significant detail. It also seems like Bluetooth 5.4 adds nothing relevant to my expected use cases: https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/nordic/nordic-blog/b/blog/posts/whats-new-in-bluetooth-v5-4-an-overview
Is there such a thing as a particularly good PCIE -> m.2 E key adapter or are they all pretty much equivalent? Specifically, are some antennae better than others or they're pretty much simple enough devices that they're going to be equivalent if they're remotely aiming at the same spec?
Unfortunately, it seems like Intel may be a bad bet in terms of use as an AP:
Also it needs a USB header on my motherboard as apparently the BT aspect is based on that bus. So perhaps I'd be better off with a fully USB adapter, I wonder if there is a downside to that approach... Edit: PCIE is the way to go