got a busted Lenovo Ideapad 520ISK out of a dumpster, missing screen but otherwise perfectly functional. the thing has i5-7200u, 8 GB, two SATA ports inside and this prompted me to look up converting the thing into a server, specifically figuring out how to run 3.5" drives off it; I’m very anti-friendly towards using USB solutions for such a task.

searching was arduous, both web and yotube, and except one lonely forum post (remember those?) didn’t find anyone attempting let alone succeeding in running it thus. the 2.5" and 3.5" connectors are identical (there are micro SATA to SATA adapters for the DVD port) but the drives will need 12 V that the 2.5" ports ain’t got.

what I’ve concluded is that all that’s needed is a M/F SATA extension cable which I have trouble sourcing locally; the power will come from a separate ATX PSU for the time being, although I’m sure I can pull 12 V from somewhere on the board.

don’t got no 3d printing nor fabricating options, so it’ll likely look super-janky, but that’s not a huge concern for me now. I’ll do a write-up if I succeed.

lol fine - 3x 2 GB 1333 modules out of a busted 1366 motherboard I found and one 4 GB 1866 module I couldn’t pair with anything, worked fine for years. the i7 got upgraded to workstation and a C2D i found by the dumpster took the server role. same drives, same debian, same docker-compose files - all good so far.

I’ve downgraded my server from 1st gen i7 10 GB RAM (don’t ask) to Core 2 Duo 4 GB with the same load and barely felt it. my entire infra including desktop, laptopS, tablet, phoneS, etc costs like a third of this “missed value”.

not shitting on your choices, but positing that the price-gouging retail market is all there is, kinda disingenuous; there’s sooo much stuff being discarded although perfectly usable.

like, I couldn’t bear the super-expensive raspberries while they were in the $50 range, let alone now. marketplaces are awash in busted laptops, with way better value and performance. discarded corpo desktops can house cheap HDD and run 24/7 for eons. etc.

way more modern CPU and chipset resulting in better power management; also faster and better graphics, but that’s not important for the use case. an undervolted i5 5250u can run with wifi and lit screen in the sub-5W range, netting you 10ish hours of continuous light use out of a decent battery and days of standby (that you can turn into weeks if you implement suspend-then-hibernate). you could make an earilier model work but the price difference should be in the $20 range, so why bother?

edit: microSD, yeah, I guess you can boot off them but why would you want the flaky and slow mess when you got a perfectly fine PCI-E SSD?

macbook air 11 2015 8gb version. just this one and no other, no 13, no 2013, no 4 gb versions, etc.

very linux friendly (once you sort out broadcom wifi drivers), sips power, tolerates undervolt. it’s useless to the apple crowd as it don’t got support for latest OS so it can be had for cheap, even more so if you wanna buy busted units and frankenstein together a new one. also, wide cross-gen parts compatibility. aliexpress got $5 USB-C to Magsafe2 adapter so you don’t gotta haul the charger around.

don’t get the 12" ones, unless they’re close to free. spectacular screen, but the keyboard is atrocious and prone to die, with no option of replacing it, SSD is integrated so can’t get the data off it if something dies, fragile display connection, it’s a shit-show.

thanks. the notification went away after login and I wasn’t able to find its text anywhere in the myriad of pages.

also I’d take this “does not” coming from them with a bag of salt.

this thing here. I’ve dramatically reduced support work at two shops I’ve set this up for. incidents went from from coupla times a month to once a year. not to mention - you don’t need no VPS no more, don’t need no database, nothing, the simplest web hosting will do and it’s very cache friendly.

as to “how” it’s as simple as torify yt-dlp https://youtu.be/etc. I don’t think it’ll help, though. maybe try some alternative frontend like Freetube that allows you to download videos interactively.

• you should give less details. model? voltage? amperage/wattage?
• there ain’t a direct line charger - battery, power goes through a buncha stuff before it reaches the battery.
• how’s this linux related?

deleted by creator

I’m not that interested to find out what exactly it’s doing. it suffices that I was explicit about fuck no don’t do none of that and it’s still outbound.

like the latest one I blocked is QownNotes. everything related to online is turned off yet it still wants to connect to api.qownnotes.com.

I’m gonna piggyback off of this to remind everyone to install OpenSnitch and go through the iinitial and super-tedious approve/deny outgoing connections.

there’s stuff on linux that, despite being perfectly offline capable and having turned off everything related to clown sync and remote check this and that, still phones home.

ixnay on anything but the vanillaest of the vanillas and that goes triple for bazzite and friends. you don’t want “intriguing” shit left behind to take care of pops, that’s a thing for you to play and experiment with.

your solution is already staring you in the face: the ubuntu you left behind persevered even under those circumstances. either fix it and update it or install a fresh one, with a tweak here and there. and don’t touch nothing else…

varied diet of whole-foods, calorie deficit, resistance (i.e. weight) training. unless you’re like 19, all three are mandatory.

but that’s too hard, so people look for quick fad bullshit, ala keto, intermittent fisting, chrono, whatever the current fad is.

I’m sure you’ve looked it up by now, but in broad strokes: install intel-undervolt, edit the corresponding config file in /etc, start with something conservative, like -50 and bump it up about 25 mV at a time until it starts freezing/breaking, then back off a step and make it permanent by enabling the service.

you should hold off on that for the first week or so, until you’re sure you got everything set up and working correctly.

well, you got it right. you want either gnome or plasma as they’re wayland based and that’s a prerequisite for a seamless laptop experience nowadays, wrt llibinput and HiDPI (like, if you use an external monitor). try out both, see which you like better. good job on scoring the 8 GB version. those are also the last models produced (2017 are identical, save for 5% faster CPUs). you can use a lot of used parts, 2013-2017 are parts-compatible, and also some things from the 2011/2012.

with those airs you need to sort out the closed-source wifi drivers, the method varies from distro to distro. also, they won’t go to sleep with the screen open, so you either remember to close them when you’re done or disable LID0 wakeup events (wakes on keypress then).

they are also very tolerant to undervolts, -100 mV is about standard, more if you’re lucky. doesn’t sound like much, but that’s 10+% less power consumption, cooler and quieter laptop, etc. is plenty noticeable.

finally, as long as you got it open, stick some heat pads on the cooling pipe so it makes contact with the cover; you increase your thermal mass which nets you even less fanspin and longer boosts.

get a local instance of dovecot running with the barest functions, like IMAP ony. it’s docker-friendly, so you can run it thus and you can have your local repository of all your emails.

you connect to it from thunderbird as another account, in addition to your gmail account. what you do is just select all the gmail emails (in the folder All emails) and copy or move them to the new folder on your server.

then, you can shut down the container and spin it up only when you need stuff off it.

I deleted my post here specifically. it was completely useless to anyone else and 0 chance anyone could find any part of it useful.

I’ve done that a coupla times when I determine that the post itself and the replies provide no value to anyone whatsoever.

I wouldn’t think of removing a post otherwise, if I made an error in OP or came off stupid or sumsuch, I’d edit it for posterity; even when it’s a pile-on downvote bonanza, I wouldn’t think of touching it.

the dev vibecodes; I make a distinction between using the crap as a boilerplate helper and a full-blown agentic “hey computer, do this but do it super-good!”. not only that, they got a super-asshole vibe as they removed claude traces from the repo and then flaunted that it’s so people won’t know what parts were vibeshat. “good luck finding the cutoff point”, I’m paraphrasing here.

to each their own, but that’s a hard pass for that fork from me.

if you were looking for an excuse to torpedo this abomination, here it is. hosting this gargantuan stack just for an encrypted csv file? at least the client (electron) gobbles up RAM like it’s free while being bug-compatible with whatever chrome version was current half a year ago.

sadly, news ain’t great on the other side of the fence - keepassXC dev is all-in on vibeshitting; latest non-polluted version is 2.7.9.; works fine and the stuff they’re working on is pretty far from essential. some unknown folks forked it but who’s to say what their expertise is.

never thought I’d disable my autoupdate timers but here we are. keep your eyes open.