True. Bit of a tangent but one issue when you have free Healthcare the cost of smoking to individuals is lower. Genuinely it’s a problem - sometimes people don’t value their health as much as they should because of ease of access to Healthcare. I’m 1000% in favour of free Healthcare, it’s just an interesting paradox.

Public health measures focusing on increasing the cost of smoking through tax work but we don’t have the pressure to stop smoking due to the cost of Healthcare itself which can make it harder to get people to understand the effects. Meanwhile public organisations understand the cost of smoking and invest in trying to reduce it as it puts huge pressure on Healthcare systems. Not just cancer but it’s a major driver of cardiovascular disease (heart attacks, peripheral vascular disease) and lung diseases (emphysema / COPD). The costs of smoking related diseases is staggering.

Smoking is in decline across the west but we’ve known since the 1940s and 1950s definitely that smoking is bad yet smoking rates have been persistently high in Europe until more recently - last 20 years or so.

Smoking rates in France for example - 23% still smoke but there has been a huge decline in the last 20 years. Yet smoking was banned on public transport in the 1970s. To be clear I’m not saying it’s because of free Healthcare - just that in countries with good Healthcare systems there is more going on. People have known for 80 years smoking is bad and there has been a gradual decline but big shifts have happened surprisingly recently.

Edit: maybe this is a bit ott comment for a meme lol

I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.

There is a learning curve but it’s not too steep and I’ve enjoyed it.

I’ve been going down the slef hosting rabbit hole recently.

First, Home Assistant is worth doing - you’ve not got a smart home yet but this is the easy way to get one going. So worth it. You can buy a few cheap WiFi plugs, and plug in devices like lights or stuff you don’t want on stand by and you have the start of a smart home. A smart thermostat and smart radiator valves are surprisingly easy to set up if you want to save some money and keep your home efficient - a bit more of an investment but worth it if you find you like the ease and power of WiFi plugs.

I also recommend Pihole - it’s an ad blocker for your entire network. You can run it on Docker on x86 machines - you just point your router to use it as the DNS and it then filters all requests for you. It’s really improved my experience on all my devices.

Next, Paperless NGX - scan your documents and paperless NGX will OCR read them to make them searchable and keep them in a database for you. You can use it to go paperless. Just make sure to sort our a backup.

Joplin is quite a good note taking app which you can self host to sync your devices and keep your data secure.

Syncthing is fantastic for syncing files between devices. I sync my main PC and living room theatre PC, plus in my case my Raspberry Pi as an always on broker and local backup.

Yeah I agree.

I also don’t like the green dots and new tags - I do see how it is reminiscent of the bloat on Windows start menus even if the motivation is very different. But if I recall they can be turned off so I’d don’t see the issue.

I’m also not a fan of someone donating €100 and then saying “I’ll donate another €100 if you remove this feature”.

I’ve never had toilet paper like that. I buy supermarket own brand stuff here in the UK. Even when I’ve bought cheap stuff I’ve not had that issue.

Switch to a different brand. The paper they’re using is bad of it’s flaking off all the time.

Yeah the urinary bladder doesn’t just stop working and burst. There will have been an underlying cause, but it was not picked up at the time so now all we have is a garbled version of how he died.

People can go into acute urinary retention - where they are unable to pass urine. That can be extremely painful and it can lead to rupture if it’s totally untreated.

But it doesn’t just happen - and choosing not to go to the toilet is not going to cause it. Underlying causes might be prostate enlargement (common), a kidney stone getting trapped in the urethra or bladder neck, or cancers of the prostate, bladder or bowel, amongst others.

In the modern era urinary retention is easily diagnosed with an ultrasound and usually a CT to assess for causes. Urinary catheterisation can be performed either through the urethra or a suprapubic catheter through the skin to bypass the blockage.

None of that was available when he was alive - he’d just have been in extreme agony and there was little anyone would know to do. When he died they might have done an autopsy and found the burst bladder but workinf out what happened would be difficult and depend on the skill and knowledge of the person who did the autopsy.

So it’s extremely unlikely he died because he didn’t go to the toilet during a banquet. Something else happened that precipitated his urinary retention and eventual bladder perforation.

Once the bladder perforated he was a dead man as there was nothing they could do to repair the bladder or clean out the abdomen in that period. He’d have rapidly become more ill and died from infection and organ failure.

Some good advice already in this thread.

Also worth considering QEMU as an alternative to VirtualBox. The Virt-manager tool is decent way of managing machines, and it’s relatively straight forward to create a base machine if you’re duplicating it. Virtualbox is perhaps initially more user friendly for absolute beginners, but once you have any familiarity with virtualization I’d suggest QEMU offers much more.

Also I find integration between the guest and the host linux system is generally more straight forward. Most linux systems already ship with samba and other relevant tools QEMU uses to interact between host and guest. There isn’t a need to faff around with the guest-additions stuff. Plus KVM virtual machines can run with near native performance.

I have one of these, it’s a decent mini PC. It’s decently powerful - I used to play some steam games on it; a bit equivalent to steam deck or a bit more powerful. I used it for streaming on my home TV. I upgraded to a even better one as I liked it so much - and wanted to do more gaming.

It’s a full PC basically. Whether it suits your purposes really depends on what you want to host? It could be overpowered and a bit redundant for a lot of self hosting uses.

I have a Raspberry Pi 5 which is cheaper than this, and am hosting docker with Home Assistant, Sync thing, and fresh RSS running on it at the moment with plenty of spare memory and cpu resource.

This mini PC is considerably more powerful and will have a higher power use at idle. You may struggle to use it at capacity so may be a bit wasteful?

And even the rasp pi 5 is over powered and expensive for a lit of common home server users.

So whether this PC is a good price and choice really depends on what you want to do with it. It’s at the end of the spectrum of being able to comfortably play 4k video. So it’d likely be a decent Jellyfin streaming host if that’s what you want?

The integration is Microsoft’s monopoly behaviour which anti-trust organisation no longer put a stop to. There are alternatives but they struggle to match the level of integration Microsoft can achieve owning and making all of the office suite.

However European local and regional government have been moving over to Office alternatives such as Collabora, Onlyoffice and Libreoffice. Collabora & Onlyoffice are particularly designed for online use and collaboration.

There are also alternatives to the Exchange email system, with Nextcloud one of a few that can either be bought as a service or self deployed by organisations and individuals.

The biggest benefits are total control and privacy of data, plus better cost. Microsoft clients don’t generally get any of this, with the increasing push to integrate online services and try to forcably up-sell by bundling in stuff customers don’t need but have to buy to get the things they want or need. Microsoft rely on inertia and vendor lock-in; once you become dependent on their services it makes it seem impossible to get out and move to a new system.

Seems reasonable to me. Open Source is seen as virtuous and noble, but then big companies take that to mean they can leach off it while making huge profits.

It’s very similar to the attitude to tax - companies avoid it aggressively, yet they use roads, benefit from schools, hospitals, rubbish collection, energy infrastructure and national security.

Maybe it’s time for an ethos shift in the open source community. For example switching to licenses that stipulate if used commercially at certains scale, fees need to be paid.

PCs are generally based around the X86 chip architecture which is an open standard. PCs are basically modular and lots of manufacturers make components that are interchangeable, creating a huge variety of possible hardware. Hardware suppliers also sell to both big manufacturing companies and individuals. It’s therefore in their interest to distribute their drivers freely even if closed source. If hardware breaks it can be replaced and the PC keeps going, and some components can be kept going for years as a result as people dot have to throw the whole machine out everything something breaks or becomes obsolete.

Mobile devices are closed standards. They use a more limited range of off the shelf components which are deeply integrated into a device, and the hardware suppliers provide their drivers to the device manufacturer or the device manufacturer builds their own drivers and custom version of the os. Hardware can have very long retail lives selling for years and still being functional, so the manufacturers have an incentive to keep drivers available and even update them.

It means mobile devices are more locked down, and the hardware drivers harder to come by. This makes it hard to build custom OS for them and therefore when the device comes to the end of its support from the maker there is limited options to keep it running securely.

It’s effectively a type of planned obscelence that keeps the mobile industry going. Manufacturers stop supporting old devices (because it provides no income) and then consumers have to buy new ones as no one can provide the security patches to keep them secure.

So for mobile there is nothing to force Android or IOS to be kept up to date for old devices. The money is in new devices, and for Android manufacturers are responsible for the mobile device anyway. While for PC it’s in Microsofts interests to keep updating and keeping devices secure via Windows becuase devices have long lifespans and old components can be in the PC ecosystem for decades. Similarly Linux is able to support hardware for a long time because drivers are more freely available and long lifespans to hardware incentivise people to put the effort in to write open drivers when they’re not there.

Microsoft is trying to force an upgrade cycle at the moment with Win 11 though. And the laptop industry ia more like the mobile industry than the desktop pc industry with more propriety devices and locked down hardware.

As someone else has said; important to check the model number for the offical guide but if its a LAPQC71 (A, B, C or D) then this covers it: https://manualmachine.com/intel/bqc71abbu6000/8104213-user-manual/

The slots look to be hidden behind your hand in your photo.

The guide says its made for an 80 mm NVME (i.e. 2280). You look to be holding a 42mm (2242) or 60mm (2260) which is too short. There could be screw holes there that aren’t documented but if not you’d have to get an adaptor to extend the length of the NVME to fit. Far better would be to get a drive the right length.

NVME 2242, 2260 and 2280 are all the same in terms of the connection, the only difference is the board length. The longer ones can potentially fit more memory on them so are “better” (good in full desktops for example where there is plenty of space) while the 2242 are designed to fit into smaller spaces like laptops or miniPCs. This laptop seems to be supporting the longer slots which is actually good but unfortunately it may mean your card is not going to be big enough.

It’s always worth reading the manual before upgrade components as it will tell you exactly what slots are available and what standards are supported. There are 2 NVME slots - 1 is NVME only, the other can support NVME and SATA.

Yeah that looks right assuming its the right model; compared to the diagram in the quick start guide, in the picture he’s covering the area where the slots are with his hand and the drive hes holding. This quide for the same model numbers is the same: https://manualmachine.com/intel/bqc71abbu6000/8104213-user-manual/

OP needs to check his model number.

Unfortunately the guide suggests it only supports 80mm length (2280) NVME drives. There could be a screw hole for the 42mm or 60mm sizes but they’re not mentioned. It may be the NVME he has is too small for the design of the laptop. OP is holding what looks like a 2242?

There are adaptors (e.g. on ebay) to add length to a shorter drive to fit into the slot, but the ideal is to buy the right size of the slot.

Not sure that is true? On a quick search, in the UK 3 in 10 had used it for point of sale purchases and 8 in 10 had used it online in 2023-2024. Of course that is used it at least once and does not reflect its actual market share.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1389396/paypal-adoption-in-uk/

Maybe remind him of that when he’s rude like this. He’s bitching at you for not doing him a favour - taking it for granted. And then insulting you for your choice in shower gel.

He cones across as a bit of an asshat.

Its a glitch.

Its important to understand that evolution does not “design” anything with intent or purpose. Its all chance and survival of the fittest does select for traits that confer greater survival.

But plenty of traits are neutral or minimally negative in their survival benefits so also suriviveor develop. And it only affects traits that impact reproducing and passing on traits to the next generation. So many traits may be totally unaffected by evolutionary pressures as they have no relevance to survival of the fittest.

Plus the other species being competed woth over time and the environment generally shape what traits are desirable versus detrimental.

Basically not everything has an evolutionary purpose or function.

So no this is not safe. Once ypu have a system it is easier to crack because if someone has 2 or more of your passwords they can work out there is a system and it’d make it much easier to crack others if they’re determined.

It is unlikely that someone random would specifically target a person and systematically try and crack their passwords. If that were to happen it’d most likely he someone they know - and this does happen sometimes. So while the passwords are definitely flawed it may not be something that anyone takes the time to exploit. But you can never say never.

The best way to manage passwords probably remains a secure password manager and randomly generated series of characters for each site. If its truly random then there are no shortcuts and every single password stands independently. The password manager gets round the issue of memorising them.

I use Firefox and Librewolf.

I’ve used Firefox for a long tine, and I strongly favour it as the only true independent browser engine left. Everything else is under Google or Apples control, and many of the various chrome forks are commercial and compromised. I dont trust Brave or Vivaldi in terms of privacy. And google has severely limited privacy options in chromium based browsers with its recent changes.

Mozilla is far from perfect and I’m disturbed by some of its actions but it remains the least bad option. Librewolf adds a layer of privacy and separation that I like although its not my main browser. I main Firefox with lots of privacy extensions.

I do have chromiun and chromium ungoogled installed and exclusively for streaming video. Not because Firefox isn’t capable but because I have loads of extensions in Firefox so its easier just to contain all my subscribed streaming services in its own browser and not have to faff with DRM or ad block issues. I watch YouTube in Firefox, but use Chromium to watch BBC, Channel 4, and Netflix (when I had it). I use Jellyfin media player to stream my own content.

Except the big danger with fully self driving cars is that drivers are not paying attention at all as they have nothing to do most of the time. They’ll be on their phones regardless of what theyre supposed to do and that will cause deaths. So such a glaring safety flaw will have numerous opportunities to happen in real life - humans do not make good safety features in cars; thats what the self drive stuff was for.

Teslas self drive technology is not fit for the roads regardless of this. Musk had sensors stripped out pf the cars design to save money because apparently he knows better than all the worlds self drive engineers. The guy is a just an investment bro woth a huge ego - he can’t let the people hes investing in get onwith it, because he sees himself as a “genius”. The guys a moron.

It’s a javascript app that uses the react library - which is an open source library originated by Meta. It’s supposed to be easier to maintain and port cross platform apps. However it is not as efficient as a native app and given the Start menu is so frequently used it’s probably not a very efficient way to program it (or parts of it - I think the start menu has reactive native components rather than entirely made in it).