Anyone who’s had to open a Microsoft support ticket can assure you technical support is already not available from Microsoft.

Forgejo, a Gitea fork used by Codeberg. I chose it because it’s got the right balance of features to weight for my small use case, it has FOSS spirit, and it’s got a lovely package maintainer for FreeBSD that makes deployment and maintenance easy peasy (thanks Stefan <3).

Nikita Khrushchev, in his own memoir, stating clearly that the USSR could not have won the war on its own:

I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin’s views on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were “discussing freely” among ourselves. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany’s pressure, and we would have lost the war. No one ever discussed this subject officially, and I don’t think Stalin left any written evidence of his opinion, but I will state here that several times in conversations with me he noted that these were the actual circumstances. He never made a special point of holding a conversation on the subject, but when we were engaged in some kind of relaxed conversation, going over international questions of the past and present, and when we would return to the subject of the path we had traveled during the war, that is what he said. When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so.

-Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich; Khrushchev, Serge (2004). Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev: Commissar, 1918–1945. Penn State Press. pp. 638–639.

Friendly reminder that lemmy votes are public

I blocked hexbear and lemmygrad to stop the firehose of kremlin/beijing propaganda cluttering up my feed and that made my lemmy experience worlds better. There’s only so many times you can read “special military operation” used unironically…

Sorry, all of the linux stuff is just specific to my own preferences/environment - if you’re more familiar with windows it would be best to just use that for testing. Presumably it will come with windows installed?

If so, put some programs on a normal usb storage device and then install/run them from there.

• For the cpu stress loading, you can use CpuStres: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/cpustres
• For temperature monitoring, you can use Open Hardware Monitor: https://openhardwaremonitor.org/
• To test the microphone/camera, I’d just use whichever app you’ll normally be using them for

As for the rest:

1. When you first turn the laptop on, at the red Lenovo splash screen, press Enter repeatedly to get into the boot menu. Once there, it’ll give you a list of options with associated keys to access them - go to “BIOS Setup - F10” (or something similar, not sure of the specifics on the X1C 6th gen). If it prompts you for a password to enter that, it’s locked.

2. To test all the ports, plug your usb stick with the apps on it into each of the usb ports and make sure it shows up in explorer; try the same with an sd card if you have one; plug in to a wired ethernet connection and make sure you have internet access through it (disable wifi at the same time to make sure); plug headphones into the jack and make sure they work; plug into an hdmi display if you have one.

3. To check battery health, run Command Prompt with administrator privileges, then run powercfg /batteryreport to generate a battery health report

Good luck!

Personally I’d do the following:

• boot into the bios config menu to make sure it’s unlocked (if it’s locked and they don’t have the password that’d be a dealbreaker for me)
• boot into a live linux environment from usb and test both batteries, keyboard, trackpoint/trackpad, speakers, microphone, wifi, and all external ports (T480 has 2 usb-c, 2 usb-a, ethernet, hdmi, headset, and sd - make sure batteries charge well from both usb-c ports)
• to check the storage health, install nvme-cli if not installed, run nvme smart-log /dev/nvme0 and check the “percentage_used” value: if it’s near 100% it might die and need replacement soon
• to check that the vents, airflow, and cooling hardware are in good shape, install stress if not installed, run stress -c 7 to load up 7 of the 8 available cpu threads, make sure the fan spins up good and strong, and watch /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp to make sure the cpu temperature stays under ~90-95 degrees

On my own time later, I’d run memtest86+ overnight from bootable usb to check the memory, then install tlp and run tlp recalibrate with the laptop on the charger to recalibrate the batteries

Edit: enjoy the new laptop! I hope it works great for you

Just part of our standard office package, everyone gets a laptop, dock, and external monitors for their workspace.

I can’t speak for all of them, but we’ve had a couple hundred deployed over the last several years with very few issues. Mine’s been solid as a rock.

The usb-c docks, however, are a nightmare, though I gather that’s fairly universal.

I daily a T480 with Debian for work, and I’d recommend it highly. Great performance, battery, build quality, look & feel, etc. We have some 7480s deployed and while they’ve been solid as well, I much prefer the thinkpad. T series will have better performance and battery than X series, also, so I’d take the T480 over the X1C.

I was sad to learn Parmesan isn’t vegetarian :(

https://grapheneos.org/faq#device-lifetime

You can buy a used Pixel 8 and it will be supported by Graphene through 2030 at the very earliest, probably the best support lifecycle you can possibly get on a phone.

There should be a section in the configuration about dhcp, which is how ipv4 addresses are given out on your network. What happens is when a device first connects to the network, it sends out a broadcast with its mac address - the dhcp server (in this case, your router/firewall) hears this, and sends back a reply allocating an address. You should be able to see a list of currently allocated addresses, and hopefully configure reservations to make those allocations permanent. To reserve an ipv4 address for a specific device, you need that device’s mac address.

Each item on that current allocations list should have a hostname, a mac address, and an ipv4 address. If it’s not clear by the hostname which device is the tv, you can look up each mac address and deduce from there (the first part of each address is unique to a specific manufacturer).

Once you have an ipv4 address reserved for the tv, you can set your outbound firewall rule to block it.

Ipv6, as I mentioned, is much more complicated. It might be possible to disable it completely on your router, and that’s likely the only way to block the tv from using it, but then your whole network will lose ipv6 capability across that boundary (probably not a lot of downside to that, though).

Good luck!

If your firewall can set outbound rules, and you can control DHCP on your network so that you can reliably know the TV’s IPv4 address, you can block the TV from reaching beyond the local network there with a “deny all from source address of TV” type rule.

If your router/firewall is handling IPv6 though, it gets a lot more complicated, since the TV could have any number of addresses that change often.

When it comes to privacy and security, I think you should treat all cloud providers equally. Use a client with client-side encryption so that the only thing that touches the provider is encrypted data.

Rclone is an example of a good client that can do this, and can even mount your cloud storage as a filesystem with its encryption layer in between.

Best gun-pants ergonomics, tucked in the front

The resolution is actually quadrupled by doubling the value of both axes. In this case going from 1500x1424 (2.1MP) to 3504x3327 (11.7MP) multiplies the total number of pixels by 5.4

With the same level of jpeg compression you’d expect it to jump from 700KB to roughly 4MB. Since both images are the same file format, the rest of the file size difference is likely attributable to less jpeg compression being used in the larger image.

The BBC Historic Farm Series is a collection of docuseries about daily life on English/Welsh farms from the Tudor period to WW2, with each series following a group of people spending a full year on a farm in each period. They show you all the ins and outs of life as it would have been in each era, and it’s like traveling back in time, a living museum.

The first series, Tales From The Green Valley, is available in full on archive.org, and is my favorite of the bunch. One episode per month of a year, on a little farm in Stuart-era England. It’s lovely.

RIP