If find the missed call notifications to be very helpful. I never remember to check my phone, but I’m on the computer all the time. I also like the ability to remote control the music player from my phone since the computer is hooked up to an amplifier with speakers in multiple rooms.

You typically only have issues if you want to use a newly released card with a distro that doesn’t run a recent kernel or if you want to use GPU compute.

It’s probably best to try that with a live CD.

A Thinkpad T480 would meet those requirements. Stick with the i5 version with integrated graphics to avoid overheating issues.

Minecraft runs natively on Linux, so it won’t take them long to figure that out.

Wow, I didn’t realize the windows tax was that high. I thought the bulk OEM licensing was significantly cheaper than the retail price.

HTTP works fine in Firefox unless you set it to HTTPS only. Even then, you only have to click off a warning to open an HTTP site.

Put a multi port NIC in your router PC and use a separate unmanaged switch for each network then.

I would just get a basic layer 2 managed switch and use VLANs. The 5 port and 8 port switches are super cheap these days.

It gets rid of most of the login attempts for me. I don’t use a popular port though. Pick a 5 digit port so they have to put in some effort to find it.

Get rid of the baud rate limits on VHF and 70cm.

The mechanical ones are really cool. There’s no way I would pay that much for the electronic ones though.

It would have to be a very old version of Minecraft. The recent ones take a lot of CPU power and RAM, even without mods.

It would probably work great for something like a Quake III or Unreal Tournament server though.

Try booting from a live disk. If it works there, it’s probably an update or config change that’s causing problems.

Uncompressed 16 bit 48KHz stereo is 1536 kbps, which is just slightly higher than what bluetooth 5 is capable of.

Just use a cable TV splitter. It won’t cover the whole frequency range, but it should work fine for HF-UHF.

I’ve been using zoneminder with some POE IP cameras for a long time. It works pretty well, but the interface looks like it’s from the 90’s. I just wish it would do object detection so it wouldn’t send alerts because of shadows or a spider crawling across the lens.

My cameras have been out in the weather for over a decade and are starting to get a bit flaky. I will probably upgrade to some 4K analog cameras and a DVR that can do object detection. Modern IP cameras still don’t support gigabit and I don’t want any more 100M stuff on my network. I don’t trust WiFi for anything security related because it’s too easy to jam.

You don’t need 64 bit programs or CPUs to fix the 2038 problem. You just need to use a 64 bit time_t. It will work fine on 32 bit CPUs or even 8 bit microcontrollers.

Scanning isn’t particularly useful on HF. You will have to manually tune in whatever signal it stops on and most of the time it will just find noise. A band scope is much more useful.

I use the Unifi access points. They work well and are fairly inexpensive. The management software can change settings on all of them at once, which is really handy if you have several.