Ah, well, that limits things a bit then.
I have refined tastes when it comes to laptops, but I'm also cheap, so lightly used high end models are right up my alley. Unfortunately, I can't think of any [brand new ones] I would stand behind that are in that price range other than maybe a Macbook Neo, but you specifically ruled out ARM (they're also not supported by Ashai Linux yet, either).
Sorry.
Are you married to a new one?
I pretty much exclusively buy used ~3 year old Thinkpads which meet all of your specs and then some. My last two were X1 carbons (7th gen and now a 9th gen). Each cost me about $450.
Interesting or useful?
I don't think I have any really interesting ones, but the most useful one I have for people is "Always On".
Basically when I see that tag, I can mentally prepare myself and roll my eyes before reading. Basically it's for people who just do nothing but preach at you regardless of the topic being discussed. It's...pretty useful.
Ever lived in a small town? Drama and gossip is fun
Yes, I have, and no it's not. It's just all there is except for high school football, making more kids, and the same drama and gossip but on Facebook. IMO that's why small towns are so toxic once you get past the thin veneer of "small town charm". Couldn't wait to leave the one I grew up in.
And after re-reading OP's opinion, I starting to see the parallels.
Hank Hill, apparently.
I don't use Facebook and use all the ad blockers, but apparently I'm still tracked by IP.
When my SO and I started dating, he hooked to my wifi one day and immediately started getting ads on Facebook for various lawn care products. He'd never had those come up before, lived in an apartment all his adult life, and has never searched for any kind of gardening supplies.
I, on the other hand, do have a lawn that I take care of and frequently shop for various landscaping stuff. But he gets the ads for them.
Wait, what?? Those are a thing?
I've seen some rechargeable smoke detectors but never had a reason to trust those. Everything else has used the old school 9v.
Literally this.
Twice a year I fill in as DBA when our lady graybeard Oracle DBA takes vacation. This month is one of those times. Yay me.
For my org, it's just the massive in-house developed line-of-business application that's tightly coupled to Oracle that keeps us chained to it. It's technical debt from top to bottom, and has been accumulating steadily since the early 2010s, but no one seems willing to start replacing it.
The new projects typically go with Postgres, MariaDB, or if all else fails, MSSQL. But the Oracle monster in the closet isn't likely to leave any time soon.
If only 9 volts were that price, I'd stock up for the smoke detectors for the next 5 years.
For everything else, I bought a bunch of rechargeable AA and AAAs a while back and those have been great. Haven't used a D battery in years and a C battery for decades. I assumed they stopped making C's.
I thought I was above enjoying all of the really campy episodes, but apparently not. I thoroughly enjoyed "Rascals" just for the Guinan / Ro Laren sass.
If they took Subspace Rhapsody to Broadway, I would happily make that my first show.
By popular demand from this post, here's the write-up for my version of that travel server.
The travel server is shown with the, currently, bare 5V UPS board to its right. One day I hope to have a 3D printed case for both of those, but they're currently separate as my 3D modeling skills are basically non-existent. The power cable is wrapped in aluminum foil and then wrapped in electrical tape due to EMI from the wifi adapter causing random glitches. A ferrite bead would probably solve that more elegantly, but I didn't have any on hand so made due with what I have.
Note: Unlike the Pi Zero, these have two USB ports. One is configured in host mode and the other in peripheral mode.
For internet uplink, there are multiple options depending on need. By default, the internal/bulit-in wi-fi is the internet uplink and the USB wi-fi adapter is the client-facing AP interface. This is how I normally keep it configured in my use-cases.
Alternatively, the built-in wi-fi can be used as the client-facing AP and the uplink to the internet can be provided by a USB-tethered smartphone or a USB ethernet adapter --OR-- the internet uplink can be omitted entirely and either the USB or built-in wifi adapters can serve clients (or both: one in 2.4 GHz mode and the other in 5 GHz mode). Fortunately, the built-in wifi chip in the Banana Pi works well in AP mode but that's not always the case (cough Orange Pi Zero W2 cough).
If a PC is connected to USB0 (the OTG port), the device will act as an ethernet gadget. The travel server will add its end of the usb0 interface into the LAN bridge along with the client-side AP. This means the connected PC will be on the same LAN as the wireless clients.
It's also possible to add a USB ethernet adapter and bridge it into the LAN side as well.
Depending on configuration, a small USB-C hub may be needed. I've got one that includes a USB A port, ethernet port, and additional USB C port.
VPNs can also be configured as needed. I've got a privacy one that can route all traffic as well as a Wireguard one that connects back to my home LAN when I'm using it remotely.
DHCP and DNS are both provided by PiHole
All applications hosted on the travel server are fronted by Nginx and use valid Let's Encrypt certificates. This eliminates the need to install a custom CA cert in end devices or have the clients accept an untrusted self-signed cert.
This also ensures all applications are protected by TLS which is required for full functionality of some applications.
How does that work?
The hostname of the travel server (mobile) is a subdomain of my personal, project domain (mydomain.xyz). All applications are a subdomain of that (e.g. jellyfin.mobile.mydomain.xyz), and I simply request a wildcard cert from Let's Encrypt for *.mobile.mydomain.xyz. Currently, Let's Encrypt requires the use of DNS validation when requesting wildcard certificates.
Movies and TV shows are provided by Jellyfin and are stored on the 1 TB SD card. I've tested 4 simultaneous streams, and the travel server didn't even break a sweat. Granted, it's not transcoding anything so I believe I'm mostly limited by USB, wifi, and/or SD card bandwidth in that regard.
For reliability, the Jellyfin database is stored on the internal 32 GB eMMC rather than the SD card. This both reduces wear and tear on the card as well as proves to be faster and more reliable.
CPU transoding is a non-starter, and the GPU drivers for these boards isn't exactly well supported. The GPU drivers also rely on V4L which Jellyfin has deprecated for hardware transcoding, so I opted to forego transcoding entirely.
To load movies/TV shows on here, I pre-process them with ffmpeg in the following way:
mov_text if available) in yuv420p pixel format to avoid the need for remuxing or transcodingMusic is provided by a combination of MPD and Snapcast and the library is also stored on the 1TB SD card.
MPD manages the music collection while Snapcast allows synchronized multi-room audio and connecting receivers via wifi.
For local playback, I use myMPD web UI and use its streaming feed or use the MPD and Snapcast clients on the end device. There's also a Snapcast client installed on the travel server itself, so if you add a USB speaker it can playback music directly.
It runs Calibre-Web to manage my book collection which is also stored on the 1 TB SD card. When my phone is connected to its wifi, it can use my FBReader app to connect to the Calibre library over OPDS to download books.
The travel server runs CodeServer which is an un-Microsofted web-based version of VSCode. You can set that up however you want, but I've got it setup for:
Other services it runs to facilitate development include:
Kiwix is installed with a large selection of ZIMS for offline reference.
I installed SearxNG so I always have an ad-free, AI-free, no BS search engine available.
The travel server has a few different ways to share files:
The lone exception is Pudding in a Cloud because it's delicious.
Edit: Here's a compilation of all the Cleveland bath gags.
Once I got the first set of rails mounted, it was a bit easier since I could anchor them to that. But the first set, whew, it was all I could do to hang onto my tools and/or parts. This is despite anchoring my backpack full of tools/materials. Backpack was just not reachable when I was doing the bottom and middle mounts.
Only got one rail (5 panels) installed today. Spent a lot of time going up/down retrieving dropped tools, getting random stuff I didn't think I'd need, and struggling to not fall off the roof myself. I get vertigo easily, so this is proving to be more challenging than I thought. Two more rails (10 panels) left to install, but that's a tomorrow problem.
Yes, they're intentionally off-center on the mounts for spacing reasons. Also, yes, I blurred out my house because apparently you can just feed these to a tool that can identify my location. God I hate the internet.
Refurbishers on eBay