The Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 motherboard has two x16 PCIe 2.0 slots running x16/x16 and two running x4/x4. A mid range GPU will be fine. That’s still twice the bandwidth you get with an external GPU on Thunderbolt. NVMe drives will work fine as well. The speed will be limited, but they will still be much faster than SATA.
A set of DDR5 RAM now costs nearly as much as a whole PC did a year ago. It’s still worth upgrading the GPU and getting more use out of an older machine. DDR3 RAM is still affordable. There are also M.2 to PCIe adapters if you want a modern SSD, you just can’t use it as a boot drive. If you’re running Linux, you can put everything except /boot on the NVMe SSD.
As long as you didn’t cheap out on the paste, it shouldn’t be fully hardened yet. Some alcohol should clean it off without too much effort.
That’s mostly just inkjet printers. The ink dries up and clogs the print head if it hasn’t been used in the last week or two. Most other types are very reliable.
I run one on my firewall, but it’s IPv6 only because of CGNAT. The other one is running on a VPS in case I need IPv4 access. I just configured them manually.
Yeah, it only has a UART and I2C. That really limits what you can use it for. It would be much more useful if it also had SPI and a few GPIO pins.
We shouldn’t even need video. It’s just a waste of bandwidth unless you are showing some slides for a presentation or something.
There are a few flash drives available with hardware write protection. They are hard to find though. Just set the switch to write protect before plugging it into an untrusted device and nothing can be written to it.
You can use LibreOffice Draw to edit a PDF. It can actually delete text and images from the PDF. You do need to install all of the fonts that the PDF uses before editing it or they will be replaced with what you do have. That will probably mess up the layout if the replacement fonts are not compatible with the originals.
Yes, except now you can just use an AI to unpixelate something without doing all that work. It’s even more effective on video than with a still picture.
When redacting something make sure you’re not accidentally making it semi transparent. Use a box fill or hard edge brush with the opacity set to 100%. I’ve seen a lot of pictures posted where someone scribbles over the info with a soft edge brush and you can still see through it if you adjust the contrast.
Yeah, there’s no way the delivery guy is going to take the time to put a package in there. Half the time they leave the package on the end of the deck out in the rain instead of putting it under the eaves.
You can get an adapter board that will make it work with an M.2 SSD. I believe it’s only PCIe 2.0, so there’s no point putting a high end SSD in it unless you need a high write endurance. Any SSD will be a huge improvement over a hard drive.
Most Linux distros will run on it since it’s using a 64 bit Intel CPU. If you have the version with 4GB of RAM, you will need something very lightweight though. I would run Debian if I was going to use it as a server or Mint if I was going to use it as a desktop.
The Mac Mini should still be perfectly usable if you put Linux on it and upgrade it to an SSD.
No, you don’t need a VPN if you’re using a seedbox.
I haven’t had any issues with public trackers on ultra.cc. I probably download about 100 or so public torrents a month, but that’s not new release stuff that’s likely to get a DMCA notice.
The VPN killswitch is not safe for bittorrent, it doesn’t work fast enough. Binding the torrent client to the VPN interface is safe though.
My old Thinkpad X200T rotates like that, but it doesn’t need any motors to do it. Motorizing it seems like it’s just adding more points of failure for no good reason.
I backup stuff on blurays and DVDs a couple times a year. I also wrote a copy of FreeDOS and some software onto a stack of floppies recently.
Only works if it’s an incandescent light
LED and fluorescent lights get hot too, it just takes a bit longer.
Torrents don’t need trackers either. They can work with just DHT.
That can be done with Apt-Cacher NG. It’s a proxy server that caches .deb packages. It really speeds up updates if you have multiple computers that are using the same packages.