I’ve posted about this on similar topics elsewhere online, but I was an early pandemic hire at my (soon to be former) employer, so I completed the entire interview and worked for quite some time remotely before being able (and required) to go into the office. As a 5’ 6" man, I am solidly the shortest person in the office, even including the few (because RIP gender equality in STEM) women. There are a few people who I would estimate at over 6 feet tall, from a smallish group. I have often wondered if I would have gotten a job here if I had been able to do an onsite interview, and if my choice to switch to more remote work in the future will benefit my career because no one knows my height.
This is wild to me because my SO and I, who are both Gen Z by some definitions, think about how much meat we are eating very frequently. On top of that, we think about what kind of meat it is, since it is my understanding that of the huge amount of environmental damage caused by meat production, the bulk of that is caused by beef in particular.
Yeah I have no concept of how much data they have, but I know services like Backblaze barely charge anything for cloud storage, most of the cost is associated with upload and especially download. Regardless, as I saw pointed out on some other discussions, $1 million is what, a few engineers annually for a company like them? It feels like not enough money to be a big deal for them.
EDIT: Looks like it wasn’t enough money, decision at least partly reversed.
By active SIM I meant having a phone plan activated on the SIM card in your phone. Since you only mentioned doing banking over WIFI, I wasn’t sure if you had a phone plan or were just using the phone when connected to WIFI. In your case, I think even the deals that prepaid providers do typically are tied to service plans that include data, but could be worth double checking with your provider just in case.
Interesting. It would still probably be helpful if you posted the output of lscpu, which should give some information about what processor you have.
One other thing that could be important, but I’m not sure about, is that I know in the past Nvidia has been restrictive about allowing consumer cards to do what they consider enterprise level things, like GPU passthrough. It has been awhile since I was looking into it closely, though, so things may be different now.
One thing to look into is refurbished devices. I don’t know where you are in the world, but in the US I was able to get a Samsung Galaxy A51 with 5G in good condition refurbished on eBay for like $300 with a one year extended warranty. The warranty was about $30 so the phone was only ~$270 shipped. I got Android 12 last month, and I think this phone should get Android 13, along with 1 subsequent year of security but not feature updates. If searching eBay seems too sketchy or time consuming, services Backmarket will aggregate reputable refurbishers for you, and handle warranty as well. Of course, you do have to check the individual model to know how long it still has updates wise.
If a new device is a sticking point, then I’m not sure what would be best. Like you say, it seems that a lot of the decent looking devices from companies like Motorola and Nokia only have Android 11. As long as they are still going to get security updates and you can live without Android 12 features then that might work, but obviously that’s going to vary by manufacturer and device. Depending on how (if?) you have an active SIM for your phone, you could also see if any carrier has a deal to switch to them. Having been a salesperson for carrier devices for a brief while in the past, I can tell you that it’s probably not a good deal in the long run, but if you already pay a traditional carrier and are willing to switch it could be worth it. Even pre-paid MVNO type carriers will sometimes offer a deal, though for them it’s typically some money off the service plans over the next two years in exchange for buying a new, higher end device through them.
One thing that I think could be interesting with air conditioning and load balancing is using the air in homes and buildings to shift peaks and make more efficient use of base load power where available. If there’s a bunch of solar power in the early afternoon or wind or nuclear in the middle of the night, it could make sense to cool buildings down further than normal, say instead of just 78 F you cool when there’s excess energy down to 68 or 70 F. Then there’s less need to run those air conditioners when there’s lots of other demand, especially if you insulate well. The nighttime cooling even has the added bonuses of the refrigeration cycle being more efficient over a smaller temperature gradient and many people preferring cooler sleeping temperatures.
Even better than just continuing to allow cars for people with disabilities, I think redesigning cities for pedestrians and cyclists is a great time to also make it easier for people to use wheelchairs or microcars too!
First, I would strongly recommend creating a bootable USB drive and booting to it instead of using a VM if you are looking to test hardware compatibility and drivers. If this isn’t something you are familiar with, just let me know and I can try to point you in the direction of some useful resources. The virtualization pass through can add an additional set of headaches that is not representative of what your experience will be after installation, and you can reuse the bootable drive later if you decide to go forward with installation. There is no risk to the data you currently have on the machine, unless you decide to do the installation process or otherwise deliberately muck about.
It is also possible a suitable driver is already in the kernel for this device, since it looks to be a fairly standard USB Wifi adapter, in which case you might learn that you don’t need to mess with driver installation at all. In my experience, I have only needed drivers for Nvidia hardware, and when I have been trying to do something unusual with AMD graphics hardware, but I also have never heard of the company for your particular adapter, so your mileage may vary. Regardless, if you are continuing with your VM testing, make sure all of your USB pass through is being handled correctly so you aren’t barking up the wrong tree.
As far as the drivers themselves, it looks like if you go a few directories down, there is some documentation, as in a Readme.txt that just contains a list of changes made to the software in various versions. I think if you dig down in the extracted zip file into WIFI-FE-2(Other Driver)/Linux Driver/DPA_MT7601U_LinuxSTA_3.0.0.3_20130313/ you’ll be in more or less the right place. From there I think on the command line you can just do make and things should get compiled by your system toolchain, and then when that hopefully finishes successfully you can do sudo make install to get everything where it needs to go. Those are fairly standard steps for installing from source on Linux, though they are typically preceded by a command to Automake or CMake to fully configure the build system. I don’t see any evidence of those tools being present, but that’s something to check out if the commands I mentioned throw up an error of some kind.
Anyway, good luck! I hope that Linux on the desktop impresses and you make the switch, but if not I hope you at least get the chance to learn more about your system. And don’t hesitate to respond here or in a DM if you have other questions!
I have an older HP laptop with a similar trackpoint style pointer. They are not as good as the real TrackPoints, because they lack the middle button in the buttons at the top of the track pad, so there’s no way to scroll while using that pointer. It doesn’t bother me because I am much more used to using a track pad anyway, but it’s definitely not interchangeable.
I am pretty sure its the reflectivity thing. Looking at this, seems like open ocean absorbs 94% of the light it gets, while even plain ice absorbs only 50%.
I really want to post this to my neighborhood email list where all the people complain about subsidized housing that the city wants to build, but since it shows price appreciation I am afraid that this will feed their confusing view that dense cities are unaffordable because they were built densely, rather than being built densely as a natural response to rising land prices.