Yeah it’s ok on a static object by law, but not on a moving vehicle.

And yes, even here in Armidale we have about four of them, and they don’t seem to have night dimming so can be a bit blinding.

I think such things are banned in Australia. Clearly not safe for traffic.

A smart switch that turns off the power when the battery hits 80% and turns it on at 78%? Dunno if that would actually work.

It’ll probably work. Biggest issue will be recovery after power failure as laptops generally stay off.

Next most likely is CPU fan failure, exacerbated if CPU usage causes the fans to run high and nobody is there to blow the dust out.

Other than that I’ve had multiple laptops that run as servers over the years and generally they’re fine. Streaming audio for our community radio station, or shoved behind wall mounted TV’s for updateable PowerPoint displays.

ddrescue (or gddrescue) is a great version if you have a sick drive. It’ll try to copy the good areas first then go back to hammer on the sick areas.

Not perfect as it doesn’t know about the file system so it tries to copy the entire surface, but generally a good tool.

Righto :)

I was thinking of usb3 hard drives. No need for internal storage if using spinning rust.

On older laptops with optical drives you can sometimes replace the drive with a sata tray and add a second drive that way.

But yes, a server that looks like a server and can recover after power loss is useful.

A cheap laptop might also be worth considering? Built in UPS that way, and sometimes UPSes have a large standby power usage. Would support a couple of bus powered drives as well.

Main drawback is no recovery if the battery drains fully.

Rustdesk, so I can remote into my main computer and the others I manage.

PWAs For Firefox.

And that’s about it.

I use Debian BTW. (Was on Fedora but killed it when there were sound issues, turned out to Rustdesk at fault. Can’t do Mint as it boots to black screen.)

Chrome OS Flex seems OK. Not sure how it manages printers.

Fedora.

Most of the others either booted to a black screen after install, or the track pad was somewhat uncontrollable when scrolling. Older Asus laptop with separate GPU.

Google News does the right thing here. I presume it’s cross platform but haven’t tried on an iDevice.

Does your system have two graphics processors? One of my laptops won’t work with many distros as they boot to blank screens after install. Fedora was one that does work in my case.

It’s a laptop with two GPUs.

Gnome.

With NoMachine to my Windows Host, hot keys go to the host as intended.

Rustdesk can’t do it in any config and they don’t care at this stage.

I blame Ian Dury.

Possibly NSFW.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kFnHPHBcb4

It’ll run Johnny Castaway just fine.

Only an issue if you don’t disable fast shutdown on Windows. A hibernated system might get surprised if another OS moves files about while it was asleep.

I wonder could someone write an app that watches the clipboard for YouTube URLs and auto launches the desired app?

I’ll have another look. Didn’t seem to be an option to have it on a Windows guest when I installed it.

Same.

The lack of graphics acceleration is a bit painful though.

VirtualBox won’t work on Fedora 40 AFAICT, and once installed it can’t be uninstalled.

No, but VNC will work. It just doesn’t have sound.