It’s impressive that they got the power consumption down to less than 2 watts. I think this is the first 10GBASE-T NIC I’ve seen that doesn’t have a heatsink on it.

Heat makes lithium ion batteries fail much quicker. A non rechargeable lithium AA would last a long time and they don’t leak like alkaline batteries.

Gas valves and igniters don’t even need much power. They could put a battery in there so it could be used when the power is out. My propane fireplace runs for years on 4 AA batteries and that’s powering the receiver for the remote too.

Why do they need an app instead of just using cell tower data? I guess you just take a flip phone then.

No, they are not socketed. They are 8 pin SOIC packages, which are not too hard to solder.

Look for an SMD solder practice kit that has SOIC packages and practice with that. The motherboard will have a lot more layers, so it will take more heat than the practice board though.

To remove the old chip, I would carefully cut the pins off and desolder them one at a time with some solder wick. Then clean the pads up with the wick. Use lots of flux and don’t drag the wick across the pads. That can damage them.

Get a soldering iron tip with a flat surface on it. The round, fine pointed tips don’t transfer enough heat. You will also want a wide chisel tip for the solder wick.

To solder the new chip, hold it with tweezers and align it on the pads, then tack one corner pin down. Then solder the opposite corner, then the rest of the pins. If you bridge any pins, just clean it up with solder wick.

As long as you have a backup image, you can just order a new flash chip from Digikey and restore the backup.

The most common grades of neodymium magnets will demagnetize at around 60-80°C. Even if they could handle the temperature, they wouldn’t stay in place well since they are smooth.

Epoxy and super glue both work well for gluing the magnets in a hole. Rough up the back side if the magnet so the glue has something to hold on to though.

That’s usually just a pin making bad contact with the socket due to oxidation. Reseating all of the tubes usually fixes it. If not, then it’s probably a cracked solder joint.

If they move to Discord, nobody will ever be able to find the answers. They must use a website that is indexable by search engines or it will be pointless.

Search engines need to start using AI detectors and drop the ranking way down when any significant portion of the page is AI generated.

You can get industrial grade CF cards that use SLC memory. They have much better write endurance than normal CF cards.

The touchscreen on my laptop works without having to configure anything. Mine doesn’t fold into a tablet, so I rarely use the touchscreen though.

I would suggest that you load Elementary OS or Ubuntu on a flash drive, boot it up and try it out. You don’t have to install anything, it will run right from the flash drive. That’s the best way to figure out if a distro works with your hardware.

That would certainly make me request a refund and just pirate the game.

It probably just needs some more RAM installed.

It’s got enough power for a retro game emulator.

Yeah, if it requires kernel level access, I consider it malware. Not all anti cheat requires a rootkit and some even works on wine when the game developers allow it. It’s still not good for privacy, but at least you can play the game from a user account with limited access and keep your data safe.

Watch for thin clients too. You can install Linux on some of them and use them as a normal PC. They will have more processing power than a cheap SBC.

The ink tank printers are pretty cheap to run if they work with generic ink. They are a decent option if you need to print a lot of graphics. A laser printer will always produce higher quality text though.

All inkjet printers have to waste ink when they are not in use. Otherwise the ink in the print head dries out and clogs it up. Inkjet printers are the worst possible choice for infrequent use.

It’s broken because of anti cheat. I believe it’s possible to use the android version though.