unnecessarily taxing my hardware

What?

I play the Tale of Two Wastelands modlist on Deck

Includes both games and runs quite well!

I do have Infuse and the pro subscription!

It’s not really a “first party” (for lack of a better term) solution so the UI is not consistent with the other apps.

Personally, I don’t really like Infuse’s UI arrangement and use it exclusively for content that has Dolby Atmos.

Many of my friends / family aren’t all that techy, usability is key and having access to that content through a single app / single name is pretty important.

friends dont let friends use plex

Emby and Jellyfin still don’t have Apple TV Apps. Many of us bought a Lifetime Plex Pass ages ago and it still does what it’s supposed to. Migrating / starting over with something else is quite an undertaking when what you already have is working fine.

storage is very cheap now

In what universe? I bought two refurbished 12TB enterprise HDDs for $80 USD each back in 2024. The same type of disks are now $250+ each.

Yes - especially with chopsticks

John Woo’s Max Payne

Not sure what they’re on about, it’s soldered.

https://www.ifixit.com/Device/iPod_Touch_6th_Generation

With that being said, it’s not a terribly difficult part to desolder/resolder. Use flux, take care not to short the positive side to anything else while you’re working.

Grandma doesn’t need to “learn” Linux

Most of the older generation compute almost entirely through a web browser. They often struggle with the amount of notifications / solicitations that come up in a a Windows OS, as they can have trouble discerning between what is real and what is a scam - becoming fundamentally distrustful of everything as a result.

Through my repair shop, I’ve transitioned plenty of older generation folks to Linux Mint with minimal friction.

Main area where that can get a bit more complicated is for those who are clinging to an older piece of software they’re unwilling to let go of.

You’ve confirmed that you have 5V / peripheral devices are being powered

Since this is affecting all USB ports, my initial hypothesis is a fault in PCH

Measure resistance between USB’s D+ and D- as well as resistance between each of them and GND

Using MMOD doesn’t track playtime for the man game

Yeah, it’s just an inline resistor

A potentiometer is a resistor that you adjust using a dial. If you want control, you may want to get a PWM fan control module. There’s the Noctua NA-FC1 https://www.noctua.at/en/products/na-fc1 but that’s pretty much just a fancy expensive version, you can find the same concept for as little as $1-2 USD

Assuming the supply can saturate the current the fan will use, at 12V it’ll be running at full speed. That’s probably pretty loud. Give it 5V, it’ll run slower and quieter.

$20 was the cost of a whole CD Album, I don’t remember singles selling for that much. Or maybe you’re referring to the phenomenon of having to buy a full Album just for the one song you like?

I prefer to buy Albums, and these days new Vinyl usually comes with a lossless digital download redemption code.

At the same time, I still subscribe to music streaming services. I’ve got some ambient / background music playlists that are days and even weeks long - I’m not going to allocate make local storage space to them, let alone pay $9,000

These services are amazing for music discovery. I live having an album or playlist finish and then getting “radio” of similar music to hear and discover.

What the hell? Premise they’re going with just makes it any other gameshow. Missed opportunity to have each “Vault” have some kind of unique experiment or twist.

Not sure if their comment is related / deliberate, but the image in the article is from the film Idiocracy

In the film, the people of the future speak real slow and dumb. When they hear the time travelling protagonist speak in a vanilla US West Coast accent, the narrator describes them as thinking he sounds “Faggy and pretentious”, there are multiple points in the film where future-folk tell the main character “you sound like a fag”

Micron used to be our default go-to for SSDs and memory (independent repair shop)

They are now blacklisted for purchase, even their SSDs, even if the competitor’s price is substantially higher.

Due to how they are affected by Bit Rot, I would bot use any kind of flash based media (USB Flash Drive, SSD, MicroSD, etc) for any kind of long-term backup.

I know I can put together a prompt to give any of today’s leading models and am essentially guaranteed a fresh perspective on the topic of interest

I’ll never again ask a human to write a computer program shorter than about a thousand lines, since an LLM will do it better

I can agree with some of the parts about how some humans can be really annoying but this mostly reads like AI propaganda from someone who has deluded themselves into believing an LLM is actually any good at critical thought and context awareness.

I don’t know that PhotoRec was the ideal place to start for this case, as it is file signature based and will scrape for an insane number of results.

I recommend that you give DMDE a shot, run a full scan of your disk and then have a look through the FS Reconstruction with deleted files included.

May as well add a Honeywell PTM7950 pad while you have the bare board