monovergent

I've realized that the display size, in inches, is sometimes in the name or model number of electronics that are sold not just in the US. Do people outside the US also talk about buying 55-inch TVs, 14-inch laptops, and 27-inch monitors? Does it naturally roll off the tongue or does it seem strange to anyone?

If it's all inches, why didn't measuring screens in centimeters take off?

Got myself a Dell Latitude ~~E4310~~ E6410 and Thinkpad T510 for free, both with discrete Nvidia graphics soldered to the mainboard. I've installed Linux on them and just went with the nouveau driver since the proprietary Nvidia driver for such old cards is no longer in the Debian 12 repo. Not going to do anything cutting edge on them, but it does leave me wondering:

• I read that I could, with some effort, install the proprietary driver manually. Am I missing out on anything at all without them, or is nouveau mature enough and the graphics old enough that I wouldn't notice?
• Is nouveau with old discrete graphics better or worse than having just Intel's integrated graphics?
• Does power consumption vary significantly between nouveau and proprietary drivers?

EDIT

Answering myself after going down a rabbit hole with the T510:

1. The dGPU is the NVS 3100M, which does have some level of hardware acceleration support under nouveau, so at least it isn't draining power for zero benefit. However, the dGPU is unable to go past its lowest power state without manually manipulating /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/pstate (I did not try to) and I suspect that this is what kneecaps 3D performance. There should be a marked difference, but I won't be doing any serious work on these machines, so I'm leaving everything as-is.

2. This situation is worse than having just integrated graphics due to the inherent power consumption of the GPU core while unable to benefit from higher power states and other optimizations.

3. Power consumption is probably less, but for much worse performance. At least it is a much better fallback than leaving at maximum.

• A later variant has the BIOS option to disable the dGPU, mine is an early variant with no options

A recent trip to the dumpster netted me a couple of old laptops (from around 2012). The batteries are completely flat and will not take a charge. I plan on using them as beater computers around the house, so battery life doesn't really matter but would be nice to have. The cheapest no-name batteries available for them are about $15 each. A used OEM battery with about 75% health is a dollar more.

For those who bought the cheapest aftermarket battery, was it worth it? Were the batteries surprisingly good or am I better off with a used but original one?

On Windows Vista and every subsequent version of Windows, if I search for a file and include the entire C:\ drive, I might very well have time to make tea or a sandwich while the search results come in. On Windows XP, using the search dialog with the animated dog, I can search the entire C:\ drive and expect it to be done in a minute or two, if not in seconds.

It can't just be nostalgia; I can replicate these results on period-accurate hardware today. What changed with Vista to make file searching so much slower, even with indexing enabled?

On occasion, I'll have to work with markdown files, sometimes with inline LaTeX. I'm surprised how limited my options are, or I'm looking in the wrong places. Pandoc does the job, but the lack of a integrated graphical workflow isn't my cup of tea.

Has anyone found a good graphical markdown editor that can handle inline LaTeX and doesn't pull a gigabyte of dependencies? Preferably also can render the final output to PDF.

A lot of recent medical advice says that hydrogen peroxide in first aid is counterproductive. Of course, what I'm about to say is one person's anecdote. But I find that if I just leave the occasional cut or scrape alone or wash it with soap and water, it'll tend to get a bit inflamed (very locally) and hypersensitive, which is very annoying when it's on my hands. On the other hand, If I just rinse it out and slather some H2O2 on the wound, it kind of chemically "cauterizes" the wound, prevents irritation later on, and heals just as well.

Am I just doing it wrong, or does anyone else find that hydrogen peroxide is good on minor wounds, despite recent medical findings? I don't mean to cast doubt on legitimate medical research, but I'd like to understand why H2O2 seems to work for me when research says it should be counterproductive.

Or historical exploits/trojans/etc. that deserve more attention? I've mostly heard about lucrative vulnerabilities that concern Linux servers, but what about the end-users on desktops? Or is the Linux desktop market small enough that we mostly just see one-off instances of users blindly running malicious scripts?

I recently figured out how nice Wine works for running old Windows games. However, many of them are fixed at 800x600 or another similarly low resolution. No big deal under X11 or Windows since the game will just stretch to fill the screen. But on KDE Wayland, the game just runs unscaled with black bars all around and none of the display settings seem to help. Is there an accepted way of setting the screen to a lower resolution but stretching it to fit the full display on Wayland sessions?

Just noticed that the lower right corner of my X230 just barely hovers above the table. It gives ever so slightly when I press on that corner and I can hear the rubber pad squish against the table.

Also, the table isn't crooked; my other laptops sit perfectly flat. Has anyone else had or solved this issue on their X230 or other Thinkpad?

The storage and processing power of modern smartphones are touted to rival those of a typical laptop. Yet, my trash-picked testing system from over a decade ago with a bottom-of-the-barrel SATA SSD can still boot to the Linux desktop faster than all but one of my Android devices.

Understandably, this isn't a huge priority since very few people are cold booting their phones every morning. But is it just plain unoptimized? How hard would it be to optimize? Do security features and checks bog it down? Is it that there's many tiny files to load when booting? What gives?

I was putting up some wall decorations earlier today and was painstakingly realigning everything until it looked level to my eyes. It might be just a hair off, but if I don't correct it, I'll see the misalignment almost instantly and get bothered for the rest of time until I fix it. Has anyone investigated, or is there literature on the minimum perceptible angle from level to the naked eye?

This was slowly driving me insane over the past few weeks and there were no results when searching for it, so I'll post it here for posterity.

I have a work profile set up through Shelter on one of my phones. Several weeks ago, I started noticing that a few times each week, I would be prompted for my PIN when trying to open a work app while the work profile was deactivated. Not once, but twice, once to activate the profile, and a second time to open the app itself. I checked every relevant setting I could think of, including "Use one lock" for work profile and device screen, and all the PIN prompts said were "For added security, enter your device PIN" with no further explanation.

Today, I snapped, stormed into the security settings, and disabled my device's PIN entirely. I think the resulting catharsis let me finally think straight and realize in the next two minutes why. Sometimes, I'll turn off the work profile. Sometimes, I'll unlock with my fingerprint instead of my PIN. The two coincide a few times each week.

The PIN can unlock both the personal and work profiles. But the fingerprint only unlocks the personal profile. So if I unlock with only my fingerprint, when it comes time to unlock the work profile, it isn't "sufficiently unlocked" and I need to enter the PIN. Why at the end of this process I still need to enter it again to open the app itself is beyond me.

TL;DR: Unlocking your phone with the PIN unlocks both personal and work profiles. The fingerprint only unlocks the personal profile.