Yeah, it’s really over priced. As long as your motherboard supports bifurcation and has a full 16 lane slot, you don’t need the expensive PCIe switch. Asus has a similar card, but without the switch for $80.

There are adapters, but you only get 1 or 2 lanes and can only use short SSDs. If there is a BIOS whitelist, it won’t work though.

My NAS uses a similar amount of power. The drives use most of the power. The PC uses less than 20W on its own. Upgrading to a couple of large helium filled drives will save a good bit of power. SATA drives tend to use a little less power than SAS drives too.

It would be nice if we could get desktops with 8 to 16 core ARM CPUs running at a very high clock speed.
128 cores is great for compiling large programs, but most stuff is not optimized to use more than a few cores.

What desktop motherboards even have a spare 16 lane PCIe 5 slot apart from Threadripper boards?

Those use a lithium ion cell, so they have a buck converter to step the voltage down to 1.5V, which will always use some power. They are not suitable low draw devices because of the high self discharge rate. They can’t be used in high draw devices because the buck converter can only supply a limited amount of current. They also produce noisy power which can cause issues with radios and audio equipment. The USB port and charge circuitry take up a lot of space, so you get less capacity too. A low self discharge NiMH cell will be better for almost any use.

Better keep a big furnace full of molten steel ready just in case.

FCC emission requirements are very lax below 30MHz, so something can pass FCC part 15 yet still jam the entire HF band.

If you buy thunderbolt cables, they support everything. If you look at the cost of those cables, you will see why not all USB cables support every feature. They are also limited to 1 meter without active circuitry, which will make them even more expensive.

There’s a lot of stuff that you can’t even buy now.

Have you tried Tiny Core Linux? It supports a 486DX, but they recommend a Pentium 2. I think the biggest issue you will have is finding programs that will run on such old hardware.

Wireless power sounds like and RFI nightmare. It will never match the efficiency of a cable either.

It looks like Meta or Yandex apps must be installed for the exploit to work. Luckily I don’t have any of those installed on my Android devices.

They can’t see much through the electrical tape over the lens.

That would be nice. I have way more devices with USB A plugs than USB C.

That seems like a good way to increase the cost of the motherboard if it has more than a couple USB C ports. That’s a lot of signals to route to every port. I just want the ports to be appropriately marked so I know what functions they support.

They should just remove the DRM from all streaming services. The fact that new TV shows can be downloaded within minutes of airing is a good indicator that it doesn’t work for its intended purpose. It just makes me find another source since I can’t watch them using my preferred browser and operating system.

Every single time the land line ISPs have gotten money for rural broadband, they use it for something else and don’t build anything. Starlink actually built a network that works. Many places have gotten decent 5G home internet too.

I have been promised fiber for over a decade yet the only wired connection available is a DSL network that’s been so poorly maintained that it barely even functions.

Streaming sites go down all the time and the quality is usually terrible. Downloading the same stuff every time you want to watch it is just wasting the seeders bandwidth.

I prefer to use FOSS software. There is a risk of getting malware from pirated software. Even if there is no malware, commercial software usually has lots of tracking and telemetry anyways.