Ahh, thanks.

Seeing as you seem knowledgeable what’s up with the ‘ring the bells’ bit?

Don’t interrupt your enemy while they’re making a mistake…

Is a VPN needed to keep your ip from being exposed ?

No more so than using any search engine directly, it’s a nice to have. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Is just using an existing searxng instance just less secure then?

By the time you’ve investigated it, you could have stood up your own instance…

Sounds like a them problem then.

podman exists and doesn’t force root…

It’s yours, no issues trusting a public instance with your searches. Pages full of settings to tweak as you like. Less problems with an algorithm ‘helping’ you. It averages searches over multiple search engines that you choose, you can set up your own (or a curated) block list of crappy AI slop sites, don’t like fandom.com or something, gone. Manage your own bangs, e.g. !aa for annas-archive. Pipe it through a VPN with gluetun for better isolation. If you have your head around docker already it’s more like half an hour to set up, so why not?

Can hook it up to perplexica and a local LLM for a fully local AI search that you define, use it as a MCP server, do deep research with it…

Well, it’s legal for medical purposes, and the current aussie protocol, AFAIK, is got THC in your system (cheek swab), you lose (and a blood test I think, happy for someone knowledgeable to jump in). Cancer chemo, no (legal) driving for you… This crap would be a step up.

I do it with a gluetun container (more versatile) zero issues, but you can just mainline wireguard as an interface if you prefer, also works fine, on bazzite.

Uh, most? do have a compass, mine does. Needs an app installed to use of course.

Wait, aren’t landlords de facto vampires?

QMK Keychron, MX Master 3, done. Perfect linux compatibility if you care.

You’ll be fine, make sure it’s a x16 card (vasty majority are), stick it in your x16 slot. Make sure you have enough power, some are pretty thirsty these days (it’s usually on the specs sheet for the card and on your power supply in the case)

You can also upgrade the CPU to AMD Ryzen 3000 series (e.g. 3900X, pretty cheap second hand) by upgrading the BIOS here for a nice performance uplift. Get to at least 16Gb RAM (DDR4, also cheap).

Later, you can recycle this as a home sever or swap to a motherboard that supports Ryzen 5000 series (also cheap these days), which will take all your present hardware and enable CPU upgrade to say 5800X3D to make it a gaming beast (at least for a couple of years).

Dammit, negative results are gold, pretty close to the essence of science and it’s just ‘not enough clickbait, fuck your career’

know truth from fiction.

You jest, but…

You are aware that Netflix et.al. put compression on their streams (usually quite a bit in regards to bitrate) ? It is often the case that BluRay rips etc. are available better on the high seas…

While I generally agree and consider this insightful, it behooves us to remember the (actual, 1930s) Nazis did it with newspapers, radio and rallies (… in a cave, with a box of scraps).

Not sure I’d use either, but may I suggest both, with a clear caveat that one or both may disappear or change ? Throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks…

If that’s all you’re after (Contact, Calender, Drive) you may well be able to just plug a hard drive into your OpenWRT router (it has https://openwrt.org/packages/pkgdata/radicale2 which does caldav and carddav), work out sharing (apparently at least samba works) work out how to back up the drive (plug in two, mirror and unplug one, RAID is not a backup) and call it a day. I don’t have one, but it seems likely doable… Tailscale in when you’re out and about…

Thinkpads have long had first tier linux support, in fact many models have shipped with linux for at least a decade (?), checking that is a really good way to be sure, but you’re going to be fine with W, P, T, X lines, many enthusiasts make light work. They were deployed (might still be) to Red Hat kernel devs for a long time, which helps things along. Fingerprint drivers tend to be proprietary and hit or miss, but passwords work.

Honestly learning to install linux yourself, and configure it to your liking, is actually, imo, a really important path to learning and you’re likely doing yourself a disservice avoiding it. It’s part of the avoidance of vendor lock in you want. Installation is surprisingly easy now, start with something simple, Mint is often recommended these days, find a decent, recent, youtube and you’ll probably be up and running in an hour. Find the apps you need for your workflow (which will take considerably longer). Get familiar with the terminal. Best thing you can do after that is burn it down and install a new distro, leaving any mistakes behind, keeping your list of apps. Arch if you want to get really deep into it, or Fedora / Bazzite are good choices and very stable. Best of luck.