BrightCandle

Universities have been running Linux since the very early versions. Slackware was pretty common back in the 90s and 2000s and universities had labs full of them not least because there weren’t really laptops so they had to have enough machines for all the students. Universities have been heavily involved in the development of unix from its inception and a lot of the tools were initially written by university professors.

Linux was in use on some university machines although I lot of them were still running Sun hardware OS. The main distribution I used at the time was Slackware.

Over the years I have used OSMC for my TV. I have never used it for streaming however always internal across the network streaming of my own content. It worked reasonably well for the most part although I have had issues with Samba in recent versions and have stopped using it. I can’t say much about its streaming, mostly for that you need a supported android or similar device rather than an open source one.

I have done this a few times, so long as the drive isn’t mounted it works fine.

One advantage of this approach compared to clonezilla is you can pipe it through netcat or similar and move it to another machine. You can also first pipe it through gzip as well to save on the transfer bytes a bit as well and then on the other end just store the compressed image or unzip it. Combine a few tools together and you have quite a lot of capability for complete image backups but its usually best done for the boot drives from a live USB.

I have used Bitcoin a number of times for international purchases. Its not really got to the point of currency so much as a medium mostly of speculation and often interchange for crime but it can improve your privacy. The user experience of the payments isn’t the best but international transfers are often hard to do anyway and in that particular field it can often be a lot quicker, cheaper and easier.

Most of the cookie banners are breaking GDPR. The requirement under GDPR is that privacy must be the default and users can select to opt in. So most of the banners you come across that default to all tracking are against the law already. The legislation didn’t stop them being annoying in this way but a few prosecutions for the breaches and dark patterns would set things off on a better path.

For not a lot more you can now get NUC like machines with Celeron’s, Pentiums and get to choose NVMe SSDS and RAM amounts and even Wifi cards (so wifi 6e or 7) and 2.5 gbit/s ethernet. At these sorts of prices they are running into the low end of NUCs at $100 and they don’t compete well on a whole range of factors. They are still cheaper but its not the 30-40 of the Pi before prices went nuts and this new higher price point isn’t as clear cut.

Its not very price competitive now. Its moved into the low end N100 territory with ITX boards and while its smaller and a bit less power its no where near as performant. They will still have some use in smaller applications but 5V x 5A is a chunky cable. I am not convinced this is the way now.