first of all, you’re awesome, that’s some excellent writeup, may your pillow always be cool. second - it worked! well, I just opened a coupla torture sites but zero stutters, pitch shifts, everything is smooth.

for posterity, that stuff goes in ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/99-the-quantum.conf

here’s a thread where most of these make an appearance: https://defcon.social/@yuman/117496056470116333

no, it’s -b, for “battery”.

you’re looking for capacity (or energy-full and energy-full-design, on which this is based off) which should tell you how much of the original capacity is available, anything north of 90% is awesome, 80+% is usable, anything below 70% only if it’s super-cheap, as a stop-gap.

• t480 - dual RAM slots, dual batteries
• t480s/t490s/t14s - soldered ram
• t490/t14 - one bank soldered, one slot free

this is the list, nothing else, no Yogas, no Carbons. stay away from AMD models until the 5000-series, all earlier ones are a nuisance to run. feel free to get busted units - broken screen, bad keyboard, as working on those is easy, there are detailed hardware maintenance manuals available, for free and parts are cheap, plentiful and cross-model/generation compatible.

soldered RAM used be eww; nowadays with the prices, it’s neat to get basically free RAM, provided it’s at least 16 GB on-board. whichever you get will be plenty fine for the stated use cases. make sure you get a good battery, as getting those is expensive (boot off a live USB and upower -b)

remember, the goal isn’t to get “a thinkpad”. the goal is to get extraordinary value, in this case a discarded corpo workhorse that’s still got plenty life in it, at a bargain price. if you’re in an area where the stated models are plentiful and cheap, grab one. if they’re overpriced, look for value elsewhere. e.g. Dell Latitude 74xx and HP Elitebook 840 are in the same ballpark.

got fed up with the local marketplace options so Imma scrap together a market. haven’t touched django in like a decade, not up-to-date on tooling, don’t wanna pay for 3rd party services… what can possibly go wrong?

got a busted Lenovo Ideapad 520ISK out of a dumpster, missing screen but otherwise perfectly functional. the thing has i5-7200u, 8 GB, two SATA ports inside and this prompted me to look up converting the thing into a server, specifically figuring out how to run 3.5" drives off it; I’m very anti-friendly towards using USB solutions for such a task.

searching was arduous, both web and yotube, and except one lonely forum post (remember those?) didn’t find anyone attempting let alone succeeding in running it thus. the 2.5" and 3.5" connectors are identical (there are micro SATA to SATA adapters for the DVD port) but the drives will need 12 V that the 2.5" ports ain’t got.

what I’ve concluded is that all that’s needed is a M/F SATA extension cable which I have trouble sourcing locally; the power will come from a separate ATX PSU for the time being, although I’m sure I can pull 12 V from somewhere on the board.

don’t got no 3d printing nor fabricating options, so it’ll likely look super-janky, but that’s not a huge concern for me now. I’ll do a write-up if I succeed.

lol fine - 3x 2 GB 1333 modules out of a busted 1366 motherboard I found and one 4 GB 1866 module I couldn’t pair with anything, worked fine for years. the i7 got upgraded to workstation and a C2D i found by the dumpster took the server role. same drives, same debian, same docker-compose files - all good so far.

I’ve downgraded my server from 1st gen i7 10 GB RAM (don’t ask) to Core 2 Duo 4 GB with the same load and barely felt it. my entire infra including desktop, laptopS, tablet, phoneS, etc costs like a third of this “missed value”.

not shitting on your choices, but positing that the price-gouging retail market is all there is, kinda disingenuous; there’s sooo much stuff being discarded although perfectly usable.

like, I couldn’t bear the super-expensive raspberries while they were in the $50 range, let alone now. marketplaces are awash in busted laptops, with way better value and performance. discarded corpo desktops can house cheap HDD and run 24/7 for eons. etc.

thanks. the notification went away after login and I wasn’t able to find its text anywhere in the myriad of pages.

also I’d take this “does not” coming from them with a bag of salt.

this thing here. I’ve dramatically reduced support work at two shops I’ve set this up for. incidents went from from coupla times a month to once a year. not to mention - you don’t need no VPS no more, don’t need no database, nothing, the simplest web hosting will do and it’s very cache friendly.