You used to get a fairly significant upgrade ever few years for about the same cost as the old hardware. Transistors aren’t really getting much smaller anymore, so more performance needs a bigger die and costs more money.

That would be nice for CAD work, but it would have to be an actual PC monitor, not a TV. 42 inch would be just about right for my desk. The only ones I’ve seen are 32 inch, which is too small to replace four monitors.

Rockbox supports modern codecs including Opus, so you can fit nearly 4 days of decent quality music on a 4GB iPod.

There’s always KolibriOS. It’s small enough to run from a single floppy disk.

It’s an ultralight. You don’t need a pilots license to fly one in the US. You can even build one yourself if you want to. You don’t even need any inspection or airworthiness certificate. Since they can’t legally be flown over populated areas, it’s unlikely for anyone except the pilot to get injured or killed.

I’ve got some games that are choppy with mitigations on, but they run smooth with mitigations off. I do temporarily disable the mitigations when playing those games, it’s just inconvenient since it requires a reboot.

IMAX film is equivalent to 12K. Their digital laser projectors are only 4K.

I’m still running a 1950x in my desktop. It works fine for most stuff, but the gaming performance is a bit low now with all of the spectre mitigations. I was planning on upgrading, but that will have to wait a few more years now.

I ran my previous laptop from 2012 until it died last year. I used it as my electronics workbench PC for several years because the battery wouldn’t hold a charge, but it still worked fine for running KiCAD and programming microcontrollers. I replaced it with a used Thinkcentre that I got dirt cheap on ebay just before the RAM prices went crazy.

Wine has support serial and parallel ports. They work fine. In recent versions of wine you don’t even have to set anything up. Just run ls -l ~/.wine/dosdevices/com* after running something in wine to see what the com port number is for your device. The ttyACM and ttyUSB ports are USB serial ports. The ttyS ports are hardware serial ports and they will probably show up even if your computer doesn’t have any.

For home use, all I can think of is wireless video. 15 GB/s is faster than the fastest DisplayPort or HDMI versions. It could handle any resolution and refresh rate currently in use without any compression. That would be useful for VR headsets since they need low latency.

You would think that RAM manufacturers would ramp up production. Hopefully the fact that they aren’t means the bubble is going to burst within a couple of years.

Hosting the site from home may be an option if symmetric fiber is available and the site doesn’t get a huge amount of traffic.

I would immediately return that as defective. I’d rather use that old 1980’s portable TV that’s been collecting dust in my closet since they shut down the analog TV broadcasts.

So start making more dumb TVs and speakers. That way they don’t need much memory.

The AM broadcast stations aren’t going anywhere, at least in the US. Above the broadcast band is mostly aircraft, marine and the 160 meter ham band. None of that is likely to change.

Below the AM broadcast band are non directional beacons. Those are slowly being decommissioned. Eventually they will all be gone and that spectrum may get repurposed. I don’t know what the spectrum may get used for, but it would be nice if the 630 meter ham band was expanded.

LF and MF can be used at low power. The 2200 meter ham band has a power limit of 1 watt EIRP and the 630 meter band has a limit of 1 or 5 watts EIRP depending on the country. Actually radiating that much power is difficult because it’s not practical to build an efficient antenna. Luckily there is no limit on how much power the amplifier can put out, so we can put hundreds of watts into a very inefficient antenna. Narrow band digital modes work great on those bands.

In the US, we have LowFER, which allows hobbyists to use 160-190 kHz for experimental use without a license. The power limit is 1 watt input and the transmitting antenna is limited to 15 meters. People still manage to make long distance contacts with those significant limitations.

For LF and MF, you typically want narrow signals, not spread spectrum. It’s hard to make wide band antennas for such low frequencies and propagation can change a lot in just a few tens of kHz.

Keep in mind that without working repeaters, the baofeng will only have a range of a few miles on level ground with nothing in the way. If the power goes out, most of the repeaters will go down too. Some have battery backups that may last a few hours to a few days. Depending on where you are, a few may be solar powered, but heavy use will drain the batteries. Some repeaters are also reliant on the internet for linking to increase the coverage area.

What you really want in that case is a portable HF radio and a wire antenna you can string up over a tree branch or a support with a fishing pole. In the daytime, you can use the upper HF bands for long distance communication. That has a range of thousands of miles, but nearby stations won’t be able to hear you if they are beyond line of sight. Since the portable radio doesn’t have much power, you may need to use digital modes to get through. For more local contacts you can use NVIS propagation on the lower HF bands. That has a range of several hundred miles and can even be used to talk to someone on the other side of a mountain. Even 5 watts and an antenna strung 3 feet off the ground can work for voice contacts out to over a hundred miles.

CGNAT is a nasty hack to work around the shortage of IPv4 addresses. It’s not used with IPv6.

There would be nothing for one to connect to out here. There’s no WiFi except mine and no cell service unless you go outside.
I would probably desolder the antenna if I was in the city though.

Mine has never been connected to the internet.