A few weeks ago I needed a computer to be a Debian server for some at-home simple Web dev / learning stuff. I bought an HP Prodesk 400 G3 SFF PC with i5-6500, 8GB RAM and a 256GB off a popular auction site for £44. It'll do. I might upgrade to 16GB. An additional 8GB stick costs £19.
I daresay you could find the odd example, as for any grid in a stressed situation, but it's not like we turn to each other every week in the dark and say "Oh, it must be half time at the Manchester United match".
I used to support DTP, and graphics for the systems house at which I worked. I travelled round the UK installing PageMaker and A4 paper-white CRT displays - boy were they heavy!
My endearing memory is calling the company in Edinburgh for technical support, to be greeted on the phone by a lady with a lovely, cheery Scottish accent announcing "Aldus UK".
Fun fact: I was first person in the UK to print in colour on an HP ink jet printer at the trade show where they were first demonstrated. The HP folks hadn't got the official colour driver ready for the show, so the HP guys were printing in mono, but I'd had an advanced model to try and hacked some other print driver to work with it.
The Motorola phones are generally good performers and value for money. My only gripe is that they cannot have their batteries replaced easily - even by phone repair shops.
I understand that this is because you have to disassemble / un-glue the phones through the front and remove the display. For this reason, the repair shops I have asked have said they don't 'do' Motorola phones because there's too much risk in breaking the display.
This effectively means that the life of the phone is determined by the ageing of the battery.
I learned how to do lacing during an electronics engineering apprenticeship in the 1980s.
After the fact, when I moved more in to systems and networking, I found that flat, nylon, waxed lacing cord, with a small nut tied to the end, was lightweight and perfect for throwing through ducting and ceiling spaces very long distances, so you could backhaul cables through the void. It was a real time saver.
LinkedIn - it takes you to the allow/deny page but doesn't automate things. It used to be that the LinkedIn login would get stuck in a cycle around this, but now it just dumps you on to the consent page.
I worked in IT support and engineering for a UK Olivetti dealer / distributor in the 1980s/90s. As such I had access to all sorts of Olivetti kit in various states of functionality. At one time, my home PC was an Olivetti M280 case with an M380 (386DX) motherboard and EGA display adapter. It had a colour monitor and the ANK 27-102 keyboard - it was a 'top end' hybrid for its time that I'd put together from several non-working machines..
I also had a 'faulty' Olivetti inkjet printer that was written off under warranty with a mysterious fault. I eventually managed to fix it by bending the metal paper detector arm so that it slotted properly into the optical sensor - it was a little out of whack and the sensor sometimes couldn't work out whether there was paper in the tray.
I tried this with Node-RED for a Meshtastic project (MeshBop), but experienced occasional timeouts even when only making a handful of calls per hour. In the end I moved to Met Norway's API for UK/EU weather.
I don't really keep up with the hifi market and seeing the headline was an eye opener.
I used to work in a building next to a B&W place where they either made speakers or at least the drive units. The day was punctuated regularly by rather loud audio frequency sweeps!
Adobe wanted £24K for a ColdFusion maintenance licence. We were code frozen into an old version and didn't actually need any support or upgrades as we were migrating to a new and different platform. They also wanted another £24K for the dev instance we retained in case any issues turned up with our old code. Adobe had changed licensing terms and so dev instances needed full licencing too. This instance was spun down for most of the time.
In effect, they wanted £48K for nothing.
Yes, Lucee was in our future, but I left before that came to be.
About 3yr after leaving that company, Adobe tracked me down via LinkedIn and my personal Web site and messaged me using my personal email address to put them back in touch directly with someone at my old job who could pick up licence negotiations.
I told them to phone Head Office - they said they'd done that but had not received a return call. I very politely told them to fu....go away as it was not my problem.
Trouble is that in many cases the food industry has rebased what was once the normal product as 'premium' and charges a higher price for it. A good example is bacon.
No food manufacturer us going to sell the 'normal' product as just that and label the cheaper one as somehow inferior.
On a side note, it irks me that a certain brand of mayonnaise (made by a global chemicals company), which calls itself 'real mayonnaise' lists its top two ingredients as vegetable (not olive) oil and water. Not exactly a classic start to how the original was made.