I don’t know what you think you’re seeing, but the airport is on the other side of the street.

I’ll let you know what I was seeing:

That’s an airport sign pointing the The Circle and they Hyatt airport hotels at Zurich airport. The whole complex is part of the Zurich airport, so I really have no idea what you are talking about. I mean, that’s literally how The Circle advertises itself:

I don’t doubt that there are also locals present, that’s how an airport works, after all. Honestly, we might just have a different opinion what constitutes being part of the airport though.

If it’s right across the street, why are there signs pointing to the different terminals in the building?

Honestly, I was about to comment how it’s kinda sad that people gather at a temple of capitalistic worship to watch a game (and an ugly one at that). I didn’t do it because my next thought was: hey, what if that’s their only option to experience a community for something they might enjoy and I left it at that. I mean come on, unless you’re kid and it’s the 80s or 90s, a mall is about the most soulless place on this earth.

Now I’m kinda glad it’s mostly just a bunch of travelers waiting at an airport that would otherwise miss the game.

I am on my 4th personal TUXEDO laptop, never had any issues. I actually started giving them to the devs at my company, no complaints so far.

They don’t offer my choice of OS, and I wouldn’t use a preinstalled OS anyway, so I can’t comment on that.

Generally all correct, here is a resource with a lot of in-depth information and additional links:

https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries

It’s not true that precision measurements are impossible with low value resistors, a lot of measurement equipment works exactly like that - it might just be more expensive than what the manufacturer is willing to budget for.

Tuxedo also offers products with an aluminum body, and while they do import the hardware from China, you get the local service and warranty guarantees any company in the EU must provide, so that’s fine by me.

Also, honest question: what do you think a unique laptop is, in particular when buying from a mass consumer brand like Lenovo? I really can’t figure out what that’s supposed to mean.

lspci will read the vendor and device id via PCI and use that to determine what the device is. You might want to make the output a bit more digestable / useful via lspci -s 03:00.0 -k -nn, but I’d assume the ids that match an 2070 will show up.

Could you please take the card out and provide us with a few pictures from different angles, maybe getting a good look at the actual chips?

I’d like to rule that out before chasing rabbits here.

Also, you could always run nvidia-settings, which will show information about an NVIDIA card using a different access method.

I’d still like to see the pictures of the card though ;)

Sure. But the number of targets you could acquire there is miniscule compared to simpler delivery mechanisms, via a malicious app download, for example, and you have larger costs (hardware) and added risks, e. g. being captured on CCTV during installation.

That’s why I said, the cost/reward ratio is really off.

Oh, that makes everything a lot easier. The majority of the relevant settings will be in your home folder then, i. e. in the ${HOME}./.config folder, while some might also be in ${HOME}/.local/share etc.

You probably want to backup the whole home folder anyway, so that would pickup most of your settings. In order to make that work on a different system, you would have to install all applications you were using on the tablet as well. Luckily, software installation in Linux is pretty easy, so you can export a list of installed applications from the Surface and then re-install them on your target system before migrating your home folder. The software list should become part of your backup. See e. g. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/82880/how-to-replicate-installed-package-selection-from-one-fedora-instance-to-another for an idea of how to perform this.

I have used this approach in the past and it will get you 95% there. There might be some global system settings that you’d like to also transfer to your new system, but you can add those as you discover you miss them on the target system.

In general, no, this won’t work. In your case, you’re lucky since at least the Surface Go is using an x86 CPU, so it’s not completely out of the question, but transferring the image as-is to a completely different device typically does not work without modification.

Simple example: your target device might not refer to existing hardware (let’s say a storage medium) in the same manner as your old device, so the existing references in your cloned image won’t work. There are other issues of course, e. g. missing drivers for different hardware present on the target device.

It’s possible to modify the image so it would boot, but given the Surface runs Windows, that’s going to be a chore. I’d consider this an interesting project if bored on a slow weekend, but I’d most likely just do a filesystem backup of relevant data and call it a day.

Honestly, that just seems like you’re treating dd as some kind of arcanum. dd works just fine and I’ve been doing 1:1, full system backups for decades with it, no issues. Honorary mention for ddrescue / dd_rescue for recovery options, i. e. re-trying bad sector reads etc.

In fact, when Clonezilla doesn’t know your filesystem, it will simply employ dd to copy the data sector by sector.

I’d argue that Clonezilla (due to its use of partclone) is actually a less complete form of backup, since it will only copy used blocks, you don’t really end up with a clone of your devices, just a copy of what partclone believes to be your data. Don’t get me wrong, that is fine in most use cases, but there are some cases where this doesn’t cut it, e. g. wanting to backup / restore a storage device from a PLC where the vendor had the glorious idea to store licensing data in unused sectors, or when you want to create a forensic disk image, might want it look into d3dd then, although it absolutely works using regular old dd as well, d3dd just adds some amenities.

All I want to say is: dd is an absolutely reliable tool and can be a one stop solution for device backups. Also, I have absolutely no quarrels with Clonezilla, if it fits what you’re trying to do and it works, great.

Not necessarily, if you find an exploit that allows you to install malware without user interaction, Mactans famously did that for an older iOS version.

I’d still argue that making good use of such an exploit and rolling out the necessary, physical infrastructure does not have a great cost/reward ratio.

The best way would in fact be testing it with an electronic load that applies a precise and well known load to the battery and integrates capacity until a matching shutoff condition is reached.

However, the majority of people do not happen to have access to such an instrument, so I’d say your suggestion is a close approximation of the best way, which could be augmented by adding simple measurements, which can be done by most people at home for a reasonable, quantifiable judgment.

You start assembling an assortment of sticks, leaves and a hollow bird bone, patching holes with moss that has already started to turn slightly yellow which you picked from the side of a tree. Somehow, your thoughts veer off and you begin to wonder if you could find a larger bone to turn into a flute.

When you look down again at your creation, you start to curse under your breath - you got distracted and manufactured a copy of Windows ME.

Roll a D20 for me please.

I took your suggestion and went to a pitch black room and re-enrolled all fingerprints. No significant improvement.

Yes, absolutely worse than the 6. At least it was possible to get the one in the 6 to do what you want, whereas the fingerprint reader in the 8 requires the user to adjust their behavior - and that’s with already enrolling multiple fingerprints per finger etc.

It’s workable, but it requires adjustment and it does fail every once in a while in an annoying way. The 8 does have face unlock though.

The fingerprint reader is worse, though. So much in fact that you kinda have to develop a feeling for the exact amount of pressure and “finger rolling” to make it work. After a few days you kinda figure it out, but naturally, every once in a while it just stops working right in that awkward moment when you are not in a position to type in your password.

Overall, not unhappy with the upgrade though. I’d get it again.

I can report that the speakers on the Pixel 8 Pro are a massive improvement. I have owned all Pixel phones since the 2.

Yup, same here. Sometimes, the HD button does the trick, but mostly it’s fucked.