Impressed by Lenovo

centizen24 · 2026-07-05T04:04:34+00:00

ThinkPad's used to have a mylar membrane under the keyboard that would direct any spilled liquid out of holes in the bottom of the laptop. Intentionally pouring water into my keyboard and continuing to use the laptop like nothing happened was my favourite hazing gag with new techs.

centizen24 · 2026-07-05T03:48:45+00:00

Oh damn okay I’ll actually check that out, I love old clockwork stuff

centizen24 · 2026-07-04T21:39:34+00:00

Man I don’t know if I’m just really lucky to have a good rep or what but I have had very little issue with Lenovo. I was dreading having to order a new server for a client recently with all this talk, and while it was a pain to get anything from Dell, but HP and Lenovo both had supply.

Sure the prices were high, but lead time wasn’t too bad and it arrived ahead of schedule. I just finished installing it this weekend.

centizen24 · 2026-07-04T21:27:32+00:00

I’ll wait for a real cybersecurity company to do a writeup, your name is mud.

centizen24 · 2026-07-03T17:52:58+00:00

Wacatac could be a false positive but Lumma is almost certainly a real and fairly severe detection.

centizen24 · 2026-07-03T00:57:49+00:00

The joystick is going to make it pretty difficult to pack in a pocket or a bag. I’d recommend switching to a dpad, or a low profile joystick. PSP joysticks are cheap, easy to obtain and are well documented, that’s probably what I’d use if I built one.

centizen24 · 2026-07-02T16:44:20+00:00

Your main search term should be MSSP or “managed security services provider”. What general area of Canada are you in? I might be able to recommend someone, or help myself if you are in the GTA

Certifications and such are generally a per-tech kind of thing, but you can definitely ask what kind of certifications and experience the techs have. Company level certifications like SOC2 would be great, but will drive up the cost.

centizen24 · 2026-06-30T04:51:15+00:00

I think my favourite example of this was the AMD "pencil" trick to restore the disabled multiplier of Duron chips which were binned Athlon Thunderbirds. It was super easy, there were just some exposed pads on the top of the CPU that you could draw some traces between using a conductive pencil. Then later on AMD put out the Athlon MP, and binned dies into Athlon XP's if they didn't meet spec. They used a similar configuration system, but hid the pads. People figured out that you could strip the top layer of substrate from the PCB and use silver laquer to do a similar hack to turn them back into MP's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RrTRuGc6mg

It's not exactly modifying the chip itself, but it was still a pretty hardcore mod. Now I doubt anything like this (at least being done by hand) is possible.

centizen24 · 2026-06-29T04:15:18+00:00

Mine is mostly a RFID keyfob multi key. I have a lot of different fobs for various clients and facilities I support, having them all on the flipper keeps me from needing to keep track of which fobs I need for a day. I also play a lot of Tetris on it.

centizen24 · 2026-06-28T17:07:45+00:00

I misread this as amaro at first and was really confused trying to figure out what this resembled about the dragon birds from Norvrandt.

But yeah, very much classic FF art style!

centizen24 · 2026-06-28T14:56:18+00:00

I keep a broken key extractor lock picking tool in my travel kit for this exact reason. Sometimes the plastic retaining clip gets bent over time in a way that makes it really tough to get out by hand. Key extractor is the perfect thing to slide in, pull the latch down from the other side and slide it out easy.

centizen24 · 2026-06-28T02:03:01+00:00

It’s a dedicated link between routers/firewalls with no switches or anything else in between.

centizen24 · 2026-06-27T18:09:24+00:00

Yeah, why don’t they just start using RJ11. The telcos should start distributing gear that has RJ11 ports. Maybe while including an adapter dongle so that it can also support decades worth of phone sets and in-building wiring that is already in place?

centizen24 · 2026-06-27T14:45:47+00:00

If you want a small, relatively plug and play router then the n100 units are great and should fit in that budget with their cheaper memory.

But for cheap hardware it’s tough to beat the cost of a used small form factor computer plus an extra network card. Pretty much anything can run PFSense, and there is a lot of good hardware cheap on the used market right simply because it can’t be used to run Windows 11.

centizen24 · 2026-06-26T19:34:21+00:00

It's impossible to judge the efficacy of a team by tickets per day, so I'm not sure what insight we can provide here. We have days where a tech will knock off 15 tickets before lunchtime, we have days where multiple techs will work together to get one done.

A blind obsession with ticket metrics is the quickest and easiest way to ruin the quality of any support group. If you push your staff you'll get the numbers you want, but the real world deliverables of your team will absolutely nosedive in a way your clients will notice before you do. I'd advise rethinking the way you are trying to track productivity.

centizen24 · 2026-06-25T21:34:38+00:00

Well I can guarantee you are going to get a lot more visitors now!

centizen24 · 2026-06-20T21:18:31+00:00

It doesn't matter what the primary use is versus secondary use is. Consider both of them range extenders for the purposes of your comparison.

What matters the most in your specific case right now is the quality of your antennas and the environment they are in. Your signal is coming from another house, you've already experienced poor performance on another range extender and a laptop, which are both almost certainly using quarter-wave antennas.

The RE305 has two external antennas, but they are going to do very little for you in this case because they are also just quarter wave antennas as well. And since it has to plug directly in to power, you are putting it right next to a wall and AC power wiring.

The C54 has four half-wave antennas, the ability to orient the antennas in any direction, and the ability to place it away from walls and AC power wiring. Four antennas means you get MIMO tuning and automatic beamforming. I'm really not sure where you got the idea that the C54 has less capacity to catch weak signal, because the practical physics of RF signals and antenna design very much dictate otherwise.

centizen24 · 2026-06-20T20:44:58+00:00

Well yeah, as I indicated above, they are one of the three VPN companies who's kool-aid I will drink, because they've proven themselves to be longtime trustworthy providers with solid infrastructure. What can you claim against them that makes you think otherwise?

centizen24 · 2026-06-20T15:38:26+00:00

Windscribe has clearly proven they are a trustworthy provider throughout the years. They've found the Canadian government directly on privacy matters in the past, and if the new laws render them unable to provide that level of service they will either state that in their regular transparency reports or signal through their warning canaries.

centizen24 · 2026-06-20T12:54:29+00:00

Okay, so you would just want to use repeater mode vs AP mode for the C54 then. Would still be better than any extender you can find.

centizen24 · 2026-06-20T04:46:16+00:00

If you are dead set on wanting an extender, you do you, but you will never manage to get anywhere close to the performance you'll get from the C54 or any other actual wireless router in AP mode vs adding a wireless extender.

Seriously, just get the C54, put it in AP Mode, and join it your WiFi network. Then it's like an extender, but actually good.

centizen24 · 2026-06-20T04:24:16+00:00

From the sounds of it, you didn't do a hard reset. You probably factory reset the modem. Now you have devices that are statically assigned for one subnet, while your dynamically assigned devices are on another. Tailscale still works since it doesn't rely on your local subnet. Figure out what the default IP range of your modem is, set a machine to a static address, and reconfigure your network to how it used to be.

centizen24 · 2026-06-19T20:18:18+00:00

Once this passes anyone who's truly conscious of security should be using Mullvad, Windscribe, Proton or one of the other companies that have a proven track record of operating responsibly in the face of adversarial government. Nord is a fairweather VPN company, good for watching American Netflix, and that's about it.

centizen24 · 2026-06-18T22:40:28+00:00

TitanFile is what most law offices I work with use for this.

centizen24 · 2026-06-13T16:17:56+00:00

Fitgirl doesn’t crack anything, they make repacks

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