Stuff like a pretty case with slots for optical drives, a laptop with a shitton of ports and all-day battery life or anything else that seems to go against the trends.
This thread is for complaining about how you can’t find it and (maybe) finding it thanks to someone else.
Ahh, the ol’ breaker breaker
Only $28.00 on Amazon!
A SBC with SATA ports, to use as a Plex server. I’ve only ever found one (the Zimaboard), but it’s a bit pricey for something that I’d still have to find some way to house with an external HDD.
The ODROID-HC4 has two SATA ports. Alternatively, you can get one with an NVMe slot and stick a NVMe to SATA card in it that will likely get you four ports.
I hadn’t looked at any ODROID stuff, and the HC4 is a cool looking solution! I’m actually even more impressed with the M1S, which has a built-in M.2 slot. Can’t use my existing spinny drives, but for the price of the M1S, I could pick up an NVMe drive to go with it.
Another option would be to get a RPi and throw a hat on it:
I had looked at those, but the hat alone is over $70. Plus they need an RPi5, because earlier ones don’t have a PCIe interface. For that much, I could get a Beelink or something similar.
The hat is a cool idea, though.
Ive heard some people use usbC connecting drive enclosures, could probably rig something up with the backplane from one of those, but yeah a finished product like that would be neat.
I think ive seen a mini-PC with a hotswap m.2 bay built in though?
the battery thing is real. I basically can not find a laptop with weak/low power cpu and igpu, but a huge battery. I get that we can not do more than 99whr, but for weak stuff, I can not find anything above 50 practically.
well, if you carry around a bag anyways a battery bank could alleviate that
yes, but that is a separate investment
There are plenty of portable second screens for laptops now. But it seems weird you can’t just hardwire a second laptop without having to resort to internet based screen sharing solutions.
if you’re saying what i think you’re saying you may be interested in something like a nexdock
Basically a laptop with no internals that acts as an external monitor, battery bank and peripherals for another device
some cheap all-in-ones i’ve worked on have hdmi in and out.
one of 'em i have here is an old atom celeron dell aio with 1600x900 native screen but on its hdmi input, it’ll run at 1920x1080. and yea, running that instead of its true native res sucks about as bad as you think it would–but it is still ‘usable’. the real sucky bit, though, is the pc has to be on in order to switch it to hdmi in.
a lenovo aio that went through here a couple years ago had to be rebooted to switch it from hdmi input mode (acting as a standalone monitor) back to pc.
A cheap ARM laptop.
Pinebooks have been sold out for ages, and then it’s a massive leap up to MNT Reform or Copilot+.
I just started watching eBay for used Pinebooks, but nothing has popped yet.
This is adjacent, but it’s worth pointing out that framework has recently started selling risc-v motherboards for their laptops for adventurous folks.
An drone that act as an ambrella
Couldn’t you just attach an umbrella to a drone?
Toilet that posts updates to Facebook
A smaller phone with flagship-level cameras and a headphone jack. I know I’ll have to charge it more often or it’ll be thicker. I’m willing to make that trade-off.
And not a slimmer phone. Make it as thick as a wallet full of business cards. I don’t give a shit. I use my phone for reading text, listening to music, and taking pictures. Just make the fucking camera top of the line and let me use my good headphones. If it’s several millimeters thicker, so be it.
Perhaps an Xperia 5 V? Depends on where you are, and just keep in mind no telephoto but it has a pixel-binned 2x (48mm) zoom :)
rip Asus Zenfone line :( It was almost exactly what you wanted.
A low power 17 inch or larger laptop in a sub $1K price point. I have big hands and I use the fuck out of numpad, but i really dont need a gaming GPU or a higher end cpu in a laptop.
If you don’t need much power, you could probably look for something used and get a good deal on a 17" laptop.
I don’t know if it’s possible but it feels like a cheap box for (sata) hard drives would be super useful for people having a bunch of old drives. The only ones I can find are top of the line expensive NAS or DAS stuff for say 2 to 4 large drives, not my 7 drives from 500GB to 2TB…
I use a 5€ sata-usb connector but it’s not very practical, a usb hub + 7 of these connectors would cost like 40€ … Not reliable or anything but it would just need a box!
https://www.amazon.fr/ORICO-daccueil-magnétique-Adaptateur-Compatible/dp/B07QD5DXV2
there is this ^ thing for 130, which is more expensive that what you mentioned but seems to fit your criteria moreso than what you mentioned
A 3.5mm-to-Bluetooth adapter that can do simultaneous headphones + mic. I have a device with no Bluetooth, only a 3.5mm TRRS jack (headphones+mic). I want to connect it to a wireless Bluetooth headset but the only adapters I can find won’t do both at the same time, only one or the other.
On top of that, it’d be nice for the Bluetooth spec to roll out a higher bitrate version of HFP, as it’s common 16 kHz monaural configuration is awful when listening to multimedia while on video calls, like for remote watch parties or just listening to music or playing video games while hanging out on discord. I ended up just buying a USB to TRRS adapter with pass through Power Delivery in order to use my Android device with proper AV quality.
A phone with a 5-5.5" screen. I’d be fine with a midrange chipset and camera. The Zenfone 10 was the last one that even came closer but they would only support it for two years and locked the bootloader (and lied about the unlock service eventually coming back online).
Depends what you call tech. I’ve been looking for a salt nic vape (say 10 watts) in the 1 ohm range with a easily replaceable battery for the last year. Bonus points if it doesn’t leak to hell and gone. Haven’t had a whole lot of luck with that so far.
Pretty much any portable device with a standard type, user replaceable battery. God bless Ryobi and the other power tool companies for building weird but useful tools beyond power drills. All with replaceable batteries.
At one point I was looking for any type robust portable storage media that had reasonable storage capacity and good shelf life (2+ years), and was large enough to actually write on a label what was on it. So far the closest I’ve seen since 2005 have been the portable SSDs and the newish USB m.2 enclosures but that’s still not quite what I’m looking for. Too large and non-standardized. Gave up on it several years ago and built a publicly accessible Nextcloud server. Yes I’m an old fart, dislike cloud storage and miss the floppy, Zip and Mini-Disk storage formats. I currently have a dozen mystery jump drives sitting on my desk in a 3d printed rack with only the vaguest clue whats on any of them. Most of them so small you can’t even put a key tag on them. I hate it.
A reliable multi port (4 or more) USB-C charger that can output 65+ watts on all of its ports at the same time.
A reliable source for 100w USB-c 3.x PD cables that don’t cost an arm and a leg. Anker makes good PD cables but tops out at USB 2.whatever.
Pretty sure more would come to mind if I sat and though about it for a while, but I’ve got to head to work now.
I’d like some PC support for HDMI CEC
My use case is a bit niche, my PC is hooked up to my TV and AV receiver.
My tv, av receiver, and even certain game consoles all talk to each other well enough through CEC controls that I can do a lot from a single remote, and not even a fancy pants universal remote, just the one that came out of the box with my tv. It was a little mind-blowing when I realized I can more or less navigate the menus on my PS4 with my TV remote. The TV remote turns up the volume on the AV receiver, most of the inputs on the receiver, depending on what’s hooked up to them, will come up on my TVs input menu, the TV will wake up the PlayStation when I go to that input, etc.
I’m aware that CEC is a bit of a mess with how different companies implement it, but personally I’ve been lucky and a lot of it has worked pretty much out of the box for me.
Mostly I just want the volume controls on my keyboard to control the volume on my AV receiver.
I recently got a pulse eight dongle that I think in theory will let me do that, but it’s not exactly the most intuitive thing to configure.
A way to easily remove dust and debris without busting open the tower
I’m jealous of my friend’s workstation that has an easily accessible filter in front of the case fans
