I wonder why nobody's making field-terminatable DACs for custom lengths. If you've torn one down, they're not exactly complicated inside.

If they existed, would people buy them?

And that was FUN, as long as you were enjoying the tinkering and not stressing about missing a game.

> Everyone copying everyone else's mp3 folders on network drives.

I think this is an under-remembered aspect, or at least, under-told. LAN parties were filesharing parties too, sometimes that more than gaming. (Which caused no end of strife with the gaming folks, until we learned to segment the network to keep the filesharing congestion from lagging the gaming packets.)

The heyday of mp3 also coincided with the explosion of coffee-shop wifi, in the days before client isolation. Grab a latte, browse Network Neighborhood...

Alright, my Trogdor-shaped guitar might happen after all...

They're all fairly low-spec in absolute terms, but even 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC is adequate to run Win10 and office apps, at least, it was before all the Copilot bloat. And you can buy them as an individual, if you search them out explicitly.

But that's not what the mass market buys when they go shopping. Partly because that's not what Best Buy puts on the shelf, and partly because Microsoft sternly warns that such machines aren't recommended for the AI-encumbered future. Gotta push 40 TOPS and have at least 16GB to get Microsoft's blessing, which I think is the single largest driving force behind the hardware upgrade cycle.

Which meant I now knew what port and password the sender was expecting to connect to me with.

However, most of them were skids, and had inadvertently executed their own dropper on their own machine at some point. And I knew their IP from the DCC.

Which meant I now knew what port and password to connect back to them with...

Except that I was in a cabin, on an island, in a foreign country. And the reason I was absolutely undistracted from my book, is that I'd turned my phone off before crossing the border. And I left it off, all week.

The isolation and quiet surroundings made the "week off" truly off. Nobody could reach me if they tried. Whatever calamity befell my boss, he'd just have to wait.

That's so much better than I'd normally do at home on a week off, and it was 100% worth the travel to achieve it.

Otherwise you just have to run a wire through the wall and put an AP in the room. Your clients can still be wireless for the last few feet, which preserves the convenience of usage, just not the convenience of deployment.

https://www.i3detroit.org/reset-on-lan-an-ethernet-aware-rem...

Exactly the same as it's always been, and it works beautifully. I can't imagine a reason to mess with it.

Luckily I got one of the valveless models, and you bet your ass I'm keeping it. Maybe I'll stick an "open away from face" label on top or something, but I'm not about to go increasing my risk of food contamination.

I have not yet made a laptop to output PoE. Though it would be tremendously useful for provisioning IP cameras, there are dedicated thick-tablet-shaped devices for that, which do source PoE from their batteries.