That falls under the category of “expectations.” Run software contemporary to your machine and it’ll fly just as fast as it ever did. Go ahead, slap Windows 98 on that bad boy.

Words of wisdom from my father, an engineer:

“The computer isn’t any slower than the day you bought it. Only your expectations of it have changed.”

Fortunately (?) my PSU let the smoke out about three years after I bought the initial one for that build which had IIRC a pair of 7950GTs in it from my previous machine, in SLI. So I had the opportunity to throw a modern-ish Corsair 850w power supply in it which has all the modular plugs I need. That box has had a succession of random graphics cards in it ranging from that old pair of 7950GTs, then a GTX680, then finally my current GTX1080Ti. Honestly, the 1080 is still plenty enough for most games in 1080p (possibly serendipitously) as long as you don’t feel the pathological need for raytracing or frame generation.

You can sidestep the NVMe issue as long as you don’t care about 100% speed by slapping a PCIe to NVMe adapter board in one of your handy unused x16 slots now that you’re no longer using SLI (if that reminds you of anyone you know). I’m not certain booting off of that is viable and I haven’t bothered to try to figure it out, so the boot drive in that machine is a SATA SSD currently.

On the bright side, that board has ten SATA ports so turning into a drive farm is a trivial prospect if you’re into that kind of thing.

It says in the article.

The reason given is rising raw materials costs, i.e. metals, and the price increases they’re talking about are on the order of around 10% which is obviously a slap in the face along with everything else that’s going on in the hardware world, but by the same token pretty minimal compared to said selfsame everything else.

I think I paid $40 for my CPU cooler. So, if I ever need to buy a another one for some reason and now it’s $44, well, I guess I’ll live.

Hell, I have a Sandy Bridge based machine I built in 2012. It’s getting there, 14 years old now, and with its 1080ti in there it can still play most games just fine. It’s not my primary rig anymore but it’s still trucking the same as it ever was.

Mainstream PC performance really hit its plateau by, when, like 2018? I imagine somebody with a machine that’s only 8 years old will probably do just fine unless some critical and irreplaceable component in it explodes.

Also the model number for this friggin’ thing.

Make sure the edge of your bed isn’t resting on something it ought not to be and/or doesn’t have any crap stuck to the underside of it. My Qidi has two plastic tabs sticking up at the rear which are supposed to be end stops to assist you in lining up the magnetic plate back onto its base, but if you’re not careful you can wind up with the back edge of the base siting on top of them which has the net effect of making the build surface the equivalent of about a 1:64 scale skateboard quarter pipe. This has predictable results if you try to print anything on the back third of it or so.

For any poor bastards not in the know, here’s 162 pounds of Tannerite some rednecks placed in the center of a barn.

(You’ll want to be at about 2:19 for the money shot.)

Yes.

But this is also because your system administrators are incompetent.

There are myriad other ways to accomplish the same thing, but this is easily rolled out via Group Policy.

I did the lower left one once in school and got in trouble for it over not using color. Actually even moreso, since I did not use any shading and deliberately did it in a binary Tracer Bullet sort of style.

Of course, no part of the assignment specified that you had to use any particular colors, or even use colors at all. But apparently the moronic student teacher overseeing the art class that semester retroactively decided that this was “wrong” and that she was going to turn it into a big deal and make herself look monumentally stupid in front of everybody in the process. In response to her threatening to give me a zero for the entire assignment if I did not give in and use color, I responded by meticulously replacing the entire background with the brightest neon orange paint I had on hand (which as I recall was actually an airbrush paint) and still left the rest in stark black and white. There, color applied.

When this incited the nutty bitch to try to escalate again I took it to the administration who wanted nothing to do with it and passed it back to the actual art teacher. I won, she lost; When our creations were eventually put on rotation in the school lobby mine was visible from the street through the door. It was probably visible from space.

These also have an entire computer running Tizen behind the screen in the door, which generates waste heat and dumps it… into your refrigerator. Genius!

Don’t worry, in the realm of major appliances the majority of what these bozos are calling “AI” actually isn’t. They’re just using it as a buzzword because they think it’s popular.

LG, selling a washing machine two years ago: “It has weight sensors to determine the load size.”

LG, selling the same damn washing machine today: “With exclusive LG® AI DD™ Technology!!!”

(I am not making this up.)

When Angelo Moriondo invented what ultimately became the espresso machine, he didn’t do it to make coffee fancier, or better, or more exclusive, or more pure. He did it specifically to make coffee faster. Absolutely every other aspect of an espresso shot is a total afterthought.

Remember that the next time some pretentious dingus in a turtleneck is prattling at you about goddamn beans.

(And while we’re at it, nobody in Italy used a tomato for anything until, near as we can determine, the 1540s. Tomatoes came from the new world; they didn’t exist in Europe until they were brought back there. Anyone claiming that their modern tomato based Italian cookery is proud tradition dating back to antiquity is thus likewise full of it.)

And, we have a winner.

Reinforce your doorframes and window frames, preferably with steel. The dinky pine wood frames of residential doors and windows are hilariously easy to kick in, and the thickest steel door and the meanest window bars in the world won’t mean much when an attacker can simply kick them out of the frame with a minimum of effort.

You will probably find that doing this is in fact deemed illegal by at least one entity in your local hierarchy of state/county/municipality. I’ll give everyone three guesses as to why.

Just like everything on Amazon. Look, if you buy a $20 indoor toy that’s what you get. But trying to say that it’s “hard” to buy a competent enough drone for a couple of hundred bucks because they’re banned is 100% false. There are perfectly cromulent options handily available right there on that page. Hell, the DJI mini 3 is the second search result.

So? They don’t need to carry ordnance or provide professional level cinematography results. They just need to have a camera that sends video back to the operator without line of sight so you can keep tabs on somebody from a few blocks away.

I just checked; the updated version of the drone that I own is readily available on Amazon and is manufactured by Xiaomi of all people (FIMI). If it’s banned, they’re not doing a very good job at it. Mine is quite capable of transmitting clean video back to you from over a mile away.

Methinks not.

Given your requirements of no cloud, no SaaS, and running in Linux you have already arrived at the correct two choices, depending on what you’re trying to model.

I am a diehard FreeCAD user, and I would say just stick with it until you are able to build what you’re trying to build. Via the expedient of Noodling Around With It I’m now proficient enough to do everything I personally want to do with FreeCAD, i.e. using its part design tools and studiously avoiding all of the other workbenches I have no use case for.

Turn something this into a moderately off road capable adventure bike and I’m sold. The BMW and KTM guys will absolutely pay $20,000 for it, albeit maybe not $37,000.

My KLR has about 200 miles of range per fill, if you’re even the slightest bit careful with it, which is necessary for excursions out into the bush where there are neither gas stations nor charging points.