You might want to rethink the laptop list. Telemetry and advertising is generally a function of the operating system and the installed software, not the hardware. Commercial operating systems like Windows, MacOS, and ChromeOS are the prime suspects here regardless of the hardware, so buying, for example, a System76 laptop and installing Windows on it will not give you any privacy advantages over a Windows-based Dell.

There may be some privacy advantages if the laptop uses CoreBoot instead of stock BIOS/UEFI.

• A few spare buttons of various sizes, since you can lose a button and be unable to find it.
• Some straight pins to hold torn edges or a patch in place while you sew.
• A few safety pins because sometimes it's more expedient to pin now and sew later.
• A thimble because pushing a needle through tough fabric can be painful on your fingers.

I feel targeted by this. Also how did you get into my house?

You might check out the hdparm utility. It should allow you to set drive sleep parameters.

You are absolutely right if it's the "thumbs up" gesture. I learned the European way, with the fingers curled but not closed and the thumb extended to the outside (right side for a right-hand gesture and left for left-hand) at about a 45-degree angle. This doesn't really look like the offensive gesture from my perspective but I realize others may disagree. Thankfully, as far as I know, I have never offended anyone doing this.

If I'm dealing with someone who I can reasonably assume is not American it's palm toward me and thumb out (but not pointing straight up) for one, thumb and index finger for two, and so on. Many American hand gestures are offensive to other cultures and it's not hard to learn to do it this way.

I think it will depend on your location. In the Midwestern US it seems that CompTIA certifications are more sought after. I'm not sure about other countries or regions.

You make an excellent point. My intent wasn't to criticize you and I'm sorry if I came across that way. I was set off entirely by the way the article was written. I probably could (should?) have left it at "read the entire article," but I never seem to use a sentence when a paragraph will do.

Unfortunately most people probably won't read past the first paragraph, but this seems to me to be disingenuous reporting. The lead mentions only one of four serious charges under the UCMJ and buries the other three charges as an "oh, by the way" sentence in the third paragraph.

This dude was sentenced to 12 years for four serious crimes, not one, but the article makes it sound as if only one was important.

This is why it's important to read the whole article.

If it was just plain water the chances are very good it will work just fine if you can dry it completely. Pure water is non-conductive.

If it had additives like flavoring or sweetener there might be some trouble because those could leave a conductive residue. Even in that case the chances are slim that a malfunctioning keyboard would damage your PC. The most likely outcome is that it sends extraneous characters or some keys don't respond.

I didn't read the article so act accordingly, but here's my personal experience.

If I remember correctly, fine filters are a relatively new feature in dishwashers. In the 1970s a standard dishwasher (at least in the US) had a "macerator," which was a water pump with a grinding function that tore food into tiny particles that could be flushed down the drain. This probably required a much more powerful pump motor than you get in a modern machine and a specially designed, heavier impeller than you'll find in most consumer dishwashers today. Large items were blocked from entering the impeller by a coarse screen that was large enough to admit softer food bits but small enough to block things like flatware. As I recall, there was rarely a need to clean anything. The macerator cleaned itself.

The new designs are probably cheaper to manufacture (better for the manufacturer's bottom line) and use less energy (better for you), but do add the requirement to clean the fine filter. I don't recall ever having an old dishwasher break, but it was the 70s and a lot of that stuff was much more solidly built than today's plastic planned-obsolescence appliances.

Hopefully this helps.

I wish I could use it but I can't. The folks developing UT are awesome but they are a very small group of unpaid volunteers and this stuff is painfully difficult to do.

One of the biggest problems is the lack of VoLTE support for making actual phone calls on most phones. Last I looked (which was admittedly more than a month ago) only a few models supported it, and it is the only supported mobile voice protocol in several countries. You can work around this with a SIP (Voice over IP) account and some geekery but it's not ideal.

Another issue is very limited software. There just aren't that many developers creating software for the platform.

I ended up on /e/.