Sorry, all of the linux stuff is just specific to my own preferences/environment - if you’re more familiar with windows it would be best to just use that for testing. Presumably it will come with windows installed?

If so, put some programs on a normal usb storage device and then install/run them from there.

• For the cpu stress loading, you can use CpuStres: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/cpustres
• For temperature monitoring, you can use Open Hardware Monitor: https://openhardwaremonitor.org/
• To test the microphone/camera, I’d just use whichever app you’ll normally be using them for

As for the rest:

1. When you first turn the laptop on, at the red Lenovo splash screen, press Enter repeatedly to get into the boot menu. Once there, it’ll give you a list of options with associated keys to access them - go to “BIOS Setup - F10” (or something similar, not sure of the specifics on the X1C 6th gen). If it prompts you for a password to enter that, it’s locked.

2. To test all the ports, plug your usb stick with the apps on it into each of the usb ports and make sure it shows up in explorer; try the same with an sd card if you have one; plug in to a wired ethernet connection and make sure you have internet access through it (disable wifi at the same time to make sure); plug headphones into the jack and make sure they work; plug into an hdmi display if you have one.

3. To check battery health, run Command Prompt with administrator privileges, then run powercfg /batteryreport to generate a battery health report

Good luck!

Personally I’d do the following:

• boot into the bios config menu to make sure it’s unlocked (if it’s locked and they don’t have the password that’d be a dealbreaker for me)
• boot into a live linux environment from usb and test both batteries, keyboard, trackpoint/trackpad, speakers, microphone, wifi, and all external ports (T480 has 2 usb-c, 2 usb-a, ethernet, hdmi, headset, and sd - make sure batteries charge well from both usb-c ports)
• to check the storage health, install nvme-cli if not installed, run nvme smart-log /dev/nvme0 and check the “percentage_used” value: if it’s near 100% it might die and need replacement soon
• to check that the vents, airflow, and cooling hardware are in good shape, install stress if not installed, run stress -c 7 to load up 7 of the 8 available cpu threads, make sure the fan spins up good and strong, and watch /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp to make sure the cpu temperature stays under ~90-95 degrees

On my own time later, I’d run memtest86+ overnight from bootable usb to check the memory, then install tlp and run tlp recalibrate with the laptop on the charger to recalibrate the batteries

Edit: enjoy the new laptop! I hope it works great for you

Just part of our standard office package, everyone gets a laptop, dock, and external monitors for their workspace.

I can’t speak for all of them, but we’ve had a couple hundred deployed over the last several years with very few issues. Mine’s been solid as a rock.

The usb-c docks, however, are a nightmare, though I gather that’s fairly universal.

I daily a T480 with Debian for work, and I’d recommend it highly. Great performance, battery, build quality, look & feel, etc. We have some 7480s deployed and while they’ve been solid as well, I much prefer the thinkpad. T series will have better performance and battery than X series, also, so I’d take the T480 over the X1C.

https://grapheneos.org/faq#device-lifetime

You can buy a used Pixel 8 and it will be supported by Graphene through 2030 at the very earliest, probably the best support lifecycle you can possibly get on a phone.

If your firewall can set outbound rules, and you can control DHCP on your network so that you can reliably know the TV’s IPv4 address, you can block the TV from reaching beyond the local network there with a “deny all from source address of TV” type rule.

If your router/firewall is handling IPv6 though, it gets a lot more complicated, since the TV could have any number of addresses that change often.

When it comes to privacy and security, I think you should treat all cloud providers equally. Use a client with client-side encryption so that the only thing that touches the provider is encrypted data.

Rclone is an example of a good client that can do this, and can even mount your cloud storage as a filesystem with its encryption layer in between.

I’d recommend a full battery calibration before running the command one more time, if you haven’t already (charge the battery fully, leave it on the charger at 100% for a while, then fully discharge until it shuts itself off, leave it for a bit, then fully recharge while off). If the calibrated values line up with a full:design ratio of ~80%, especially with a 10-year-old battery with almost 700 cycles on it, my take is that’s pretty great.

That said, I think the best way to get an accurate feel for the health of an old battery is to put it through one full cycle of normal use and time how long it takes to die.

If you’re genuinely worried about this, you shouldn’t be using untrusted machines for remote access.

Apache Guacamole might be a good option. “Clientless” (browser-based), supports various mfa, uses ssh/vnc/rdp on the backend.

However, if the data on that machine is sensitive, or if that machine has access to other sensitive things on your network, I’d suggest caution in allowing remote access from untrusted machines on the wider internet.

RIP

Heyr himna smiður - a medieval Icelandic hymn, set to music by Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson

piped.video link

The only legitimate commands for a non-root shell are sudo -i, exit, and echo "yee haw"

That’s awful, I’m sorry :(

Is your ISP’s infrastructure based on RFC 1149?

🥲

DNS is what you’re looking for. To keep it simple and in one place (your adguard instance), you can add local dns entries under Filters > DNS Rewrites in the format below:

192.xxx.x.47 plex.yourdomain.xyz
192.xxx.x.53 snapdrop.yourdomain.xyz

Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a loooong time.

Can’t beat an X230 with an i5 for that use case, and you can still find them for around 100 bucks. Swap in an X220 keyboard, maybe a new battery, coreboot it, and in my opinion you’ve got the perfect laptop. I’ve daily driven that setup for the last 5 years and it’s been great.