Good point, comrade. App services split to separate list.

Done and done

1. DNS resolver, like pi-hole, unbound with adguard, diversion, etc.
2. RMS server: a lot of Remote Desktop software has the option to install a listener on a low power device elsewhere on the network that can use wake-on-lan to access computers within the network without keeping everything on 24-7.
3. Log aggregator: would be useful for anyone who troubleshoots stuff regularly, but historical info of any kind can come in handy.
   Simplest form might be a scribe server. Network gear often has an option to send logs to a particular URL, so if you added the scribe server IP/port to the field you’d have historical network logs.
4. Additional loggers: could also be run on-device, such as a wifi connectivity checker, smart home or energy monitoring state data, decibel meter with USB microphone
5. RADIUS server for managing enterprise WPA keys
6. Mobile home: due to the size and power draw, when paired with a hotspot and battery the potato could be useful as a mobile service repeater, a VPN client that deploys your home services on the go (e.g. in a vehicle, hotel room, family/friends’ houses, etc) to arbitrary client devices. If you use the same SSID/PW and encryption type, personal devices would use it automatically during travel.
7. Home theater box like kodi or jellyfin client

At the level of individual apps, the list explodes. Many progressive web apps can be hosted essentially for free on the potato, so you could shunt your always-on services to this machine to allow low power states on a beefier machine. For example:

1. Network management or security software like Fing
2. Low throughput NAS or incremental backup management server like rdiff, TimeMachine, etc
3. inventory management like partkeeper, storaji, etc
4. Smart home bridges like homeassistant or homebridge
5. Bookmark aggregator or landing page like heimdall, raindrop, pinalist, etc
6. Retro game emulators or ROM libraries like retropie
7. Photo libraries like photoprism
8. Book libraries like calibre-web

Edit: list subitem formatting messed up
Edit: add common micro services, mobile deployment
Edit: add home theater suggestion
Edit: add always-on and PWA examples

I assumed display damage because every time I’ve seen these artifacts it’s been due to a damaged display matrix, but i agree that if it’s intermittent and isn’t some kind of unusual defect in the display, the ribbon coming partially loose sounds most likely, followed by cable damage (e.g., pinched by lid hinge).

Ribbons are usually pretty secure, especially from factory if tape hasn’t been removed before, but with enough heat (e.g. left in car outside) and jostling, the tape can loosen, and cable’s weight plus jostling can be enough for ribbon to pull itself out.

To quickly check without opening case i would try lifting the machine in two hands and driving it gently but firmly into your right palm (which would jostle the ribbon toward/into its terminal). If it’s loose, i would expect to see the display respond in some way after at most a few tries, if the ribbon cable is loose. If not, it’s still worth opening and re-seating ribbon to be sure, but jostling it a bit should immediately worsen or improve the visual artifacts, confirming the diagnosis.

No worries. In case this is your first display replacement, few quick tips…

1. Helps to skim video teardowns like this
2. Take photos of internals of electronics when you open them up so you can reference them later after reassembly.
3. Keep track of screws. Trick: unscrew but leave them loose in the holes of the case tray with pieces of tape over each of them. Then you can remove tray without concern.
4. Bare display edges are especially fragile and often have coatings that scratch easy. Trick: leave protective film on, just put a few pieces of folded tape on edges so you can pull off after install.
5. Your display connects to the mainboard with two connectors wrapped in gaphers tape the right side:
6. Display ribbon terminal (tall one far left) is more fragile than camera/lid sensors (wide one far right). Trick: use guitar pick or credit card to lift clamp right to left, never knife
7. Ribbon itself often has physical tabs or printed white/color blocks indicating seat depth. This makes it far easier to verify its secure before closing case.

Good luck!

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Oh, that sounds like a recent laptop, and ASUS laptops have high interoperability. I’m sure there are at least 3rd-party generics available.

Edit: like this for example https://ebay.com/itm/364157672993

But in seriousness, as a rule it’s not possible to unfuck a display matrix, only replace. The easiest temp solution is an external. The easiest long term solution, if the manufacturer is no longer selling the part, is saving alerts for parts-only listings of that laptop on sites like eBay.

Online? Looks like there are plenty of lines on there already.

Apple used to straight up steal the idea of existing apps. Lately it seems they favor buyout, like with dark cloud becoming weather, but it used to be that Apple would randomly swoop in and crush developers by creating a first party version of their app.

I think you can also register 10 years in advance, or maybe more depending on the registrar, which would cover all other potential snafus like expired card info.

deleted by creator

Ah! Been there. Allocating lanes on small systems always seems to have more trial and error than I expect.

And here’s that x4 SFP+ card: https://www.trendnet.com/products/10g-sfp-pcie-adapter/10-gigabit-pcie-sfp-network-adapter-TEG-10GECSFP-v2

can’t find any SFP+ card that is x4

Pretty sure mine is x4. I’ll check.

Edit: confirmed.

+1, also chocolatey

Maybe yeah. Also got the sense from the strong opinions that this is a preexisting debate, presumably in the context of continuous workloads or cached arrays with minimal spindown intervals. In that context it’s true that rotational disks still often win in energy efficiency and robustness (assuming we’re comparing them to consumer SSDs and not the latest enterprise u.2 stuff that’s rated for continuous work).

Not sure what everyone is arguing about here. Clearly SSD is better for intermittent r/w, whereas HDD can be more efficient at continuous r/w (especially in terms of watts/TB)

Just looking at specs should be enough to see that. SSDs can idle in ready state at close to 0 draw (~0.05w) whereas HDD requires continued rotation to remain ready. So consider an extreme case of writing for 1 minute then maintaining ready state for the rest of the day. For that the SSD will be far more efficient, obviously.

I don’t know, but I’d guess the buffered chipset controller has more stability during certain power state transitions.