swapoff, reformat, swapon?

Also make sure the drive isn’t dying.

The employer doesn’t claim any intellectual property rights over my work product. I’m not able to find anywhere that the proprietary vendor does either.

You’re probably in the clear. Legalese isn’t so opaque that you would miss a section about this.

Of course, that doesn’t stop them from suing you if they decide your work could be very profitable for them.

I’m not sure there’s a good adhesive that will accomplish this. What’s the shape of the earbud? Could a piece of heatshrink on the outside accomplish it?

tl;dr:

The research was initiated after scientists on the research team reported seeing occasional flashes of green light while working with an infrared laser. Unlike the laser pointers used in lecture halls or as toys, the powerful infrared laser the scientists worked with emits light waves thought to be invisible to the human eye.

But packing a lot of photons in a short pulse of the rapidly pulsing laser light makes it possible for two photons to be absorbed at one time by a single photopigment, and the combined energy of the two light particles is enough to activate the pigment and allow the eye to see what normally is invisible.

“The visible spectrum includes waves of light that are 400-720 nanometers long,” explained Kefalov, an associate professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences. “But if a pigment molecule in the retina is hit in rapid succession by a pair of photons that are 1,000 nanometers long, those light particles will deliver the same amount of energy as a single hit from a 500-nanometer photon, which is well within the visible spectrum. That’s how we are able to see it.”

Neat! But please don’t shine lasers into your eyes even if it’s supposed to be invisible.

Even at big companies, devs get flexibility because they need to run a bunch of random stuff that can look sketchy to security software.

Sometimes it can’t connect to the server (which is a completely stupid necessity).

That’s where it does the voice processing. The only processing it does on-device is the wake word and taking commands. Actually figuring out what you mean is done in The Cloud. Doing that on-device would not only make the devices significantly more expensive, but they would also rapidly become outdated.

The rest of your complaints are valid and I’ve experienced them all myself to boot.

Overkill and overpriced. If you’re on Windows, bitlocker is enough. If you’re on Linux, LUKS is enough.

I’ve used Apricorn drives at previous jobs. They’re cool and very much fit for purpose, but I’d have a hard time justifying the significant price premium when software is nearly as good, free, and works with any drive.

It wouldn’t be significantly different from any other access method.

Android provides this information natively under /sys. Exactly where depends on your version.

But if you want an app, merely searching F-Droid for “battery” produces a number of leads.

yet

Mounting or unmounting a filesystem won’t make a difference for drive longevity.

If you want to keep your backups secure, you want to keep them offline, so if you get ransomware it doesn’t encrypt your backup too. (Or if you just mistype a command and target the wrong device, folder, etc.)

But drive motor starts and stops are when the most failures occur. So the ultimate question isn’t how to make a drive last longer, it’s how you plan to handle it when the failure inevitably occurs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

Sounds like a weak argument. They’re not going to be inclined to operate a local ML system just for one or two people.

I would see if you can get a quote for locally-hosted transcription software you can run on your own, like Dragon Medical. Maybe reach out to your IT department to see if they already have a working relationship with Nuance for that software. If they’re willing to get you started, you can probably just use that for dictation and nobody will notice or care.

What, exactly, are your privacy concerns about this?

I would expect any browser to properly render a page, regardless of platform. Are you sure the page is mobile-friendly? Why do you say it’s “not great”?

That’s not busy work. Busy work, as explained in the article, is work that doesn’t really accomplish anything, like re-folding towels that have already been folded. Or as I’ve had to do before, sweep a perfectly spotless sidewalk. Data validation is valid work.

How confident do you need to be? I don’t think I’ve seen any convincing evidence of any firmware spying in PC components.

Well, except the NSA’s Clipper chip, but I don’t think that really ever got implemented.

Long story short, I can’t use multiple monitor RDP because I have different resolution monitors and they are stacked 2x2 instead of all in a row.

Did you try setting them up as one big display across all four, instead of four little ones? I think that’s something you can do.

Does the multi-mon RDP thing work from a Windows client too? I’d be surprised if it did, Windows’ multi-monitor support is fairly lacking in my experience too.

This doesn’t have anything to do with patient data and everything to do with pharmaceutical companies abusing care platforms.

Yes, and? They are not sending your PHI to Microsoft.

Or, if they use Microsoft cloud services like 365 or Azure, where they are sending PHI to Microsoft, Microsoft agrees to follow local healthcare information protection law. In the US, as a business associate, they are a covered entity under HIPAA and must maintain compliance to protect your information.