New (old) laptop & Twitter banned from Brazil

Got a new puter, well, more like an old one. Honestly, the build quality of laptops made after 2014 is atrociously bad. Companies are always cutting costs to mass-produce products as cheaply as possible. Sure, you might get a Ryzen 5 or a 10th gen i7 under the hood, but it's wrapped in a shell made of cheap plastic that will probably end up in the ocean when it eventually roots apart. Laptops are portable computers; they need to be durable, rugged, thick, and bulky. Yet, everyone is now competing to make the thinnest, most anorexic product possible. Even worse, these laptops are not upgradable, a pain in the ass to repair, and extremely fragile. Next thing I know, they'll strip out all the components and just leave a streaming shell with only a screen, trackpad, and internet connection... oh wait, I think Microsoft is already planning to do that.

Anyway, rant aside: HP 6460b

Pretty good, despite the second-gen i5. It's responsive and snappy for work. I’m planning some mods, though. I looked at the internals and compared them to its cousin, the 8470p, and their motherboards are identical in size, connectors, and so on. I'm thinking about getting one and making a Frankenstein out of this laptop. With the 8470p board, I’ll get 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1 connections and compatibility with a higher generation of processors. Seems like a good idea, so I’ll give it a try.

Speaking of Frankensteins, check out this monstrosity...

I took the guts out of a Lenovo laptop that was falling apart and mounted them in the box of my SH440. Not too shabby. I bought some acrylic sheets and M2 extenders to make a proper case for it. I also got a PCI 1X adapter to connect a proper network adapter (There’s no Gbps connection in this despite the higher gen, even the HP 6460b has one). I added SATA extenders to connect a hard drive and got proper fans. To be honest, this half-baked setup keeps the system idling at 38°C, even when hosting Counter-Strike Source or Node apps. It runs great.

Laptops aside, it’s been a pretty noisy week here in Brazil. Twitter got banned, I mean X, or whatever it’s called now. I don’t use it, but still, it was to be expected. Elon is a retarded dumbass, but the Supreme Federal Court is even when it comes to dumbness and ignorance though. It’s horrifying how just one judge can make such a big decision all by himself. People seem to forget that we’ve lived under dictatorships before, and to be honest, I don’t think we ever really left.

The Twitter ban didn’t worry me as much, what did it for me was the VPN ban and the fine. Can you believe the Judge (Alexandre de Moraes) set a fine of 8,000 dollars PER DAY for anyone or any business caught using a VPN to access Twitter? Initially, he even called for a complete ban on VPNs altogether. Does that make sense? I mean, not even China has done something like that. Okay, it’s not like our incredibly efficient legal system (cough, sarcasm) could actually track down millions of people and fine them. It’s almost impossible to get caught unless you’re a business or a famous person. But 8,000 dollars? The average Brazilian makes 322 dollars per month, and someone is supposed to pay that per day?

You get a lower bond for getting out of prison after killing someone.