rotisserie chickens are bred for that purpose and their lives are cut short to meet the cost and weight targets of the largest customers (walmart, etc), which means the facilities can produce ‘more’ in the same amount of time than roasters. they cost $6-10 here and $5-6 on sale (higher $ is at the regional convenience store chain, lower is wm), and i can frequently find ‘old’ ones in the cooler at wm marked down to $2 (yea, just two bucks each).

roasters are larger, priced by weight, and usually cost more (per bird) than rotisserie chicken. here, they’re $10-12 at wm, $15 and up at the ‘local’ grocery store. they’re rarely on sale.

not shown: the small hose that ‘naturally’ refills the jacket.

the form itself is easy, it’s the bot detection and spam prevention that’s hard. on my own sites, i’ve given-in and use the highest-level recaptcha, a hidden form field triggered by bots but not humans, and a server-side script for the mailing that also has some spam detection routines. they still get through, but far less often than a naked form would.

if you’re satisfied with your existing comments function, can you simply enable comments on your ‘contact’ page and hide them from public view?

have to have PiHoles and other DNS sinkholes for a basic protection, which is hard for regular people

mullvad’s free dns. free for all, not just their subscribers. encrypted doh or dot only. a basic ad and malware blocking dns sinkhole is a fairly simple configuration away if your os supports it (win11 and android do… those are what i’ve set it up on for others so far).

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

not a whole lot of takers here either, and not a single one yet due to win10’s “retirement”.

everyone wants windows. but after that, most are pretty receptive of other foss options like libreoffice.

perhaps higher amongst fediverse users, but not with the general public… default settings all around–including auto updates, no intentionally installed browser addons, maybe a wallpaper change. but that’s it… is the most common windows configuration we see, by far.

you could just point them to everybody’s favorite github-hosted script which has an option to unlock extended updates.

some of the schools around me just post on their web site or fb when they’re getting rid of old systems. they’re gone within an hour or two… they’re priced to sell fast.

for shits and giggles i took a win7 and a win81 straight to iot 24 with no problems on either. run the upgrade from a rufus’d (these were 2009-10 era desktops) usb made from a modded (upgradematrix) iso. going to 10 ltsc or iot should be the same process.

since you’re buying parts, you can specifically look for boards with 6-8 (more than that will require a ‘specialty’ board). 8 isn’t impossible to find. start a build on pcpartpicker, go straight to motherboards and filter 8 or more ‘SATA 6Gb/s Ports’, then sort low-to-high on price. you should find a msi pro am4 and an asus prime am5 that are quite reasonably priced and have multiple reputable vendors selling them.

otherwise you’re looking for an expansion card to add to a board you’ve already got or to expand one of those above for even more.

of course, you need the drive bays to hold them all, too. which can be harder to find at a reasonable and affordable price than motherboards and controller cards.

linux mint’s “installers” can boot into a live environment.

and even when you do know what you’re doing, you’re probably choosing not to host your own. at least not one that faces the public. a private mail ‘server’ that consolidates mail for you from multiple providers (and sends mail back out the same way) is different.

i have an old wood desk at the office. it just resonates and amplifies noise when i set a desktop form factor external hdd (with its attached rubber feet) on it. it now sits on a couple old-school foam rubber mouse mats.

don’t expect a 19 year old laptop to perform all the tricks something more ‘modern’ can do, such as transcoding video for a streaming media server. also note that a t5600 is not a ulv chip (draws as much as 34w under load, on its own)–so probably not a candidate to run ‘lid down’ without some outside help for cooling.

it’s not fast, it’s not power efficient, it has slow networking (10/100 and 22-year old ‘g’ wifi), and lacks usb3 for ‘tolerable’ speed on extra external storage space—but it will be ‘ok enough’ for learning on.

if you go with something like yunohost or even dietpi, you will pretty much restrict yourself to what it can run and do and how it does it. if you want more ‘control’ or to install things they don’t offer themselves, you’ll need to ‘roll your own’. a base (console only) debian would be a great place to start. popular, stable, and tons of online resources and tutorials.

i use dietpi, which is built upon a minimal debian.

office back in the 9x days you could just use all 1’s.

that’s the one i remember… and the picture of it next to the release countdown at microsoft’s offices.

i think the only things these days for ‘unactivated windows’ (home, pro editions) is inability to ‘customize the desktop’ (change wallpaper, theme…) and occasional activation nags.

it doesn’t quit working or shutdown (iirc enterprise or server trials do that after they expire, though) or quit getting updates or anything like that.

they actually still ‘win’, because you’re still using their platform.

afaik the major pc laptop vendors, dell, lenovo, hp, ms surface… all have at least some models now with glass or haptic trackpad.