It’s a GPO 706, which is a classic British bakelite phone from the '60s. I have it hooked up to a SIP trunk through an OBi 100. Right now it can receive calls but not make them because I haven’t gotten around to sorting out a pulse-to-tone dialing converter yet.

As an IT technician in a school, I have to repair Chromebooks of many different models on a regular basis, mostly from Dell and Lenovo. I haven’t seen one that I would consider durable yet. All of them use butterfly switches that break when a child rips off the keycap, meaning the whole keyboard has to be replaced. It is also common for the brass inserts into which the hinges are screwed to pop out of the plastic on most models due to rough handling. We also had one Lenovo model where almost every device we put into service developed a no power issue due to the same ceramic capacitor going short. Of course, the display panels are just normal panels that crack when struck - that is probably the most common damage we have to deal with.

I do think the sleaze is an integral side to Frank’s character that should stay or he would be a lot less interesting. I don’t think anything in the article actually demonstrates that they are changing his character despite the headline. If I recall correctly, Off the Record also included the mechanic even though Frank was not the protagonist so perhaps it was never meant to reflect on his character and was just there to reward the player for being kind of gross.

This is nothing new. I was taught about analysing bias etc in news sources during “citizenship” classes 20+ years ago. Before that, it was called PSHE if I remember correctly.

When I updated to Windows 11, it detected TPM 2.0 but failed to notice my drive had an MBR partition table and therefore couldn’t use Secure Boot. It happily updated anyway and rendered my drive unbootable.