hackkitten

The USB port on routers is generally intended to be connected to something like a printer or external drive with its own power supply. Likely it can provide just 500 mA to 1A, which would not be enough for even the Raspberry Pi 2B. Best to get it its dedicated mains-to-USB adapter.

Most likely explanation is the high number of employees on sick leave, not just at Amazon, but basically everywhere. Seeing the erratic delivery pattern for a range of items. As long as the product in question is in stock, it's not a supply shortage, but more likely a lack of warehouse/delivery personnel.

Pros of leaving a system on 24/7 is the lack of thermal cycling. Every time a system boots the components heat up, with different (internal) parts heating up at different rates (due to dissimilar materials). This puts a fair bit of stress on components and is one of the factors in component failure (along with electron migration). Whether this is a concern mostly depends on how long you wish to keep using the components for. If you'll build a new PC and trash this one in a few years, it won't matter, and you can save energy & money by turning it off when not in use. If the goal is to keep using the parts (especially CPU, mainboard, etc.) for many years (passing/selling on), then leaving the system on 24/7 can help with that.

Visual Studio 2017 should be fine too. It's what I use with UE4 and other projects. Can also try VS 2019 or newer if you're feeling adventurous :)

I can't hear 'Metaverse' without flashing back to Snow Crash. And that was the early 90s. Second Life came and mostly went. GeoCities and kin tried this 'virtual world' thing in a sense, but everyone flocked to the thought-free world of MySpace and eventually FaceBook et al. The main question to ask here is whether the FB 'Metaverse' is any different in this regard. So far I haven't seen anything that would put it beyond what Second Life and '3D in browser' attempts with VGML and kin tried in the 90s and early 2000s. Sure, we got better VR now than we did back then, but what fraction of a percentage of FaceBook users even have a VR headset? We're still a long way from The Street in Snow Crash's Metaverse, that's for sure.

My experience with cheap buck converters has been very negative. In the sense that I had two literally catch on fire. Even though the XLSemi IC on it was supposed to have thermal safeties and the like, the moment the diode on the board failed and created an open feedback loop, the IC incinerated itself and the rest of the board along with it. The second board right next to it also suffered catastrophic failure, though it was hard to say whether it was due to the first board catching on fire. Both boards were being run at about 20% of their rated performance (in amps) to supply power to some LED strips, so they weren't even being pushed hard. The main issue with most of the cheap boards you can get on sites like EBay, AliExpress and kin seems to be that they lack even the most basic safeties, and even nice luxuries like in or output filtering. It's much more safe to go with a Recom, TRACO or similar DC-DC converter module from a reputable site like Digikey, Mouser and such. With those modules you know at least that they have been designed by competent EEs and there's a whole datasheet to go with it that's even correct (usually) :)