Recent content by Mercutio

Everything in my house is now running on Xorg. Rustdesk magically works. Displays stay the resolution I tell them. Bliss. Wayland can eat my entire ass. I've never complained about systemd even though it also occasionally pisses me off, but Wayland is dumb beyond words for dumb things and has...

After playing with it for a bit, Zentyal (I spelled it properly this time) is just some smartly-configured options on an Ubuntu 24 LTS base, or a package you can overlay on a Debian/Ubuntu system already in place. The DC config is just Samba, but it is REALLY easy to set it up as a DC. The...

The Aorus B650i isn't silent. It has one of those stupid chipset fans, but you'd never know over a fan noise from a midrange GPU at full blast. I built in a Fractal Terrra with a 9700X with a Be Quiet Purerock LP and an Asrock Radeon 9070, and honestly I'm giving serious thought to keeping it...

IIRC AMD has committed to AM5 for at least one more generation of desktop CPUs, so your Ryzen 10whatever should be an option on a motherboard you buy right now. If you haven't been keeping up, Intel really pulled off a coup with the Arrow Lake Plus refresh it released a month ago. If you're...

I have a couple customers who insist on buying home PCs from Costco or something instead of standardized client systems. These are the jerks I can never talk in to setting up anything else just so I can centralize authentication. I'm about to donate a couple old Lenovo mini PCs so I can quietly...

Just wait for the forthcoming MASSIVE FUCKING INFLATION because every single thing needs just in time delivery and Diesel is 33% higher than gas. For the most part, once prices on something go up, they generally don't come down. We should really be out with pitchforks and torches over all this.

Replacement Intel P4510 showed up just now. It's the only drive in a box meant to hold 24 2.5" SSDs, which is hysterically funny to me given that I shipped it out in in one thin layer of bubble wrap and a paper envelope. It took me just over a month to get back everything I shipped for...

I just found a particularly interesting Linux distro, Zentayl, which is made as a drop-in replacement for old-ass Windows AD or Small Business Server setups. It's Ubuntu-based and there is a free edition, although the paid system doesn't seem terribly expensive to me either. The sales pitch IMO...

I just BARELY remember the tail end of the 1970s,, but that also means that I do remember the '79 oil embargo, albeit mostly as something that was shown on the evening news. The Iranian embargo back then resulted in the loss of about 5% of the global oil supply and resulted in rationing and...

Microsoft has an internal Windows build focused on improving Windows 11 "pain points" including overall Explorer and GUI responsiveness and a de-emphasis on AI components. No, we can't see it. But they're working on it. Maybe it'll make its way to public testing. Maybe they'll turn the whole UI...

If you happen to have some old ass but not suspect SSD, maybe you could transition your Windows setup to run on that instead? You can always relocate your user folder to the dodgy Samsung.

I feel like motherboards are getting more affordable. That's probably not too surprising given how few people are building PCs right now, but my overall impression is that things are 15 - 20% cheaper than they were a year ago. I remember not seeing any AM5 ITX boards for less than $200 and I saw...

I was celebrating my first weekend of not having small human houseguests. June - early September, yes, I probably do have some intoxicated young ladies who might be in bikinis visit a couple times a week. This is definitely a point in favor of my beach-adjacent apartment. I actually spent...

Crucial got me back just fine. Teamgroup did get me a replacement 2TB drive. It's a newer model than I sent in that uses QLC, but at least I did get a drive back. Silicon Power has informed me that, while it cannot ship me a working drive, it is willing to refund me the pro-rated purchase price...

Samsung's normal failure mode is to make the drive read-only, which can result in lock-ups or other strange behavior. Even if Samsung Magician says the drive is OK when the software is being used, that's probably a drive that should be replaced.