Recent content by Mercutio

As an aside, Firefox and Brave are the only two mainstream browsers with ongoing support for thorough ad blocking. I've found no combination of settings on Chromium derived browsers like Chrome or Edge that actually work to provide the same level of safety. Of course I can put an ad blocking...

Look under Settings --> Privacy & Security --> DNS over HTTPS. Try turning that on or off to see if that makes a difference.

Just blood pressure management. Both my parents needed blood pressure medication by my age so it's not surprising that I do too. I'm still having a hard time with the idea that a common medication would be in short supply nationally, but I did finally get some overnighted to me.

There's a stray I've been feeding for the last few years. She's had a litter of kittens every June like clockwork. She kind of nests with her babies under a car that only moves a few times a year; the guy who owns it can't drive it any more, but his son uses it maybe the second week in August...

Decent CPU and nice screen is an extremely solid recipe for almost everyone's day to day needs so long as they aren't doing gaming, engineering or content creation. Which kind of explains why Macbook Airs are somehow seen as acceptable. A couple months ago, I observed that I couldn't get a...

I'm more than a little concerned that an entire generation of educated people and actually untold natural resources have been diverted to work on this instead of doing something that helps humanity as a whole. Between this and the commoditization of every system and resource on Earth by Fintech...

Ed Zitron just published some leaked internal revenue data from OpenAI. This company that wants $70 billion this year from VCs and partners to build itself spent almost $9B on running its models on revenue of $2.3B. They're spending $3 to make less than a buck and apparently lying to everyone...

New Steam Deck thing was announced today. It's a 30W Zen4 6c/12t CPU with 16GB RAM and either 500GB or 2TB of internal storage. That sounds to me like a less powerful version of the HX 370, although I suppose it'll have newer and fancier GPU cores than that. It will purportedly be able to...

I lost a cat to breast cancer at the beginning of 2024 and a kitten to brain cancer in 2020. The kitten absolutely killed me, because I spent so much money and went through so many different diagnoses that offered varying levels of hope for improvement. He literally passed while he was on the...

Softbank announced that it is divesting itself from nVidia, currently the most valuable enterprise in human history, to fund OpenAI, a company that seems to do nothing but spend money on nVidia GPUs and datacenter construction contracts. Softbank is literally taking its holdings in nVidia to...

It's been brought to my attention that it's possible to buy an Asrock BC250 SBC for around US$100. These things are 6c/12t Zen2 APUs with somewhere around Radeon RX580-class GPU cores and 16GB of all GDDR6 RAM. They're crypto-mining hardware and they don't have a bunch of traditional PC ports on...

Tiny baby roommate is finally gone. I don't know how parents do it. I've never letting one of those things in my place again.

The Canon R6 III was unveiled today. The new one has a 32MP sensor, a CFexpress slot and the ability to shoot video horizontally and vertically at the same time. I'm definitely intrigued.

Chris Thile was the replacement host for Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion, which was a very gentle and Midwestern part of my Saturday afternoons for around 40 years. It was more or less the last thing I made it a point to hear on the radio every week.

Flyby11 works by using the Windows Server 2025 installer to unpack and run the Windows 11 .wim file. All the hardware checks are in the Windows 11 setup. You can also use the Windows 10 setups file to do the same thing. Those products are already out in the world, so short of constantly checking...