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This week, Citi and UBS analysts independently issued blanket investment advice to seek European and Chinese securities and investments over those in the US. China's economy is a mess; it keeps trying to jump start a consumer economy and it has a negative trending real estate market because it's...

My GenZ Ladies all carry/wear small backpacks rather than purses, which are a little more forgiving for someone who wants to keep something on hand. There's a decent chance the camera-inclined will have one with them, and if not they might have a Switch or a Surface Pro on hand. Half of a...

I suspect that the last remnants of Sprint are no longer operating. I'm definitely not willing to pay $60/month for my phone. For as little as I care to talk on it, all I really want is real time maps and enough data service to play audio at a decent bit rate.

Just got a message from T-Mobile that my 21 year old service contact is no longer going to be honored and I finally have to switch to one of its plans. My bill is about to double, or else I have to change carriers to MetroPCS or something. What a revolting development.

When I was a little kid, my house was about 1km off the path of a tornado. It blew through a corn field and the winds were strong enough to drive corn cobs clean through our garage wall. My parents weren't home when it happened, but my brother and I knew to get in the crawl space to wait it out...

In what world is the NYT left wing media?

Look at an R50. My partner's backup camera. It's very close to a somewhat larger R7, but with fewer controls on the back. The kit lens is 24-70 equivalent and not great for aperture, but the RF 35mm is cheap and excellent. A Sony Alpha 6700 is probably over a grand but it's TINY for being as...

It seems that pricing after the launch has been left to board partners and in general, they seem to have a much higher opinion of their hardware than we had last week. I suspect we'll be seeing $750 9070XTs for the non-premium models and maybe even $900 for the premium ones, just like the 7900XTX.

The US has functionally withdrawn from NATO. While there is a legal requirement for a 2/3rds Senate vote to abandon a treaty, the Trump administration has announced that it will not conduct joint exercises with any NATO partner in the next two years. While NATO article 5 protects treaty members...

He's not getting ousted. He's going to die in office. Vance is a moron but he's as surely Thiel's patsy as Trump is for Musk.

The Microcenter in Westmont, Illinois is one of the very few places that 9070s are still in stock. There's no option to buy and pick up; they're only there for people willing to drive in and take one off the shelf. I was planning to drive out there after work today to pick one up but over the...

I remind people of this periodically, but there's a lot of goodies on Amazon Prime Gaming right now if you haven't looked for a moment. Saints Row 3, one of the newer Wolfenstein titles and Mafia II are both free right now. If you look in the app, make sure you scroll down to check offers on...

Trump just overspent every tiny bit of goodwill the US had in international trade and diplomacy in something like two weeks. One of my favorite images from the news this week was King Charles sitting in a helicopter, clothed as an Officer of the Canadian Navy. It has come to having to remind...

I used to get fulfillment on corporate orders from CDW in the mid-90s when I was just the kid moving new PCs on to people's desks and I remember seeing their full color catalogs in the late 80s, before I discovered Computer Shopper. That is some SERIOUS history.

KVMs are one of those things that should be a lot cheaper than they are. You can get a keyboard and mouse for $15 and a portable display for $50, so how the hell is it $300 to get a box with a push-button to switch between four inputs?

No HEVC 422 and the power draw is higher than I'd like to see but there aren't really any surprises with the 9070-series cards. They look great for gamers but they're still the last place option for content creation. Bogus.

I'm super looking forward to Trump and his pals announcing plans to withdraw from NATO, start carpet bombing migrants or announcing that we'll be supporting Russian territorial gains in Ukraine in the State of the Union tonight. There's definitely a BINGO/drinking game out there for blaming...

I get good mileage out of using RustDesk for my computers since I honestly have damned near everything somewhere in my home. I have a portable 15" FHD display I can move around to whatever system if I actually need to look in firmware for the very rare times I need to do that.

That's how Intel Arrow Lake works on mobile, but as far as I'm concerned, on-SoC RAM is a disease we don't want to spread past ARM. Bad enough that Macs and most Chromebooks work that way. I'm trying to help another photographer I know get back on her feet. She had to sell her cameras and...

I think the S2x+ models mostly get knocked for missing the premium camera features. I have as S24+. which as I have said repeatedly, are not that interesting if you have access to some other form of camera. Nice to see you again, mubs.

They did add dual encoders like the nvidia x090 cards on the 7090XT but so far there's no suggestion they've actually changed the h.264 or h.265 supported. AV1 isn't really news. It's not encumbered by patents, so there's no cost to add support for it. So far all the news is gaming, gaming, gaming.

Well, $600 for the big guy. I've been looking for two hours but AMD hasn't updated support/developer documents yet so I still don't know if the new cards have the video encoder support I want, but if it does I might very well go camp out at Microcenter next Thursday night. It's been probably 15...

I'm sure he's fine. I know he's pretty frustrated with PC stuff. I suspect LM will be very happy to see AMD Strix Halo APUs once that stuff starts shipping.

LM and I have had conversations about Topaz Photo AI and I did bite the bullet and pay to upgrade to the latest version. The current version, 3.5, has AI Denoise that is on par with what Lightroom Classic does and which is functionally instant, unlike the...

Anybody else have a feeling that those $699 9070XTs will magically be $1000 about 30 seconds after they're cleared for sale next week?

Looks like the AIB vendors want to charge $900 for a 5070Ti. Probably the better part of a paycheck for most of us.

The first time I ever flew, I made the rookie mistake of putting my car keys in my coat pocket and packing my coat because it was unseasonably warm in Philadelphia in February. My bags wound up on the wrong plane and when I landed in South Bend, there was a raging blizzard. I was eventually (~8...

If you felt the need to get home on Valentine's Day, you're better off getting home. It's a tough break but sometimes things just don't work out. Sorry man.

Double posted somehow

I wasn't with her on that trip. The people she was working for paid for everything, but car caused a lot more problems than it solved.

Winget is just winget but once it's installed, it mostly does the same things as chocolatey. Chocolatey is easier to use but it doesn't install Windows components, you you need to know about both.

I typically fly to places where someone is either willing to drive me around, or where I can just get a cab/lyft/uber to city center and deal with public transit. Having a car seems to just lead to costly mistakes. My partner wasted an ungodly amount of money trying to deal with parking to have...

The weather here yesterday was not NEARLY as bad as forecasts suggested, but since we're talking about air travel, it didn't have to be bad HERE if it was bad someplace between here and where you were going. Flying is definitely better safe than stupid. They said we'd get 6 - 8 inches of snow...

Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC does not not require a Microsoft Account to use and it is free to download and "evaluate." This is the version of Windows you want to use for your VMs, although it comes with almost nothing installed. No Windows Store. Almost none of the accessories. But you probably...

A Canadian retailer accidentally displayed prices for the new AMD card earlier this week. Looks like $700 for the 7090XT and $550 for the suffixless 7090, assuming Cheetolini's tariffs don't fuck us all.

It's been Passport required since 2004 and Passport REALLY STRONGLY SUGGESTED since about October of 2001. On the other hand, my passport has yet to get a stamp in it because everywhere I've been has been somewhere in the Caribbean and apparent they just don't care if you show up on a boat...

For some reason, neither Spirit nor Frontier boarding passes load properly in Gmail or Outlook mobile, which if I had to guess are probably two of the top 3 most widely used email applications on Android. They even tell you this in the email. My solution is to screenshot whatever I'm given in...

An SAS backplane for anyone who might be thinking about a DIY NAS setup. I regularly forget that AliExpress is where weird electronics live, but after looking at a bunch of weird server backplanes with weird power connectors I don't want to mess with on Ebay, I found that thing about five...

This is my experience with nearly all optical media as well. CD-Rs from the 90s are fine (as are pretty much all red book CDs; which DO have a staggering amount of error correcting data built in), and my oldest DVD-Rs. I was very picky about Writable DVD media for myself but even so almost no...

For anyone using a Microsoft 365 subscription, you've probably gotten an Email recently about a change to your subscription price. It's a pretty substantial change, US$30 for the 6 user family plan. Here's the thing: You don't have to buy the family plan. If you have no use for Copilot AI (and I...

USB sticks and for that matter memory cards just up and die sometimes. For USB drives, this might be because of damage to the PCB or the USB contacts. I keep a couple terabytes of 250 and 500GB SandDisk Fit drives in my pocket every day and some of them have damage to the plastic shell over the...

It's going to happen. AI is a real "Emperor has no clothes" situation. DeepSeek offering 30x the efficiency of ChatGPT OM1 means that US Tech has been vastly overspending on hardware and that's for products that don't really do all that much for the overwhelming majority of people who use...

Generally speaking, if your political beliefs can be summed up on a legible bumper sticker, there's no reason to take your thoughts on those matters seriously. Every single thing about the contemporary right wing populist movement seems geared toward offering as little actual discourse as possible.

Microcenter is showing MSRPs for non-Founder's cards around 10 to 30% over MSRP for a Founder's Edition card and feels like insanity for something that's only half a 5090. I feel like the value just isn't there.

Apparently the 5070Ti will launch on February 19th with a base MSRP of $750. There WILL be a 16GB 5060 of some sort coming in Q2 as well, but historically those low-end cards are compromise hardware that give up other aspects of performance. This isn't really good news, but I guess that it is news.

re: the Office of Professional Management, Donald Trump fired the various Inspectors General of Executive agencies last week. The normal response to unusual behavior in any Federal department would be to file a complaint with the IG's office in that department. These offices are currently...

Fun true story that I did not find out until I was well into middle age: I have a condition called Klinefelter's Syndrome. I didn't know anything about it until a much older and drunk-at-the-time cousin mentioned it, but I'm actually genetically XXY rather than the normal XY. When I was born, my...

I'm a current employee at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I'm posting this because people need to know what's going on at OPM. I've been an OPM employee for nearly a decade and a Federal Employee for almost 20 years. I've never...

Well this is fucking terrifying. I think we all get why this is bad, right? Someone with enough juice to turn off or fix network authentication access controls and encryption certificates put unverified and uncertified messaging servers in place at the HR department for the entire federal...

At issue in this matter is the question of what alternatives we have in the arena of mobile device software: We have Google, which offers both Android with the Play Services Framework and ChromeOS; the Android Open Source Project, which exists and is almost never used for anything commercial...