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Their life cycle incorporates the DNA of the parasite that incubates from a facehugger. In Alien3 and the Aliens v Predator films and games, Xenomorphs that come from non-human hosts (a dog and the Youtja aliens, respectively) have clear signifiers of their parasitic parent's species...

Fun true fact: The Weyland-Yutani corporation, which owned the Narcissus and the Sulaco, the space ships in the first two Aliens movies, is name checked in Blade Runner as well and there's nothing in either series to make them incompatible with one another. This can further be extended to...

I generally don't need a Photoshop alternative but a Lightroom alternative. I use Capture One + Topaz software for photos and Davinci Resolve Studio for video editing. I also use a tool called Optyx as a first pass tool to cull the photos I've taken from any given shoot. Optyx was a one time...

Oregon Trail 5th edition was released at about the same time as Windows XP. It's a completely normal Win32 application. It definitely SHOULD work. Things get a lot goofier when you try to get games originally made for Windows 95/98 to run on new systems, but for example the original Age of...

A zillion years ago, I had a job deploying about 3,000 top-end at the time Thinkpads to BP's Downer's Grove "The Cancer Hot Spot" Research Facility. There were four VPs with offices there and I was asked to be the personal point of contact for those guys, or more realistically their assistants...

Off topic CSB but my folks spent two months on a private island in Hawaii for their 50th wedding anniversary in 2018. My mother spent the entire time complaining about how dark and grey and even slightly chilly it was for most of their visit because Kilauea was actively erupting and really had...

My rent is reasonable. My apartment is a short walk (300 feet?) to Indiana Dunes National Park or to the South Shore commuter rail line to downtown Chicago. My neighborhood is diverse. My landlord doesn't mind my cats. The stated reason I am not allowed to switch out the AC unit is that it is...

I bring this up every year, but I don't have functional AC, and because of how my apartment is laid out, there's no real airflow either. No windows on the west or south, where they would offer any relief to heat. I'm just used to it, but I use a pair of industrial fans to generate airflow...

The SER6 uses the same barrel and transformer as 9th generation Intel NUCs, which I have verified by plugging one in where I had the NUC. I have no idea why the newer ones changed.

I'm going to blow away the OS on absolutely anything before I put it in service regardless. The digital license entitlement makes life a lot easier in that respect. It may be that the 7840HS is a bit much for the cooling solution in that form factor. My most-purchased Beelink units are much...

I usually buy Beelink devices. They're put on sale on Amazon with shocking regularity. I have purchased Intel based Minisforum workstation systems a couple times. Never bought an AMD model.

something something low hanging fruit something My #1 stupid waste of time games are Breakout or Bubbleshooter type titles. I like this one for Android and understand that I tried dozens before I picked that one. These games work really well for those "It's going to be a couple minutes while I...

I think that it is, yes. I quite like NUC-like PCs as full fat desktop client PCs and I prefer AMD's approach to overall architecture at the moment. Strix Point by all reports is a very promising upcoming platform. It would be insane to put those facts aside just because you've typically only...

Kind of a cool story: City of Heroes is the only MMO I really played. P5 was also a fan, back in the day. The game was closed by its Korean parent company NCsoft in 2012 as a cost-saving measure after a Korean-only title failed at launch, even though the game was still making money and had a...

I kind of live in Resolve Studio (the paid version). It's.... a lot. I learn things as I need to, but if you don't have complex needs, it might be easier to work with CapCut, which a lot of my Onlyfans-ing friends use for themselves since it runs on literally everything, or something a little...

Mildly off topic from anything important, but Humble Bundle is currently selling a package that includes Corel Draw, Painter and WordPerfect Office for $25, for people who want a useful Office Suite and don't like the idea of using something like G2A to get a grey market version. That's a pretty...

Yes. There's a market for them on eBay.

Someone posted their experiences with the current flagship Matrox C680 as of June 2024. It's actually an AMD workstation GPU, but Matrox provides all the drivers on its own. The person who made this video does take it seriously as a $50 graphics card and of course it's completely pathetic, but...

It's just a checklist for branding. One of the checkboxes is a new key for the keyboard. It's functionally meaningless.

Copilot+ is just branding, like having a laptop that says it supports Intel Vpro. Your King Kong desktop with a 400W GPU will run rings around a Snapdragon X Elite-whatever in every possible way. The only thing that can be said is that said desktop doesn't have anything like the power...

Me asking a group of bluegrass-playing boomers who need to sit down to pick a banjo for 90 minutes to do anything in Indiana sounds like a great way to get hate crimed. Their crowd looked like it had a lot of overlap with an NRA convention. The rag was honestly a real highlight for me. I was sad...

That game is very pretty. It's an absolute walking simulator it is something different and enjoyable. It's on Xbox game pass, which is probably the only way I could see someone obtaining it. It's not worth $20. I own an odd number of games where you play as an animal just trying to survive and...

I don't know when Lightroom was updated but now you can just mask an element in a photo and make it go away. No photoshop required. And then apply that edit to every photo. I took some concert photos where there was a rag sitting on stage the entire time and in every frame. It was a one-second...

That's not actually a reinstall situation. There's a tool called mbr2gpt you can use if you are still on MBR disks. Otherwise, you just have to pop in your firmware and track down whichever of the 40 different things the TPM emulator dingus is called and enable it. Windows doesn't actually care...

Microsoft has apparently restarted its Insider Update channel for Windows 10. Makes me think there's a big subset of customers who have gone ahead and said "not no, but hell no" to a Windows 11 migration.

I went ahead and made a game thread in the pub just to keep this to bitching about nvidia and intel like normal.

Just to keep the stuff out of the video card thread. Marvel's Midnight Suns is free on Epic Right now, if you are a person who played and like the Firaxis X-Com games. I always check Epic and Amazon Games every week became none of my other friends remember to do that and get mad when they miss...

My partner has re-purchased Skyrim on every platform, every time it has been released. Same thing with the Bethesda Fallout games. I mentioned this somewhere else, but doing the math from her reported play-times across Playstation, Xbox, Switch and PC, she's spent a meaningful portion of her...

That's on the specific sellers, a bit like blaming Ebay or Craigslist for sellers there. G2A is weirdly big enough to offer buyer protection, which is often not the case from other ventures that sell grey-market Microsoft keys. I've never bought a game through it though, which I understand to...

As usual, my caveat is that I really don't care how well games work. Do they mostly work? That's close enough for me. Developers will sort it eventually. Intel GPUs probably are vastly better on Windows than Linux, driverwise, just for the usual reasons around the size of the market and the...

In fact, if knowing about G2A.com saves you $150+, I ask that you go to your local club and leave $20 on the rail for whichever tatted goth borderline personality disorder-having princess most tickles your fancy. This is the way.

nVidia is going to have the high end. It has been conceded by everyone else. nVidia will also charge a small fortune for everything it makes and it has definitely decided to do so. Cost is not an issue, but even then, you aren't buying the giant 3-slot GPUs, so you must have a limit as well. My...

The kind where I absolutely do not care if Microsoft ever makes a dollar again. Give that money to somebody you like, like strippers.

Intel provided a ton of info on Xe2 yesterday, including a bunch of architectural changes that should improve compatibility, but more official clues about what Battlemage will be offering, with the mid-range SKU, the B580, being approximately what an A770, but priced at $200, can do right now...

Buy Windows from g2a.com. It'll be around $20. You can even get a perpetual Office license at the same time. The licenses that are being sold are either meant to be sold in international markets (China, India) or they're being sold out of someone's Action Pack sub and either way Microsoft cannot...

Apparently Lunar Lake notebooks will ship with entirely integrated RAM, either 16 or 32GB, and don't quite live up to the performance of AMD's AI 300 mobile NPUs.

By reputation, Ryzen 7000 is a massive PITA to keep cool. Its heat spreader is thought to be too thick and may act as an insulator. AMD Expo is likewise kind of half baked compared to XMP for Intel and based on my relatively limited experiences with AM5, it's pretty common to see systems revert...

Microsoft itself made a thing called PC Manager. I would think that something called PC Manager is something they would just put in Windows, but no, it's a stand-alone thing you can get through the Windows Store. It does a lot of things we might've had CCleaner do before it became terrible, but...

LM is gonna be even madder about the Canon R1 since the rumors are now saying it's a 24MP quad-pixel AF. Not even 30MP. It's barely a spec bump over the R3.

At least one of my cats would probably try to eat it.

Here is a fun thing that I just discovered: Samba supports Windows Previous Versions. This can be really interesting when combined with your zfs or btrfs snapshots. I'd never even considered whether or not Previous Versions worked or not, but there it is, and not terribly difficult to set up...

This little guy looks super cool for those of us who actually shoot video. Cheap, too.

Matrox still makes video cards. I bought a couple during the pandemic when they were some of the cheapest options to get a graphics card, but their main use is video wall setups now. They're pathetic for gaming/3D needs. The easiest way to get them is on eBay, second hand.

My father travelled his whole life and now he doesn't want to go anywhere he can't drive in less than a couple hours. He's also a guy who doesn't want any help for anything he knows how to do himself, and he's a guy who has learned how to do more or less anything that has to do with home...

It really sucks trying to buy a gift for someone well off enough to just buy whatever they want the instant it crosses their mind.

What it sounds like to me is that anyone with a better than iGPU setup will want their graphics hardware to handle all that stuff, but for APUs, SoCs and Intel's weirdo Big.little nonsense, NPUs make a lot of sense.

I think somebody at Canon has looked at what it's doing and decided that there are sweet spots at 24 and 45MP and those are good enough for most purposes. I definitely don't get a whole lot out of the extra pixels from the R7 vs the R6. At least not most of the time. We still don't have R5ii...

Apparently, NPUs are meant to consume less power than GPUs, and to fall into the arena of weird background stuff that a traditional CPU wouldn't be good at doing, which mostly fall into the category of real time processing of video (e.g. augmented reality) or sensor data. I don't think most...

I think desktops are supposed to shove NPU stuff onto the GPU, so I suppose it's a question of what the GPU can do? I genuinely don't know if I care or not. Are we going to start to run localized LLMs Real Soon Now? I'm assuming anyone with decent graphics card probably has hardware that blows...

AMD officially announced Ryzen 9000 over the weekend, claims that the NPU in its next processors is 10% faster than the one in Snapdragon X Elite and supposedly has 10 - 20% better IPC than Ryzen 7000. It also made a commitment to Socket AM5 until at least 2027.