Search results

I think my Gimbal is rated for 2kg, which I know means I'm not running anything longer than a 24-70 on it with the bodies that I have. Actually, my partner is better than I am at running the Gimbal anyway. She can actually kind of run in the steadycam gait and I am NOT that coordinated. I've...

For those who were wondering, CougTek did get back to me today by e-mail. Hopefully, he'll pop in and give everyone a status update but if he doesn't, at least we can know he's OK up in the great frozen north.

Most people don't have any idea what they have. Home users usually buy for a price point, but even that can be a bad idea because home users will do idiotic things like buy computers from the Home Shopping Network or go out of their way to find the one and only 17" notebook that still has an...

Home users mostly use them as web/Facebook/word processing terminals at this point. This is a big reason why I don't have a problem advocating for ChromeOS devices. Even people who say things like "I use it for pictures" really mean that they're looking through photos they already have, rather...

I have a Surui ball head. x40something. My gimbal also works for that but not with a lens that big. Height adjustment is a common need in many places where I shoot. In an auditorium or stage setting, I may be up too high to want a camera another 60" higher, or I may just prefer to shoot up at...

I live in an apartment. I'm not that worried what happens to the blacktop. 😉 Coug shares his real name with a well known Quebecois musician but I think I see him on LinkedIn, something I'm not going to actually look at. As I recall, he joined some sort of IT firm after trying to get by on tech...

The Steam Hardware survey suggests that AMD is running on about 1/3 of gaming PCs as of September. Since Steam is practically the monoculture of PC gaming, it's a highly representative sample.

This is the Sigma but I was glad to find a place to try it out, given the rain and moisture we've had. I knew it was heavy (with my camera, about 8lbs) but I was thankful to have ledges and rails to shoot from after about my 10th shot. What I'm doing in that circumstance is close to sports...

300mm@2.8 is fucking perfect for getting gorgeous portraits of dancers on stage from 70 feet away, if nothing else.

I like to chuck mechanical drives off my 3rd floor balcony into the parking lot. They have to make the trip one way or other and usually some/most of the PCB doesn't survive the fall intact anyway. I can email Coug if you guys want.

I have Spotify because one of my customers pays for his employees to have it on a group plan. Although I do like how responsive the app is compared to Amazon Music, which is something I do pay to keep.

Actually, there's a standard for even higher density SSDs, called 3.S or 3.L, for when you really want a single 100TB+ drive right now. I'm sure Linus Tech Tips will be along in about a month making a video about how they built a new 32PB storage server with 64 of them that some memory...

There are also 30TB+ SSDs if you have any spare kidneys sitting around.

In my case, I detest gamepads and the model of relying on a manufacturer to provide legacy compatibility. Millions of Nintendo fans will be happy to sit and explain how aggravating is that Nintendo won't sell them old titles they've already bought on one platform or support them on newer...

A lot of gamers do incremental upgrades and have a mix of older and newer parts in their systems. 8GB RAM on a video card is absolutely normal if you just got one but up until recently, it's been considered the high end of such things. The issue here is that the games that are being ported...

There's a massive complaint at the moment about how intensive the hardware requirements for new some games are, but the biggest source of this seems to be games titles that initially target the Playstation 5. Alan Wake 2 minimum spec is an RTX 2060 and Core i5 7600 and recommended is RTX 3070...

I paid for a year of Dr. Amy's graduate school.

Windows S mode is a reduced functionality mode of operation where only Apps installed from the Microsoft Store or already included in the system image can be used. It is most often found on less expensive notebooks or on managed systems belonging to a school or similar institution. The normal...

I have a chance to get a Sigma Sport 120-300/2.8 for $600. It's second hand and I don't exactly need it but that's such a good deal that I'm not sure I can pass it up. I've been looking at either the RF 28-70/2 or 70-200/2.8 for a while now but 120-300s are in the same usually unreachably...

Try to find a used Shield if you can, or a MiTV or the relatively new ONN AndroidTV box. A lot of other boxes are too suspect to be considered.

Once again, MAC is an acronym for media access control. 😋 Everyone has plenty-strong CPUs for local processing if you need it, but basically the only people who care are doing engineering and content creation workloads. Even gamers don't particularly get bottlenecked by their processor unless...

If you're not doing much local processing, an ARM CPU is definitely fine. New Intel 14th gen CPUs are actually exceeding the thermal loads of the brand-new Zen 4 Threadrippers, which is so far beyond ridiculous that those things don't even merit attention as a mainstream product IMO. Intel is in...

Ah. So it is. That's weird. The formatting bar icons are all pretty low contrast and it definitely didn't register as being any more enabled than the other icons.

Both Google and Microsoft have an OS that's essentially just a front-end for web services (ChromeOS and Windows S-Mode). Some people will always want local processing but we haven't had any major change from Windows since Windows Vista was released. The new features in Windows are generally tied...

See subject. Is it just me?

I'm vaguely aware that Youtube is really cracking down on ad blocking so I thought I'd mention some things. I've been using SmartTubeNext since forever. It's an AndroidTV client that'll run on a Shield STB with ad blocking and sponsor blocking that works so well that my partner actually ditched...

My impression overall is that Microsoft doesn't REALLY want to make OSes any longer. It wants to make a framework for online services and get people to pay for it to host everything. On Prem Windows Server is disappearing and I think there's a constant sales pitch for more and more things to be...

I think I've mentioned this site before, but they've massively updated it and how it works. Ameliorated.io is a set of scripts that strips BS out of a Windows 10 or Windows 11 install to suit your specific needs. These scripts are called Playbooks and each of them removes a subset of components...

Since LM is asking about Frontpage, I'll also mention that this works fine in every version of Word going back to at least Office 2007. You can choose to make a .HTML file or a .MHTML, which is functionally a .zip file with all the file the page needs (e.g. embedded images or fonts) in one...

You just can't catch a break, can you? Hope everyone is current on their vaccinations.

The colo rental is in my name. I only pay $350/month for 21U and I don't pay for power. Most colos charge between $80 - $100/1U.

I wouldn't be either, but I have a couple 2TB U.2 drives on adapters like that. I haven't had an Intel P4510 die yet but my experience with older Intel drives has been that they flip in to read-only mode rather than crap out entirely.

I have more Seagate drives than anything else, but all of my 14TB+ drives are system pulls from enterprise product lines and I'm not picky about what I get given what I pay for them. The Seagate enterprise (Exos / Ironwolf) are a little louder but I have to be less than six feet from my file...

My datacenter is moving to Detroit at the end of the month. They've been giving me a sweet deal on my 1/2 rack rental for almost a decade and now I have to decide if I'd rather let all my stuff move beyond easy access or if I'd rather have my hosting costs more than double. Today is not a good day.

I agree that it would be really nice if Intel gave us a new high end enthusiast platform. There ARE weird adapters to run PCIe devices via m.2 slots, but that doesn't really solve the problem of not having enough PCIe lanes overall.

You don't need a server. You just need an HBA. In the 90s, we'd run SCSI controllers so we could use Cheetahs and X15s. This is basically the same thing.

You're basically as far from me as you could be and still be in the Chicago area. It's a not-quite two hour drive from here. Woof.

I have a SpyderX something or other.

One of the things I appreciate about the u.2 / u.3 form factor is that the drives are basically made out of finned aluminum heat sink instead of just being a bare PCB. It's also easier to get high capacity drives with better options for endurance among the u.2s than the m.2s.

Yes. I've been looking at DxO. The default "Natural" processing works pretty well for anything shot in natural light but oh boy does it ever screw the pooch on RGBW or stage lighting. I'd say it can have higher highs than default processing with Capture One but also much lower lows than Capture...

My company maintains a fax number 100% because of a dingbat secretary one of our customers uses. She's in her early 70s and she's impossible to train in any way, shape or form. Someone told her to send a particular report by fax 30 years ago and she's been dutifully printing out the report at...

Photos of human subjects can at times appear too sharp. There's a balancing act in this, but a shot at f/5.6 might not exactly be forgiving to a subject, even if that's what it takes to get a most of a person's body in focus. I find that fine grain can tone that down without much loss of actual...

Do you use LUTs or presets in processing, ever? I very often use LUTs that simulate well known medium format film stock to finish portraits. I see that DxO has a collection of those that can be purchased with DxO.

It sounds like you'd probably be served just fine by any of the above. I'm assuming the Yamaha in question is a soundbar? My preferred configuration is all devices into an AVR (Receiver) and monitor out to TV. I don't do any sound processing on any TV. My receiver is fancy enough to let me fix...

I've been using Topaz AI. Lightroom is vastly superior from a tech standpoint, but as a question of whether or not I'm willing to give Adobe a blank check to use its software for all time, the answer is no. I can get acceptable results out of Topaz.

Check you ad and/or script blocker.

PCPartPicker.com allows for searches of video cards by their length if you're looking for more options by specific length.

I've stuck with Topaz for now.

Wired/Wireless is not an issue. Rather, Roku doesn't have a native player that will accept locally stored audio or video. Apple does not have this capability either. This is super-lame if you have a collection of ripped DVDs or a music library on hand. The most common fix is to run a Plex Server.

There's an even cheaper plan that basically doesn't have any online storage but for me the there's a matter of principle because Adobe is on the same list as Apple and Western Digital. If someone ever makes me the benevolent dictator of the world, past and present employees of those companies...