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Black Friday was always a prime time to jack everything up 50% prior to it so people felt like they were getting deals. Better to just buy something when you need it vs. buying at a particular time of year.

Right? This isn't even the first time Apple's made a black computer. The coverage is ridiculous.

Bear in mind with that figure that Ryzen laptops are quite uncommon and a lot of folks have gaming laptops. You're not likely to get any of those without an Intel CPU and nVidia GPU. The Steam Deck has gone a long way to remedying that, though. Xbox/PS/Switch are the lion's share of gaming...

Are you sure you're not confusing Coug for P5-133XL?

Got it in and after a bizarre moment where I figured out only the armeabi v7 build would work -- side note, does this mean this device is only ARM32? -- I have it going. Very nice... I canceled my Nebula/CuriosityStream sub because I didn't watch it enough, I cancelled YT Premium, now it just...

I'd say a decently powerful drill with a hard enough bit could easily poke holes through the drive with enough care and patience. Alternatively, disassemble the drive (most use T8 screws IIRC) and pull the platters -- if they're glass cores, you can shatter them, if not, I imagine bolt cutters...

I was borrowing an Omada router from work to test-drive and see if I wanted to buy one for myself, since we had spares (not in box, don't have a cow) and it was almost perfect... unfortunately, there's a longstanding bug/feature request related to DHCP options. I run a PXE boot server, I've got...

It's Qualcomm, so I have about a mountain of salt to take their claims with. They've had their chance to be the market leader in performance and they blew it. Windows on ARM won't take off until the Qualcomm exclusivity contract finally ends because their desktop/laptop offerings don't perform...

The new ONN one is actually what I was recommended by a friend of mine, that's likely what I'm going for.

Considering grabbing a cheap Android TV box to check out SmartTubeNext, thanks for the idea Merc. If it works out I'll ditch YT Premium.

I traded the Parhelia off to a friend of mine who can appreciate it better -- I got frustrated with the drivers and being unable to disable vsync for love nor money. It also benchmarked worse than a GeForce3 Ti500, absolutely pathetic for something that was coming out before the Radeon 9700 Pro...

They do nothing. I think you can sideload applications through iTunes if you turn on some obscure developer mode, but it's a moot point since, you know, nothing open really gets made for iOS.

Works for me. I almost thought it was some new "this site works best in internet explorer" bullshit targetting chrome instead until I realized I'm using Firefox and it would have prevented me from using it were that the case.

Since when does Microsoft care about negative press that doesn't come in the form of a lawyer serving them court documents? They've been a technological punching bag for over thirty years now. They don't care as long as people keep buying the product, which, they will, because of inertia and...

I feel a little pedestrian with my 3xWD Blue setup but it's been reliable and it's more space than I really plan to use for a very long time. I think I'm sitting at ~5TB used on the array, total? And thats with a backup of my steam games thrown on there so I don't have to waste my data cap...

Yep, everytime I try to do right, I'm wrong. Everyone's current and they got their latest ones a couple weeks before I showed up in preparation for the worst. Just sucks that the worst did in fact come to pass.

Well it's probably for the best that I'm so far away Merc, apparently the allergies I was fighting with a day or so after landing was COVID. I must have picked it up at the airport, or so my Mom says. I feel like an idiot and a horse's ass. I got over it fine by Tuesday, but my Grandma is...

My mom did a fair bit of her growing up in Crystal Lake. I was born in Elk Grove myself, we lived in Itasca for a while, then Romeoville, then my dad and I moved down to Kentucky.

I still support several businesses with fax lines and machines. Fun fact, PCs were able to fax directly back in the day, that was half the point of most modems, but I don't recall seeing anyone ever use it. Such a shame, really. Speaking of landlines, I've been thinking about getting with our...

As proof that my life is a comedy, I've used up this year's allotment of good luck and found a Antec Plus 1080 case at a thrift shop. And it has a build in it! A funky dual-Athlon MP build using an MSI K7D Master-L. It has dual 2000+s and a gig of DDR RAM, and, get this, a Matrox Parhelia. For...

It was a heroic battle, but I got my oil changed, tires rotated, and rotors/pads replaced without major incident on Friday afternoon. I borrowed a floor jack from a coworker since my trolley jack apparently has erectile dysfunction (the hydraulic doesn't seal anymore), and even that couldn't...

Well, the Athlon XP build has kind of evolved into its final form: I found a reasonably-priced example of the Geode NX 1750, or in other words, a heavily, heavily binned Thoroughbred AXP nominally clocked at 1400MHz at 1.25v for a TDP of 14W. It came from Germany and arrived quite a bit before...

Just trying to get it high enough to put a stand under it, yeah, but something's wrong with my jack. I'm going to borrow one from a coworker over this weekend so I can get the work done. It's past time.

Nice! I meant to change out my rotors, brake pads and oil today, but either there's something wrong with my jack or it just can't lift high enough to move my car. I'm going to need to get another one before I can do the work.

Merc, I will say that I don't have the virulent hatred that you do. I think it's that I'm just too young to really remember these studios back when they weren't primarily motivated by being able to sell 2387432194873209847 copies on launch day simply because there wasn't that many people in the...

Yeah, Bethesda as we knew and loved them is dead.

I will say that ECS wasn't my first choice either but the particular model I'm using comes pretty well reviewed and it's promising that they thought it was of high enough quality to put their own name on it rather than release it under their PC Chips sub-brand. I'm aware that they did also do...

Yeah, without PAE (and without hacks, XP has no PAE due to driver issues) you can't get more than 3.25GB even disregarding chipset limitations. 2GB ought to be perfectly fine, as I'll explain below, but if it's not, I'll take 1GB and be happy with it. The kind of things these specs can run won't...

I don't know if I'm just cursed or what but the only PIII build I've ever managed to have stable was based on a i815EP b-step board out of Ukraine a few years back. Even that had some personality quirks. The only actually stable PIII machines I've had other than that were prebuilts. I say this...

Merc, are the lenses your headlights shine through cloudy or yellowing? That might rate a visit with a polishing kit and a buffer, some sealant afterward. That'll help immensely right there. I'm told there are kits to black out the reflective surfaces on the inside of your fixtures for LED...

No 'probably', definitely. OpenCL is treated as a back-path option only to be used if you absolutely must in most software if it supports it at all. If you're using any sort of professional compute solution, you're using CUDA or you're basically running in software. The only software I saw make...

It will only ever be available on nVidia hardware as it's an nVidia technology and I doubt they're willing to license it out, at least (maybe) until such time as nVidia goes completely mask-off and leaves the PC graphics card market behind for their greener AI pastures. nVidia benefits from...

The problem with letting a laptop sleep in a bag is that Microsoft forces some newer sleep standards than plain ol' S3, meaning the WiFi hardware will wake up every so often, connect, and update some things. If you've ever noticed your laptop was rather hot and used a ton of battery while it was...

There's also a point I realized a while back -- there are plenty of Sandy Bridge through Skylake machines that not only run fine, they're faster than the endorsed or even packed-in Pentium Silver craptops being sold by the boatload at your average Walmart. My cousin has one of those things...

I mean, honestly, I've been getting along fine for anything that isn't heavy gaming on this Broadwell machine. For someone who just reads the news, checks their email, watches the odd YouTube video, positively elderly hardware (that was perfectly well supported under Windows 10) suffices just...

I'll be alright with one to start with, and with the regularity I plan to use it, I don't expect disuse-based failure to be an issue. Once I have a workflow established, I'll be keeping eyes out for spares. They're not exactly uncommon.

Looks like the ride's over for folks shoving Windows 11 onto 'unsupported' configs. Microsoft can't seem to leave it at just not supporting those folks, they have to actively push new hardware. Supposedly this is actually unintended behavior. The cynical part of me asks "for how long" in response.

I used to recommend/use CCleaner by Piriform, but can no longer in good conscience do that as it acts more like malware than actual malware these days. If I've told it once, I've told it a dozen or more times to not run at startup but like a bad ex it keeps coming back. I'll still use old...

Well, the hope is that I'll never need to restore from them, but ~10 tapes should be enough to have three or four sets in rotation even without compression since I'm only using 4.5TB right now. I'll add more tapes as I need to, and plan to be compressing the data myself via 7-zip as I've noticed...

Which is why I'm on the lookout for LTO-6, as it's much cheaper (the drives are basically all used) and still sufficient for my needs. Floppies were the pinnacle of reliability in their era of main usage -- the eighties and early 90s. When they became cheaper, commodity products that were sold...

Slower doesn't matter for a backup format and while I'm skeptical of the 'less reliable' claim, I'd say it's offset by having many copies in many locations. Tapes are much cheaper than buying a subscription for online storage and murdering my cable data cap in one night making my first sync. I...

On the subject of backups, I'm trying to get my hands on an LTO6 drive for my NAS -- tapes are cheap, I can drop a backup off at my office or at my aunt and uncles for having an off-site storage, and they're reasonably high capacity without being eye-wateringly expensive like the newer LTO...

I knew of this as OTVDM a couple years back. It was neat, but for me, it'll never replace actually having the target platform handy. But you know me well enough by now to know that. :p Intelliadmin cron is interesting -- I barely make any use of cron myself even on a UNIX/Linux machine as I...

A friend gifted me their old MacBook Pro, specifically, the 12,1 Early-2015 13-inch model, since they upgraded to an M1 Pro. Kicking the tires on it, it's an 8/256 model with the "2.7GHz Core i5" meaning the 5257U. macOS Monterey is predictably unwieldy on it, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple...

I'm not a fan of Windows Hello without the fingerprint reader either, but I get along fine with a PIN. I believe, incidentally, from my experience working in the POS industry, that those USB fingerprint readers are intended for that sort of purpose -- POS software can typically use a fingerprint...

Well, this is for my homelab, so the decision's down to me -- I personally don't want a house-fire especially since it was lightning that killed my last switch. Even this isn't really budget for me, budget would be something I can easily replace if I need to. Surge protectors and UPSes don't...

Honestly, knowing that, I may be better served by just jumping all the way to 10Gb. Sure, I won't saturate it, but I'm not expecting to. I'd have been shocked if I'd managed to saturate 5. I only need, like, at most 3 ports on a switch to be full-speed in this instance, the rest can all be 1Gb...

BitFenix -- it's been a minute since I heard their name. I think before I had my N400 I had one of their Neos cases back when I actually wanted a vaguely flashy rig. I remember it being very cheap and nasty, thin pot metal everywhere, lots of sharp edges. That said I probably ought not be too...

What does the landscape for unmanaged 2.5/5Gb switches look like? I don't need the whole thing to be 5Gb across the board, just a couple of ports would be perfect.

I've got to be honest, I just like Ubiquiti because I manage them for work and even if they're not the bang-for-buck option I haven't had an issue with them that wasn't my own dumb fault. I have a 48-port gigabit switch I got from a decommissioned project from work, and I'd honestly trade half...