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Synology just announced that they're no longer going to force users to buy special Synology drives starting with rollout of the next release of their custom OS. I don't actually have any devices new enough to be impacted by that, but at least I no longer have to toss it from consideration...

I love how Republicans control every branch of Federal Government but it's somehow the fault of Democrats that they can't pass a budget. The ICE nazi parade from Trump's occupation of Chicago showed up in lily-white Valparaiso, Indiana over the weekend. They did NOT go to either Hammond or East...

You can also set all the regional options in an autounattend.xml, which is the only way to make Windows 11 acceptable in the first place.

Windows 11 25H2 is available for download now. Most everything that makes it different form 24H2 only happens for systems that meet the branding requirements for CoPilot but apparently they HAVE improved the automated system recovery if you manually turn the setting on.

Xbox Pass prices increased 50% yesterday, on top of having an extra $100 premium heaped on all the new current-gen consoles. They did add Ubisoft titles and Fortnite Battle Pass to the now-$30/month tier and that does at least have value for the Fortnite-playing console peasant in my life, but...

We don't really talk about set top boxes anywhere, but Amazon announced yesterday that its new, low-end FireTV devices won't be running Android/FireOS but rather Vega, an Amazon creation that is explicitly not an open system. Further, the new devices will offer less RAM for what I'm assuming...

The album art collection was definitely amusing. I have the cover art embedded in each music file and present in containing directories and it STILL went out and found thousands of vintage photos or paintings of composers or pictures of concert halls.

Saw this in the Register. We all probably have a story like this.

It turns out that Jellyfin actually DOES just natively handle multichannel audio-only files, so in that one extremely niche way, it is definitely better than Plex. Just like Plex, it still doesn't respect my well-organized and properly tagged music collection with embedded album art, but at...

My phone got Android 16 overnight. I don't see a whole lot that's different from Android 15, but I also don't use any software provided by Samsung on my Samsung phone other than the camera app. So far the only big difference I've seen is in the Quick Share menu. There's also a new revision of...

I just found out about Lutris. Lutris connects to basically every game service (Steam, Gog, EA, Epic et al) just like Playnite or Heroic Launcher but of greatest interest to me, it has tools and scripts for working with local Windows game installation files instead of downloads via storefronts...

I have an aunt who tells me her ipad is broken every time she sees me. She's not dumb, but I do think the ipad actively does a lot to prevent her from understanding what she's doing. Anyway, there is a maximum number of open tabs in Safari and once her device hits that number it's "broken." The...

I can't believe I'm shucking external drives again, but I already ran out of space on the little 4 bay N150 NAS box I have running Plex. 48TB was not enough TBs. I was able to get 4x 26TB external drives for $1200 by buying Seagate external drives that are by all indication the same damn thing...

A neat trick for dealing with protected PDFs is to print them out to a Microsoft XPS document. This strips any protection they have. It's then straightforward to write them back to a PDF if you want or need them in that format instead.

Google has made a desktop search app for Windows that adds a lot of Spotlight-like elements. You can get to the same place with a combination of Everything and ueli, but the Google app is aware of Gdrive as well, which I find handy for my day to day needs. It does not work with Google Photos and...

On unless I'm using it on unsupported hardware. Older Intel iGPUs won't install their Windows 10 driver with memory integrity turned on. If I'm running Windows 11 on Sky Lake hardware, I'm probably not that worried about that particular level of security anyway.

I bought a Passware license a zillion years ago that handles PDFs and MS Office file formats. I think I paid $50 for the basic license.

This is such a can of worms. Wyze has decent cameras that don't absolutely require an on-prem NVR. They can record to a local SD card with decent image quality and they can send video to a cloud host for you to view on your phone even if you're not home, albeit only in 10-second clips. Down...

This is a good kitty

Again, this the day to shave scallywags with a rusty razor. Merry Piratesmas to all.

Spatula came from a hoarding situation involving a dozen blind and deaf Great Danes. He is frightened of every single thing except me and sometimes his brother and can most often be seen slinking or lurking under my bed. Kitten, AKA WAP, belonged to an occasional roommate of mine. Kitten is...

This is mostly for my own benefit, but somebody made a module that adds a game auto-downloader to Batocera or Knulli. Knulli runs on a bunch of emulator devices. The short version of the setup is to pop into the File Manger, go to Tools > Terminal then curl -l bit.ly/rgsx-install | sh They do...

You may be interested to know that someone did ultimately buy the Calendar Creator code base and there's a new version as of ~2021-ish. There was for a time an incompatible release when the source code couldn't be found, but the most current version is based of the old Broderbund code and is...

100Gb ConnectX-4s are a LOT more affordable than they were the last time I looked. I have a total of three PCs that I want on a high speed connection, so I'd need 1x 2 port card and 2x 1 port cards. Two of the systems are in the same rack and can run over a copper DAC that would probably cost...

This is because every printer is fucking terrible. I've had better experiences with Brother, so they're what I recommend and support. I don't even hate Brother MFC inkjets very much. Truthfully, I think the best way to print is to use whatever network printers you can use over a VPN to...

As fallout from the Windows 11 switchover, I have had a dozen i7-7700k mITX systems inflgifted to me. They're in a chassis that supports 2x 2.5" drives and they support 1x m.2, as well as a giant HSF. These guys were pulled out of an industrial setting of some sort, so they're absolutely filthy...

Beelink SER5s have been my go-to client PCs for a while but this Firebat A6 is the same price as a Beelink 5825U and it has a newer 6800H (H = "high wattage") in it. They have 2x m.2 instead of 1xm.2 + 1x SATA and the construction is similar overall. My overall impression is that it's not bad at...

Just to reinforce this point: Unless your personal habits are exceptionally poor, third party security software on Android is wasting electricity. I've found a virus on an Android tablet only one time and the person who had it was installing hacked .APK files so they could get free in-game...

Samsung devices come with Knox as a security platform, but overwhelmingly the issues you'll have on any mobile platform will come from either an app abusing permissions you gave it willingly or from a service provider being hacked, rather than something that happens to your individual device.

Apparently the outcome of Google's ad tech antitrust ruling amount to basically nothing; no structural changes with regard to Chrome or Android, only that Google cease making payments to promote itself on other services, although it IS somehow still OK to pay to be the default on iOS through...

The newest Windows 11 updates changed the Out of Box Experience to get rid of another workaround to force users to create a Microsoft account. There is still at least one known escape to command prompt that allows for a local account but they're clearly intent on patching out all of them...

A LOT of movies are given cyan and orange color grading because it generally looks good to people and because dark blues can be graded as a stand-in for shooting in actual dark conditions. You almost never see a pitch black scene in a movie or a TV show nowadays thanks to digital color grading...

Almost all of the PC games I own are from GoG, but even some of those games do phone home to something or other sometimes. 16 year old Dragon Age Origins, which I bought on physical media, freaks out if it can't talk to EA. With that being the case, I'm not terribly enthusiastic about getting...

One of my friends has a boy who is about to turn 10. He loves games and right now all he has to play on are a Chromebook and a old Wii. His mom doesn't have internet at home, so part of my interest here is to put together a very capable gaming setup that can be played stand-alone. I think...

I'm pretty sure I have all of Nintendo. Maybe it's because they're so litigious, but I found massive collections of everything but Switch at some earlier point, and I was able to get the .NSP files one at a time when I was asked to. The headache for me has been that limited numbers of seventh...

I'm not sure how it is right now, but for a very long time there was no supported browser addon for keychain sync to Firefox, which makes me think it's not exactly an Apple priority. And the minute you mention Linux to most commercial software vendors, you're probably SOL. Have you looked at...

I wasn't previously familiar with vimm.net, but but it is indeed where one can find absolutely all of the console video games. All of them. Every single one. 99.9something percent of all released titles for everything up to the PS3 / Xbox 360 / Wii. Apparently, the site has been around for 20ish...

Oh no, you can absolutely see the impact of color grading in movies, even on an ancient CRT. It's the reason everything in Marvel movies is shifted toward blue and why the Matrix movies show everything with a greenish cast. The most common grading is toward cyan and amber, which works very well...

Maybe try Desynger? I have it installed on my tablet but I can't remember whether or not I've used it to edit anything since that's something I usually do on Windows with PDFgear.

My partner kept one and the other got swapped for a miscellaneous collection of parts since I couldn't in good conscience sell it. These monitors are decidedly less impressive, though they're nicer than what I typically buy, 27" 180Hz QHD. If I wind up with extras, I'll definitely be able to...

UPS just delivered a pair of monitors I reported lost almost a month ago. The boxes look like they've been through hell but both the monitors inside worked fine. The funny part is, I have another pair of them coming tomorrow, the replacements for these. If this sounds familiar, it's because I...

This web site can generate a script to turn on whichever of the Windows Defender Attack Surface Reduction tools you might wish. They're a pain in the ass to handle otherwise, but if you're relying on Defender for primary protection, it's probably a good idea to turn some or all of these features...

If somebody is using Outlook, I'm not supporting them in the first place. Outlook is right up there with iTunes on my shit list as singly incompetent for its stated purpose. They're Google Workspace and actually do use GDocs. I'm not sure if anyone there has ever created a spreadsheet. It's just...

You CAN just plug a bunch of 7.6TB u.2 drives into the NAS you have right now. Just like how m.2 drives can be addressed as SATA drives (sometimes), so too can u.2s be addressed as plain old SAS. 7.6TB u.2s are fairly easy to find but in my experience they're going to be priced nearly the same...

Insurance agency. Systems are Beelink SER5s (Ryzen 5800/16GB). All they use are Chrome (or Edge, for one guy) and NitroPDF. They don't even have MS Office. Average RAM in use on clients, at least among the systems I checked, was just under 7GB.

I actually can't believe prices on 8TB drives haven't fallen any more than they have. It seems silly that a refurb 8TB drive is $100 when I've found 16s for $140 in recent memory. At least your Synology unit probably does support SAS (mine does and mine is ancient) so you have the option of...

Amazon is doing a buy two, get one free sale on Silicon Power 4TB TLC 2.5" SSDs. I'm not sure if anyone needs 12TB of 500MB/sec storage but on the other hand, that's an absurd bargain for $360. This post will be hilarious in about five years.

Hey, I was a working professional through all of that as well.

My internet service was out most of the weekend and a Comcast tech couldn't come look at it until Sunday. Turned out that wasps had built a massive nest in the cable junction box that only I use and the solution was for the tech to put on what amounted to a bee-keeper suit to remove all the nest...

I have Arch installed on an Ideapad Slim 3 and it also doesn't have working internal audio. Bluetooth audio works and I'm reasonably certain audio worked in the past, but since I use this thing about once a month, I have no idea when it quit working. This thing has a fairly common for...