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Well, I let a drive train specialist look at my car. His official diagnosis is that the people at my original mechanic's shop just encountered a sound they didn't want to look into and so wrote it off as someone else's problem. I still need work on my car, but it's basically all suspension...

A Samsung S23/23+ is worth about the same amount as an iphone 14. You can also find Samsung S24FE, a Pixel 8 or 9a or 2025 Moto G Power for somewhere between $300 and $400. Another curious option is the Samsung A56, which isn't MEANT to be sold in the USA, but can used on US networks. The A5x...

iOS is evil and should not be countenanced. Some fun things to know: There are three and a half real phone carriers in the US, Tmobile, Verizon, AT&T and the half is US Cellular, which is only available in some parts of the US Midwest. There are DOZENS of MVNOs, resellers of services from one...

I think I got a death sentence for my Element today. I'm going to get a second opinion but my mechanic seems to think I need my rear differential replaced at a cost roughly on par with the value of my car. I am not sure what I want to do about it, but I haven't had a car payment in 10 years and...

Given that they tend to live in places that are pretty hard to get to, like private islands, fortified mountain compounds and Montana, I'm not sure digging them out would be the best use of limited revolutionary resources.

I think there is only one name being protected. Not the minimize the issue, but the fact that actual millions of deaths can be laid at Trump's feet for his administration's handling of Covid, not to mention the cuts to medicaid and food assistance that will kill even more, is a far greater crime...

The people working at the three letter agencies are just as Trumpy as everyone else. No one is coming to save us from ourselves. I don't believe that a poor showing in 2026 elections will be allowed to stand. I think we're done.

Honestly, even pictures of NYC have value. It is the epicenter of Western Culture, after all.

Google AI Studio. AI doesn't do a whole lot for me and I kind of think most of the people who are pushing it have no idea what people actually DO with their devices or for their jobs, but my partner actually brought this to my attention: AI Studio can interact with live audio video, either from...

First thing is there are no blue states. There are CITIES and not-cities. Everyone has access to the same tech and same training, and you're as likely to find urban and rural dwellers who know how to conduct drone warfare or cybercrime. What cities largely don't have is a widely distributed...

There is something wrong with your PC if Firefox is using 100% of your CPU. Maybe you're missing some video codec and stuck rendering something that should be handled by a GPU on your processor? Every browser is a RAM hog. All of them. Especially if you're blocking ads, which IMO is not...

Mubs, I've never heard of that. Maybe it is something in the full driver package that nobody bothers to install? I use 3x 32" displays with the one on my left in portrait mode, plus my Samsung tablet as a drawing tablet/display. My 4k screen is set to 125% scale but the others are just 100%...

Firefox with non-crippled ublock origin.

None of them require phone activation if you're the first person to use a particular key. Most of the time, if you use a reseller key, you won't be. Microsoft will still activate it though.

If I want plausible deniability on an Office license, I get it through g2a.com. I'm sure the storefronts there are just selling generated keys or something, but at least I have a bill of sale. If you use a Microsoft product key purchased from ANY key reseller, fully expect that you'll either...

Aoostar sends me emails that I generally ignore, and I know I have been flogging this brand, but this is kind of a dream device. Ryzen 7 8845HS (8c/16t up to 5GHz), supports 128GB ECC DDR5, 6x Hot Swap SATA, 5x m.2, 2x10GbE, USB4 and an OCulink port. $700 for the bare system. That's enough...

RAID0 is most helpful when you are doing large file loads and need increased drive transfer speeds. This is largely mitigated by NVMe drives, especially PCIe gen 4 or 5 models. Even if you have a PCIe gen 4 drive, you'll almost never see 7GB/sec transfer rates on a regular desktop PC because...

Sounds like dd. You can set custom scaling if you want. It's a better idea than using nonstandard screen resolutions.

We can change our avatars? Hm. Learn something every day.

Regarding music services and local streaming, there's plenty of perfectly capable options. Lyrion (formerly Squeezebox) is a decent option for most people. I use a tool called ScreamRouter because many music streaming tools don't support arbitrary bit depth and audio channels specifically for...

I just tested this again and the Massgrave activation script will in fact activate a local copy of Office 365. It doesn't do anything for the OneDrive storage or limitations of the web versions, but if you use the Office Click to Run in the Windows 10 Start menu, it activates just fine. Given...

Thanks sed. What's with the new avatar?

I think when people think "civil war", they think Johnny Reb and grapeshot cannonades into cavalry charges but it's not going to be like that. It's going to be random bombings and assholes blockading highways and railroads with semis or driving through protests with their cars. The Unite the...

Not really. I check woot, which is now an Amazon brand anyway and occasionally get bored enough to look for stuff on Ebay. They'll sometimes have stuff at a discount from even used prices on the main Amazon site. I'm mostly looking for stuff like thumb drives, PC cases and AM4 motherboards...

When looking at premium pointing devices, I see absolutely no reason not to consider used or refurbished units. You can dip them in vodka or something if you're worried about hand-cooties.

One of my customers uses a Logitech Vertical mouse because of arm mobility issues unrelated to RSI. I've only had to use it a couple times but since Logitech wants $100 for it, it's probably not at the top of your list regardless. I've seen other people using pistol grip mice over the years. I...

I swear by Logitech trackballs and I have no issues with RSI in spite of my decades-long, very active pointing lifestyle. Have you investigated vertical or pistol-grip mice at all?

sed, my partner is literally half my age. I took her in because she didn't have a place to stay right when the pandemic started; she'd been couch surfing for a few months and was basically sleeping with people to have a place to keep her stuff. Her situation kept getting progressively worse and...

Using the California State National Guard and calling in Marines are both signals that the administration will jump at any chance it gets to assert martial law over big (blue) cities where the administration has the least power to enforce its policies already. We can look forward to some Kent...

I massively regret having a 4k 15" screen on my current laptop so believe me, I understand.

View > Small Icons? The automatic scaling drives me insane as well. I do use 150% on my laptop, which has a 4k, 15" screen, but I don't want that on remote sessions, which I typically run as less than full screen.

Plex Pass wasn't a big deal when it was $75 and I saw it as contributing to a small project. sed, I don't have a problem with Jellyfin as such but I also don't see it doing anything better than just running Kodi. I guess it's a central point of configuration instead of having to configure per...

You are almost certainly better off reinstalling than trying to troubleshoot whatever-this-is. I still don't know why/how you're getting 11 22H2 instead of 24H2 but even then, you're within the window for getting normal updates so it shouldn't be THAT much of a problem. Still, I'd track down a...

I use PrivateInternetAccess for VPN. Its status as logless has actually been tested in court and it has an extremely fast end point in Sweden, which is the main need I have. I use Tor and .onion addresses when I can but of course that does depend on what I'm looking to find. AVG, Avira, Avast...

I've been providing Plex for about as long as Plex has been around, but I don't really use it myself. Plex is mostly for people outside my home, and it is because it has an easy external authentication system for access that I keep it. That being said, Plex has gotten worse and worse and worse...

I'm personally a Google Docs fan for my word processing and note-taking needs. LibreOffice exists and it works great unless you have specific demands for compatibility with Excel macros. Wordperfect Office still exists and does not require a subscription. I see it sold by Humble Bundle...

I've really been enjoying Wildermyth. It has a very intriguing papercraft art style for what amounts to a turn based tactical RPG in a sort of X-Com vein. The surprising thing is that the game procedurally generates its campaign, which is allowed to play out over years and generations. Your team...

I'm updating a campus-area Wifi setup with Trendnet EAP670s and EAP225s as edge devices. The existing ethernet cabling is plain old Cat5, so I'm making a go with a wireless backhaul. I'm pleasantly surprised that it's working well. Some of the APs report better than gigabit transfer rates. The...

I'm not used to the empty place. My quasi- partner goes out at night because she lives somewhere with a night life now, so we don't talk nearly as often as I'd hoped. I've been able to keep relatively busy with photography work and general hobby-tinkering but my cats aren't great at keeping up...

My office building used to be a bank. We still have the vault, the safety deposit boxes and the pneumatic tubes for the drive through teller lanes. The building is supposedly hardened to vehicle crashes or explosions as well, so I'm guessing it's an insulation thing. My personal office is on the...

I'm more concerned where your ISO came from. It's still possible to get old ISOs if you know to look for them by name but a generic search for Windows 11 download should take you to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11 (or en-gb if your PC is set up with International or...

There's a registry/GPO you can set to trigger the update but you can also just download a newer ISO and kick off the upgrade from that.

I generally work from home, but summer is vacation season for everyone and a combination of grandma responsibilities and a fresh case of covid left me the only person able to open my office building today. Neither of the building HVAC systems are working and it's not just a tripped breaker...

For purposes of comparison, if I take six cores from my 3960X (Windows Server 2022) and the Arc A770 in it on to a Windows 11 VM, I can play Doom 2016 in WQHD at around 60fps. I'm not sure if the version of VMware you're using handles GPU pass-through but that's what I'd expect from any...

If you want something that just works my first thought is to just convert your vmdk file to a vhdx and use Hyper-V. Beyond that, MAYBE you forgot to enable some hardware virtualization settings in firmware or need to update VMware tools but nothing with 6 cores of Zen3 should be that bad full...

I PROMISE you can use a Win7 Technet key --> 10 --> 11 progression. I used that exact progression probably 40 - 50 times. After a certain point, I even found out that my key activations reset and I could use them again a bunch more times. My personal Technet keys got used for A LOT of virtual...

https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ I vastly prefer to work from my personal autounattend.xml (I've posted it in the Toolbox section) but this is a powershell one liner that puts a GUI full of tweaks on your screen. My guess is that you have a sparse-allocated VMDK and/or dynamic RAM...

The biggest issue I can see with the WTR Pro is heat. It probably needs another fan somewhere and I'm not sure where I'd put it. I actually love the form factor of this box, but it gets surprisingly warm for an N150. I think I'm going to have to mod another fan on this thing, if only because I...

I've observed that the Private DNS function can get wonky sometimes, especially when there's a switchover between Wifi and Cell networks. It'll tell you it can't contact the DNS server and then stop resolving names until you turn Private DNS off and back on. It's been years since I last tried...

I haven't see any issues from in-place upgrades of Windows 10 to 11. I did see them from 7 to 8 or 10, usually because the PC was already having problems with Windows Update. I do still see problems with PCs where people turned updates off entirely or have dutifully skipped updates for multiple...