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Happy New Year, also.

No hair is at least a valid option. My older brother started losing his hair by the time he was 30. These days, he does the clearly-unfortunate combover where he keeps hair from one side of his head far longer than the other. That's the look I can only pity.

Native encoding and decoding of video has become the driver of my upgrade choices. Particularly in knowing that "none of the above" is the strongest contender. There are a couple Quadro RTX cards with support for h.265 422, but they also cost as much as a small car.

Canon Log or h.265 output is 10-bit 422. There are no plans from any GPU manufacturer to offer support for that particular level of chroma sampling, although 10-bit 444 and 420 ARE supported on all the newest GPUs. Intel iGPUs (but not Ark), high end Snapdragon and Apple M hardware DO have 422...

Apparently the Compute/$ ratio on the 4070s is at least in the realm of sanity, but I still don't see myself getting an $800 video card that has no idea what to do with the native video output from my cameras.

A lifetime of not being in the sun definitely helps as far as wrinkles, as does abstaining from smoking or drink. I just turned 47 myself and given my choice of unnatural hair colors and my social circle, I'm usually mistaken for someone in my early 30s. The matter of my hair is partly a case...

The fastest Arc is somewhere around an RTX3060 or 3060Ti in terms of benchmarks. It's also a little bit cheaper.

I've tried several but I've passed the ones I don't like as well on to builds for other people. I know for sure I have a couple Be Quiet units in my chassis right now.

Apparently, if you're doing video encoding work and you have an Intel CPU with graphics and one or more Arc GPUs, Intel's architecture allows all of the above to be used at the same time. Arc GPUs have apparently had some pretty serious driver improvements since launch. I believe they still...

There are heat sink shells you can put around your m.2 drives. Sabrent makes heat sinks that include copper heat pipes. They aren't cheap but they really do help.

My father has Platinum membership. I'm not sure exactly how. It's been years since he's been on regular flights, but he may just have THAT many frequent flyer miles or a credit card that that keeps him up there. Sometimes I can convince him to book a flight on my behalf and I reap the benefit...

I want to say that 6TB is no weirder than any other amount but also that 6TB seems like an insane amount of work in progress. But then, so does 4TB. On the other hand, I have a few video projects that have over 100GB worth of associated files and I could see that backlog stacking up pretty...

Every so often, my father will share his Delta Platinum whatever lounge access and free miles with me, which has been great when sub-optimal public transit schedules have kept me at O'Hare longer than I'd like, but in general the thing I want to say is that Spirit has been solid in every way I...

I'm sticking with the R7. I have two great camera bodies and the upgrade would be fairly marginal. I'd get a lot out of a Canon 28-70/2. I have a set of Sigma EF 24, 50 and 85mm/1.4 primes +the RF 3.5/1.8 that I could probably sell to that end, but I really love all those lenses. In any case...

Several of my family members are also deeply hosed right now as well. I sincerely hope there's a very nice "Maybe you shouldn't be in business any more" from the Department of Transportation in their near future.

Basically as long as the chipset is from the same family and you're using the same primary disk controller, Windows should be untroubled by a hardware switch. You'll have to reactivate any time you switch a motherboard unless the NIC connected to the internet did not change. Windows 10 and 11...

There's some grumbling that content creation applications are better optimized for Intel, still, but the waters are muddy enough between the two to shrug and pick whichever. Most of the advice about what to buy right now is aimed at gamers and their needs are different regardless. In general...

You're missing out. There's tons of gorgeous lighting and there are lovely surroundings all over a cruise ship.

It's very possible to pick up stupid expensive office chairs for very little actual money. Herman Miller status trophies wind up on auction sites all the time, and if you know NOT to look for those, you can do even better, because those are the ones everyone looks for. I picked up an X-Chair a...

I believe it is more correct to wish for an adequate airing of grievances on Festivus. I was supposed to have a gathering on the solstice but there was a goddamned blizzard. I'm not exactly complaining but I have about 4kg of standing rib roast work work through in the next few days.

All the U.2 bridges I see are for a bare drive with U.2 interface to USB. None seem to offer an enclosure, although a 2.5" form factor is somewhat more protected than an M.2 drive. MLC drives of substantial capacity are available. You should have all sorts of options opened up once the...

All the units I've looked at are just a straight attachment for a drive, but I don't see that as a problem for a 2.5" SSD; you can buy a little case to put it in when you aren't using it.

At this point, the first question to ask Mac people is why they came to you instead of taking their shit to Apple. Either it's too old for Apple to look at or they have something weird going on that deserves additional explanation.

I found myself missing the fast aperture a lot more than I thought I would, but I will say that conditions aboard a cruise ship generally led to some absolutely killer golden hour lighting, above and belowdecks both. I was able to get photos uploaded to Google Photos from my devices within 8...

The main reason to have a Mac around for servicing computer is that a Mac is explicitly the only way to EASILY and LEGALLY download MacOS. Unfortunately, You're only legally able to grab MacOS versions that you've claimed, so older releases that are widely compatible with Macs one might have to...

Maybe you could look at a u.2 to USB bridge? That would open up your options somewhat.

Hackintoshes are very hacky and miss out on some of the stuff that makes MacOS interesting. Airdrop might not work, for example. I'd say Macs aren't particularly interesting either, but I primarily interact with them from a terminal window and have no need of the mobile integration tools, so I'm...

I spent $40 on a subscription to CuriousityStream, in part because it includes the cost of Nebula, a sort of creator-driven extension of Youtube. Nebula operates on the lure of creators who already make content people like. CuriosityStream is just a huge collection of curated documentaries...

Actually, I didn't know it could identify leaves. My plant identification stops at knowing what poison ivy, oak and sumac look like. It's absolutely KILLER for quickly importing all the recipes mom wrote out on index cards in 1972 though.

I am really surprised how many people don't know about Google Lens. One of my customers was going to buy a $500 dedicated book scanner to handle OCR. Lens can pick up text from a photo, even handwritten text, and put it all on your clipboard. Just paste it in to a Google Doc or something, with...

I did a fun little experiment with my students today. We set up a small RAIDZ1 on a Linux system using 3x2TB drives, copied some data to it and then installed OpenZFS on Windows, plugged in our drives and imported the existing zpool. It's not perfect, because it mounted read-only, but we're also...

For real, I've almost always been a trackball person, starting with the Microsoft Intellipoint then the Logitech Trackman and Trackman Marble+ and now the M570. I buy a new one about every 30 months (old ones get moved over to less frequently used computers); I use the wheel as a button a lot...

Settled on a 24 - 105/4 and my R6. I don't see myself needing anything where I need the extra speed over the extra focal range.

Honeywell Footed mouse! It's the future of pointing devices!

True story: a former co-worker of mine has been involved in ongoing national news because he dropped his wife's grandchild out of an open window while on a cruise. He was found criminally negligent but I believe his family is still trying to pursue a civil suit against the cruise line. But in...

I'm to pack for a surprise offshore trip next week. I'm taking my RF 35mm for sure; it's small and inexpensive. But 24 - 70? 24 - 105/4? 24 - 240? 28-70? :D I'd have to rent a 24 - 105 or the insane 28-70, but my Sigma 24-70 is enormous. I've never been on a cruise. I'm going on a cruise.

The song is actually a lament from older man watching a beautiful young woman walk by. She's oblivious and unaffected by his gaze. It's a rather universal experience for men of a certain age, I suspect. One of my great-great aunts was a classical pianist. She taught my mother to play, and my...

My quasi-SO is an Adobe adherent. She's been going to school for graphic design on and off for some time, and she has the $10/month everything for students package. And here's the thing: in the last 18 months, I've become aware of some of the crazy, crazy advancements that have been added to...

The Girl from Ipanema is an absolute all-time banger. It's the movie trope for elevator music, but it's also the one of the most frequently recorded songs in history. I'd never REALLY listened to it, and as a middle aged person whose social life authentically involves attractive women young...

I have a Canon R6 and an R7 right now, with the R7 intended for "secondary" tasks, which is usually either video with a wide lens or (I hope; it's too cold to be outside where I live to do much with human subjects) long shots with my 70-200, while my R6 is for pure photo work, usually off a...

That is indeed a glorious crop off a 600mm lens, and it's spectacularly free of noise for such a short shutter time. "Fast" for me is almost always 1/500 second and "far" for me is almost always less than 12m. Are you doing anything special in processing these images or is this straight out of...

I set up a customer's new offices on Sunday and I couldn't believe the internet speed for the price they were getting. I've been on the same Comcast service plan for something like five years. Last time I talked to them, the main thing I heard was that I had to accept an extra subscription to...

Most AMD motherboards have a designated USB port for doing firmware updates even when entirely unpopulated by CPU. For years, I've kept a lowest-cost CPU for any platform I support on hand for doing BIOS flashes. AM4 has been particularly bad about this, especially since AMD kept redefining...

ANDROID supports multiple user accounts, as in it is part of the AOSP baseline. I've only ever seen it enabled on tablets and phones running LineageOS. My Tab S8 and old-ass nVidia Shield tablet both have it, for example. Functionally, it doesn't look like there's MUCH difference between Samsung...

There's a crypto mining process that fills drives and then doesn't do anything more with the data. My datacenter doesn't charge for power, so it's popular with miners. I think that's why stuff is so frequently abandoned, too.

Sometimes the answer is nothing. I've been getting drives from my datacenter guys for a while to say satisfy my need for better than SMR high capacity drives and many of the ones I've received have had very low numbers of total bytes written and/or power on hours. I can usually buy 5 used...

Iirc, multiple user profiles is a tablet thing. You should be able to do eSIMs on your S20 though. Mine just got Android 13, which definitely does support that. I have an unlimited use Office 2007 volume license that dates from before activation became an issue, which started with Vista and...

Diskprices.com is really nifty and sorts results to include whether or not the drives are new, used or refurbished.

The hardware warranty in no way depends on the state of software on the PC. We won that fight in like 1998. When I ship an in-warranty laptop for service, I remove the drive before I ship it anyway; I've heard of people getting their laptop factory reset too many times to trust anything else.

I happen to know that there ARE older products Microsoft absolutely refuses to reactivate. Neither Small Business Server 2003 nor 2008 work any more. I was even trying to re-activate SBS2003 on its original hardware.