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When you say M.2 without specifying, I am assuming you're talking about B-keyed drives, in which case they are 100% just SATA drives, whether they're in an M.2 port or a SATA one. If you have M-keyed drives, those are the PCIe ones that have vastly higher read speeds. In practical terms, the...

You have to understand that init scripts have been around for a LONG time, and actual replacements for low-level stuff in the UNIX world happen very, very seldom. The last absolutely huge change I remember was the switch from a.out binaries (which didn't deal well with new-in-the-mid-90s systems...

The thing that I emphasize to people who talk to me about getting a new PC is that almost no one really needs a computer with top-end parts. CPUs and GPUs that cost over $300 new will almost certainly be wasted on someone who is going to play games at 1080P. Even someone with 4k screens who...

Usually I'm on board for whatever the current desktop Windows version might be. I lived with Vista and 8. My current policy on Windows 11 is that it needs too many little fixes to make it tolerable on any computer I care about. Yes, I can fix the taskbar with a third party version, or fix the...

I definitely remember ME as a crashy POS. Everything based on 9x was bad enough that the standard practice was just to copy the OS files to the PC so the user could painlessly reinstall. I also vaguely remember supplying a boot floppy for ME users just in case they needed more DOS than they...

I can't think of a single thing that ME did better than 98SE. I think it was the OS that moved a lot of people to Windows 2000. 2000 itself is still shockingly functional other than no longer having access to an up to date web browser. I'm using a native Linux desktop today for the first time...

Here's a funny new one for me: Windows 11 Pro client keeps invoking a UAC prompt for no reason I can find. It's a trusted .EXE with a valid hash. The "Run this program as Administrator" bit isn't set anywhere I can find. The user is already an admin on the PC in question. The Registry settings...

$150 is more or less my sweet spot for drive purchases. I've seen 14TB SAS system pulls for not much more than that, so we're getting there.

There's no comparison. Drobos are slow, especially if you're using them in their special RAID mode. Almost any other way someone could get a RAID5-like setup will get something that reads and writes faster. The special sauce they add is that users can supposedly mix and match drives of different...

Yes, but you can just use Crashplan Small Business instead. That's appropriate for my needs anyway, but people who were on individual plans were migrated over and just asked to pay a little more for it if they were on a family plan.

If you have seldom-accessed data like media files, there's no reason to look at SSDs anyway. Most of your inexpensive high capacity drives are going to be crummy QLC NAND, and anything that isn't that as of this writing is probably an expensive Enterprise-class model. Intel D3s or something. I...

Drobo filed for Chapter 11 this week. I have some Drobo hardware and it's been fine-ish. No complaints in particular but I've always liked Synology better for all the same stuff.

I just ran in to a problem with an MS account earlier in the week. User wanted to create a new account on her personal laptop. It wouldn't let them because her kid tied her cell phone number to an Xbox account a dozen years before. There's no way for her to remove it. Her kid would have to do...

I've been advocating for Google as an SMB solution all along. Google Docs and Sheets are sane and need virtually no management. Gmail, if used as a web application, is perfectly fine, although there can be weirdness if you're using a third party client. I've found EMclient to be a solid full...

Microsoft is making it harder and harder to have fully local Windows. I disable Onedrive with a registry hack that's integrated into my installation .wim files. I think it's still installed, but Windows no longer tries to use it. No customer I deal with can afford to move to Azure, and MS...

As I've said repeatedly, I do most of my processing with Capture One. My roommate is an Adobe person. The newest version of Lightroom does something that's flat out amazing, though. It has special magic now that can replicate masks in different photos. It's not dumb; if she masks someone's hair...

There's still Pentax!

I can verify that Rufus 3.19 will skip all the hardware checks, most of the OOBE BS and MS Account creation for a bootable Windows 11 image as long as the PC in question isn't connected to a network. My new pet peeve in life is that current releases of Office now require registration by an...

Haiku is today what was once called BeOS and still looks to be in active development. Looks like they built a compatibility layer to use a lot of bits of FreeBSD. The hardware requirements are fairly minimal (Pentium 2 with 384MB RAM) but not quite the realm of the ancient Ambra 486.

How does one get an employee discount from B&H?

Back in the day before I started college, I was running OS/2 on a high end 486. That might be another interesting project to go along with your collection of legacy hardware.

I don't know why anyone would expect a xy30 card to be anything but awful. The price is a naked cash grab, but IMO anything xy50 and below should be sitting at $100 on the highest end and $40 - $50 for the least expensive SKU.

I've found that local HDR content played back through Kodi oversaturates as well, especially toward green hues. The one place I've found that I actually appreciated having it was while watching the later seasons of the Expanse through Amazon. I think I've decided that HDR is mostly something...

Well the good news is I only have two broken toes and one that's only fractured. There's just a giant ugly bruise on my big toe. I have a walking boot for at least a month.

Someone who was not me dropped a laser printer on me today. I have at least four broken toes. Earlier in the week, someone knocked me down while I was taking photos at a protest, breaking a $1000 camera lens. To top it off, TSA removed an envelope with about $400 in cash from my carry on while...

I'd never bothered to check my power rate. It's $.13/kWh for me. I don't know if that's because I'm living in an apartment vs. a single family home but holy crap you guys are getting killed.

nVidia is at the point where AMD was about five years ago. They are currently trying to brute force a low-efficiency design into better and better performance by relying on die shrinks for real improvement. TSMC is delivering, but it's pretty clear they're going to need a new architecture if...

The most current rumors suggest that the 4070 will be a 300W GPU, with the 4080 at 420W and the 4090 at 450(!)W. That suggests to me that the upper ceiling on the class of card I'd be willing to buy is the 4070.

He was 18 or 19 years old. It's hard to know exactly, but he was grown in 2005. Someone dumped him by my apartment. Instead of running off, he saw me getting out of my car and asked to come in. I named him Hiro Protagonist after the main character in Snow Crash, because he had golden fur like...

I came home to a cat who is probably dying. He's 19 and I had an idea that this might come soon, but he wants to be on cool tiles in the bathroom tonight, so my roommate and I are hanging out in this tiny little room with him, watching news coverage of the congressional hearings on a laptop...

Apparently the new version of Rufus has built in options to fix the Windows 11 installer ISO from doing some of the dumb things it does.

Usually, yes. I can override or add to its selections if I want, but if for example I have five shots of the same subject taken in the same in the same small period of time, it's probably going to pick the one picture with the best combination of facial expression and pose, which saves me from...

I'd love to see the legal gymnastics involved in calling a fetus a citizen for purpose of legal protection but not for tax purposes. But yes, this is an issue. The other fun part will be the day that a gay marriage in Illinois does not have to be recognized in, say, Alabama. This gets to the...

Also for what it's worth, my current workflow is to dump my card to a folder per shoot, run that folder through Optyx for photo selection, import culled photos into a new Capture 1 catalog per shoot, where I do most of my develop work. 1. I'll export TIFFs and pick those up in Topaz Products as...

Merrick Garland, the current AG USA, is a member of the same ultra-conservative Federalist Society as six members of the US Supreme Court. When Garland was nominated by Barack Obama to serve on the court, he was seen as a compromise pick who might have had a broad appeal with more conservative...

I usually use one setting for a given ISO value and only on ISOs 12k and above. Normally, the lightly tuned low-light preset does what I need. The biggest problem I noticed when running things that way is that I'll lose some detail in hair, but since these are often images taken a 1/250th of a...

I did some amount of BLM protesting in 2020 and I've gone to other rallies and events since. I was at one event that turned somewhat violent. Chicago has notoriously brutal police though, so I took PPE gear and left my phone and camera (my good camera stays behind anyway; I have an old Panasonic...

sed is unusually interested in retro-computing. It's very challenging to build and maintain 30 year old hardware, so more power to him.

I run standalone conversions on TIFFs. I had a stress test of photos that I'd taken of stage sets at the club where my friends work, and some of those images went all the way up to 25k ISO. The latest version of Topaz had chewed through ~300 images in about the amount of time it took to make a...

Time to go yell at some feds. Chicago is a safe harbor, but it is an island in a sea of idiots, and I need to scream at all of them.

The improvement in performance in Topaz Denoise 3.7 is absolutely incredible. Processing time on my photos when from 10 - 12 seconds to about 2 seconds.

Matrox had those super-fast RAMDACs, which made them amazing for driving high resolution CRTs at extremely high refresh rates, like 1600x1200@90Hz (note to sed: that was beastly in 1999). They also had their house in absolute order with regard to driver quality. I did a little bit of research...

LEGO guy creates single-brick LEGO display that can display a game of Doom.

There are a lot of CPUs that don't have integrated graphics for one reason or other. I have a few R7 3700s sitting around, for example, and some of the newer i3s and i5s don't have iGPUs either (and what's up with that, Intel? Used to be i3 = iGPU. Not any more). Any of those guys would make...

It's deeply frustrating that the lowest tier of new discrete GPUs, stuff like the RX6500XT, are still overvalued on the market. I can get a nine year old GTX 950 for $75-ish, which is just barely an improvement over current iGPUs, but nVidia x10 and x30 cards are still by and large commanding a...

Catching up on posts from my crummy weekend... The newer 5600G and 5700Gs are actually looking pretty solid overall as a mid-tier build. AMD recently relented and released BIOS updates to let affordable B350 and 450 boards use 5000-series Ryzen, which makes the high end APU parts a lot more...

I had one. My landlord didn't want me venting the condensate out a window. and I don't want to run a hose through my whole living space, so I sold it and just live with it. I'm not even complaining.

It's not that different. You can't move the taskbar and the right click menus are stupid but everything can be fixed if you have administrator rights on your own PC.

I don't have AC. Old apartment, not something I feel I need in general. I'm used to being warm. I pay for decent internet at my place (1000 down, 100 up + a 120MBps synchronous connection from a long haul wifi link to municipal fiber). I have a large battery backup and my home has a certain...

My roommate just let me know that she's been hired to work for a concert promotion group centered around a major venue in Chicago. I should to be able to get a media pass to take pictures of music acts people have actually heard of, instead of the guys who play my local 500-seat theater. The...