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Every big tech company is the devil. IBM was the devil before Microsoft, and now it is seen as a moderating force to the other evils at Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google. We can't live our lives without those guys, even if it's only because of a javascript framework, video codec or beloved TV...

Shang Chi wasn't what I thought it would be. Marvel made a Wuxia movie, akin to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, by way of both frequent nods to Chinese mythology and the now clearly defined Marvel Cinematic Universe. In comics, Shang Chi was absolutely created to tie in to Bruce Lee and Shaw...

I'm actually a big fan of Chromebooks as-is. Google Docs/Sheets, Drive and Photos are a highly compelling set of tools that work really well. Even the Celeron-based models are fast enough. ChromeOS is actually my go-to recommendation for people with modest computing needs. I especially...

There are five of us. No one cares. But damn does it do everything I want out of a repair setup.

I just ran across Sergei Strelec's WinPE Rescue Disk, which seems to have a crazy amount of added functionality. There's a substantial amount of commercial software in the disk image, including TrueImage, AOEMI Partition Manager and, believe it or not, Office 2007. It passes malware and AV...

Looks like Google is kicking Intel to the curb as well.

It Could Happen Here is a legitimately interesting podcast. The oldest episodes in the feed are about the ramifications of civil war and the Balkanization of the USA, from a journalist who spent his career in conflict zones like Syria and Georgia and from relevant subject matter experts. The...

Yes I misremembered the ET6000. I have it in my head that Tseng Labs didn't survive into the PCI era. The rarity might've been an Aussie issue though. I definitely built a few systems using DX/50s. I was in my late teens then, but I had no trouble ordering or assembling systems with them...

You might have a better time if you just tracked down an OG 486DX/50 than messing with the 3rd party clock multiplied CPUs. Cyrix and AMD both made absolute garbage in that era, and the reason the DX/50 was so badass that everything else clocked to 50MHz along with the CPU. You'll probably get...

I might be wrong but it seems like there are a lot fewer options available now than there used to be if you just want aftermarket air cooling. I'm sure there are decent AIOs if you don't want to spend a year learning about tube fittings and bend radii, too.

I very seldom use SMS messaging. I have a Google Voice account I have set up to receive them, which I studiously ignore for anything outside behaviors that aren't defined by my rules, which mostly have to do with getting SMS verification codes or texts from people who can't stop themselves from...

Almost every time I encounter water cooling, it's in a system doesn't seem so quiet to me. It seems like a lot of extra work for a very dubious benefit.

I have custom alert sounds for certain email senders and tend to rely on my phone or whatever tablet for those. My co-workers largely use iMessage or Amazon Chime for their communication, but my role is different and I'm not involved in 99% of that. I was lobbying for Skype, since it actually...

I got an deal on the Threadripper that was too good to pass up. The previous owner had screwed up their water cooling setup and killed their GPU and motherboard. I swapped a working i7-8700 system with a GTX1080 and got a more or less intact system that became operable with a motherboard RMA...

I have a Threadripper 2950X (16c / 32t) with a 2080. There's room for improvement on that system but not very much.

I use Capture One. I don't really notice how long it takes to import or export but my files are substantially smaller than your R5's and I'm kind of on a best case scenario as far as hardware goes.

3dfx should have won. nVidia lost a huge lawsuit and responded by buying out 3dfx instead of paying up. I've always had a lot of antipathy over nVidia hardware because so, so, SO often I'd run across graphics cards that would die approximately 5 seconds after their cooling did, but at least...

The place I see the biggest difference is in using Resolve Studio. It helps with .RAW exports as well but I barely notice that. I just looked at what a new GTX 730 is going for and apparently the bin full of graphics cards I've pulled out of dead Dell and HP desktops over the years is now worth...

I buy my own laptop because the use is mixed enough between my salaried work and my side work that I don't want to make an issue of it. The person I work for will actually say yes to anything I ask for but that's not something I'd care to abuse.

My drives are both fine, but Lenovo no longer offers a T-series notebook with support for two internal drives or a WQHD display, so I just replaced it with another T470p. I don't want a 4k screen because of the hit to battery life, and most Thinkpads only have a 3 cell battery anyway. I hadn't...

I ran over my laptop bag this morning. Set it down behind my car while I adjusted the load of parts I was moving around. Forgot to pick it up. Thinkpad did not survive. It actually doesn't LOOK damaged aside from the screen being busted, but it's not turning on any more, either. Whoops.

I'm a regular Hangouts user. Hangouts is being phased out for most people, so I've installed Google Chat. Now I get notifications about IMs in three different applications, plus extra notifications on computers if I happen to have Chrome open, plus extra extra notifications if I have "Your...

I shot pictures in an informal capacity at a friend's wedding yesterday. I had my RP set up on a gimbal for video use and let my quasi-SO creep around with that (using a gimbal is an art and it turns out that the person with 10 years of ballet is just naturally better at that than I am) while I...

I've had a bad time getting meaningful service from Toshiba, but kind of like Fuji back in the day, it's also pretty easy to ignore their offerings. HGST is the standard to which all others are held, but probably not worth the 50% price premium. I'm perfectly happy with Seagate Enterprise...

I've been able to print 44"x54" (thanks, work!) and honestly it looks good from about 10 feet away. Usually, ungodly large prints aren't meant to be viewed up close. The people doing billboard photos only use something like 2MP images for the images that actually go up. Even at 20MP, I'm...

I'm buying a lot of drives, although my need for growth in capacity has finally stopped being a concern, at least in the next couple years. I have an in for buying retired drives from my local data center now as well, which might also help me out in that area.

I have a couple (literally 2) M1 Macs at work because the graphics/CAD/print production guy we work with uses them, one Macbook and one iMac. He's also been annoyed by the RAM limit on the iMac, although he's only actually had an issue with it a couple times and only while working on personal...

Don't sport-focused bodies usually have lower resolution sensors? It's REALLY hard to complain about 20MP in an R6. The other bodies I've used are 21MP and 24MP. I try to compose for the shot I want so I don't have to do much cropping, but that's a good habit for photography anyway.

Today's Google Doodle, Champion Island, is pretty amusing.

I generally recommend Moto phones to older people. Very often I've found the things that make smartphones confusing for people are Samsung-default or Verizon-default behaviors, like Samsung's bizarre insistence on using the Gallery app instead of Google Photos or Verizon's bullshit storing...

Because cheap Seagate SMR drives go on sale at Costco approximately every other week. 8TB drives for $130? Don't mind if I do. The SMR drives do behave properly in Storage Spaces arrays, and there the SSD buffers work wonders. I haven't had any issues with reliability. It might be a problem for...

I just ran across someone running Groupwise in 2021. I have neither seen it nor thought about it since maybe 1998, but apparently it still exists as a thing people can buy and use. That set me off Googling, and apparently IBM is RIGHT NOW going through massive pain as they transition to new...

X Com 2, including all its DLC, was released for Android today. It's only supported on about 20 devices, only a couple of them tablets. The install size is 17GB. The texture quality isn't as high as the PC version but it's advertised as a complete port. That's pretty damned impressive for a five...

Going along with the idea of paying for a subscription to use Windows, it sounds like they're rolling out cloud access to a personal Windows VM as part of Windows 11. Microsoft charges just a hair under $200 a month if you want to have a small Azure federated Active Directory, so it'll be...

Right now, there's a case of take what you can get, unless you're so well off you can do something like buy a name brand gaming desktop or engineering workstation solely to pull the GPU out of it. AMD, nVidia and even Intel are all making strides in improving their discrete GPUs, but we have...

I definitely played with recordsize and different configurations for my cache drives, but I haven't hit an perfect configuration. As thing stand, it's functional but clearly sub-optimal. I was under the impression that there's nothing about my workload that would be impacted with a SLOG; I'm...

I'm more impressed that I got an RMA on a CPU in the first place. I've always heard it's close to impossible to get one back.

Here's a fun, kind of cheery thing: I found a status-unknown Ryzen 7 1700 in its retail box a couple weeks ago when I cleaned out my car. I popped it on a couple different motherboards and it didn't boot (it had also spent probably two entire years in my trunk), but AMD accepted and replaced it...

I thought I'd be OK as well. I'm using SMR drives, but they behave well under Windows. The cache drives generally ameliorate the slow writes on Storage Spaces, but the slow browsing was something I wasn't prepared to see. I'll re-visit this once I get some more RAM though.

You should be able to get a decent Win98 compatible Socket 423 or 478 board if you want to make a switch to something just a touch more modern.

My ZFS setup currently has a 80TB raidz2 with a couple 500GB L2ARC drives but only 32GB RAM. I was thinking I'd be able to use 64GB (It's a Ryzen 3600 on an Asrock B450 motherboard) or at least 48GB but seemingly once I have my two 16GB DIMMs, it wants a matched set to go higher. The array is...

I have a system that has over 50 attached drives, but they're in smaller individual arrays precisely because I don't want to deal with the nightmare of doing some kind of crazy huge rebuild. I have a Mint system up and running with ZFS but I haven't gotten around to buying enough RAM see how...

Apparently a feature has been added to OpenZFS called dRAID, which uses a hot spare as a distributed target for parity data in order to greatly reduce time for rebuild operations. It looks to be much less read-intensive for repopulating a spare drive while maintaining normal RaidZ levels of...

I don't think performance will hold up, no. It's interesting that there's a budget-friendly device that's so competitive for specifications with those FE devices, though. Same AMOLED screen, same RAM etc. I suspect RAM is the biggest predictor for long-term usability in Android hardware, not...

Apparently the not-sold-in-the-USA Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 could be workable, if I were willing to accept a 700-series Snapdragon CPU and a certain amount of Chinese spyware. The price is right. They cost around EU$300. This is apparently the phone that cause Samsung to release the S2xFE edition...

Notes are too goddamned big. 7" devices used to be called Tablets. I don't even care about 5G; the closest LTE tower is barely 100m from where I live now, and my phone speed tests north of 30Mbit most of the time. Seems fast enough to me. Bixby is a sore point for sure, but so are the many...

Mobile devices are deliberately difficult to fully back up or clone. You can do it on a rooted device, but some devices and some carriers are hostile to that as well. I have a 5TB Google Workspace account almost entirely as a giant space for Google Photos. Google Photos really is a best of...

Black Widow is basically a James Bond movie. The action choreography is top notch, and if the plot is closer to a lesser Bond thriller than Winter Soldier, at least the new leads are every bit as memorable as the titular character. There's more "male gaze" in the camera work than I would've...

Two reasons: one is that I have a strong preference for being able to switch my phone's personality between content creation (mostly recording video) and media consumption. The second is that I'm absolutely terrified of losing data when a phone dies. I don't really want a half terabyte of data...

So I have to buy a new phone and I'm super annoyed about it. I have an LG G8. Specs-wise, it was very similar to the Samsung S10, only without Samsung's bullshit all over it. LG phones can be fixed without much effort and the flagships at least have great screens, headphone jacks and SD card...