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Well this is certainly a game changer for Desktop admins.

The Moto G is an excellent device, and I've used devices with screens smaller than 4" to RDP. If you're desperate enough, it's surprising how usable it'll seem. ;)

In context of "chromecast" and "Roku stick", it should be clear that I'm referring to the FireTV Stick.

They seem to have become increasingly uncommon, actually. In the last couple years, I noticed that the 36"/37" size has largely vanished and almost all the sub-40" screens seem to have settled at 720p. I'm not saying they're impossible to find, but I think there were more options a few years ago.

Marvel announced Black Panther, Inhumans and Captain (Ms.) Marvel movies today.

Down side to pretty much any TV less than 40" is that it will almost certainly be 720p. 24" or 32" 1080p TVs are hard to come by. Maybe you can beg and plead for something like this instead.

From what I've read, it's the same BS of being mandatory online rights management, just like Steam: "Origin-enabled games are those games which have Origin as a mandatory requirement regardless of where the game is purchased from. These games are listed as follows:..." And of course Dragon Age...

The Kindle device is again faster and has more RAM than the Chromecast and Roku stick. Assuming that it's the same release of FireOS, it'll also be dead simple to load Kodi/XBMC and Firefox on one. I ordered got a Matchstick a couple weeks ago. I don't really need one of these, but the price is...

I think I'd be arguing to make the more modest DDR3/Slightly fewer cores Dev machine the eventual standby server so that some future machine could be the expandable production box. It's OK to have one big server if that's all the resources you have, as long as contingencies have been made and...

I'd switch the Samsung 830 for something else. Maybe a Kingston or Crucial drive. It'll save $25 and you won't have to deal with the possibility that Samsung will lose your drive if you ever have to ship it back to them. Jerks.

Is Origin indivisible from games like Steam or is it just some kind of download service?

Greg, you do realize that most of the CPUs at the top of that list are at least six years old, right?

It's ancient history now but It was an Proliant DL350, only about 10 months old at the time. HP kept sending me FlexATX power supplies instead of a rackmount redundant one. I chalked it up to HP's normal level of competence and resolved to just stick with Intel.

The thing I heard about Beyond Earth is that it's relatively lacking in the distinct voices among the faction leaders and the atmospheric touches that were present in Alpha Centauri. I had been hoping to see SMAC2 and it sounds like we got yet another Civilization game with some upgraded art...

My eyes are bad enough that the surgery wouldn't be sufficiently helpful. I would still have to wear glasses. If I did anything, I'd probably have a bunch of extra skin cut off my midsection.

There was/is an Amazon App Store app for Android. Updates to the regular Amazon App for Android have added the functionality of its App Store to the app that's most often used for Shopping; the App Store for Android is functionally obsolete now.

That the standard Amazon (store) app for Android can now download and install apps on its own. We don't need the App Store app now.

My new classroom machines are i3-4130s on Gigabyte GA-H81N motherboards, 4GB RAM, with 240GB Crucial M500 mSATA drives, sitting in Antec ISK300-150 enclosures. The only down side is that the motherboard I chose doesn't have a USB3 header, so I have to buy a $6 adapter for the front USB port...

For as little work as is involved in swapping a standard PSU, especially in an environment like a server room where clean power and a good UPS will be available, it's a risk I'd be willing to tolerate. Last time I had half a redundant PSU blow, it took three weeks to get a warranty replacement...

In that scenario, I'd be tempted to look at some kind of workstation board and use off the shelf parts rather than rolling with the SuperMicro. If you set your sights on an older chipset with DDR3, you could effectively buy twice as much RAM or make some needed changes to the storage configuration.

With no compelling reason to consider the GPU, I'd suggest a modern i3. I'll admit that I have a prejudice against AMD these days that stems from the frequency with which I wind up replacing motherboards for one platform versus the other. For a home system where modest gaming might be on the...

I had good results at 3Mbit/720p using it as a Plex client. Pushing up from that gave me occasional stuttering jumps. You'll get better results for around the same price with a Chromecast, though those aren't as friendly to tinkering.

In the MCU, it's vibranium rather than adamantium (the word is X-Men IP, so it's for Fox to use). In the movies, Ultron is a drone controller invented by Hank Pym in the 60s. Stark tinkers with it and a new villain is born. A lot of the footage we saw is of Johannesburg and Andy Serkis is in...

Plex makes a lot more sense if you have houseguests, kids or travel. I don't use my server that much myself either, but I'm glad it's running if only so that whomever is staying in my spare bedroom can happily enjoy whatever they want without occupying my living room.

The one thing I can say is that absolutely no one can make the Startech HDM I capture card work.

The Surface product line actually has a locked bootloader. You couldn't dual boot anything on one even if you wanted to.

Plex Media Server is really more for organizing and presenting local media than for streaming. There are "channels" where it can act as a front-end for specific online content like Youtube and Netflix, though client support for those is considered optional and may not be implemented on every...

Actually, is anyone else actually using Plex Media Server yet?

So... new Avengers 2 Trailer. Spader's voiceover at the end is a pretty big payoff. Also, this is Air New Zealand's new safety video. Featuring Eliza Wood, Sylvester (Radagast) McCoy, Peter Jackson and a surprising number of Orcs.

That device accidentally strips HDCP all on its own. Actually, a lot of HDMI splitters just happen to do that. You can google "HDMI stripper" to find other, cheaper ones, but the Monoprice device is one I know specifically to work. A lot of people who do console gameplay recordings for Youtube...

You need a this thing.

Unsupported App Installer for Plex Media Server. Adds access to questionably legal streaming services, adult metadata scrapers and content streaming, perhaps most importantly, Google Play Music and Spotify from within Plex clients.

The lycanthropy should only be temporary. You're going to get some of that when you start a new medication.

Hyper V was in Windows 8 as well. Now let's have an argument about how useful it is to have to use RDP to have a fully functional guest OS, 'cause having to do everything through the Hyper-V Connection Manager blows goats.

Gaffgun is a literal, rather than software, tool. I don't know if anyone needs one but it's actually just cool to watch.

We don't really need any sort of software monoculture. We need different web browsers, programming languages, E-mail clients and operating systems. I'm glad that the option to use "something else" exists, even for the technology where I'd never use that other option myself, just because there...

Compare a modest i3-4360 to an i7 920. Progress has definitely been made, even if the subjective experience isn't that different most of the time. I'm probably going to pull the trigger on a Haswell-E desktop soon. Broadwell is supposedly coming any day now, but it's a mobile-only design that...

Like it or not, we all have to deal with Windows. Even the guys who actually do get to spend their days on *nix or OSX systems still encounter Windows with some regularity. It makes good sense for Windows to help make Windows the best OS that it can be; it really is the point of commonality for...

At least you can look forward to bad skin and hair in some fantastic new places. It's just like being a teenager.

What's the justification for the ifruit that costs $200 more than the Samsung equivalent? Magical Apple fairies aren't sprinkling value-adding moon dust on them, you know. Also, here's the thing about the 8.9" form factor: You get the same number of pixels as a 10" tablet in a weight that's...

One of my students was whining about it yesterday, but if you're enough of a techie to understand why that hack is so useful and how great having RDP access is, you also probably could guess that wasn't going to be a reliable tool. The funny thing is that Microsoft probably closed the loophole...

The big thing about the 7" Nexus is that it was powerful and inexpensive. I heard that some of them had hardware issues, but overall those guys drove a lot of people in to a pretty nice device for the money. I suppose there wasn't a reason to refresh that model when there are also 6" and 9"...

It's good to see the Bartender again. This place has been dry for many long months. It's like he retired or something.

The rumors were pretty much true. 4:3 display, quad-core 2.3GHz CPU, 2GB RAM, no sign of a card slot. I'd say it's a sideways step from a Fire HDX. It's 50g heavier and has a 4:3 screen, and there's no 64GB storage option. From a hardware standpoint, that's a little disappointing.

Android 5 - "Lollipop" - was released today. Phones are finally getting user accounts and guest access and there's supposed to be notification prioritization in addition to the usual BS about improved performance and battery life. I'm concerned about is the degree to which 5.0 will cripple...

Google announced Nexus Player today, which has features very similar to the FireTV, right down to Voice Search and bluetooth gamepad support, but it's running on a quad core Atom with 1GB RAM and a PowerVR GPU. One thing I don't see is an ethernet port, but it does 802.11ac.

Microsoft's official Windows Features Suggestion Forum. If you sign in, you get 20 "points" to spread out among suggestions or you can make your own.

This is technically safe for primetime TV but may not be safe for work and you should watch it anyway because it will change your life unless you are an uncultured prude.

It looks like your recovered the Windows recovery partition, which is probably just about completely useless. There's almost certainly a recovery path from Symantec that your corporate IT staff would know or be able to get a support ticket to find out. If somebody made the decision to deploy...

The nice thing about Play Books is that, like Play Music, you can upload a library of content you already have. Down side is that Play Books may not be the simplest cross platform choice (there's no ModernUI or Windows Phone or iOS version - those users can work through the web if that's...