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I was able to get a bunch of 15.6" Vivobooks with Ryzen AI 5 330s, 500GB SSDs and 16GB RAM last week for $400. They're not as well constructed as typical Asus laptops, but for $20 more than my Ideapad 1s, that was a crazy good deal. I sold them all within a day and now that same model is $600.

I'm looking at a direct trade with Samsung; maybe other carriers have different offerings, but not the weird little one I'm using. I'll need to check retailer trade-ins. Maybe Best Buy will give me more for the phone than Samsung will, but its discounts are usually tied to big carriers...

In the final accounting, as much as it completely sucks, I can't justify the cost for an S26+. In past years, the preorder bonus was a $100 coupon and a storage upgrade. This year, the preorder bonus is a $30 coupon AND a vastly lower valuation on my trade-in, with no storage upgrade at all. I'd...

It's pretty easy to get heavily discounted rate at Trump Tower Chicago. I've been known to use rooms there for affordable (sub-$100) photo shoots . Normally I hate working in hotel rooms but it's a very tall building with great views on every side, so sometimes it works for me. Eventually, the...

Chicago named its newest Snowplow Abolish ICE.

If you were at all worried if the RAM crisis is a real thing or not, I just traded a G. Skill 2x32GB DDR5-6400 kit that I think I paid about $150 for a year ago for an Asus TUF RTX5070 Ti.

Today in useful things for Windows Admins to know, here's the recipe for putting the Windows Recovery partition at the beginning of your drive. This is super helpful if you are maintaining disk images or Windows virtual machines. This is assuming there's only one drive in the system and you're...

Greg, do please go be an admitted racist someplace else.

I will leave this here without additional comment. 😔

The Ideapad 1 systems I've been buying and reselling by the dozen for the last couple of years are now being sold with 4GB (soldered!) RAM and 128GB SSDs for the ~$300 SKU, while the previous $319 SKU with 8GB/256GB is currently selling for $380. Yikes.

My musical taste can largely be described as "things wealthy Europeans liked 120 years ago", but I do enjoy a certain amount of jazz, definitely including the previously mentioned Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson. William Grant Still is the only African American composer of Classical music I can...

The great Satan has sold every drive it was going to make this year.

I am really impressed with how far I've been able to push Wazuh as a fully cross platform SIEM. Built in Compliance reporting and everything. Goddamn.

"This page does not exist." I can't wait until that applies to the rest of Twitter as well.

Svideo output is a substantial improvement on Composite even on VHS-C sources. VHS-C is still going to look like ass to us, spoiled as we are by 1080p videos, but someone who maybe only watched their old home movies on the same crappy 2 head VCR everyone else had will be surprised that it can be...

I did it with TDARR, where you can specify templates that give the encoder something to do. My rules basically look at the source video to decide if it's progressive scan (i.e. analog source) or not and then upscale based on that. TDARR is interesting in and of itself because it just sends out...

This is EXTREMELY out of left field, but it's fascinating to me, a long form interview with minimalist composer Steve Reich, about his well known (for people who like late 20th century classical music, anyway) piece Different Trains. It's from a podcast called Song Exploder, which most often...

She likes to climb and she's made herself a little nest on top of my fridge. RIP my Flour Jar. She's also claimed my ENTIRE couch. The other three cats are holding the line at keeping her out of my bedroom though. She doesn't sit still very much, so I've had a hell of a time getting a decent...

An additional kitty has entered my life. I found her out by the dumpster at my office, snuggling a bigger, lifeless cat. She squeaked, but didn't even try to move. She was covered in blood and at first I was afraid she was also mortally injured, but I think she just didn't know what else to do...

This link has some commentary on DOJ Attorney Julia Le's testimony before Judge Jerry Blackwell on the ongoing debacle in Minneapolis. Everyone above Le and in the employ of ICE is in the process of resigning their posts, so this VERY junior attorney who was only given credentials to see...

The Sxy+ models generally make sense as premium devices. They typically have the RAM and storage options the Ultra models do, but lack the stylus, better cameras and slightly larger batteries. I'm looking forward to the S26+ so I can go back to a smaller phone. I'm sincerely hoping that...

uBlock Origin on Firefox and Firefox-derived Browsers, uBlock Lite on Chromium-derived Browsers (Edge, Vivaldi, Chrome, Opera et al). I also install SponsorBlock on every browser. If I go above and beyond that, it's probably because I'm dealing with someone is proof that nature can build a...

Another tip for stupid selfhosting tricks: TDARR is a tool for intelligently batch re-encoding video data, but it's mostly just a wrapper for ffmpeg. If you have a bunch of old-ass camcorder or DV video for whatever reason, it's fairly trivial to set up a JSON template to use neural upscaling...

Steam Headless is a Docker Image preconfigured to support nVidia (or not-nVidia, but nVidia is the one people struggle with) GPUs and Moonlight for game streaming. The idea is that it will interact with locally installed games under /mnt/games, a path it will share with the host system and...

Linux from the end user side isn't genuinely too different from Windows or MacOS. There are a couple small exceptions, one being that there really aren't official clients for cloud storage and another being locked out of full-fat desktop MS Office. A variety of third party clients for storage...

Ars Technical posted this article about nVidia's more than 10 year and still ongoing support for the Shield set top box.

Menace is coming out next week on all the storefronts. I like my turn based strategy games, my Battletech and various forms of X-Com. Menace is a marines in space kind of deal with squads instead of individual units and it's made by people who very clearly love the same kind of game I do. It's...

In other news that should have people concerned, the Administration arrested several journalists who covered ICE Raids on a Minneapolis Church last week; it also had the FBI raid the Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney's office, looking for evidence of election tampering from the 2020...

I find it extremely hard to understand why you care more about property rights than human rights. Even if he actually managed to physically damage a vehicle, that in no way rises to the level of state-sanctioned violence in response. I'm not even talking about American law here. Agents of the...

The administration has not released even the names of agents involved in the shooting to the public, nor to law enforcement organizations in Minnesota. Supremacy clause or no, there are a number of ICE Agents who should at the very least be subject to city and state level legal processes. Is...

What my customer actually noticed was "funny characters" and partial nonsense, which they assumed were data corruption, showing up in a daily report. I was terrified I had bad RAM in a server until my customer let me know that one of his employees had a bunch of the same weird characters and...

You don't see any possible justification for being physically demonstrative over the actions of Immigration Enforcement? None at all? If he was acting in an unacceptable fashion in the moment, why was he not detained in that moment? That's complete and utter bullshit and you know it. Cops turn...

One of my customers had an issue that it took me a couple days to find and deal with. They had a bunch of weird, invalid text in a database they're using, starting a couple weeks ago. Turned out that one of their employees has turned on an AI translation feature in Edge, such that it was taking...

I'm specifically looking at it as a way to get a simplified ISO to turn off the most egregious BS. Like... Go ahead and kill Recall, Onedrive, Microsoft account on OOBE, restore the classic context menu and turn on show file extensions. Those things are the bare minimum I am going to do on every...

Today in nifty things for people, I bring you Winhance. irm https://get.winhance.net | iex What does it do? It does a lot of the same things as chocolatey and the Chris Titus Tool, in that it has the ability to install third party software and toggle Windows default software and settings...

I did finally complete a Steam account setup. Something else I found out is that Adults who are members of the same Steam Family can also share each other's game libraries. I was assuming it was a one-way thing with the person making the invitation being the one sharing the games, but since my...

Wherever they're on sale. They go on sale regularly at Best Buy and Amazon.

It might be making a boot optimization pass. Either that or you got some updates that installed silently and it did more than usual back-end work during your next startup. With regard to low cost, reasonably powerful systems, I can't recall seeing mini PCs with Ryzen 3550H CPUs before, but...

You can make something like a Ryzen 5600G/16GB/2TB or a Ryzen 9600X (or 7700X, maybe)/16GB/1TB work for around $800, if you can accept the iGPU in either product. In my mind either one of those builds should be more like $550 or $600, but cheap RAM just can't be had. I don't mind putting a...

Someone was in mortal danger. Pretti was attempting to help a person having a seizure at the time he was murdered. He was not in that moment threatening anyone. His firearm was not drawn nor did he make any attempt to draw it in the moments leading up to his murder. I need to be very clear about...

I have a couple bus-powered Arc A310s sitting around. They're godly for video editing and encoding, but if you don't have working Rebar, they're not going to work properly for you either. I do know Gigabyte had Resizable Bar support on its Z77 boards; I've tried Arc cards on systems that old...

That man was murdered. No one's life was endangered by Pretti's actions; how dare he try to use his nursing skills to help someone in physical distress. I'm aware you're the most gun-nutty of gun nuts, but Pretti was in lawful possession of a firearm, something that you should fully support...

What a revolting development, actually. The 5700XT was my secret weapon for getting something decent in a PC. I was getting them for $75 and now they've more than doubled in price. Even the formerly maligned Vega64s are around that price now. The A750/A770s can still be had for reasonable...

How can you seriously ask a question like that? Sadly, HDD prices are shooting through the roof right now as well, so I do think that the only deals to be had at the moment are on the external drives that you can shuck and install internally. They're perfectly normal SATA drives for all...

RAM prices are up 400% (literally, the RAM kit in my workstation was $350 when I bought it and now it's over $1700). NVMe for anything but the DRAM-less budget segment is similarly high. I mentioned this a few weeks ago, but I was able to buy three 4TB drives back in August for what one costs...

Contemporary Android devices have a setting to reboot on a schedule. Weekly reboots seem reasonable to me.

You might try Blackplayer, but if you're having problems playing music from your SD card, it's possible the issue is the card you're using rather than an issue with the application you're playing with.

You can make incompatible CPUs run 11, but unless you know the secret sauce, they can't be upgraded past whatever version is initially installed. As previously mentioned, an N150 had more or less the same computing power as an i7 7700. It also has better integrated graphics. At this point...

So you're looking to buy a PC that was born incompatible to run Windows 11? Why?