Recent content by Mercutio

I remember having scads of desktop systems around a dozen years ago. I realized I needed to stop collecting them about around the time I realized even my low-end systems had 12 threads. I still have more systems sitting around than I use with any regularity, but I'm down to actively using only...

The Consumer Council of Norway posted this on Youtube yesterday and goddammitsofuckingmuch if it doesn't describe our entire world now.

A decapitation strike on a reactionary religious state is not going to end well for anyone. This is just going to turn into another Afghanistan. We'll have to occupy and then spend decades and trillions dealing with bombs and drone strikes that kill a few of our soldiers a week until we decide...

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.