Recent content by Mercutio

I've used Flyby11 to upgrade Windows 10 on more than 30 PCs so far this week. Most of them were laptops belonging to social workers or retirees from my community center. Have we bitched about how stupid Windows 11 hardware requirements are recently? Almost everything people brought me had either...

The last couple on-premises storage devices I've bought were Ugreen devices. At this point I might go with an Aoostar system instead. As long as the hardware basically works and I can put Truenas on it, I don't particularly care.

Synology just announced that they're no longer going to force users to buy special Synology drives starting with rollout of the next release of their custom OS. I don't actually have any devices new enough to be impacted by that, but at least I no longer have to toss it from consideration...

I love how Republicans control every branch of Federal Government but it's somehow the fault of Democrats that they can't pass a budget. The ICE nazi parade from Trump's occupation of Chicago showed up in lily-white Valparaiso, Indiana over the weekend. They did NOT go to either Hammond or East...

You can also set all the regional options in an autounattend.xml, which is the only way to make Windows 11 acceptable in the first place.

Windows 11 25H2 is available for download now. Most everything that makes it different form 24H2 only happens for systems that meet the branding requirements for CoPilot but apparently they HAVE improved the automated system recovery if you manually turn the setting on.

Xbox Pass prices increased 50% yesterday, on top of having an extra $100 premium heaped on all the new current-gen consoles. They did add Ubisoft titles and Fortnite Battle Pass to the now-$30/month tier and that does at least have value for the Fortnite-playing console peasant in my life, but...

We don't really talk about set top boxes anywhere, but Amazon announced yesterday that its new, low-end FireTV devices won't be running Android/FireOS but rather Vega, an Amazon creation that is explicitly not an open system. Further, the new devices will offer less RAM for what I'm assuming...

The album art collection was definitely amusing. I have the cover art embedded in each music file and present in containing directories and it STILL went out and found thousands of vintage photos or paintings of composers or pictures of concert halls.

Saw this in the Register. We all probably have a story like this.

It turns out that Jellyfin actually DOES just natively handle multichannel audio-only files, so in that one extremely niche way, it is definitely better than Plex. Just like Plex, it still doesn't respect my well-organized and properly tagged music collection with embedded album art, but at...

My phone got Android 16 overnight. I don't see a whole lot that's different from Android 15, but I also don't use any software provided by Samsung on my Samsung phone other than the camera app. So far the only big difference I've seen is in the Quick Share menu. There's also a new revision of...

I just found out about Lutris. Lutris connects to basically every game service (Steam, Gog, EA, Epic et al) just like Playnite or Heroic Launcher but of greatest interest to me, it has tools and scripts for working with local Windows game installation files instead of downloads via storefronts...

I have an aunt who tells me her ipad is broken every time she sees me. She's not dumb, but I do think the ipad actively does a lot to prevent her from understanding what she's doing. Anyway, there is a maximum number of open tabs in Safari and once her device hits that number it's "broken." The...

I can't believe I'm shucking external drives again, but I already ran out of space on the little 4 bay N150 NAS box I have running Plex. 48TB was not enough TBs. I was able to get 4x 26TB external drives for $1200 by buying Seagate external drives that are by all indication the same damn thing...