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  1. Mercutio

    Sept. 19th is "Talk like a Pirate Day"

    Since I can be somewhat excited about two things on the same day... For those who haven't seen it, "Our Flag Means Death" is about what we can definitely say is a Foppish Dandy who takes over a pirate ship from the vicious and world-weary Blackbeard. Everyone on the ship is a complete idiot...
  2. Mercutio

    I do want to buy a used car

    A few years ago, I had my car in for a new set of tires. It was the last appointment of a work day for the tire place, but I had an appointment. All the bays were full when I got there, so a couple of the morons decided to go out in the parking lot and manually lift my car with jacks to do the...
  3. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    I just checked using the freebie, but Safer-Networking applications have been obnoxious on Windows 10 since it came out. I believe Windows Defender was even marking Anti-Beacon as unwanted software for a minute, probably because Anti-Beacon disables the telemetry stuff Microsoft insists on using.
  4. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    Do you have the paid version of Spybot or just the freebie? Firefox isn't being doing anything differently from normal on a freshly installed Windows 10 + Spybot (with Anti-beacon) for me. It did take 40 minutes for signature updates to download, though.
  5. Mercutio

    How Many Androids

    That's how I see it. I wind up getting and testing a lot of Android stuff; the people I work with all have poor taste and judgment in their mobile technology. The only place I can recall Google having specific device limits was Google Play Music, but that's been replaced by Youtube Music, which...
  6. Mercutio

    Windows 11

    If it works with Apple computers, your printer already works with Internet Printing Protocol and should be supported going forward. There are a small number of printers that use the Windows graphical layout engine (GDI) to to handle printing and my guess is that those will be the ones that are...
  7. Mercutio

    Windows 11

    Microsoft announced over the weekend that they're FINALLY moving to Internet Printing Protocol, the system that every single other OS uses to handle printing. Android, MacOS, BSD and Linux straight up use CUPS, which works with more or less everything. Since Macs use it, just about everything...
  8. Mercutio

    Posting files

    Most hosting providers have automated using Let's Encrypt Certificates, which are signed and available for free.
  9. Mercutio

    How Many Androids

    I see 33 on my account right now.
  10. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    Apparently, Samyang also makes a 35-150/2-2.8, albeit only for FE-mount. Seems like it might be a more broadly adopted option if that's the case.
  11. Mercutio

    Something Random

    The video game ruining assholes of that name do their video game ruining in that very place. I am in fact sure that this is the process by which Bethesda makes games, only very slowly and with some kind of extra metrics awarding the most bugs and/or child molestations. For what it's worth, I...
  12. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Bethesda has always been the Fallout-Ruining Bugfest Nightmare Reason to Hate All Gamepads and Consoles to me but Nadia has spent about 6% of her entire waking life in Bethesda games. She actually pointed out that she has even more time than her Xbox numbers since she also played on her dad's...
  13. Mercutio

    Something Random

    My partner played about 10 hours of Starfield on her Xbox whateverX and gave up on it. She is currently playing Diablo 4, having reserved this day in advance for 24 entire hours of Bethesda nonsense. She is a person with a total of over 8000 in game hours between Skyrim and Fallout 3, New Vegas...
  14. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Abit made very interesting boards, but it wasn't well known for reliability. ECS was, and in my mind still is, the poster child for vomit grade PC components (Yes, they were THAT bad). But ECS also kept making more and more boards after other OEMs moved on, and I remember a lot of shops wound up...
  15. Mercutio

    Windows 11

    Over the weekend, I had a NUC crap out in someone's office. I drove over and swapped it for an identical one and then went back about my day. Windows 11 was just fine and dandy, actually. No problems with Windows 11. These people have perpetual Office 2019 licenses on their systems, but they...
  16. Mercutio

    Posting files

    If you're just looking for an image host, Imgur.com is nice if you want to see metrics on what you're posting. If you don't care and just want a place to drop some random picture, there's prnt.sc.
  17. Mercutio

    Laptop time?

    I think this is pretty obvious but can't you just go in to power options and set "Do nothing when lid is closed and system is plugged in" under your power profile? You'd just have to open it to turn it on the first time. My stack of back to school laptops this year are Lenovo Ideapad 1 R3...
  18. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Yes, RAM support on AMD was definitely weird in that era. If I remember right, you could have compatibility issues over some chipsets supporting or not supporting double-density DDR, and that led to systems of wildly different capability. My experience with those particular AMD chipsets was...
  19. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Dear god I hated that SiS chipset. Via was always the better behaved option IMO.
  20. Mercutio

    Posting files

    I can set up a Wordpress for you in about 10 minutes. I suspect Handy could as well.
  21. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    I take my camera out with me all the time. I try to clear it beforehand, if I'm going someplace in public. Concerts are iffy but because my partner knows people, sometimes do-able. Nightclubs generally aren't a problem. I usually just take a 24-70 and RF 35mm and keep them in a padded...
  22. Mercutio

    I do want to buy a used car

    New lights definitely work as advertised. MUCH brighter. I'm not having people flash their brights at me, so they must not be TOO bright, but normal operating headlights are brighter than my old brights were. I'm going to say that's well worth the $60 I spent.
  23. Mercutio

    I do want to buy a used car

    I don't have access to a garage of my own and I've never thought of a car as anything but an annoying, costly tool, but after checking the wisdom of youtube, this is something I can definitely do myself. Or rather, I will do, if Amazon ever brings me my package.
  24. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    I'm mostly just thinking of it as an extremely flexible daily use lens. My walking around lens is almost always my 24-70/2.8. I know a lot of people love their 24-105/4 but IMO that doesn't feel like enough of a gain at the tele end to make up for the slower aperture. Going from 35 up past...
  25. Mercutio

    Home NAS

    Not at all. But the platform supports astonishing amounts of RAM and I/O. I could even turn off hyperthreading entirely and still have an extremely nice VM host. That system might be a nice overall upgrade for me.
  26. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    The Z7 was the nicest body Nikon had at the time. The Z6 was out by then, but IIRC it was seen as a step down. Nikon DOES have the Tamron 35-150/2-2.8 and that is definitely another dream lens. They make that lens for Sony as well, but I have higher hopes to see an RF native version. That might...
  27. Mercutio

    I do want to buy a used car

    I did some poking around and apparently weak headlights are a very common complaint with my car in particular. The housings do not look bad and they are clean, but my bulbs are original to my car. I'm going to try well-reviewed-by-other-Element-owners front and rear LEDs since my roommate is...
  28. Mercutio

    I do want to buy a used car

    So far as I can tell, my car just has a swappable front bulb that I can reach just by popping the hood. I've put in rear lights before but the fronts are original to the car and have never burned out or been broken. The lights look OK to me, but I'm usually not the person driving my car at 3:30AM.
  29. Mercutio

    I do want to buy a used car

    Since I'll be damned if I ask my father a single thing about carsanything: I drive around in a 2011 Honda Element. To my mind, it's a perfect car. Two doors. Plenty of room for stuff. The seats are at exactly waist height. Doesn't look like a van or a station wagon. My partner swears up and...
  30. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    My single experience with a Nikon z7 was a resounding meh, but I'm not interested in wildlife photography or lenses that look like antitank weapons, which seems to be the largest source of Nikon's appeal.
  31. Mercutio

    Home NAS

    This is somewhat relevant to my interests. Only 4x U.2s but it comes with a tri-mode HBA and supports 12x 3.5" drives. Skylake Xeons run anywhere from 6 to 28 hyperthreaded cores, are priced reasonably and registered DDR4 isn't crazy expensive any longer.
  32. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    That is indeed a very weird camera. 60MP BSI sensor but only one SD slot? I could see the 500g body as a bonus for the poor guys who wind up carrying multiple bodies to handle all the lenses they need but even then I'd want a second card on general principle. I've been shooting video at the...
  33. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    OpenCL is probably somewhat slower than using CUDA to do CUDA stuff.
  34. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    The other mainstream machine learning language is OpenCL, which has pretty pathetic support compared to CUDA. There's a dim possibility that Intel and/or AMD could leapfrog nVidia and CUDA, maybe with some new and hyper-specialized compute units or extra instructions, but given where nVidia's...
  35. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    It's hard to say because an awful lot of stuff wants to work with CUDA, which is an nVidia-only deal. It seems to be a generally better graphics card all around though.
  36. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    Apparently, the XT 7600 and 7700 take nVidia hardware to the shed at their respective price points. This is actually fantastic news. An XT 7700 with performance on par with an RTX 4070 that also has 16GB RAM AND costs $150 less is what we are all looking for for a next Gen update, I think.
  37. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    I couldn't find any serious performance advantage to 11 and there's really nothing in the UI that makes feel like switching anything I actually care about it, but I've been keeping up and trying new things just to see it change. It's fine, just like every other Windows.
  38. Mercutio

    Laptop time?

    I think I can get 6 hours off a charge on my X1E if I keep the screen turned down. I don't ever really let it sit idle in a bag though.
  39. Mercutio

    Windows 11

    It's my experience that Microsoft will continue to offer the upgrade every few weeks even on hardware that is compatible but using legacy boot. Legacy boot is, by definition, NOT compatible. I have a hard time calling a 7th gen Intel PC "old" (four years at the time Windows 11 was released)...
  40. Mercutio

    Windows 11

    LTO6 drives are COMPLETELY affordable as second hand or refurbished devices. When the drives are $150 or $200, the curve looks completely different, and the biggest issue for backup/archival needs is just a matter of mindshare. Even at relatively small 2.5TB/tape, it doesn't take long to make...
  41. Mercutio

    Windows 11

    Tape is by no means obsolete, but anyone using tape systems should be looking at buying at least two drives. Once you have a drive and you know that it works, the cost per terabyte is very low compared to any sort of fixed disk, and properly stored tape is the closest we're going to get a long...
  42. Mercutio

    New Windows DeCrapification Software

    PC DeCrapifier still works in both its 1.0 and 2.0 versions, so unless you're removing Windows Store apps, it's OK to give those a go.
  43. Mercutio

    Windows 11

    I have been alone on the LTO hill for a very long time. Welcome, fellow tape backup tribesman.
  44. Mercutio

    Laptop time?

    From experience, my biggest issue with the larger screen of the X1 Extreme / P1 is just surface area. I had to have my photography bag modified a bit to accept the slightly larger screen than the 14" stuff I'm used to. The P1 gen 6 was JUST released. We have a long wait to see a new one. If...
  45. Mercutio

    Merc's Useful Tools of the day

    Here's an extremely niche but useful tool: wineVDM. This is an executable wrapper that allows users to run 16-bit Windows software transparently on 64-bit Windows. I used it to get an ancient version of CorelDraw working. A lot of Windows software from the late 90s was 32 bit, but packaged...
  46. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    That lens is very much in the someday category.
  47. Mercutio

    Windows 11

    I've had enough weird things happen with scheduled tasks that these days I do everything with Intelliadmin Cron for Windows instead. Macrium isn't 100% free any longer, but older versions are and they still work just fine.
  48. Mercutio

    Laptop time?

    Threading will work correctly once you upgrade to Windows 11. There is no requirement that you have an account. I have two Windows 11 PCs that are not signed in to a Microsoft account. Both are still getting updates. Lenovo P1s weigh 4lbs, have 2x DIMM and either 2x m.2 (with an RTX 4050) or...
  49. Mercutio

    Laptop time?

    Windows 10 isn't fully supported by Intel Thread Director. You need to be running Windows 11 in order for the system to properly prioritize Pcores vs. Ecores. AMD is currently competitive in every aspect of laptop-grade CPUs and if you're dead set against Windows 11, you're probably better off...
  50. Mercutio

    Mini PC

    If I remember right, I bought it for a build I never made. I Just opened the box after after I got an RMA'd ITX board back and realized i finally had something to do with it. It's a nicer chassis but it does have less than ideal cable management, but that's going to happen in any ITX case with...
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