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Well it's probably for the best that I'm so far away Merc, apparently the allergies I was fighting with a day or so after landing was COVID. I must have picked it up at the airport, or so my Mom says. I feel like an idiot and a horse's ass. I got over it fine by Tuesday, but my Grandma is...

My mom did a fair bit of her growing up in Crystal Lake. I was born in Elk Grove myself, we lived in Itasca for a while, then Romeoville, then my dad and I moved down to Kentucky.

I still support several businesses with fax lines and machines. Fun fact, PCs were able to fax directly back in the day, that was half the point of most modems, but I don't recall seeing anyone ever use it. Such a shame, really. Speaking of landlines, I've been thinking about getting with our...

As proof that my life is a comedy, I've used up this year's allotment of good luck and found a Antec Plus 1080 case at a thrift shop. And it has a build in it! A funky dual-Athlon MP build using an MSI K7D Master-L. It has dual 2000+s and a gig of DDR RAM, and, get this, a Matrox Parhelia. For...

It was a heroic battle, but I got my oil changed, tires rotated, and rotors/pads replaced without major incident on Friday afternoon. I borrowed a floor jack from a coworker since my trolley jack apparently has erectile dysfunction (the hydraulic doesn't seal anymore), and even that couldn't...

Well, the Athlon XP build has kind of evolved into its final form: I found a reasonably-priced example of the Geode NX 1750, or in other words, a heavily, heavily binned Thoroughbred AXP nominally clocked at 1400MHz at 1.25v for a TDP of 14W. It came from Germany and arrived quite a bit before...

Just trying to get it high enough to put a stand under it, yeah, but something's wrong with my jack. I'm going to borrow one from a coworker over this weekend so I can get the work done. It's past time.

Nice! I meant to change out my rotors, brake pads and oil today, but either there's something wrong with my jack or it just can't lift high enough to move my car. I'm going to need to get another one before I can do the work.

Merc, I will say that I don't have the virulent hatred that you do. I think it's that I'm just too young to really remember these studios back when they weren't primarily motivated by being able to sell 2387432194873209847 copies on launch day simply because there wasn't that many people in the...

Yeah, Bethesda as we knew and loved them is dead.

I will say that ECS wasn't my first choice either but the particular model I'm using comes pretty well reviewed and it's promising that they thought it was of high enough quality to put their own name on it rather than release it under their PC Chips sub-brand. I'm aware that they did also do...

Yeah, without PAE (and without hacks, XP has no PAE due to driver issues) you can't get more than 3.25GB even disregarding chipset limitations. 2GB ought to be perfectly fine, as I'll explain below, but if it's not, I'll take 1GB and be happy with it. The kind of things these specs can run won't...

I don't know if I'm just cursed or what but the only PIII build I've ever managed to have stable was based on a i815EP b-step board out of Ukraine a few years back. Even that had some personality quirks. The only actually stable PIII machines I've had other than that were prebuilts. I say this...

Merc, are the lenses your headlights shine through cloudy or yellowing? That might rate a visit with a polishing kit and a buffer, some sealant afterward. That'll help immensely right there. I'm told there are kits to black out the reflective surfaces on the inside of your fixtures for LED...

No 'probably', definitely. OpenCL is treated as a back-path option only to be used if you absolutely must in most software if it supports it at all. If you're using any sort of professional compute solution, you're using CUDA or you're basically running in software. The only software I saw make...

It will only ever be available on nVidia hardware as it's an nVidia technology and I doubt they're willing to license it out, at least (maybe) until such time as nVidia goes completely mask-off and leaves the PC graphics card market behind for their greener AI pastures. nVidia benefits from...

The problem with letting a laptop sleep in a bag is that Microsoft forces some newer sleep standards than plain ol' S3, meaning the WiFi hardware will wake up every so often, connect, and update some things. If you've ever noticed your laptop was rather hot and used a ton of battery while it was...

There's also a point I realized a while back -- there are plenty of Sandy Bridge through Skylake machines that not only run fine, they're faster than the endorsed or even packed-in Pentium Silver craptops being sold by the boatload at your average Walmart. My cousin has one of those things...

I mean, honestly, I've been getting along fine for anything that isn't heavy gaming on this Broadwell machine. For someone who just reads the news, checks their email, watches the odd YouTube video, positively elderly hardware (that was perfectly well supported under Windows 10) suffices just...

I'll be alright with one to start with, and with the regularity I plan to use it, I don't expect disuse-based failure to be an issue. Once I have a workflow established, I'll be keeping eyes out for spares. They're not exactly uncommon.

Looks like the ride's over for folks shoving Windows 11 onto 'unsupported' configs. Microsoft can't seem to leave it at just not supporting those folks, they have to actively push new hardware. Supposedly this is actually unintended behavior. The cynical part of me asks "for how long" in response.

I used to recommend/use CCleaner by Piriform, but can no longer in good conscience do that as it acts more like malware than actual malware these days. If I've told it once, I've told it a dozen or more times to not run at startup but like a bad ex it keeps coming back. I'll still use old...

Well, the hope is that I'll never need to restore from them, but ~10 tapes should be enough to have three or four sets in rotation even without compression since I'm only using 4.5TB right now. I'll add more tapes as I need to, and plan to be compressing the data myself via 7-zip as I've noticed...

Which is why I'm on the lookout for LTO-6, as it's much cheaper (the drives are basically all used) and still sufficient for my needs. Floppies were the pinnacle of reliability in their era of main usage -- the eighties and early 90s. When they became cheaper, commodity products that were sold...

Slower doesn't matter for a backup format and while I'm skeptical of the 'less reliable' claim, I'd say it's offset by having many copies in many locations. Tapes are much cheaper than buying a subscription for online storage and murdering my cable data cap in one night making my first sync. I...

On the subject of backups, I'm trying to get my hands on an LTO6 drive for my NAS -- tapes are cheap, I can drop a backup off at my office or at my aunt and uncles for having an off-site storage, and they're reasonably high capacity without being eye-wateringly expensive like the newer LTO...

I knew of this as OTVDM a couple years back. It was neat, but for me, it'll never replace actually having the target platform handy. But you know me well enough by now to know that. :p Intelliadmin cron is interesting -- I barely make any use of cron myself even on a UNIX/Linux machine as I...

A friend gifted me their old MacBook Pro, specifically, the 12,1 Early-2015 13-inch model, since they upgraded to an M1 Pro. Kicking the tires on it, it's an 8/256 model with the "2.7GHz Core i5" meaning the 5257U. macOS Monterey is predictably unwieldy on it, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple...

I'm not a fan of Windows Hello without the fingerprint reader either, but I get along fine with a PIN. I believe, incidentally, from my experience working in the POS industry, that those USB fingerprint readers are intended for that sort of purpose -- POS software can typically use a fingerprint...

Well, this is for my homelab, so the decision's down to me -- I personally don't want a house-fire especially since it was lightning that killed my last switch. Even this isn't really budget for me, budget would be something I can easily replace if I need to. Surge protectors and UPSes don't...

Honestly, knowing that, I may be better served by just jumping all the way to 10Gb. Sure, I won't saturate it, but I'm not expecting to. I'd have been shocked if I'd managed to saturate 5. I only need, like, at most 3 ports on a switch to be full-speed in this instance, the rest can all be 1Gb...

BitFenix -- it's been a minute since I heard their name. I think before I had my N400 I had one of their Neos cases back when I actually wanted a vaguely flashy rig. I remember it being very cheap and nasty, thin pot metal everywhere, lots of sharp edges. That said I probably ought not be too...

What does the landscape for unmanaged 2.5/5Gb switches look like? I don't need the whole thing to be 5Gb across the board, just a couple of ports would be perfect.

I've got to be honest, I just like Ubiquiti because I manage them for work and even if they're not the bang-for-buck option I haven't had an issue with them that wasn't my own dumb fault. I have a 48-port gigabit switch I got from a decommissioned project from work, and I'd honestly trade half...

Are you kidding me? Issues with durability and stability are considered features now, by the manufacturer at least. Anything to get you to trade something in that otherwise works perfectly well. My guess is that if the chemical formula's changed at all, it's to make it even cheaper so it falls...

Ah, yes. The classic move of countering a design flaw by adding another delicate electronic system that can break and cost thousands to repair. Then again, the people buying vehicles with leather seats typically don't need to worry about repair bills.

I'll keep my RAV4 thanks. EV adoption down here is... not great, I think the only supercharger station I've come across is the Bucee's in Foley off of I-10. The people I see driving Teslas and Ioniqs and such are the bougie types that have the chargers at home and never go further than a hundred...

Is the GPIO pinout RPi compatible? If not, what's stopping them? Does the RPi foundation or whoever have a patent on that pinout? That's my biggest question. As huge as the support has been for the Pi, anything x86_64 immediately has a huge leg up in compatibility. Do you mind giving a...

I took the opportunity at the start of the month to snag a 5700X for my main desktop so I could kick the 5500 downstairs and give my server a competent memory controller that could actually run four dual-rank DIMMs at full-speed. I should note that I wasn't at all upset or unsatisfied with the...

These are little NUC boxes that won't take a card and every USB one I tried didn't work for similar reasons. I just ended up installing 10 Pro and calling that good enough, and put my boss on notice that we'll want to price out and move them to proper (if lower-spec, their needs aren't crazy)...

The problem with that procedure, Merc, is that Hyper-V Server 2019, in its quest to eliminate bloat and tools that make it easy to admin -- because why would you want an easily-administrated hypervisor for free -- doesn't include Device Manager, you have to use pnputil to install INFs. And...

Merc I agree, I loved Skyrim when it came out but as time wore on and my tastes matured (ie I beat Morrowind and Baldur's Gate for the first time) I just can't stand how shallow it is without mods. I have an 80+ strong modlist that I need to even launch the game much less play it. Fallout NV was...

Well, that'd be it then -- I don't think I've ever taken public transport with my mom in my entire life. She drives absolutely everywhere.

Well, as it happens, I don't travel for fun usually. I have family in the Huntley/Elgin area and my mom's always picked me up at Midway. She doesn't like O'Hare for some reason.

Well, no, the Surface won't have enough ports. The Pro 7+ had one USB-C and one USB3 type A with a headphone jack and magnetic charge port. The 9s have dual USB-C and I can't quite remember but I think they drop the headphone jack. It's not really designed for someone like you who actually uses...

Between only the two, I've been more impressed by the build quality of the Surfaces, and I've had both in hand, although the Yoga wasn't particularly recent. I'm actually waiting on backorder for a Pro 9 through work right now -- the only thing I'll really be missing over my current laptop is...

Finally plunked money down on my trip to Chicago in October. Supposedly arriving at MDW around quarter after 7pm on the 5th, coming back the 15th. I used a coupon code and got both ways and a checked bag each way for ~180 bucks, which isn't bad at all. I could probably have done it maybe even a...

So, with the 5600X3D being a wet fart, I had to look elsewhere for my plan to upgrade my main machine so I could kick the 5500 downstairs to give my server a competent memory controller. Newegg has 5700X's for, like, 170 bucks. I think with tax and shipping I paid 190. That'll do. I also...

Oh, the things I got away with as a kid. And my parents were actually pretty savvy! I just happened to be savvier. But man, if they'd known about logging DNS requests, I'd have been a goner. :whistle: Yeah, honestly, if I end up in a situation where I'm somehow raising a kid, I'd implement the...

Lightning storm came through today and killed some pretty key equipment for one of our clients today. All of it was at minimum surge protected and usually on a UPS. Not a fun day. I managed to cobble something together that'll last them until the RMA units arrive, but when we replace these guys...