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For my purposes it's fine. It can take 12MP images, which is plenty for what I do. And the macro feature works great. Here I zoomed in on a quarter: Here's another of one of my circuit boards: I can easily resolve details to about 0.001" (i.e. the wider track is 0.025" for comparison...

I just checked the camera (Panasonic DMC-ZS7) I'm using now out of curiosity. I couldn't even find an option for RAW. Anyway, there's a very practical reason people save as JPGs. Before we had multi-gigabyte cards, you might get a few hundred JPGs on your card, but maybe only a dozen or two RAW...

I do but no central HVAC. The house was built in 1952.

Buildings have had central heat for probably well over a century. Heat is easier than A/C. No ductwork, just pipes and radiators. Central A/C started being a thing in office buildings first. Even now, a lot of relatively new residential buildings don't have it. You have cutouts in the wall for...

Yes, that's the model NYC is starting to install in housing projects. Believe or not some of the buildings were still using coal furnaces for winter heating.

Here in the typical hot, humid NYC summers they would be completely useless. The humidity is often already 90%. Can't add much more moisture to it. Me neither. So far with the much improved attic insulation I've gotten just about halfway into June without needing the A/C. There were only a few...

Nope. Never edited video before. I'm thinking it might be something interesting to do in the near future.

Is Pinnacle Studio worthwhile for editing videos? Right now I have nothing. Might be worth it getting the bundle just for that alone.

Can't be any worse than the Deathsquitos in my yard right now. I get swarmed every time I go back there.

I'm into simulators. Mostly train simulators, but flight simulators can be fun also.

I wouldn't expect it to be readable in 2,000 years. It would simply be an artifact of the times, like a spear tip is. In other news from 4,000 AD, Elon Musk is sending probes into intergalactic space. Yes, the research he funded in the 21st century to extend life was successful, and he's still...

Ironically their CDs are starting to become collector's items: https://www.ebay.com/itm/304346527642 I actually find this disturbing on a number of levels. People used to throw these things in the microwave for fun. If they're starting to get rare enough to be worth anything, then that means...

Every cat I've ever had would definitely be chasing that.

I haven't bought gifts for anyone in ages. Both my siblings fall into the category Merc describes. My mother wasn't herself for the last decade of her life, so gifts would have been pointless. She would have lost them or threw them in a closet. The only gift I've given for like the last ten...

Also, NPUs might be able to supplement an iGPU. My understanding is they're designed for massively parallel calculations similar to a GPU, but for less than 64-bit or 32-bit math. Any graphics calculations that don't need 32-bit precision could probably take advantage of an NPU.

Tell the repairman about RS-24. It's a drop-in replacement for R-12, which is getting ever harder to find, and more expensive, as they haven't made it in many years.

My mother and sister both had the carpal tunnel release operation. It's not a permanent solution for everyone. Often, it comes back after a while, although maybe not as severely. I haven't had medical insurance since I was kicked off my parent's plan in college, so I haven't even had the...

I've had it badly since my late 20s, to the point I was no longer able to work full-time from that point on. It runs in the family. My mother had it, my sister has it. I think my maternal grandmother may have had it also.

I don't think so. One of two things will happen, maybe both. One, it will act as a Faraday cage, which is almost a certainty. Two, it'll start heating up when absorbing the output from the wireless charger, similar to an induction stove. As for carbon, consider they use it on bikes. By...

Which thread? I'd gladly post in it instead of here but I don't know which thread you're talking about.

They should wait forever. Tariffs just hurt the common person. Lots of these products subject to tariffs are mostly made in China and won't be made in the US in the foreseeable future. The tariffs on EVs especially irk me. I want BYD to flood the US market with sub-$10K EVs to light a fire under...

I wish he had this judge when sentencing time comes: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/b95d9252-7879-4c65-90a7-f564ed00fa5a

Sadly, people get the leaders they deserve. I saw firsthand during covid how ignorant and selfish a large part of the population is. This is Trump's base. He has the kind of momentum he does because these people want to be him. They want to get their way regardless of how it hurts others. We saw...

For a while after I switched to Verizon I was only getting ~100Mbps speeds, but around 400 to 500 Mbps when using devices with wifi. I didn't know why since I had connected the router to the 1Gb Ethernet port on my PC. I forgot exactly what I did, but it may have been a setting to get the port...

I hear you. Honestly, I wouldn't want to put a bunch of work or money into a place I don't own, either. I was suggesting your landlady pay for it, given it would make the place more attractive, as well as save energy. Where you are you obviously don't have to worry about heating given the...

I think it depends on what you get. The very fast SSDs get hot. Heat is the enemy of all electronics. For me even the slowest SSD is worlds faster than any HDD. The thing here is HDDs are one bump away from data loss. Maybe I accidentally bump into my PC case. Now I'm looking at replacing the...

Honestly, even new HDDs give me pause these days. The bit density has gotten way too high. If any one part of the drive fails, you lose data. I trust stored bits on a chip, instead of bits of rust spinning at thousands of times per minute, a lot more. The last HDD I purchased was a 2TB, 5400 RPM...

I don't know if any of these helps, but an ongoing project I'm doing is to get the house better insulated. For now, I did the following: 1) Installed cellular shades (the double-cell ones) in my bedroom and the kitchen. I'll probably eventually get them for all the windows. Windows are by far...

Totally agree, Doug. The high prices don't just hurt people looking to buy. They hurt those like me who might face buying out their siblings if they want to stay in their parent's house. My parents bought the house for $52K in 1978. Had prices kept up with the CPI, it would be worth about $250K...

Home price inflation is a problem for almost everyone. As I mentioned a while back, if my siblings insist on getting their share of the market price of the house, I'm out on the streets. Basically, I need $600K or more live on for the rest of my life. I might end up with $275K from my third of...

Regarding radiators, if you want to go cheap pull the evaporator out of an old A/C someone is discarding (after they have the refrigerant removed, which is usually required before putting it out by the curb), get some car radiator fans, and you're in business. With the fans running at a fairly...

That's 5 to 10 watts less than my entire system, less the monitors, pulls from the wall socket for most of my use. Graphics or computational intensive stuff can get me around 125 watts, but that's relatively rare.

If MediaTk/Nvidia can come out with an APU which also has some fast, dedicated VRAM that would be a winning combo. A big bottleneck for iGPUs is the fact they use system RAM, not dedicated, much faster VRAM. Even a relatively small amount (i.e. a few hundred MB) of VRAM in the same package as...

Just wondering if it would be remotely possible to install Win 7 on a modern system with, say, a Ryzen 8000G?

Yes, noise and the cost of electricity. Plus in summers it's that much more heat the A/C needs to deal with. With my intermittent but all day long use patterns, my PC is on 24/7. The monitors shut off after 10 minutes. At ~45W while idling, that's OK. It comes to only ~30 kW-hr/month. Something...

Well, that explains a lot. Honestly, when I first tried running Open Rails on my laptop, I crossed my fingers that the performance would at least match that on my desktop. When I saw it was probably 2x better, I was pleasantly surprised. I didn't know Intel closed the gap with AMD this much...

Same here. I'm going by how often you would actually need that extra performance. Take my use case. About the only thing I currently do which taxes my iGPU is play Open Rails. Even then, 90% of the time I'm getting 40 to 60+ FPS, with 30s most of the rest of the time. Maybe a few percent of the...

Isn't quite a bit of power used just sending data to and from a discrete GPU? When everything is on one chip data transfer is a lot more efficient. It's easily possible that a 65 to 105 W APU can come close to the performance of a 65W CPU and ~100W graphics card as a result. Even if the discrete...

I'm thinking the reason for these monster graphics cards might have to do with the fact iGPUs have gotten good enough for most people to not need a graphics card. They essentially fill the niche which used to be taken up by lower end graphics cards. I guess the reasoning goes, why make a $50 or...

The 20th century model worked fine. The problem is businesses think their profit margins should be a lot higher now. It's the difference between making a reasonable profit providing a good or service, versus an obscene profit. It's also the result of defacto monopolies like Microsoft. In theory...

Sounds like a much better idea than every home having a furnace and hot water heater. Are there any heat exchangers to recover some heat from wastewater? In theory if you could recover most of the heat once you "prime" with some hot water to get things started you would need to add very little...

I looked into that first for the kitchen sink. They have ludicrous power requirements, starting at well over 5 kilowatts. That doesn't even get you a great flow rate. If your incoming water is 40°F (typical in NYC winters) and your outgoing is 110°F, 5 kW only gives you ~0.5 gpm, maybe twice...

He repairs PCs for a living, so that at least gives him some credibility. Truth is people are too complacent. We should have nipped this whole thing in the bud years ago. It's not just happening with PCs, either. Too many things are becoming rentals instead of buy once and use forever.

Yeah, I'm getting the impression we're fast approaching a time where a PC will need to be on its own circuit breaker, much like a larger air conditioner.

Speaking of that I was in MicroCenter the other day and saw what I thought was a heat exchanger for a small air conditioner inside one of their display computers. I think it was an RX7900 video card. So much for more efficient processors. Unless I needed a space heater, I'd never run one of...

Honestly, I smell a big class-action lawsuit against MS for stuff like this. You shouldn't have to jump through all their hoops just to access your own data. I get security to some extent but you should be able to disable it. I'm the only one who will ever access my PCs. Nobody lives with me...

That explains why using a picture doesn't work. I guess if you cut off someone's head and attempted to use that to log in it wouldn't work, either. I'm surprised more fingerprint ID sensors don't use IR also. True story here-one of my family members was scammed by someone. A relative (who is now...

I don't recall being asked for a PIN when I set up my new laptop. It is set to log me in with facial recognition. Maybe to future-proof that against my appearance changing radically I should make a cast of my face. Merc, I wonder if you could get an artist to do something similar with that guy...

I don't get that, either. A driver's license, or non-driver's ID, issued by the state with your picture should be sufficient to serve as ID on a video call.