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I've been providing Plex for about as long as Plex has been around, but I don't really use it myself. Plex is mostly for people outside my home, and it is because it has an easy external authentication system for access that I keep it. That being said, Plex has gotten worse and worse and worse...

I'm personally a Google Docs fan for my word processing and note-taking needs. LibreOffice exists and it works great unless you have specific demands for compatibility with Excel macros. Wordperfect Office still exists and does not require a subscription. I see it sold by Humble Bundle...

I've really been enjoying Wildermyth. It has a very intriguing papercraft art style for what amounts to a turn based tactical RPG in a sort of X-Com vein. The surprising thing is that the game procedurally generates its campaign, which is allowed to play out over years and generations. Your team...

I'm updating a campus-area Wifi setup with Trendnet EAP670s and EAP225s as edge devices. The existing ethernet cabling is plain old Cat5, so I'm making a go with a wireless backhaul. I'm pleasantly surprised that it's working well. Some of the APs report better than gigabit transfer rates. The...

I'm not used to the empty place. My quasi- partner goes out at night because she lives somewhere with a night life now, so we don't talk nearly as often as I'd hoped. I've been able to keep relatively busy with photography work and general hobby-tinkering but my cats aren't great at keeping up...

My office building used to be a bank. We still have the vault, the safety deposit boxes and the pneumatic tubes for the drive through teller lanes. The building is supposedly hardened to vehicle crashes or explosions as well, so I'm guessing it's an insulation thing. My personal office is on the...

I'm more concerned where your ISO came from. It's still possible to get old ISOs if you know to look for them by name but a generic search for Windows 11 download should take you to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11 (or en-gb if your PC is set up with International or...

There's a registry/GPO you can set to trigger the update but you can also just download a newer ISO and kick off the upgrade from that.

I generally work from home, but summer is vacation season for everyone and a combination of grandma responsibilities and a fresh case of covid left me the only person able to open my office building today. Neither of the building HVAC systems are working and it's not just a tripped breaker...

For purposes of comparison, if I take six cores from my 3960X (Windows Server 2022) and the Arc A770 in it on to a Windows 11 VM, I can play Doom 2016 in WQHD at around 60fps. I'm not sure if the version of VMware you're using handles GPU pass-through but that's what I'd expect from any...

If you want something that just works my first thought is to just convert your vmdk file to a vhdx and use Hyper-V. Beyond that, MAYBE you forgot to enable some hardware virtualization settings in firmware or need to update VMware tools but nothing with 6 cores of Zen3 should be that bad full...

I PROMISE you can use a Win7 Technet key --> 10 --> 11 progression. I used that exact progression probably 40 - 50 times. After a certain point, I even found out that my key activations reset and I could use them again a bunch more times. My personal Technet keys got used for A LOT of virtual...

https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ I vastly prefer to work from my personal autounattend.xml (I've posted it in the Toolbox section) but this is a powershell one liner that puts a GUI full of tweaks on your screen. My guess is that you have a sparse-allocated VMDK and/or dynamic RAM...

The biggest issue I can see with the WTR Pro is heat. It probably needs another fan somewhere and I'm not sure where I'd put it. I actually love the form factor of this box, but it gets surprisingly warm for an N150. I think I'm going to have to mod another fan on this thing, if only because I...

I've observed that the Private DNS function can get wonky sometimes, especially when there's a switchover between Wifi and Cell networks. It'll tell you it can't contact the DNS server and then stop resolving names until you turn Private DNS off and back on. It's been years since I last tried...

I haven't see any issues from in-place upgrades of Windows 10 to 11. I did see them from 7 to 8 or 10, usually because the PC was already having problems with Windows Update. I do still see problems with PCs where people turned updates off entirely or have dutifully skipped updates for multiple...

I assure you that it does. There is a mention in the toolbox to Flyby 11, which patches a Windows 11 install ISO to drop the hardware check by using files from a Windows Server installer. It makes Defender freak out as a hack tool because it modifies signed Microsoft files but it works...

The option is called Private DNS on a Samsung device. I promise DNS66 works fine.

Flyby11 handles patching of Windows 11 installation media to bypass the hardware requirements. It uses files from Windows Server media rather than Windows 10. This might be relevant to some interests right about now.

Looks like there are reports from reddit that N100/N150-based systems given one or two 10GbE interfaces can in fact keep up with them for routing and filtering; they're roughly on par with an i3-8300 in overall performance. N1x0s only have a total of 9 PCIe lanes, but some of them DO have...

The advice I'm currently giving customers is that they should be making good-faith efforts to remove Windows 10 from active service, including the ones they use at home. A lot of people have perfectly good systems that are thrust into unsupported territory and that sucks. Not everyone wants to...

I think it would depend on the NIC's chipset, but the only option to get 10Gb would be from an m.2 slot regardless. Everything important in my place is 40Gb anyway. ;) There's no perfect prebuilt box or even perfect ITX rig. I'd rather have something with more than 4 cores and a faster option...

"Humble Little Celeron" round 2 is another Aoostar box. This one is called the WTR Pro. It's a DIY NAS-shaped box with four hot-swap SATA bays, N150 CPU 2xNVMe and 2x2.5GbE. It'll take 64GB of DDR4 and it honestly seems just about perfect for a modest TrueNAS system for somebody, even if I don't...

I like DNS66 from the Fdroid repository. Your phone might have ad blocking DNS built in. Samsung has an option for it.

Typically, I'm fine with using ssh to interact with my *nix systems, but having a PC that actually has good graphics hardware gave me a reason to see what's been going on in desktop-land. I've typically liked KDE more than Gnome as a "fancy" desktop option and I do think Plasma is a little...

The Windows drivers for the Blackwell GPU are super weird around multiple displays; nVidia doesn't automatically output to an HDMI monitor. I have to go in to the nVidia control panel and enable the HDMI monitor every time I make changes to the displays on that PC, even for something as simple...

I experimented with Apollo (a fork of Sunshine) this weekend but something that I've discovered is that the Windows version doesn't work well with multiple display setups and an absolute fuckton of things don't work right on Linux if you have a Weyland-based GUI, including most remote desktop...

The 5060Ti more than doubled my boot time versus either Intel or AMD. I'm talking about a 9950X with a Crucial PCIe 5 boot drive. This is not a computer that should take nearly an entire minute to get to a login prompt. I think it's all BIOS boot time given how long my system sits with no...

I got somewhere with a $15 voice command capable IR transmitter since the only thing I need is for the AVR and TV to toggle on, but it's a little janky and maybe 20% of the time it doesn't turn one or the other device on when I tell it to. My LG TV doesn't have a physical power button either...

I install ad blocking on everything I touch. I don't care. Advertising is a malware vector and must be treated as hostile.

They're very useful for people with lame mobile devices or who are too lazy to set up ad blocking on their devices. I've set them up before and I appreciate having them on devices I can't control. It's easy enough to set up special rules to prevent users from visiting problematic sites if for...

I had to make a trip to Micro Center this morning for a couple CPUs and as luck would have it, I was able to get a Gigabyte 16GB 5060Ti at MSRP. There were a half dozen 5070s and scads of 8GB 5060 Tis, but there was only one other 5060Ti 16GB, an Asus factory overclocked model for $130 more than...

The Fractal Define and Cooler Master Nwhatever have been my go-to options for modest builds, but it's hard for me to justify $150 for a case on a $700 PC. Mesh cases are alright for gamers, but they also make for computers that are louder than I'd care to deal with.

I did actually go digging around on the Silverstone web site, where I found this monster. I have a pair of Norco 3U 24 bay chassis and when I bought those, they were under $400 apiece. $1100 is a bit much. I do actually like the RM45-360 as a general purpose case, but 4U is a lot of chassis...

You know they're going to want $250 for that thing. There were some great looking beige cases back in the day but no, they went deliberately hideous.

I actually managed to use all 96GB + 96GB swap on my workstation today by accidentally calling ImageMagick on on about 20M files. Surprisingly enough, it's still running and responding over an RDP session. It just took a REAL long time to open another shell session so I could kill the script.

I appreciate having the differing failure models. Every once in a while I see an SSD switch over to read-only mode but most of the drives that die just stop being drives. At least hard drives usually give some warning before they completely crap out.

For future reference, if you ever need to delete and/or recreate your recovery partition on a Windows system, you have to work from diskpart.exe rather than Disk Management. You have to do the following: reagentc /disable (tells Windows to stop using the recovery partition) Diskpart List Disk...

I put a 3.5" drive in every bigger-than-ITX desktop I assemble. Usually it's just a little guy. It's easy enough to add $35 to the cost of a system for a 2TB spinny drive, just to keep backups on hand for an end user. Some people do have bulk storage needs aside from giant media collections; my...

I've been looking at Computex coverage of new chassis designs and dear god I hate everything I see. Seems like 90% of new designs are clear on at least two sides and either overblown full tower height or ITX only. Zero room for mechanical drives. I do like the trend of adding wood accents...

I can't tell if you're too young for your dad to be having these problems or if I've been too lucky to have never had them.

My quasi-partner's new place has 5Gbit synchronous fiber according to their bill but the ONT the ISP provided only has 1Gbit ports on it. Nobody else she's living with bothered to check. Has anyone else finished Andor yet? If not, budget some time to sit quietly in the dark with your thoughts...

Looks like the products do exist, at least in the form of a Pulse 8 CEC Injector. Unfortunately, they don't work with high bandwidth setups, so if you have a TV fancy enough to do 12 bit HDR or 120Hz refresh at 4k, they're glitchy. There's also a real annoyance in spending $50 on a device just...

I actually built that low-spec build last night. Ryzen 3600X, 16GB DDR4, RX 5700XT. The whole PC is worth MAYBE $350. I set it up on Fedora 42 and used Heroic launcher to get Gog and Epic titles on it and everything was nice and smooth at 1080p. I have no complaints. I don't have a Steam library...

Health care is extremely frustrating on pretty much every level and you're right that there's pretty much nothing you can do, but sometimes the act of being there is powerful on its own. Maybe it's a good day to sit down and write your dad a letter? You don't have to say all the things you're...

Does anyone know where to get those little rubber or nylon clips some OEMs are putting in systems for M.2 retention?

I am a heavy reader and here are my thoughts: Larger than 10" tablets are too fucking big. They're heavy and it's difficult to read comfortably on one and still do things like flip pages. I did find a use for a (12") Tab S9+ as an extra screen for tabletop gaming but I swapped my partner back my...

Basically my closest friends all live in Florida now. A lot of socialization happened over voice chats in games, but not games I play (I'm not one for Marvel Rivals, for example) but now that my partner is gone I don't expect to be included in that. We have a tabletop game night too, but since...

FireOS kind of sucks given Amazon's app ecosystem. A lot of things just aren't available from the Amazon app store. Fire tablets have very nice screens but the rest of the hardware is regrettable. You should be able to find a much more capable Lenovo M-series tablet in that price range and you...

I've seen mini PC systems get stuck at their lowest Speedstep state as a misbegotten firmware default. Turning off some of the C state options has helped me deal with that.