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Thanks sed. What's with the new avatar?

I think when people think "civil war", they think Johnny Reb and grapeshot cannonades into cavalry charges but it's not going to be like that. It's going to be random bombings and assholes blockading highways and railroads with semis or driving through protests with their cars. The Unite the...

Not really. I check woot, which is now an Amazon brand anyway and occasionally get bored enough to look for stuff on Ebay. They'll sometimes have stuff at a discount from even used prices on the main Amazon site. I'm mostly looking for stuff like thumb drives, PC cases and AM4 motherboards...

When looking at premium pointing devices, I see absolutely no reason not to consider used or refurbished units. You can dip them in vodka or something if you're worried about hand-cooties.

One of my customers uses a Logitech Vertical mouse because of arm mobility issues unrelated to RSI. I've only had to use it a couple times but since Logitech wants $100 for it, it's probably not at the top of your list regardless. I've seen other people using pistol grip mice over the years. I...

I swear by Logitech trackballs and I have no issues with RSI in spite of my decades-long, very active pointing lifestyle. Have you investigated vertical or pistol-grip mice at all?

sed, my partner is literally half my age. I took her in because she didn't have a place to stay right when the pandemic started; she'd been couch surfing for a few months and was basically sleeping with people to have a place to keep her stuff. Her situation kept getting progressively worse and...

Using the California State National Guard and calling in Marines are both signals that the administration will jump at any chance it gets to assert martial law over big (blue) cities where the administration has the least power to enforce its policies already. We can look forward to some Kent...

I massively regret having a 4k 15" screen on my current laptop so believe me, I understand.

View > Small Icons? The automatic scaling drives me insane as well. I do use 150% on my laptop, which has a 4k, 15" screen, but I don't want that on remote sessions, which I typically run as less than full screen.

Plex Pass wasn't a big deal when it was $75 and I saw it as contributing to a small project. sed, I don't have a problem with Jellyfin as such but I also don't see it doing anything better than just running Kodi. I guess it's a central point of configuration instead of having to configure per...

You are almost certainly better off reinstalling than trying to troubleshoot whatever-this-is. I still don't know why/how you're getting 11 22H2 instead of 24H2 but even then, you're within the window for getting normal updates so it shouldn't be THAT much of a problem. Still, I'd track down a...

I use PrivateInternetAccess for VPN. Its status as logless has actually been tested in court and it has an extremely fast end point in Sweden, which is the main need I have. I use Tor and .onion addresses when I can but of course that does depend on what I'm looking to find. AVG, Avira, Avast...

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.