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I'm a regular Hangouts user. Hangouts is being phased out for most people, so I've installed Google Chat. Now I get notifications about IMs in three different applications, plus extra notifications on computers if I happen to have Chrome open, plus extra extra notifications if I have "Your...

I shot pictures in an informal capacity at a friend's wedding yesterday. I had my RP set up on a gimbal for video use and let my quasi-SO creep around with that (using a gimbal is an art and it turns out that the person with 10 years of ballet is just naturally better at that than I am) while I...

I've had a bad time getting meaningful service from Toshiba, but kind of like Fuji back in the day, it's also pretty easy to ignore their offerings. HGST is the standard to which all others are held, but probably not worth the 50% price premium. I'm perfectly happy with Seagate Enterprise...

I've been able to print 44"x54" (thanks, work!) and honestly it looks good from about 10 feet away. Usually, ungodly large prints aren't meant to be viewed up close. The people doing billboard photos only use something like 2MP images for the images that actually go up. Even at 20MP, I'm...

I'm buying a lot of drives, although my need for growth in capacity has finally stopped being a concern, at least in the next couple years. I have an in for buying retired drives from my local data center now as well, which might also help me out in that area.

I have a couple (literally 2) M1 Macs at work because the graphics/CAD/print production guy we work with uses them, one Macbook and one iMac. He's also been annoyed by the RAM limit on the iMac, although he's only actually had an issue with it a couple times and only while working on personal...

Don't sport-focused bodies usually have lower resolution sensors? It's REALLY hard to complain about 20MP in an R6. The other bodies I've used are 21MP and 24MP. I try to compose for the shot I want so I don't have to do much cropping, but that's a good habit for photography anyway.

Today's Google Doodle, Champion Island, is pretty amusing.

I generally recommend Moto phones to older people. Very often I've found the things that make smartphones confusing for people are Samsung-default or Verizon-default behaviors, like Samsung's bizarre insistence on using the Gallery app instead of Google Photos or Verizon's bullshit storing...

Because cheap Seagate SMR drives go on sale at Costco approximately every other week. 8TB drives for $130? Don't mind if I do. The SMR drives do behave properly in Storage Spaces arrays, and there the SSD buffers work wonders. I haven't had any issues with reliability. It might be a problem for...

I just ran across someone running Groupwise in 2021. I have neither seen it nor thought about it since maybe 1998, but apparently it still exists as a thing people can buy and use. That set me off Googling, and apparently IBM is RIGHT NOW going through massive pain as they transition to new...

X Com 2, including all its DLC, was released for Android today. It's only supported on about 20 devices, only a couple of them tablets. The install size is 17GB. The texture quality isn't as high as the PC version but it's advertised as a complete port. That's pretty damned impressive for a five...

Going along with the idea of paying for a subscription to use Windows, it sounds like they're rolling out cloud access to a personal Windows VM as part of Windows 11. Microsoft charges just a hair under $200 a month if you want to have a small Azure federated Active Directory, so it'll be...

Right now, there's a case of take what you can get, unless you're so well off you can do something like buy a name brand gaming desktop or engineering workstation solely to pull the GPU out of it. AMD, nVidia and even Intel are all making strides in improving their discrete GPUs, but we have...

I definitely played with recordsize and different configurations for my cache drives, but I haven't hit an perfect configuration. As thing stand, it's functional but clearly sub-optimal. I was under the impression that there's nothing about my workload that would be impacted with a SLOG; I'm...

I'm more impressed that I got an RMA on a CPU in the first place. I've always heard it's close to impossible to get one back.

Here's a fun, kind of cheery thing: I found a status-unknown Ryzen 7 1700 in its retail box a couple weeks ago when I cleaned out my car. I popped it on a couple different motherboards and it didn't boot (it had also spent probably two entire years in my trunk), but AMD accepted and replaced it...

I thought I'd be OK as well. I'm using SMR drives, but they behave well under Windows. The cache drives generally ameliorate the slow writes on Storage Spaces, but the slow browsing was something I wasn't prepared to see. I'll re-visit this once I get some more RAM though.

You should be able to get a decent Win98 compatible Socket 423 or 478 board if you want to make a switch to something just a touch more modern.

My ZFS setup currently has a 80TB raidz2 with a couple 500GB L2ARC drives but only 32GB RAM. I was thinking I'd be able to use 64GB (It's a Ryzen 3600 on an Asrock B450 motherboard) or at least 48GB but seemingly once I have my two 16GB DIMMs, it wants a matched set to go higher. The array is...

I have a system that has over 50 attached drives, but they're in smaller individual arrays precisely because I don't want to deal with the nightmare of doing some kind of crazy huge rebuild. I have a Mint system up and running with ZFS but I haven't gotten around to buying enough RAM see how...

Apparently a feature has been added to OpenZFS called dRAID, which uses a hot spare as a distributed target for parity data in order to greatly reduce time for rebuild operations. It looks to be much less read-intensive for repopulating a spare drive while maintaining normal RaidZ levels of...

I don't think performance will hold up, no. It's interesting that there's a budget-friendly device that's so competitive for specifications with those FE devices, though. Same AMOLED screen, same RAM etc. I suspect RAM is the biggest predictor for long-term usability in Android hardware, not...

Apparently the not-sold-in-the-USA Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 could be workable, if I were willing to accept a 700-series Snapdragon CPU and a certain amount of Chinese spyware. The price is right. They cost around EU$300. This is apparently the phone that cause Samsung to release the S2xFE edition...

Notes are too goddamned big. 7" devices used to be called Tablets. I don't even care about 5G; the closest LTE tower is barely 100m from where I live now, and my phone speed tests north of 30Mbit most of the time. Seems fast enough to me. Bixby is a sore point for sure, but so are the many...

Mobile devices are deliberately difficult to fully back up or clone. You can do it on a rooted device, but some devices and some carriers are hostile to that as well. I have a 5TB Google Workspace account almost entirely as a giant space for Google Photos. Google Photos really is a best of...

Black Widow is basically a James Bond movie. The action choreography is top notch, and if the plot is closer to a lesser Bond thriller than Winter Soldier, at least the new leads are every bit as memorable as the titular character. There's more "male gaze" in the camera work than I would've...

Two reasons: one is that I have a strong preference for being able to switch my phone's personality between content creation (mostly recording video) and media consumption. The second is that I'm absolutely terrified of losing data when a phone dies. I don't really want a half terabyte of data...

So I have to buy a new phone and I'm super annoyed about it. I have an LG G8. Specs-wise, it was very similar to the Samsung S10, only without Samsung's bullshit all over it. LG phones can be fixed without much effort and the flagships at least have great screens, headphone jacks and SD card...

Windows 10, since the 1904 version, has attempted to railroad users into creating Microsoft accounts. If your PC is connected to the internet, you're forced to make an account. Users used to be able to skip that step, but now the only way to get past it is to not have a PC connected to the...

The market for $250,000 1200mm f5.6 lenses is just a bit self-selecting. Let the niche stuff go last. But the writing is on the wall for camera bodies. There will still be DSLRs in the supply chain for years, obviously, but apparently some of the more common EF mount lenses have dropped off...

Windows 10, in its latest update, prompts users to sign up for Microsoft 365 for systems that aren't on a Domain. If people do that, or assume they have to, that's a de facto $100 annual subscription cost.

I've worked in places with unisex bathrooms a few times. I think the theory is more "Do you want to use a bathroom that has urinals or do you want to have a bathroom that is all stalls." And I've seen women use a men's room many, many times. I can only think of two times that I've seen an...

Remote Workers still aren't moving to the midwest. My favorite bit of the article: 700,000 people moved away from the Bay Area but only 19,000 of them left for the American midwest. Ouch.

That's much easier to do in a studio setting than outdoors.

The standard behavior is to ask someone their pronouns. Most people don't encounter THAT many non-binary (NB) or Trans or Agender or Two-spirited folks, and USUALLY it's a pretty minor adjustment. There are some people who go out of their way to misgender people, which is generally going to be...

It's very common for me to spend all day with someone, with multiple changes in clothes and of location. Summertime has been very rough on my SD cards. Being near a major city, a national park, several beaches and the one of the rust belt centers for urban exploration, I've been a lot more...

A podcast I genuinely enjoy, Behind the Bastards, recently did a two part episode on Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation. Bill Gates the philanthropist might be a worse person than Bill Gates the tech billionaire. The host, Robert Evans (the journalist, not the movie producer) used to cover...

I have a couple Macs sitting around, but nothing I'd choose to use in a photography workflow. I definitely notice that a lot of the tools that get recommended for this work are Mac-only though, and a lot of others are subscription based, which is a nope for other reasons. I can see the appeal...

That person did exist and apparently a big deal in that community. Gender-related matters are can be weird and difficult, but in practice the important thing is to treat people in the matter they wish; a great deal of what we think of as "gender" is really wrapped up in social or cultural...

There was a definitely barrier to compatibility with Ryzen and Windows 7, in that not many people would have the technical knowledge to integrate the chipset and USB drivers into the install media for it to be functional from the installer. I suspect Microsoft won't be happy until everyone is...

This was originally going to be a question specifically for LM but I'll throw it out there just in case as a topic of broader interest. Lunar just mentioned his his workflow in another thread and I'm interested in knowing what other people do. Culling photos is a real issue for me lately. I...

Mine is the one true gospel. Verily, the world shall be made better when WD burns and is cleansed in righteous fire from this Earth. I've been kind of wondering who those things are for, but ironically I know a few people who have them. They're all Mac/iPhone people who bought them to back up...

You're a big Adobe-whatever user, right? If you're on one of their subscription plans, chances are pretty good they'll force you to upgrade before too terribly long. IIRC Adobe CS dropped Windows 8 all the way back in 2018. The upgrade might be forced upon you earlier than you might like...

Ars seems to think that the TPM and CPU requirements aren't as scary as they sound, but apparently people with older Core i9 systems are being told they're incompatible from the PC Health Check application.

Apparently the next wave of pro bodies will support quad rather than dual pixel autofocus, and it's fairly reasonable to think we might get real autofocus improvements in firmware over time as well. For the majority of my shooting, the eye autofocus is doing exactly what I want. Unless I screw...

I'm at about 1 for 3 on systems I support. I have an awful, awful lot of 5/6/7th-gen Intel CPUs floating around and I've historically used CSM boot simply because that's what my disk images have always been. At least that's a relatively straightforward fix. I'm going to have to talk to...

I think we all know how popular random UI changes are for Windows users. I have a few customers that still use Office 2003 because they hate the ribbon THAT much.

Apparently Windows 11 has leaked. I haven't heard about anything but cosmetic changes yet, but we'll all be complaining about it soon enough. Might as well make a thread. The biggest change I'm aware of is a move of the Start button to the center of the dock, which, one, who cares? And two...

Two sets of drive heads sounds a lot like double the chance for a physical failure to me. I'll be interested to get the Backblaze report on these in a year or so.