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I'm not suggesting anything elaborate, but by all indications sed's family isn't exactly filled with technophiles with high awareness of his interests. A little encouragement could go a long way. Another thought, if physical parts might be seen by some as detrimental, might be a udemy course or...

Seems we have at least one scare a year.

Some of my students do TV/Appliance repair. Most of them have a pretty negative impression of Samsung as far as customer service, after-sale and repair-ability. Apparently it's practically impossible to get Samsung to honor the warranty on flat panel TVs that aren't still available in stores...

It's pretty nice for a TV stick. The remote is smaller and the UI isn't quite as responsive as the big-boy FireTV. It's also missing the voice search function, but the experience is otherwise very similar. Mine is probably going to wind up being someone's Xmas present, especially since I should...

Spend another $100 on an SSD and you'll have a machine that's essentially indistinguishable from a brand new system. Speaking of value: I can't believe that, now that we have sub-$100 240GB SSDs, none of them are making their way into modest consumer hardware. A trip to the usual retail...

I usually have at least 100 on my main desktop. 107, at this very moment.

I have a small claim judgment for $300, basically the MSRP of that drive when it was new. I'm still trying to figure out how to collect on it.

I believe the two logins are for Origin and Bioware. I've been looking for something to run on my new PC, just to see what it can do. It looks like Witcher 3 is the most graphically-intensive title available on GoG.com. Has anyone played those games?

The thing that seems to do more to hose my browser RAM utilization is tumblr. Certain tumblr layouts absolutely annihilate all available RAM. Some of my friends use tumblr for one reason or other and I believe it's entirely the reason I've had to switch to Palemoon or Waterfox. I did have some...

You could also buy a drive from a company that doesn't require a court order to get a drive replaced when they fuck up your RMA.

This should make Coug happy:

Crucial is usually pretty good stuff but the machine BSODs with astonishing regularity if I have one particular DIMM installed. It's a little like getting the paint scratched on your brand new car. It's also extremely quiet, though I haven't found any reason to make the video card do anything...

Not yet. Next week. It's depressing. New PC is definitely insane in most respects but one of the DIMMs I was shipped seems to be bad. Amazon wants the whole kit back and Crucial says turnaround on the RMA is three weeks. Goddammitsomuch.

The Lego movie was charming but most of the good stuff was in bit moments. Lego Batman was for sure the best part.

meh.com has a refurb 28" Samsung 4k monitor today for $330.

Acer/Gateway/Emachines notebooks are INCREDIBLY poorly constructed. Not just cheap but actively bad design. The screen will break because there will be some kind of minute tap to the edge of the screen (like shifting off the thigh to the wooden arm of a chair) or the center of the cover side and...

I think those people are probably lying. I've also seen fake batteries with markings close enough to OEM that I probably wouldn't be able to tell if I didn't have several examples of the real thing at hand. I went back and looked and the last good clone I got came from this Amazon seller, but...

The aggravating thing about the teaser is how much of it is blank or static images. That worked for Phantom Menace, but at this point fan-made Star Wars productions can be amazing and other than the ships, there wasn't a lot going on to show me this is the real deal. I'd like to see some more...

Not that this will make you feel any better, but my father's active service in the US Navy ended because he threw his back out during to a particularly vigorous attempt to to void himself after a very long period of constipation. This is not something he will ever live down. At any rate, back...

Since an awful lot of people don't want to buy a $100 battery for a three year old laptop, I've experimented with non-OEM replacement batteries for Lenovos many times over the years and been burned probably 66% of the time. I can also say that efforts to buy a "good" clone battery by dealing...

Just go ahead and buy the replacement LCD panel now. Your mom will break it soon enough.

Screen mirroring is pretty hard on battery life on everything I've seen that can do screen mirroring, including Airplay. You normally CAN'T turn off the device's screen during mirroring. Some apps such as Plex and Youtube do allow for screencasting, which sends output to a screen and normally...

Also, the failed drives? The one that I can tell is FAILED is a WD Red, the only one I have. The one with status "lost communication" is a Seagate. I'll pull it and it'll probably pass all of Seagate's diagnostics, but I'll RMA it anyway.

I had my first two-drive failure in a Storage Space last night. My data is in arrays of six 3TB disk stripes with one extra drive allocated as a hot spare. I initiated a rebuild after one drive died and a second drive dropped out of the array during that process. My data still appears to be...

I think because it looks cool and there will be people who buy it on that basis? I don't understand the point either. The images being viewed are fundamentally rectangular. All the curve will do is distort the rectangle.

I haven't used any of the 6TB units yet, but yes, you can use "NAS" drives for whatever you want. They're just drives, purportedly with firmware optimization that make them better for arrays. Personally I think NAS drives are just a bullshit reason to get people to pay extra money to get fully...

I'm more disgusted with the devaluation of free will that leads people to purchase Apple, Acer and HP consumer laptops than anything that might've been on the keyboard. I have bleach wipes and Purelle but some laptops are just born in the crotch-stink of evil.

Walmart is going to have the 50" Vizio 4k for $700 on Friday. Even though I've been a few places that have had the 4k Vizios, all of them had the Samsung 4ks on display and none of the Vizios were turned on, making it very difficult to compare them.

A Soft Murmur is a really nifty white noise generator. There's also an Android version.

I'd trust a used T-series Thinkpad. Put a $75 brand-name battery in it and it's as good or better than anything being sold new at retail for less than $600. The 1366x768 screen resolution is ubiquitous and inescapable for inexpensive laptops regardless.

Nitsirk tells me that Dragon Age: Inquisition is extremely crashy, needed hours of updates despite being distributed on physical media, requires sign-on to TWO online services and uses a control scheme and UI entirely for the convenience of gamepad rather than keyboard users. I'd say that's...

She's not in pain, not that I can tell. She's never liked being picked up and carried, but now she just meekly accepts when I put her back in her spot on my bed. She's hiding rather than staying in accustomed places, which is what cats do when they get near their end. She's had a fatty tumor on...

I have a Corsair HX750 that I'm planning to use. Honestly, it's overkill for the application; this machine will probably have nothing but an SSD and two or three HDDs in it, and even the CPU and GPU going full-bore won't approach that sort of power draw. I did buy the same Noctua unit dd...

Does it have to be a live conversion? You could try imaging the disk to a VHD or TIB and building the VM from that.

I know there is something terribly wrong with my 15 year old Grace cat. I don't want to take her to the vet because I'm sure I won't be bringing her home.

The X99-UD4. I don't need the extra ethernet or 802.11 support on the more expensive model and I don't feel like trying Asus's quality control given my experience with its current mainstream offerings. With regard to ATI/nvidia, I'm fairly certain that I've bought hardware that won't be as...

Since dd ended up finding a place for his parts, I turned around and bought my own 5930k, 32GB RAM and Noctua cooler, though I went with the Gigabyte board. I'm pairing it with an nVidia 970, mostly because as much as the nvidia-ness will suck, I've heard the fans on a 290X and I know they'd...

Yup. That was the start of my career as a Windows admin as well. And then something would happen, NTUSER.DAT would shit itself and you'd have a user freaking out that all their stuff is gone. Good times indeed.

mklink is functionally the same thing as the ln command on a Unix system, but symlinks are new enough that not everything in Windows handles them correctly. There's a tool called WinLibraryTool from Zorn Software that does, however, allow you to add un-indexed network locations to library folder...

Actually, if you can get past all the site crashing, every single thing Udemy has is $10 right now.

My Thinkpad T20 from 2001 still works as well, but that doesn't mean I'm going to try to use it for anything. It's not even productive to use for web browsing at this point.

dism manages the integrity of the system image, starting from the baseline configuration from source media and as updates and extra software. It works with Microsoft's disk imaging and backup tools and it's sometimes used along with SFC to repair weird, random problems with Windows. It's not...

Ironically, I noticed that one of the dism commands copied over the entire Windows 8 recovery image for later use by Windows. I know why they did things that way, but it's still an enormous waste of time for anyone who has to actually use their tools.

It was break time, and is so often the case, the topic turned to ladies who got ass. Or something. I missed the first part. Plus my office has fast internet service, something that actually isn't true in a steel mill.

Speaking of, hey, here's a brief introduction to using RSS feeds with uTorrent. I leave the question of how that might be related to the preceding two posts to the reader.

This could go in something random but we'll put it here instead. I was teaching a class today of extremely varied racial composition and some of the African American gentlemen were enjoying a particular youtube video featuring a bunch of big booty girls dancing around to bits of "Baby Got Back"...

Since, for some reason, not everyone views copyright law as optional, the MPAA now has a handy web site to let everyone know where they can legally watch the things that were keeping them from stopping their cable TV or satellite service.

I started the DVD-based Windows 8 OEM recovery for a Thinkpad T440p (i7, 8GB, SSD) four hours ago and it's still not done yet. Lenovo used dism to integrate all the application and driver installs and it's actually replaying them one at a time and holy crap someone should tell those people...

Not every touchpad is awful. Like a lot of things, the crappy stuff is most likely on consumer hardware, with some of the worst examples being the HP/Dell vomit boxes.

Probably. What's the full hardware list?