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Consumer notebooks are hard. My Ideapad 1s came from visiting a Walmart and a Best Buy to see what's acceptable at less than $350, because so very often, that's as much as people are willing to spend. I have a prejudice against 17" models and their breaky, breaky screens, and the moment I bring...

I'm thinking that the fresh (Windows?) user account is a good idea just to avoid the possibility that there's some accumulation of cruft from past installs generally. Maybe even sanity check from a bootable Linux ISO or something.

I have the additional aggravation that my health care is non-traditional, so my meds are at least partially selected for what can be obtained for cheap.

This does not align with my experiences with Firefox. Even on something deeply pathetic like a 4th gen i3 with 4GB RAM, Firefox and Chrome are subjectively similar with Chrome being maybe a hair faster generally (with the caveat that it also isn't blocking as much, either). What if you try...

As an aside, Firefox and Brave are the only two mainstream browsers with ongoing support for thorough ad blocking. I've found no combination of settings on Chromium derived browsers like Chrome or Edge that actually work to provide the same level of safety. Of course I can put an ad blocking...

Look under Settings --> Privacy & Security --> DNS over HTTPS. Try turning that on or off to see if that makes a difference.

Just blood pressure management. Both my parents needed blood pressure medication by my age so it's not surprising that I do too. I'm still having a hard time with the idea that a common medication would be in short supply nationally, but I did finally get some overnighted to me.

There's a stray I've been feeding for the last few years. She's had a litter of kittens every June like clockwork. She kind of nests with her babies under a car that only moves a few times a year; the guy who owns it can't drive it any more, but his son uses it maybe the second week in August...

Decent CPU and nice screen is an extremely solid recipe for almost everyone's day to day needs so long as they aren't doing gaming, engineering or content creation. Which kind of explains why Macbook Airs are somehow seen as acceptable. A couple months ago, I observed that I couldn't get a...

I'm more than a little concerned that an entire generation of educated people and actually untold natural resources have been diverted to work on this instead of doing something that helps humanity as a whole. Between this and the commoditization of every system and resource on Earth by Fintech...

Ed Zitron just published some leaked internal revenue data from OpenAI. This company that wants $70 billion this year from VCs and partners to build itself spent almost $9B on running its models on revenue of $2.3B. They're spending $3 to make less than a buck and apparently lying to everyone...

New Steam Deck thing was announced today. It's a 30W Zen4 6c/12t CPU with 16GB RAM and either 500GB or 2TB of internal storage. That sounds to me like a less powerful version of the HX 370, although I suppose it'll have newer and fancier GPU cores than that. It will purportedly be able to...

I lost a cat to breast cancer at the beginning of 2024 and a kitten to brain cancer in 2020. The kitten absolutely killed me, because I spent so much money and went through so many different diagnoses that offered varying levels of hope for improvement. He literally passed while he was on the...

Softbank announced that it is divesting itself from nVidia, currently the most valuable enterprise in human history, to fund OpenAI, a company that seems to do nothing but spend money on nVidia GPUs and datacenter construction contracts. Softbank is literally taking its holdings in nVidia to...

It's been brought to my attention that it's possible to buy an Asrock BC250 SBC for around US$100. These things are 6c/12t Zen2 APUs with somewhere around Radeon RX580-class GPU cores and 16GB of all GDDR6 RAM. They're crypto-mining hardware and they don't have a bunch of traditional PC ports on...

Tiny baby roommate is finally gone. I don't know how parents do it. I've never letting one of those things in my place again.

The Canon R6 III was unveiled today. The new one has a 32MP sensor, a CFexpress slot and the ability to shoot video horizontally and vertically at the same time. I'm definitely intrigued.

Chris Thile was the replacement host for Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion, which was a very gentle and Midwestern part of my Saturday afternoons for around 40 years. It was more or less the last thing I made it a point to hear on the radio every week.

Flyby11 works by using the Windows Server 2025 installer to unpack and run the Windows 11 .wim file. All the hardware checks are in the Windows 11 setup. You can also use the Windows 10 setups file to do the same thing. Those products are already out in the world, so short of constantly checking...

I have a milestone birthday in a month-ish. The plan was originally to spend a week in Jamaica or Cancun, but my partner forgot to renew her passport and my best friend can't get away from her job for more than a three day weekend anyway. So we're now talking about New Orleans, where even the...

I don't know if anyone caught this, but AMD has started calling mobile Ryzen 6000s "Ryzen 100 series" and mobile Ryzen 4000/5000 series Ryzen 10s. There's no change in the actual hardware. They're just naming them differently to match their high end branding. Thanks, guys.

I'm still trying to figure it out. I think the Xbox brand will still exist for software and maybe input devices. It sounds like Microsoft doesn't want to be in the console business. Maybe it'll be branding on Asus or Dell PCs? Just not a dedicated-function gaming device.

Apparently the next Xbox will just be a PC. It will have access to the full Windows desktop and compatibility with all Windows desktop software, meaning that it can run Steam et al. They're framing it as "compatible with Playstation-exclusive games" by which they mean that it'll run Playstation...

I think the next step in the decline is when the dollar stops being the currency of global finance. I think it will happen during Trump's turn and it truly will be the end of American global power.

Apparently the big news now is that Microsoft is expecting its gaming projects to hit 30% profit margins, which is somewhat unprecedented by past performance and on top of that, with the acquisition of Activision, there's no longer a non-Microsoft gaming company big enough to buy the Xbox brand...

For what it's worth, there have been supported Microsoft OS releases on ARM since Windows 8. They might not be well supported and they certainly didn't have the massive engineering push that came with the new Snapdragon Elitewhatever, but the Thinkpad x13s pre-dates the "PC-spec" SoCs by a...

A happier thought for just a moment: If Trump is allowed to run in 2028, the Democrats could potentially nominate Obama. He's not History's Greatest President by any stretch of the imagination, but we can remember a time when a sane and competent administrator (who isn't kissing 80 years old)...

Backblaze data seems to suggest that the bathtub curve for drive replacement is getting wider. Big drives really do seem to be lasting longer than old ones did. The article links to the most recent Backblaze data dump if anyone needs to see it, but the important detail is that they're still...

I know that Marine tablets are a thing. I've been out on Lake Michigan and seen them in action, but I can't say for sure that it's not just a fancy case over a regular tablet.

Someone asked me this morning to remote in and connect his second monitor.

I went to protests on Saturday in Valparaiso, Indiana. There were around 1000 people there, which is about 950 more people than these things usually have when they're in Indiana. We had a bunch of idiots in "Roll Coal" trucks gun their engines or try to drown out our chants and I'd say support...

I'm also on the lookout for one of those things, just to satisfy my personal curiosity. I know one person who has an Asus Snapdragon X Elite something or other, but 80% of her job is just being in meetings and taking notes about meetings. I don't even think she knows the difference between what...

The application I support is still largely Visual Basic. We need to move our development to C# and two of my three developers are in their mid 60s, so I'm guessing modernization efforts are gonna have to wait for some meemaws to retire.

The Better Offline podcast has a 100-minute long interview with the guy from Gamer's Nexus today. There's a lot of discussion of non-public aspects of running an outlet dedicated to reviewing PC hardware.

Pour one out for Windows 10. Somewhere, LunarMist is cursing the $10,000 Mac Studio he was no doubt forced to buy thanks to the end of mainstream Microsoft Support.

For a mixed use device, a Lenovo IP Duet 5 (13Q7C6) is genuinely pretty nice. FullHD OLED, 8GB RAM and better-than-advertised ~14 hour battery life on a 13" 2 in 1 that weighs almost exactly 1kg means that there's a lot to like. It's ChromeOS, which can be a down side, but since it can always...

I've used Flyby11 to upgrade Windows 10 on more than 30 PCs so far this week. Most of them were laptops belonging to social workers or retirees from my community center. Have we bitched about how stupid Windows 11 hardware requirements are recently? Almost everything people brought me had either...

The last couple on-premises storage devices I've bought were Ugreen devices. At this point I might go with an Aoostar system instead. As long as the hardware basically works and I can put Truenas on it, I don't particularly care.

Synology just announced that they're no longer going to force users to buy special Synology drives starting with rollout of the next release of their custom OS. I don't actually have any devices new enough to be impacted by that, but at least I no longer have to toss it from consideration...

I love how Republicans control every branch of Federal Government but it's somehow the fault of Democrats that they can't pass a budget. The ICE nazi parade from Trump's occupation of Chicago showed up in lily-white Valparaiso, Indiana over the weekend. They did NOT go to either Hammond or East...

You can also set all the regional options in an autounattend.xml, which is the only way to make Windows 11 acceptable in the first place.

Windows 11 25H2 is available for download now. Most everything that makes it different form 24H2 only happens for systems that meet the branding requirements for CoPilot but apparently they HAVE improved the automated system recovery if you manually turn the setting on.

Xbox Pass prices increased 50% yesterday, on top of having an extra $100 premium heaped on all the new current-gen consoles. They did add Ubisoft titles and Fortnite Battle Pass to the now-$30/month tier and that does at least have value for the Fortnite-playing console peasant in my life, but...

We don't really talk about set top boxes anywhere, but Amazon announced yesterday that its new, low-end FireTV devices won't be running Android/FireOS but rather Vega, an Amazon creation that is explicitly not an open system. Further, the new devices will offer less RAM for what I'm assuming...

The album art collection was definitely amusing. I have the cover art embedded in each music file and present in containing directories and it STILL went out and found thousands of vintage photos or paintings of composers or pictures of concert halls.

Saw this in the Register. We all probably have a story like this.

It turns out that Jellyfin actually DOES just natively handle multichannel audio-only files, so in that one extremely niche way, it is definitely better than Plex. Just like Plex, it still doesn't respect my well-organized and properly tagged music collection with embedded album art, but at...

My phone got Android 16 overnight. I don't see a whole lot that's different from Android 15, but I also don't use any software provided by Samsung on my Samsung phone other than the camera app. So far the only big difference I've seen is in the Quick Share menu. There's also a new revision of...

I just found out about Lutris. Lutris connects to basically every game service (Steam, Gog, EA, Epic et al) just like Playnite or Heroic Launcher but of greatest interest to me, it has tools and scripts for working with local Windows game installation files instead of downloads via storefronts...

I have an aunt who tells me her ipad is broken every time she sees me. She's not dumb, but I do think the ipad actively does a lot to prevent her from understanding what she's doing. Anyway, there is a maximum number of open tabs in Safari and once her device hits that number it's "broken." The...