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The Girl from Ipanema is an absolute all-time banger. It's the movie trope for elevator music, but it's also the one of the most frequently recorded songs in history. I'd never REALLY listened to it, and as a middle aged person whose social life authentically involves attractive women young...

I have a Canon R6 and an R7 right now, with the R7 intended for "secondary" tasks, which is usually either video with a wide lens or (I hope; it's too cold to be outside where I live to do much with human subjects) long shots with my 70-200, while my R6 is for pure photo work, usually off a...

That is indeed a glorious crop off a 600mm lens, and it's spectacularly free of noise for such a short shutter time. "Fast" for me is almost always 1/500 second and "far" for me is almost always less than 12m. Are you doing anything special in processing these images or is this straight out of...

I set up a customer's new offices on Sunday and I couldn't believe the internet speed for the price they were getting. I've been on the same Comcast service plan for something like five years. Last time I talked to them, the main thing I heard was that I had to accept an extra subscription to...

Most AMD motherboards have a designated USB port for doing firmware updates even when entirely unpopulated by CPU. For years, I've kept a lowest-cost CPU for any platform I support on hand for doing BIOS flashes. AM4 has been particularly bad about this, especially since AMD kept redefining...

ANDROID supports multiple user accounts, as in it is part of the AOSP baseline. I've only ever seen it enabled on tablets and phones running LineageOS. My Tab S8 and old-ass nVidia Shield tablet both have it, for example. Functionally, it doesn't look like there's MUCH difference between Samsung...

There's a crypto mining process that fills drives and then doesn't do anything more with the data. My datacenter doesn't charge for power, so it's popular with miners. I think that's why stuff is so frequently abandoned, too.

Sometimes the answer is nothing. I've been getting drives from my datacenter guys for a while to say satisfy my need for better than SMR high capacity drives and many of the ones I've received have had very low numbers of total bytes written and/or power on hours. I can usually buy 5 used...

Iirc, multiple user profiles is a tablet thing. You should be able to do eSIMs on your S20 though. Mine just got Android 13, which definitely does support that. I have an unlimited use Office 2007 volume license that dates from before activation became an issue, which started with Vista and...

Diskprices.com is really nifty and sorts results to include whether or not the drives are new, used or refurbished.

The hardware warranty in no way depends on the state of software on the PC. We won that fight in like 1998. When I ship an in-warranty laptop for service, I remove the drive before I ship it anyway; I've heard of people getting their laptop factory reset too many times to trust anything else.

I happen to know that there ARE older products Microsoft absolutely refuses to reactivate. Neither Small Business Server 2003 nor 2008 work any more. I was even trying to re-activate SBS2003 on its original hardware.

You CAN use Rufus to prepare an install image that drops the MS account requirements. Most of the integrations for the account boil down to redirecting folders to Onedrive (no, thank you) and having a place to put the default-on Bitlocker recovery key.

That is what a mirror set is for. Maybe something like this?

The R6 is the dark room with no control over lighting champion. I partway wonder if I should return it for an R6mk2 instead, but unfortunately, I won't get many opportunities to shoot outdoors in good light for several months unless I manage a couple weekend getaways to the south or west. I...

Have you thought about syncing everything to a cloud service or are you places where bandwidth is a distinct issue?

I'll say that I have enough faith in Topaz DeNoise to use 6400 ISO on the R7. We're having awful weather here. It might be a while before I do anything interesting with it.

I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed or cares, but Google Play Games has a beta for enjoying your Android games on Windows.

I finally got my goddamned R7. It feels cheap compared to the RP I had and I don't like having the power control on the right-hand side. From just chasing my cats and roommates around the house with it, it definitely doesn't keep up for low light; ISO 6400 looks to be about as high as I can push...

I FINALLY got the shipment notification for my R7.

What makes you think that I am anything other than sincere in my faith in the seven Angels entrusted by God to stand as stewards of the Earth and Mankind? What makes you think that your Krishna, faint echo of he who did not bow even to almighty God, is the greater source of truth? Melek Taus...

We can have a perfectly pleasant discussion. We don't have to involve Parky until he contributes something of value. I'd like to assert that the ancient and inspirational message of the Peacock Angel on his shining throne of pearl is a vastly more enlightened one, as is evidenced by all of...

jtr, I do believe it is the right and responsibility of parents to instruct their children and it is their first duty to explore ethics and morality so their children can function with other human beings. There are not many people who teach the basics of these things in an absolutely incorrect...

There are purportedly real benefits in holding out for higher bandwidth RAM on AMD's architecture. I have DDR4 3600 CL18 RAM in my workstation and I've never used anything else with it. I believe DDR5-7200 is the highest speed RAM currently approved by JEDEC, so that's probably the stuff you're...

Parky, can you offer even one objective reason to support your sentiment that your faith is the singular true one in all of human history that is not itself reliant on your holy texts or dissertation from an adherent? I will just as certainly reject the Koran, Bible or Adi Granth as evidence of...

I mildly disagree; there is value to be had in the study of religion, both from the standpoint of comparative views and in using holy texts as literature or art. I took a Bible as Literature course in college; it was the only time I got to be in the same class with the Saudi, Bangladeshi...

Religion at its best is a lubricating element for ordered social cohesion. A self-selecting group chooses (or inherits with or without additional thought on the subject) a set of beliefs they agree to adhere to. In this way, almost all religions ultimately have very similar beliefs, at least...

AMD lifted the curtain on RX7000 hardware and the 7900 is apparently more than twice as fast in compute terms than the 6900 and has a downright reasonable 300W TDP and $1000 MSRP.

Cooler Master N-whatever or S-whatever are pretty great cases. They've kind of replaced Antec as providers of a generally good if unspectacular chassis. Actual Antec kind of went off the deep end with weird RGB and festishy skeletal styles for everything but the most basic models. IMO the P5 is...

I'm a big fan of the Cooler Master NR200, which is a big boy for mITX but it does support at least SOME 3-slot uATX boards by relocating the PSU cage. It's definitely sturdy enough to support real weight on it and can be used in any orientation. It can handle a full size GPU and it has nifty...

Flip the screen. You can control focus and shoot by dragging and tapping your left thumb on the screen if you'd like. I'd love to see a left-handed camera. Having everything on the right is a real inconvenience IMO. Even with my heavy Sigma lenses, it's not a big deal to have my thumb wrapped...

As long as they don't bring that godawful touch bar from the R back, I can probably get used to almost anything else, although I definitely miss the top display on my old 5D. On the R6, I do find that I have to be very deliberate in recording video, because the record button is too close to...

I have an EF 135/2 already, which is an amazing lens. I don't have as many opportunities to use it as I'd like given the limitations of my normal subject matter and likelihood that I'm shooting in a relatively small space. I got a "Launch Day" R6 that was actually delivered the day after I heard...

Well that's definitely hilarious. Acronis went subscription-only back in 2020 and I've long suspected that Microsoft would love to ditch the legacy backup application on desktop Windows anyway, so I've been putting Aomei Backupper on home systems when I configure them. It's a freebie that...

My roommates both play games. One of them had the Razor headset with the cat ears. She said it lasted about 10 weeks, and that is currently off for RMA. Sounds like not buying Razor is a solid plan at least. Right now I actually have to listen to their games; one of them plays on the big setup...

Anybody have gaming headset recommendations? Or anti-recommendations? Is 7.1 worthwhile for FPS stuff? The main thing I know is that cheap headsets don't seem to hold up very well.

My roommate got her iPhone 14 Pro today. Still no sign of my R7 though. I'm contemplating the extra $400 to buy one with the 18 - 150, which is a lens I'd probably at least use if I had it. Apparently the latest wave of Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom updates that are hitting in the next couple days...

Puget Systems finally put up some analysis of the 4090 for content creation workloads. Here's the executive summary: Unfortunately, it doesn't look to me like dual hardware encoders are THAT awesome for video encoding, or Resolve isn't set up to use more than one, because the gain there is...

There can be big improvements for video editing that come from having direct hardware codecs for particular file types. This is why ProRes 422HQ is such a big thing for Macs as an intermediate editing format. It's much smaller than raw video formats, preserves 10 bits of color and it's fast and...

Signal announced today that it's going to drop support for SMS messaging on Android. This is a big deal for people who prefer to have a single messaging client that isn't controlled by Facebook, Apple or Google, as it makes the platform a lot less palatable for a gradual transition for users who...

One of the things that makes the 4090 actually interesting in this regard is that it has dual hardware encoders. I'm not sure if they work in parallel and that's something I'd like to know. I will say that NVenc in my experience beats all comers as far as hardware video encoding on Windows, as...

There have been a bunch of overviews of the 4090 and it seems that the claims of performance roughly doubling over the 3090 are more or less true, but I haven't found a single discussion about them as general purpose computing devices. AV1 encoding is on my radar as an important feature to...

If you're using it on a tripod, aren't you supposed to disable the lens IBIS anyway? I had special access to a pre season NBA game this weekend but "special access" meant a VIP suite behind one of the baskets rather than court side. I had a 70 - 200 but nothing longer. 3x zoom didn't really cut...

You are definitely overestimating my willingness to work on a 20 year old printer. I'd probably give any of the early models of Laserjet a shot at repair but IMO if any other printer lives for more than five years we bow our heads and say goodnight. I will say that current HP color lasers are...

My ancient but still functional Tektronics Phaser 850 died today in the most spectacular way possible. The power supply had a flame out. I wasn't even home to see it, but one of my roommates turned it on to print something, something that happens about three times a year. Not much to see from...

Ars doesn't totally hate the high end 7x0 Intel Alchemist GPUs. $330 to get an A770 that's in the same ballpark or maybe a little faster than a R6600XT or 3060Ti. Unfortunately, we can buy R6650XTs for $300 without trying very hard, but who knows what the discount off MSRP will be once these...

The impact of it being JBOD or RAID0 is functionally the same. I just used the hardware to make a volume instead of using storage spaces or LVM within the OS in order to have a large enough space to work in. I wouldn't have bothered if 4TB consumer drives were affordable.

Google Japan produces 1.5m straight line English keyboard. For some reason.

Just a fun reminder to toss in that Intel expects 13th gen i7s to draw 250W.

It's a volume I created with the X399 firmware. It doesn't NEED to be RAID0 because it'll never be running so fast that I need 5GB/s+ transfer rates, but I did want the single volume to be large enough to not have to worry about capacity. If that volume craps out, it's not the end of the world...