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A tool I like and use a lot is Optyx, which uses AI to help me cull my photos. I bought my copy of Optyx 1.0 just days before it transitioned to a subscription product with the 2.0 release. It keeps me from agonizing over facial expressions and which photos represent the best lighting in a...

It just seems like such a weird conglomeration of hardware. "I want something small, but not ITX small. I really wanna slide it in between my 48 port switch and the Drobo!" USB 3.2 is respectable for external IO, but not what I think of for rackmount gear. At least put U.2 on those front bays!

It's going to depend on which CPU you stick in that thing. The -Xs and X3Ds have much higher TDPs than the baseline non-suffixed versions of the CPUs. There are 65W 8c/16t Ryzen 7 series CPUs, but the faster parts all have 120W+ TDPs, high enough to be of concern. 13th gen Intel isn't exactly...

If you log in with a Microsoft ID, the decryption key is stored as part of your Microsoft account instead of a text file. Your MS credential is enough to unlock encrypted drives. The keys are in theory short enough that you could memorize them but they're long enough to be painful to type out...

There's no reason you CAN'T turn it on for those drives, so long as you're using the same Microsoft ID to carry the decryption key.

Apparently, Intel has new fab processes that put it on par with TSMC "2nm" scale production. If that's the case, I fully expect Intel to absolutely leapfrog AMD in a generation or two. I put the "2nm" in quotes because everything now is apparently a set of compounding rounding errors and the...

You can absolutely turn bitlocker off. It's handy on the primary drive of computers in a business or laptops that go on trips outside the house but whether you use it for anything else is up to you. I don't use it on desktops at home.

I got a new kitten on Sunday. His name is Spork, which goes along with my other cat, Spatula. Spork introduced my phone to the floor just now. It fell off my armchair and apparently hit a hard drive lower-left corner first. My phone is in a bumper but sure as shit it cracked the edge of the...

Synology just uses Linux LVM so if you're REALLY ambitious you might try creating your array with your drives attached to a Linux host and mdadm like the wind to set your chunk size to something bigger like 64 or 128k. :D But honestly, you're getting 2x one HDD worth of write speed, and...

Small servers are not necessarily loud. I have Lenovo RD550s servers at home, in my office and in the datacenter and they're all shockingly quiet except right when they start up and put the 20krpm fans on full blast for about 15 seconds. Even with the CPUs pegged at 100% for 10 minutes, they...

If you have software RAID, it should be a parameter you can set at creation of the array, but if you're seeing 700MB/sec sequential writes, you have NOTHING to complain about.

I tend to view public transit as part of the experience. Chicago is a vastly different place through the El than it is from Lake Shore Drive and Interstate 94. I also take a different view of cities with wholly inadequate transit, like Vegas (outside the strip) or Denver (has light rail but...

More likely Berlin / Munster / Vienna / Bern / Budapest / Prague, for a European trip. I still haven't made any significant trip to NYC, a trip that's a much higher priority, but also one I wouldn't want to attempt without a decent local guide. My brother is in Prague and both I and my best...

RAID6 is always kind of iffy and write speed depends a lot on implementation but in my experience with HDDs, it's usually about as fast as write speed of between one half and two drives for an array of five or six, depending on stripe sizes, caching strategy etc. That's generalizing across...

I'm a big fan of going anyplace I can go for about $100. This means frequent trips to central Florida, Vegas, NOLA etc, as those are usually the cheapest flights, or else day trips to whatever is in range. I'm a fan of visiting cities any chance I get.

Humble Bundle's Turkey-Syria Earthquake relief package is a crazy good deal even if most of the products are Steam games. X-Com 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker by themselves are probably worth $30.

I have never in my life thought of using a piece of hardware as a display item. I do keep some old stuff in plastic bins, including a few old graphics cards and sound cards, and the oldest of the disk drives. I'm most weirdly sentimental about my first CD burner and my Soundblaster AWE32, which...

There are a bunch of sites that offer rankings. Many of them want to use specific cards rather than generic chips, but it's easy enough to navigate. cpu-compare.com is an easy one to remember.

Since you're using someone else's VM, is it possible the actual disk image was thin-provisioned and/or set to use dynamic RAM?

I've seen the Intel P4500 4TB as cheap as $800 on Amazon, but never when I was looking to buy a 2.5" drive of that capacity. There's some difficulty in knowing whether or not a particular drive is new or a pull, but most of the time pulled drives are around half of MSRP rather than 80%. The...

Since we're probably talking about consumer graphics hardware, single-precision FP32 is probably a decent indicator of GPU computing performance. The actual specifics will depend on what a given application has decided to implement and support.

The RTX 4090 has dual encoding modules, which could be a big deal since nVidia typically has the best supported encoding hardware. On the other hand, Intel has the best overall support for codecs in Quickpath, which can be enabled from either CPU or a GPU. In either case, you get the same...

Video work is a whole thing, man. It's deeply specialized and the recommendations change entirely based on your hardware and applications. My setup is extremely idiosyncratic because I choose to work in Resolve Studio instead of some other thing.

LM, you have much to learn about awesome movies. This movie is bad. Everyone knew it was bad. It is still AWESOME. Hal Needham stunts? Motorcycles? DUNE BUGGIES WITH LASERS? Fuck yes. I lost a dear friend last year who had a more-than-passing friendship with Barry Bostwick through Rocky Horror...

If Red Hat derivatives were off the table, I'd probably take up Slackware, which is philosophically closer to a standard Unix than most anything else. I almost always use Ubuntu if I'm teaching. It's just the path of least resistance.

I need to share with everyone the greatest movie of all time. I am making the GenZs watch it tonight.

I actually have a very long and deeply held prejudice against ANYTHING based on Debian because some waste of oxygen from the FSF was shitty to me on IRC in about 1995, but truly, Ubuntu doesn't think commercial software is the devil, comes with the hooks to get almost everything running with...

There is no Microsoft Office for Linux, but people have gotten most of recent versions of Office to run on WINE. It's cool if you don't care about Access or Outlook. And no one should use Outlook for anything anyway because it's awful. You could also get away with running the Android version of...

I would probably say Ubuntu, just from the abundance of support that exists for it. You will lose out on a few things, like some cloud services not making official Linux clients, but IMO if you do most everything in a browser, Firefox is fully functional from the moment you boot the installer...

Most of the changes are pretty subtle, and if you're a Samsung user, Samsung likes to do as little as possible to expose users to Google stuff. There are some little things that you'll notice in Settings, like the battery use indicator is different. Samsung's philosophy is that users should be...

Just to answer my own question, I did find this list. Short version: There are affordable 48" 120Hz gaming OLED displays and weirdo longscreens, but the minute one starts looking at 24 - 32" screens with prioritized color accuracy, the prices range between $3500 and $5k. Oof.

Be glad you are still at a point where glasses are somehow optional. My eyesight can't even be corrected to 20/20 with glasses, and I am physically incapable of putting in contacts. Not hyperbole. I had a very patient optometrist and his assistant conclude, after three hours of trying, that the...

I believe the cameras with the software in question were Powershots or their predecessors rather than DSLRs. I do have a Kodak DC290 kicking around my place somewhere. It's definitely an antique at this point, but I recall it smoking the image quality of early smartphone cameras. Turns out, it...

I'm a little bit surprised you'd chose a 27" screen. I've had 32" monitors for 15 years at this point.

There's a bit of a curve in this because there is no One True Display that has both extremely high refresh AND high color accuracy. You usually get one or other the other. Samsung hauls out weird high end displays that kinda-sorta do both for big trade shows, but then they use nonstandard ultra...

dd, give Puss in Boots 3 a shot. Not kidding. I saw it in the theater AFTER I'd pirated it. It's enjoyable for both kids and adults. I'm obviously a pretty hardcore Marvel person. I go to midnight showings and I also usually go as part of a group to see them as well. We average a theater...

This is another one of those "long memory" things, but Canon used to package a gallery and light editing cool with cameras in the Win98/NT4 days that didn't put things under Pictures in My Documents. It was a big source of irritation for me because the only other software I regularly saw doing...

Honestly even 75Hz is subjectively noticeable.

I have a hard time taking Linus Sebastian seriously. I know he has smart people working for him but he's also the muppet version of gamer stereotypes, and very often his non gamer content boils down to "watch what happens when we spend the GDP of Burkina Faso on hardware." But I have been...

Ant-Man Quantumania is maybe the most 3D trippy thing Marvel has done since the first Doctor Strange movie If you are a fan of substances, take substances. It's also doing a whole space opera story rather than a comedy heist like the other entries in the series.

I can only respect the corporate grudge. Fatwa on all the bastards. It makes sense that would be an issue with DPP, but I've never considered using it. I remember some precursor Canon camera software that wanted to keep had data somewhere under Program Files YEARS after user directories were...

I've had absolutely zero problems with Sigma Art or Sport lenses. In fact, I found that I like Sigma's 50/1.4 better than the melted-butter soft Canon EF 50/1.2 and the Sigma Sport EF 70-200/2.8 more than the Canon L version (FREELY admitting the RF L version is lust-worthy though). I know and...

Mostly I work with Farmer's agents and independents, but the sites are names you'd recognize if you've ever worked with an independent insurance agent.

Virtual CPUs are only ever about 60% as fast as real ones but if I had to guess I'd say you're getting more headroom in your thermal budget to hit higher clocks if you aren't using them.

The thing I dislike about Sony is screwy the control interface is. Sometimes touch works and sometimes not. Canon cameras more or less work along the same intuitive lines as operating a mobile device, and it's pretty straightforward to operate it with the hard controls or the display. Sony...

We lost the Chicago area Fry's years ago. We still have two Microcenters though. They're well worth visiting, especially for the novelty of being able to see computer cases prior to purchase, but the value is somewhat questionable since both Chicago and Westmont, Illinois have rather local high...

I already had EF lenses from the 5D I had been using. Granted that most of them are Sigma rather than Canon, but the only thing Sigma really gives me to complain about is weight. Their optics are excellent. That predisposed me to stick with Canon, even if I'd need an adapter to use them on...

The sad thing is that some insurance agents I do for work just last week got instructions that they are to only visit certain insurers' sites with IE mode Edge. I tried to explain why this was a terrible idea in 2023 and yesterday I forwarded them the same news article about it going away. But...

The horror has finally come to an end.

It worked for cheapskate Dell and HP consumer desktops that were still shipping with HDDs in 2019. Kind of.