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I paid for a year of Dr. Amy's graduate school.

Windows S mode is a reduced functionality mode of operation where only Apps installed from the Microsoft Store or already included in the system image can be used. It is most often found on less expensive notebooks or on managed systems belonging to a school or similar institution. The normal...

I have a chance to get a Sigma Sport 120-300/2.8 for $600. It's second hand and I don't exactly need it but that's such a good deal that I'm not sure I can pass it up. I've been looking at either the RF 28-70/2 or 70-200/2.8 for a while now but 120-300s are in the same usually unreachably...

Try to find a used Shield if you can, or a MiTV or the relatively new ONN AndroidTV box. A lot of other boxes are too suspect to be considered.

Once again, MAC is an acronym for media access control. 😋 Everyone has plenty-strong CPUs for local processing if you need it, but basically the only people who care are doing engineering and content creation workloads. Even gamers don't particularly get bottlenecked by their processor unless...

If you're not doing much local processing, an ARM CPU is definitely fine. New Intel 14th gen CPUs are actually exceeding the thermal loads of the brand-new Zen 4 Threadrippers, which is so far beyond ridiculous that those things don't even merit attention as a mainstream product IMO. Intel is in...

Ah. So it is. That's weird. The formatting bar icons are all pretty low contrast and it definitely didn't register as being any more enabled than the other icons.

Both Google and Microsoft have an OS that's essentially just a front-end for web services (ChromeOS and Windows S-Mode). Some people will always want local processing but we haven't had any major change from Windows since Windows Vista was released. The new features in Windows are generally tied...

See subject. Is it just me?

I'm vaguely aware that Youtube is really cracking down on ad blocking so I thought I'd mention some things. I've been using SmartTubeNext since forever. It's an AndroidTV client that'll run on a Shield STB with ad blocking and sponsor blocking that works so well that my partner actually ditched...

My impression overall is that Microsoft doesn't REALLY want to make OSes any longer. It wants to make a framework for online services and get people to pay for it to host everything. On Prem Windows Server is disappearing and I think there's a constant sales pitch for more and more things to be...

I think I've mentioned this site before, but they've massively updated it and how it works. Ameliorated.io is a set of scripts that strips BS out of a Windows 10 or Windows 11 install to suit your specific needs. These scripts are called Playbooks and each of them removes a subset of components...

Since LM is asking about Frontpage, I'll also mention that this works fine in every version of Word going back to at least Office 2007. You can choose to make a .HTML file or a .MHTML, which is functionally a .zip file with all the file the page needs (e.g. embedded images or fonts) in one...

You just can't catch a break, can you? Hope everyone is current on their vaccinations.

The colo rental is in my name. I only pay $350/month for 21U and I don't pay for power. Most colos charge between $80 - $100/1U.

I wouldn't be either, but I have a couple 2TB U.2 drives on adapters like that. I haven't had an Intel P4510 die yet but my experience with older Intel drives has been that they flip in to read-only mode rather than crap out entirely.

I have more Seagate drives than anything else, but all of my 14TB+ drives are system pulls from enterprise product lines and I'm not picky about what I get given what I pay for them. The Seagate enterprise (Exos / Ironwolf) are a little louder but I have to be less than six feet from my file...

My datacenter is moving to Detroit at the end of the month. They've been giving me a sweet deal on my 1/2 rack rental for almost a decade and now I have to decide if I'd rather let all my stuff move beyond easy access or if I'd rather have my hosting costs more than double. Today is not a good day.

I agree that it would be really nice if Intel gave us a new high end enthusiast platform. There ARE weird adapters to run PCIe devices via m.2 slots, but that doesn't really solve the problem of not having enough PCIe lanes overall.

You don't need a server. You just need an HBA. In the 90s, we'd run SCSI controllers so we could use Cheetahs and X15s. This is basically the same thing.

You're basically as far from me as you could be and still be in the Chicago area. It's a not-quite two hour drive from here. Woof.

I have a SpyderX something or other.

One of the things I appreciate about the u.2 / u.3 form factor is that the drives are basically made out of finned aluminum heat sink instead of just being a bare PCB. It's also easier to get high capacity drives with better options for endurance among the u.2s than the m.2s.

Yes. I've been looking at DxO. The default "Natural" processing works pretty well for anything shot in natural light but oh boy does it ever screw the pooch on RGBW or stage lighting. I'd say it can have higher highs than default processing with Capture One but also much lower lows than Capture...

My company maintains a fax number 100% because of a dingbat secretary one of our customers uses. She's in her early 70s and she's impossible to train in any way, shape or form. Someone told her to send a particular report by fax 30 years ago and she's been dutifully printing out the report at...

Photos of human subjects can at times appear too sharp. There's a balancing act in this, but a shot at f/5.6 might not exactly be forgiving to a subject, even if that's what it takes to get a most of a person's body in focus. I find that fine grain can tone that down without much loss of actual...

Do you use LUTs or presets in processing, ever? I very often use LUTs that simulate well known medium format film stock to finish portraits. I see that DxO has a collection of those that can be purchased with DxO.

It sounds like you'd probably be served just fine by any of the above. I'm assuming the Yamaha in question is a soundbar? My preferred configuration is all devices into an AVR (Receiver) and monitor out to TV. I don't do any sound processing on any TV. My receiver is fancy enough to let me fix...

I've been using Topaz AI. Lightroom is vastly superior from a tech standpoint, but as a question of whether or not I'm willing to give Adobe a blank check to use its software for all time, the answer is no. I can get acceptable results out of Topaz.

Check you ad and/or script blocker.

PCPartPicker.com allows for searches of video cards by their length if you're looking for more options by specific length.

I've stuck with Topaz for now.

Wired/Wireless is not an issue. Rather, Roku doesn't have a native player that will accept locally stored audio or video. Apple does not have this capability either. This is super-lame if you have a collection of ripped DVDs or a music library on hand. The most common fix is to run a Plex Server.

There's an even cheaper plan that basically doesn't have any online storage but for me the there's a matter of principle because Adobe is on the same list as Apple and Western Digital. If someone ever makes me the benevolent dictator of the world, past and present employees of those companies...

It depends. Streaming of traditional broadcast/cable TV shows means different things. Hulu (owned by Disney) has the most next-day content from traditional TV of any service. There's also Hulu Plus which does extra stuff. Peacock (owned by Comcast/Universal/NBC) has NBC content Paramount+...

Also, as of this week Microsoft is no longer allowing activations of legacy Window keys. No more using a Windows 7 or 8 key on Windows 10 or 11. Bogus.

You may find that the bang for the buck on the AMD 6700XT vs. a 4060. The 6700XT has 50% more RAM and is very slightly faster for about $20 more than the 4060. It's a tough call there, because a lot of GPU capabilities are only optimized for nVidia, but the 6700 is a slightly better general...

Maybe they'll have some extraordinary new AI DeNoise. I'd pay $300 for DxO if it means getting something closer to the thing built in to Lightroom Classic.

It looks like the N95 and the mobile Zen 2 CPU in a Steam deck trade blows pretty well. The N95 runs on single channel DDR5 and is using 13th gen Intel cores, which I think help it a lot. They're both stuck at 15W and top out at 16GB RAM, but the little box is a bargain compared to the cost of a...

Didn't say anything about going abroad; she'll be in Boston, NYC, Nashville, Austin and LA.

Maybe just maybe m.2 isn't the best form factor in the world for this stuff?

That particular drive seems to have an operating temperature range of up to 70C. It's just another part to keep cool under load. I'm sure a nearly two inch tall heat sink helps a lot with that. Hope no one is sticking that thing in a laptop, though.

She travels more than I do. In fact, she won't even be back in Indiana until the end of October and after that, not until December.

Long photo-related but mostly off-topic rant to follow My partner just moved from an iPhone 14 Pro Max to an iPhone 15 Plus, because while she is happy to get USB-C to match every other goddamned thing in the house (jokingly, the same charger as her vape), the Pro Max doesn't come in pink, and...

I'm sure I have dozens of Sandisk cards that are between 64 and 256GB. They're more reliable than Samsung or Lexar and a lot cheaper than Angelbird.

Anything that sells refurb / secondhand cards carries a little bit of risk, but it beats wasting $100 extra to get a new in box item that isn't worth $150 in the first place.

I can't even tell what's being advertised by that.

I've had very few negative experiences with second hand video cards. I know for a fact that all of the GTX1080s I passed to people during the pandemic that were definitely used as crypto mining cards are still fine to this day. It's not all horror stories. You might look on ebay for cards...

I do not need to explain how WD sucks. You all already know. Every time I buy a SanDisk SD card, I die a little in my soul, although ironically the SD cards are the one thing with which I haven't had a bad time.

It's explicitly stuff that doesn't map well to anything else, so the OS just gives up and says "put it in that other category." If you are looking at things closely with ADB commands or a real file manager (e.g. Solid Explorer), you can get a better idea of what's going on, but that one report...