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From what I gathered, the reality is that Backblaze loses something like 1.5% of the drives it buys within three years. That's an astonishing level of overall reliability. Seagate drives are a bit less reliable, but they also cost less, so the relative value from their side very close either way.

Not gonna lie, that works for me. My living room area already looks like a Philips Hue factory exploded and the desktop out there DOES have a clear panel. 2TB isn't big enough to bother with, but if I saw one of those, it might be worth an extra $10 for the novelty. Properly speaking, Luke's...

I had SMP systems on 486, P54C Pentium, Pentium Pro and finally Pentium 2. I went back for the Athlon X2, Core2Q and a succession of i7s. The only generation I really skipped was the dual Thunderbird Athlon platform you had. I'm not going to pretend that anything from the Pentium 2 era or...

Lots of cores work great with Resolve, which ends up being the biggest consumer of my CPU time. And I like having crap-tons of I/O and RAM on my workstation. Lots of cores is also really handy when I'm both rendering video AND editing photos. But I strongly suspect that Adobe specifically isn't...

I tried Lightroom Classic on my 3960X. It's apparent to me that Adobe software is in no way, shape or form optimized for more than maybe four cores. There isn't much subjective difference between doing things on the Threadripper than the R9 5900. Just watching AI masking or DeNoise work, it...

There's a really fun book that I like to share with substance-using friends called "A Brief History of Vice" by Robert Evans (not that one, although that one probably knew a thing about substances as well), wherein the author discusses the things that ancient peoples did to get blasted and then...

Do you have a datacenter to host such a system in another region or do you have a second residence somewhere besides California?

I really do think your frustration at existing NAS products is a compelling argument for building some kind of appliance device. There are a number of ITX boards with integrated Celeron CPUs, 6x SATA, 4x2.5Gbps LAN and an M.2 port that are very affordable. Combine with something like a...

VideoMass: for the day when you want to download an entire Youtube channel, playlist or whatever. Everyone has access to Youtube. Not everyone has access to Youtube without commercials or other BS messages. I decided to create a few Plex libraries for high quality content that i know to exist...

Microsoft Accounts? They're analogous to Google Accounts that anyone with Gmail or an Android device would have or Apple accounts for anyone with an iThing. Microsoft started pushing for them in Windows 8 and is making them more and more mandatory as of the most recent Windows 10 and 11 release...

Is that on the 7950? What I'm seeing on the 5990 with 6650X is that GPU RAM is climbing up to about 7.5GB usage while overall utilization sits at around 15%. It makes me wonder if there's a bottleneck from having "only" 8GB texture memory. Adobe does have rules for what the new AI Denoise...

If you upgrade or install fresh from original Windows 11 Pro media, you are not forced to create a Microsoft account. We've talked about this. You should be able to back up all your account settings if you're worried about that, and if your data is properly segregated to a drive besides your OS...

Do you have GPU set to auto in preferences for Topaz or a specific GPU? I have to mess with the setting kind of often depending on what else I'm doing. With regard to CR3 -> TIF -> DNG: Yes, it works, but the free converter won't do it. You have to do it in a paid Adobe application, although...

I think it's a safe bet there will be another generation in a year. At the same time, there is really nothing so terrible about Windows 11. I think we'll see a Windows 12 relatively soon. Adoption rates on 11 have been pretty low and Microsoft knows it. It's sounding like AMD is going to adopt...

Minor correction: The 20 minutes on 300 images in Topaz Denoise would be the CPU (on my Threadripper) rather than GPU time. It's in my head that it's around 15 seconds/picture but it's between 3 and 7 seconds if I have the nVidia card do it. I note that the times per image can be VERY uneven. I...

I had time to mess with it today. Using the R9 5900 with 6650XT in my living room, I'm not sure what in the hell it was doing. The process took about an hour to handle 300 pictures, all images taken under hostile conditions at at ISO 25600, but at no point did my CPU utilization rise above 30%...

I have a liter of diluted cold brew most days. The coffee is mostly to counteract a relatively high fiber diet.

There's a local roaster I visit every time I'm around. Their blends are amazing, but they're also so snobby about it that if you have them brew a cup, they'll tell you to leave if you ask for sweetener or any milk-like substance. But i also brew a lot of Target store brand coffees, so I'm not...

SR doesn't even HAVE forums any longer. I do think I like the new site better than the previous ownership though.

The rumors are that Zen 5 APUs coming next year will be competitive out of the box with low and mid-tier RTX 4000 mobile graphics. We all get tired of hearing things are changing real soon now, but this is probably good for a lot of PC users.

The woodshed is where you found the paddle to beat the shit out of your kid. It is a widely known idiom. My Thinkpad X1 Extreme has a discrete GPU and still weighs less tha 2kg. I know your LG Gram is probably around half that, but computers in that class are a different beast for other reasons...

A/B testing between Spotify and either Apple or Amazon makes the difference pretty clear. The other guys are just delivering more bits per second. Apple and Amazon always deliver lossless-equivalent sound. This is Tidal's deal as well, from back when CD quality audio was more of a point of...

The 780M integrated graphics in new Ryzen mobile CPUs apparently takes the GTX1650 mobile to the shed. For hardware that's "free" with a Ryzen 7 or 9 mobile CPU that is really, really respectable.

Speaking of random audio ranting: These days, I'm using all of the following in my home: Plex for my local music files. This can be nice since I spent a long time going out of my way to collect and rip multichannel audio recordings, but it's also sluggish to use and relies on my home internet...

Per my roommate, you don't HAVE to install updates and you can install older versions should you choose to, so long as you're on a paid plan. The software gets new versions approximately quarterly. I am also under the impression that most of the changes are AI-related.

I kind of think Topaz Products other than PhotoAI have been abandoned. They don't seem to be getting much in the way of updates any longer. Adobe products are in my home whether I like it or not, if only because my roommate gets them through school. She does believe that the suite would be...

My standard for over a decade was the paid version of Swype. Swype had an online synching dictionary that I really appreciate since I use a lot of jargon and it had the very best keyboard support for punctuation while swiping and also cut, copy and paste. Microsoft bought and abandoned Swype. I...

The Google and Samsung SMS applications have some kind of external access from the web, which probably sets them ahead of other SMS software.

The AI DeNoise in Lightroom does IMO visibly better work than I can get out of Topaz but IMO it also seems like Topaz Photo AI does Denoise better than the dedicated Denoise product.

I rely on the noises my phone makes to track normal activity vs anything out of the ordinary. I also want some noises to ALWAYS play from the phone speaker rather than bluetooth. My phone is almost never on silent, unless I'm at a concert or something. I have a whole bunch of triggers to make...

You can set ringtones for callers. That's a bit of a PITA but it's probably worthwhile to do. I have a folder full of sounds I have assigned to specific people that I've been using for years and years. You might also be able to do it with Tasker or the like.

I used to get calls almost constantly, frequently at the least opportune times and often very often from people I really couldn't bill or hold accountable for the time. Like some random jerk would have my phone number because I'm the office support person and his computer at home was screwing up...

For the low, low price of $10,000... Of course that thing plus the 28-70/2 would more or less replace a bag of primes.

There's also itch.io, which is focused on GAMING but not necessarily electronic sorts of gaming. It's very possible to get PC games, but it's also a place where free or low cost tabletop games can be obtained. It's where I got fun stuff like Honey Height and Thirsty Sword Lesbians.

If you're OK with letting people have your personal phone number, fine. There's no technical reason for things to work that way any longer, and I don't want to be forced to disclose the number people can call whenever they want. One of the major annoyances with SMS is the assumption that...

GoG is owned by CD Projekt Red. It has licenses to distribute many games from the DOS/Windows 98 gaming era and also a decent sized selection of new titles from Indie studios. VERY few games on GoG have any sort of DRM or require any kind of external login to play, and it also refuses to allow...

SMS is evil and no one should use it under any circumstance, since it requires users to disclose their phone number. My phone number is absolutely privileged information. iMessage is just SMS but worse, and also assures that any binary attachments are mangled by Apple before they are delivered...

You can just deny the camera permission to the camera app you have installed. That'll take care of it just fine, although every time you accidentally open the camera somehow, it'll bug you about it.

I have Stellaris, which I haven't started yet, and Rifts, a turn based RPG that ran on the Ngage and was never ported to anything else, that I've been playing on my tablet. I'm really waiting for Baldur's Gate 3. I paid full price for it and I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but it's had a very...

Per my Prague-resident brother, if you're in an sort of major city, it's actually difficult to find a place without someone around who speaks decent English. Learning a "minor" European language like Finnish or Polish or Czech is actually very difficult because the natives go out of their way to...

Just a thought, but a camera lens that zooms to 600 or 800mm + a teleconverter would give you similar levels of zoom and the ability to capture what you're seeing. LM probably has stronger opinions about long zooms than I do though.

I am sorry to hear that.

Do you know someone with that condition?

I just ran across this on Ebay, but I imagine the Newegg link is probably more appreciated since it has more info. 8c16t, Zen 2 GPU, 2x DDR5, SATA and nvme. Seems like an absolute dream of a NUC-alike to me.

Ironically, another dear friend came from a weird Lutheran offshoot. You don't really hear a lot about Lutheran fundamentalists, but they're out there.

The pattern among my closest friends has been a family that is extremely religious that for one reason or other isn't willing to support daughters who are unwilling to get with the program. My current partner's family are Scientologists. She was expected to start her journey in that faith at 16...

Go looking now. The opportunities evaporate as you get older and the chances that someone will see your professional success as a way to correct their youthful mistakes just increases with age. Even someone's adult offspring still mean you get static from another parent and potentially two sets...

The age gap isn't terribly relevant to either of us, jtr. We just get along really well and recognize the mutual benefits of being a team for some period of time. It's a good model to have for people who aren't necessarily trying to start a family or find til death do us part.

My domestic partner is 22. Her father is a few years younger than, young enough that he MIGHT be a millennial. She's also involved in Chicago-area concert venues and music festivals, so she's always talking about who is going to be where and which things are worth making plans, because she can...

Hot April is great because it's the time I can absolutely get away with doing questionable outdoor modeling shoots. I was out on the lake shore this morning, even. LM, you gotta let me know if you're through here. Even if you're just at ORD on a layover, there's places to meet up as close as...