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Apparently, nVidia has improved its hardware encoder to the point that anything Maxwell or newer (and not an -MX) can now encode five inputs simultaneously with NVenc. Before, the encoder could only handle three streams at once. No support any of the stuff I care about, but it's probably...

The California Zephyr (Chicago - San Francisco) is apparently the absolute jewel of functional Amtrak runs, although I've been told that doing it without getting a sleeper berth is a bad call. When my friend lived in Reno, she'd take the Reno - Denver leg to meet up in a place much cheaper for...

I have a friend in LA who is an employed as a TV comedy writer and my roommate knows a bunch of people who work for the Upright Citizens Brigade. One of the specific appeals of LA would be a guided tour of the various comedy clubs. I also have some San Fernando area contacts who would model for...

Isn't LaGuardia the second tier option for NYC anyway? Like flying in to Midway in Chicago or John Wayne in LA? I'm mildly annoyed that I've never been any farther into California than Lake Tahoe. I have friends in Southern California but between those people and the folks I know who are FROM...

Allegiant has regularly scheduled flights from Tampa, Clearwater and Orlando to South Bend International Airport, which is a hilarious name for an airport with three runways and nine gates. I'm perfectly happy going through O'Hare but taking off from SBN is a 15 minute walk to the train + a...

There's a lot wrong with Michigan, but the drive up the Eastern shore of the lake (roughly I-136 to US 31) is absolutely gorgeous and other than two weeks around the end of September, a clear and easy trip with scads of cheap vacation rentals and places to get interesting photos. I like to drive...

I'd say that it depends on your expectations. I like having access to group policies and remote desktop and I always assume that Windows computers have those things, but home edition doesn't. You can use things like VNC or use various tricks to enable proper RDP, but I'd rather just have it...

Something I just found out is that the firmware ID string overrides the online Windows activation database. I have an Asus Zenbook that I switch up for making and testing system images and I just noticed that when I applied the Win 11 Pro image that should activate through online entitlement, it...

In 2019 and through 2021, several of my close friends had some kind of commitment ceremony. I wound up standing up for the bride (Bridesmaid? Bridesman?) at each service. I've only attended one wedding as a guest since my cousins have all done the two minutes at the courthouse thing, done one as...

The Fits? Samsung makes a theoretically faster model with a similar form factor but I've had a lot worse luck with Samsung memory cards and thumb drives and I try to avoid them. The basis for my tech tools are Easy2Boot Hiren's BootCD Strelec's USB Boot disk Strelec in particular bears...

If you REALLY want to fix it for all time and don't mind breaking out a bazooka, you can force the matter with a group policy object. Here's an article that explains it. The GPO overrides any BS Microsoft does, even with full OS upgrades. One of the companies I support uses NitroPDF Pro on...

The Fits probably top out about 75MB/sec writes. Before we were all spoiled by SSDs, ~150MB/sec (the read speed; usually more important for my needs) was basically "as fast as a hard drive", which is good enough for my normal needs. I keep a bunch of them handy for tech work. One that's set up...

Another reason I like those SanDisk Fits: they survive a washing machine just fine. The reason I put them all on lanyards and a key ring is that I have washed my flash drives more times than I care to admit.

You'll have your default Mail, Web Browser, Image Viewer and Media Player set to a default Microsoft application. If you have software that's known to be incompatible with Windows 11 (eg Flash Player), it'll be removed. You'll be pressured to make a Microsoft account if you don't have one...

The current Core CPUs night be too hot for the little VESA box form factor. The little NUCs don't have a whole lot of cooling built in at all.

I'm not going near a wedding again. The expectation of gear, lack of cooperation from subjects and inability to understand why a photographer is present in the first place are all reason enough for that. Let the people who have all the gear and years of putting up with bridezilla handle it...

From what I've read, it at least performs better than Luminar. As far as a generic wishlist photo editing tool, my biggest current need is basically something that could magically apply fixes to hair. Flyaways, frizz etc. I suspect every portrait and wedding photographer in the world would...

Anything that goes on any sort of external storage is temporary at best. My main need for them is to 1. comfortably carry in my pocket. 2. Hold disk images and boot environments 3. Transfer data from old systems to newer ones. I have a bunch of them on a pair of key ring attached via lanyard...

Large flash drives. I have a bunch of 250 and 500GB Sandisk Fit drives in my pocket most of the time.

I only ever saw USB integrated interface drives from WD. Really. It was a lot more common among the 2.5" models than 3.5", but I saw it with both. I will also say that plugging a problematic external drive in to an internal interface fixed a problem maybe 20% of the time. That's not a bad option...

Denoise is the only one of the tools I use. I don't even have PhotoAI installed. I paid for an extra year of updates and we'll see if that's worthwhile.

He does have big pointy ears though.

Spork is an overly enthusiastic, friendly idiot. He looks like this: My older cat is Spatula. Spat is about four years old now. He's shy and permanently anxious, having come from a house full of blind Great Danes. The funny thing about Spat is that he is very visibly a big, muscular cat and...

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...