Search results

Car happened. It's fine, I guess. I am going to miss my old one. The newer car doesn't have in-dash maps, so the first thing I wound up doing was to get a tablet to do Android Auto. I didn't realize how used to it I've become. Putting a tablet in to handle it only costs about $100, which seems...

I have a cousin who is on his third Tesla,. He was an early adopter and I remember that he always had a bunch of Tesla merch to give away because that was something Tesla just offered to people who bought their cars. Anyway, right after he got his first one, his employer transferred him to Erie...

I spent $60 filling the tank on my Element yesterday and then it did another Engine whoopsie on the way home, which REALLY clarified my mind about the whole buying a car ASAP. The fix isn't horrifically expensive, but that's the third time it's happened in two months. I actually thought about...

Finally bought something, a 2018 RAV 4 Hybrid with 80k miles on it. It's being shipped from Arizona, which I hope means it spent its life in the southwest, and I won't get it for a week or so. I did wind up dealing with CarMax, which means I can finally block all the numbers car salesmen have...

Given how much of a PITA my car has been, everything I just got is getting dumped immediately on someone who can actually use that rig. Even if I gave somebody a $2500 bargain deal, that's still a sizeable chunk of extra cash I can put in to my purchase. Also, I'm finding that car salesmen LOVE...

I like the convenience of having a desktop session in a tab an awful lot, especially for VMs I don't need to use for very much. Actually the first use I had was for direct sharing of :0 on my CachyOS game clients, since I'm always having to mess with Steam Rom Manager, something that I can't do...

Apache Guacamole is a session manager for remote desktops that runs in a browser tab At least, remote desktops you can look at via RDP or VNC. It's not perfect, but it's handy as a tool to access desktop VMs in one place. I'd never encountered it, but I think it's something I'll keep using.

Guys, it was just a regular Ryzen 9800X not an X3D, and she decided to keep her giant monitor. Shucks. AI Bullshit updates: nVidia and Perplexity.ai released a new tool over the weekend for on-device AI via RTX GPUs. It's supposed to offer Agentic tools. I have access to Perplexity Pro; I...

I forgot that I never updated this so: Caddy, for signing SSL certs, was absurdly easy to set up. Install it, set up hostname overrides in your DNS server and write what you want to happen to its config file. You have to add its security certificate to your OS and/or Firefox installation if...

The biggest gamer I know is a 70-something year old divorced woman. She's been getting her hair cut based on her headset needs for about the last 15 years. She told me last night that she's been advised to stop gaming because of ongoing joint pain in her hands and neck, so she's asked if I want...

As I'm writing this the 5060Ti 16GB currently costs more than a 9070XT, a card that's something like 75% faster. To be clear, they're both overpriced right now, but at time of writing this post, we're talking about a $800 (basically double MSRP) 5060Ti and a (20%-ish above MSRP) $750 Radeon. I...

My favorite part of that picture is the way Bill's mouth is just a little bit open in the most simian way. I'll change it some day when somebody pies Elon Musk. I don't think he'll take it as well as Mr. Gates.

Through some unique confluence of events, I've gotten packages from just about everyplace I order things today: 3 Amazon deliveries (so far; I'm supposed to get another one "before 9PM"), FedEx, UPS, US Mail (Aliexpress), Shein, Instacart and Walmart have all been by my place today. This was not...

That's been a rumor every year since the Element was discontinued. They're absurdly practical cars, but Honda only sold ~50,000 of them in the US over their whole production run. Somebody shows up with a mock-up design and I get my hopes up. I'm pretty sure a new Element will be north of $40k...

I'm actively campaigning to buy my father's Element. Low mileage, no rust and pampered for its entire life. It's 20 now but I can probably get 10 years out of it. I set a ceiling of $25k for a new-to-me car, ideally a hybrid crossover-something. What I'm seeing is that to stick to that number...

I just found this fun youtube channel, which is devoted to testing PC case fan designs. The guy gets designed by his viewers, which he 3D prints and attaches to a Noctua frame/motor. It's oddly satisfying.

Ok now I have power. Huzzah! I bet it scared the shit out of my cats though.

It's day 15 now.

New Corvettes definitely look like Italian sports cars, but they're also very common where I live. A cherry red paint job on a low-to-the-ground sports car might be a Ferrari or a Lamborghini. My area does get those, because there's a lot of money in the vacation homes along the Lake shore. But...

Any car I own is going to get filled with things most people would never guess is valuable, and it will full time look trashed. Photo stands and lights, tons of random cables and plain cardboard boxes with random PC hardware. There won't be visible tools. My T420 is in there someplace, sure, but...

I mean that's probably a different state's troops... But really, state government actively wants Gary to go away, even though it loves the taxes from all the industrial output here. We're not getting shit from the republican supermajority in Indianapolis. We never have. I have also heard that...

Option 1 is highly dependent on my dad being willing to sell. In the past he's said he wants to keep it for the same practical reason I have one: They're great to just pile crap in, which is awesome when you're bringing home a load of whatever from Home Depot. His "main" car is a '25 Grand...

Random aside while I'm sitting in the dark and contemplating my car options: When the hell did Corvettes hit Ferrari pricing? $250k for a ZR1? Corvettes? The car that divorced boomers who never wear anything but khaki shorts and polo shirts, drive? Where is Clocker? I have so many questions...

I have a dream of getting an actually fuel efficient vehicle. To double my fuel economy would be quite the blessing. I probably put $200 worth of gas in my car every month at current prices. Which is kind of gross, now that I think about it. Part of my desire for a physically smaller car stems...

I love my Element. Truly. Irrationally. It's not comfortable but it's practical. The cargo capacity to overall size of the vehicle is insane. And there's nothing else like it. But now I do have to think about something newer. It's time. Option 1: My dad's Element. It's 20 years old, but it has...

Gary is in national news now because of our situation. The current goal is for near-complete restoration of service by the 25th, a full two weeks after the storm. The reason this is so controversial is that our local Power Company, NIPSCO, initially left Gary off its announced schedule of...

Here's a hilarious project I should not have to have: Firefox recently made some security changes such that sites accessed via HTTP are disallowed from storing certain kinds of local data. Plex Web normally uses HTTP and expects to store things in exactly the way Firefox won't accept any more...

One of the funny things about my current situation is that I'm using a laptop with the hot spot on my phone until the battery on the laptop gives out, then switching to another laptop. I brought six laptops with me to charge at my office. My favorite old guy is a Thinkpad T470s which apparently...

It's a Solix S2000 that was in a package deal with 200W of random solar panels. I live on the beach. If I have to go babysit everything just to get it all charged, I will. The deal for on offer looked great to me. I've already brought it up to full charge once off the wall at my office. The...

Being used to no climate control is normal for me at least. My office did get power back, so I've at least been able to get somewhere with decent internet and lights that are on. I bought a couple of these guys as well as my power station and honestly, no notes. $30 for a huge battery that can...

My part of the world has just had terrible storms. Sustained 90mph winds. There are a million people in Northwest Indiana and Chicago's with suburbs without power. I don't expect to get power back for a couple weeks. They aren't running TRAINS here because of all the crap on the tracks. This...

I don't exactly jump at the chance to go to baseball games, but the place where White Sox play is uniquely awful. Wrigley field has a Red Line stop directly next to it and it's a very old place full of character. The Sox place is like bench seating at a McDonald's. I wind up at a baseball game...

I've been using bifocals since I was six. I can't get contacts in my eyes, either. Other people can't get contacts in my eyes. My vision can't be corrected to 20/20 with glasses, so I've chosen to favor my mid- and near vision

I bought an $80 thing off Amazon with one of those Realtek chips on it. It's plugged in to a 10Gbit USB 3.2v1 port. It works-ish at faster-but-variable 5Gb+ speeds. I think performance depends on how hot it is. It's the only 10GbaseT device I own, and I have it sitting on an AMD Wraith Spire to...

I didn't even mention the m.2 adapter on the table because the Beelink would have no internal space for the port unless you want to start playing with a Dremel. For what it's worth, I've had good luck with these inexpensive 10Gb Switches at customer sites. They aren't all snooty about which...

A lot of my family lives around the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Were we in a relative-visiting time of year, it would actually be the easiest of those to go to. The Virginia is a full-on movie Palace, massively renovated through the patronage of film critic Roger Ebert. It has...

There are some sellers on AliExpress offering 10GbE over USB 3.2v2 using some Realtek chip or other. Relatively few desktops have USB 3.2v2 ports, so you'll probably have to contend with lower data rates, but still much better than 2.5GbE. The OTHER down side with those is that they're Twisted...

beets is an incredibly flexible music tagging tool. It's just a Python script, actually, but it has fantastic flexibility in how it tags and sorts files. Unlike other taggers I've messed with, you can actually extend the schema it uses, so you can for example define a tag for something yourself...

I have a giant OLED TV and a great audio setup in my living room but man, but going to the movie theater is a treat. In the last three weeks, I've seen The Odyssey, the filmed staging of Hadestown and of course the new Spider-Man movie. And man, I have yet to be let down this summer. These were...

You could always set up robocopy or something to run periodically so your desktop and notebook stay in sync. Unless you're in the habit of writing video files in your user folder tree, that's also workable.

A Sandisk support representative just told me that my use of multiple partitions on a 500GB Ultra Fit is a completely valid reason for her to deny my warranty claim and that initiating the warranty on my drive was a courtesy on her part.

There's some wisdom in having a file server for your stuff, even if it just replicates the stuff on your desktop. Since you're only talking about two PCs, it's pretty unlikely that you'll get file replication errors if you have your systems pushing and pulling to the same back-end.

You can get multi-bay 2.5" SATA enclosures but I think that if you're trying to get dual SATA AND dual NMVe, you're talking about either a NAS or a very complicated Direct Storage system with newish SAS controller. Dual drive enclosures are a thing. But in this case you're talking about...

FFactions has a integrates a crap-ton of useful FFmpeg operations into your Windows context menu. I found this because I have a folder full of movies taken on phones where the video plays in the wrong orientation on some, but not all the files, but it will also do things like turn a stack of...

I have to confess that part of my reasoning behind not taking the steps to make my CachyOS clients cleaner desktop systems was the recent chaos from poorly secured AUR packages. On the other hand, they're pretty complete systems as they are. The have the correct browser and MS Office documents...

I think the only packages I grabbed from AUR were Chrome and Edge, which are browsers supported by Amazon Luna. Each one is specifically set up with different credentials to keep their Epic Logins for Fortnite purposes.

The Desperation home lab: Machinist X99 dual LGA 2011 board. Pair of Xeon 2678s. 256GB ECC DRR3 RAM. I already had the RAM so the setup is $190, +$200 if I didn't. It uses a standard PSU and it supports m.2 and has a bunch of PCIe options. It can sit in an eatx case and use normal cooling...

Trump tanks the markets most weekends and says something to walk it back on Sunday. It's been like that almost his entire term.

Still ok out there jtr?

I set up somebody's 55" TV a couple weeks ago. My standard practice is to ignore the TV's internal OS. WebOS isn't as bad as Tizen, but they're both pretty bad. A model year 2025 LG TV would NOT proceed to display anything until its terms of service were accepted. Shut up and be a display. I do...