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Apparently the next Xbox will just be a PC. It will have access to the full Windows desktop and compatibility with all Windows desktop software, meaning that it can run Steam et al. They're framing it as "compatible with Playstation-exclusive games" by which they mean that it'll run Playstation...

I think the next step in the decline is when the dollar stops being the currency of global finance. I think it will happen during Trump's turn and it truly will be the end of American global power.

Apparently the big news now is that Microsoft is expecting its gaming projects to hit 30% profit margins, which is somewhat unprecedented by past performance and on top of that, with the acquisition of Activision, there's no longer a non-Microsoft gaming company big enough to buy the Xbox brand...

For what it's worth, there have been supported Microsoft OS releases on ARM since Windows 8. They might not be well supported and they certainly didn't have the massive engineering push that came with the new Snapdragon Elitewhatever, but the Thinkpad x13s pre-dates the "PC-spec" SoCs by a...

A happier thought for just a moment: If Trump is allowed to run in 2028, the Democrats could potentially nominate Obama. He's not History's Greatest President by any stretch of the imagination, but we can remember a time when a sane and competent administrator (who isn't kissing 80 years old)...

Backblaze data seems to suggest that the bathtub curve for drive replacement is getting wider. Big drives really do seem to be lasting longer than old ones did. The article links to the most recent Backblaze data dump if anyone needs to see it, but the important detail is that they're still...

I know that Marine tablets are a thing. I've been out on Lake Michigan and seen them in action, but I can't say for sure that it's not just a fancy case over a regular tablet.

Someone asked me this morning to remote in and connect his second monitor.

I went to protests on Saturday in Valparaiso, Indiana. There were around 1000 people there, which is about 950 more people than these things usually have when they're in Indiana. We had a bunch of idiots in "Roll Coal" trucks gun their engines or try to drown out our chants and I'd say support...

I'm also on the lookout for one of those things, just to satisfy my personal curiosity. I know one person who has an Asus Snapdragon X Elite something or other, but 80% of her job is just being in meetings and taking notes about meetings. I don't even think she knows the difference between what...

The application I support is still largely Visual Basic. We need to move our development to C# and two of my three developers are in their mid 60s, so I'm guessing modernization efforts are gonna have to wait for some meemaws to retire.

The Better Offline podcast has a 100-minute long interview with the guy from Gamer's Nexus today. There's a lot of discussion of non-public aspects of running an outlet dedicated to reviewing PC hardware.

Pour one out for Windows 10. Somewhere, LunarMist is cursing the $10,000 Mac Studio he was no doubt forced to buy thanks to the end of mainstream Microsoft Support.

For a mixed use device, a Lenovo IP Duet 5 (13Q7C6) is genuinely pretty nice. FullHD OLED, 8GB RAM and better-than-advertised ~14 hour battery life on a 13" 2 in 1 that weighs almost exactly 1kg means that there's a lot to like. It's ChromeOS, which can be a down side, but since it can always...

I've used Flyby11 to upgrade Windows 10 on more than 30 PCs so far this week. Most of them were laptops belonging to social workers or retirees from my community center. Have we bitched about how stupid Windows 11 hardware requirements are recently? Almost everything people brought me had either...

The last couple on-premises storage devices I've bought were Ugreen devices. At this point I might go with an Aoostar system instead. As long as the hardware basically works and I can put Truenas on it, I don't particularly care.

Synology just announced that they're no longer going to force users to buy special Synology drives starting with rollout of the next release of their custom OS. I don't actually have any devices new enough to be impacted by that, but at least I no longer have to toss it from consideration...

I love how Republicans control every branch of Federal Government but it's somehow the fault of Democrats that they can't pass a budget. The ICE nazi parade from Trump's occupation of Chicago showed up in lily-white Valparaiso, Indiana over the weekend. They did NOT go to either Hammond or East...

You can also set all the regional options in an autounattend.xml, which is the only way to make Windows 11 acceptable in the first place.

Windows 11 25H2 is available for download now. Most everything that makes it different form 24H2 only happens for systems that meet the branding requirements for CoPilot but apparently they HAVE improved the automated system recovery if you manually turn the setting on.

Xbox Pass prices increased 50% yesterday, on top of having an extra $100 premium heaped on all the new current-gen consoles. They did add Ubisoft titles and Fortnite Battle Pass to the now-$30/month tier and that does at least have value for the Fortnite-playing console peasant in my life, but...

We don't really talk about set top boxes anywhere, but Amazon announced yesterday that its new, low-end FireTV devices won't be running Android/FireOS but rather Vega, an Amazon creation that is explicitly not an open system. Further, the new devices will offer less RAM for what I'm assuming...

The album art collection was definitely amusing. I have the cover art embedded in each music file and present in containing directories and it STILL went out and found thousands of vintage photos or paintings of composers or pictures of concert halls.

Saw this in the Register. We all probably have a story like this.

It turns out that Jellyfin actually DOES just natively handle multichannel audio-only files, so in that one extremely niche way, it is definitely better than Plex. Just like Plex, it still doesn't respect my well-organized and properly tagged music collection with embedded album art, but at...

My phone got Android 16 overnight. I don't see a whole lot that's different from Android 15, but I also don't use any software provided by Samsung on my Samsung phone other than the camera app. So far the only big difference I've seen is in the Quick Share menu. There's also a new revision of...

I just found out about Lutris. Lutris connects to basically every game service (Steam, Gog, EA, Epic et al) just like Playnite or Heroic Launcher but of greatest interest to me, it has tools and scripts for working with local Windows game installation files instead of downloads via storefronts...

I have an aunt who tells me her ipad is broken every time she sees me. She's not dumb, but I do think the ipad actively does a lot to prevent her from understanding what she's doing. Anyway, there is a maximum number of open tabs in Safari and once her device hits that number it's "broken." The...

I can't believe I'm shucking external drives again, but I already ran out of space on the little 4 bay N150 NAS box I have running Plex. 48TB was not enough TBs. I was able to get 4x 26TB external drives for $1200 by buying Seagate external drives that are by all indication the same damn thing...

A neat trick for dealing with protected PDFs is to print them out to a Microsoft XPS document. This strips any protection they have. It's then straightforward to write them back to a PDF if you want or need them in that format instead.

Google has made a desktop search app for Windows that adds a lot of Spotlight-like elements. You can get to the same place with a combination of Everything and ueli, but the Google app is aware of Gdrive as well, which I find handy for my day to day needs. It does not work with Google Photos and...

On unless I'm using it on unsupported hardware. Older Intel iGPUs won't install their Windows 10 driver with memory integrity turned on. If I'm running Windows 11 on Sky Lake hardware, I'm probably not that worried about that particular level of security anyway.

I bought a Passware license a zillion years ago that handles PDFs and MS Office file formats. I think I paid $50 for the basic license.

This is such a can of worms. Wyze has decent cameras that don't absolutely require an on-prem NVR. They can record to a local SD card with decent image quality and they can send video to a cloud host for you to view on your phone even if you're not home, albeit only in 10-second clips. Down...

This is a good kitty

Again, this the day to shave scallywags with a rusty razor. Merry Piratesmas to all.

Spatula came from a hoarding situation involving a dozen blind and deaf Great Danes. He is frightened of every single thing except me and sometimes his brother and can most often be seen slinking or lurking under my bed. Kitten, AKA WAP, belonged to an occasional roommate of mine. Kitten is...

This is mostly for my own benefit, but somebody made a module that adds a game auto-downloader to Batocera or Knulli. Knulli runs on a bunch of emulator devices. The short version of the setup is to pop into the File Manger, go to Tools > Terminal then curl -l bit.ly/rgsx-install | sh They do...

You may be interested to know that someone did ultimately buy the Calendar Creator code base and there's a new version as of ~2021-ish. There was for a time an incompatible release when the source code couldn't be found, but the most current version is based of the old Broderbund code and is...

100Gb ConnectX-4s are a LOT more affordable than they were the last time I looked. I have a total of three PCs that I want on a high speed connection, so I'd need 1x 2 port card and 2x 1 port cards. Two of the systems are in the same rack and can run over a copper DAC that would probably cost...

This is because every printer is fucking terrible. I've had better experiences with Brother, so they're what I recommend and support. I don't even hate Brother MFC inkjets very much. Truthfully, I think the best way to print is to use whatever network printers you can use over a VPN to...

As fallout from the Windows 11 switchover, I have had a dozen i7-7700k mITX systems inflgifted to me. They're in a chassis that supports 2x 2.5" drives and they support 1x m.2, as well as a giant HSF. These guys were pulled out of an industrial setting of some sort, so they're absolutely filthy...

Beelink SER5s have been my go-to client PCs for a while but this Firebat A6 is the same price as a Beelink 5825U and it has a newer 6800H (H = "high wattage") in it. They have 2x m.2 instead of 1xm.2 + 1x SATA and the construction is similar overall. My overall impression is that it's not bad at...

Just to reinforce this point: Unless your personal habits are exceptionally poor, third party security software on Android is wasting electricity. I've found a virus on an Android tablet only one time and the person who had it was installing hacked .APK files so they could get free in-game...

Samsung devices come with Knox as a security platform, but overwhelmingly the issues you'll have on any mobile platform will come from either an app abusing permissions you gave it willingly or from a service provider being hacked, rather than something that happens to your individual device.

Apparently the outcome of Google's ad tech antitrust ruling amount to basically nothing; no structural changes with regard to Chrome or Android, only that Google cease making payments to promote itself on other services, although it IS somehow still OK to pay to be the default on iOS through...

The newest Windows 11 updates changed the Out of Box Experience to get rid of another workaround to force users to create a Microsoft account. There is still at least one known escape to command prompt that allows for a local account but they're clearly intent on patching out all of them...

A LOT of movies are given cyan and orange color grading because it generally looks good to people and because dark blues can be graded as a stand-in for shooting in actual dark conditions. You almost never see a pitch black scene in a movie or a TV show nowadays thanks to digital color grading...

Almost all of the PC games I own are from GoG, but even some of those games do phone home to something or other sometimes. 16 year old Dragon Age Origins, which I bought on physical media, freaks out if it can't talk to EA. With that being the case, I'm not terribly enthusiastic about getting...

One of my friends has a boy who is about to turn 10. He loves games and right now all he has to play on are a Chromebook and a old Wii. His mom doesn't have internet at home, so part of my interest here is to put together a very capable gaming setup that can be played stand-alone. I think...