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I got an amazing little out of nowhere gift, a Godox IT30 mini flash. It's TINY, only 130g, and charges over USB C instead of annihilating a bunch of Eneloop AAs like my traditional flashes do. Just getting an inexpensive and travel friendly flash is a big deal. I'm really excited to have...

Microsoft needs to present as not being reliant on x86 and truthfully, there's a real market for datacenter hardware with low energy consumption and scads of cores. Working with ARM also applies pressure to get AMD and Intel to improve in areas they might not have chosen otherwise Finally...

Maybe the AI bubble will finally pop and destroy the global economy sooner rather than later and then RAM will at least be cheap again.

The feeble attempt at an insurrection on January 6th was unquestionably an attempt. This time the deck is stacked with toadies who have already put loyalty toTrump ahead of any other oath or reason. The administration has been functionally declared to be above the law and has demonstrated...

Speaking of kids, my friend and her baby stayed with me for two months and they played so much goddamned Cocomelon that it was my most-played artist on Spotify this year. Cocomelon is primarily a Youtube channel, but I just read that the version is available on Netflix has a teacher character...

Curious as to that choice in particular. You've obviously chosen to stick with Apple in general, but the Studios are a particular sort of investment, especially if you're getting one with a meaningful amount of RAM. re: Linux gaming, it is extremely credible at this point and even moreso if...

The USA is kind of set up to force people to pair off somehow. I've never had a job that's offered me health insurance and that's been the one thing that might actually lead to me marrying my partner, but she doesn't get it either. Still, life is a lot easier when there's a second income, even...

I suspect that a physician doesn't have much time to mess with this stuff even if they want to. On an unrelated note, I mentioned SmartTube up-thread. SmartTube's primary developer had his Github key exposed over the weekend, so he revoked his signature for the application, which should disable...

What are you doing with the server? Is it just running file services or do you have the *RR stack operating or? I'm kind of curious to see where people have landed on Windows 10 vs 11 or if we have any consensus on Linux distros. I haven't seen any mention of contemporary Intel on SF other than...

I never thought I'd get one either. Instead I have a few now. They're small, personal and in places where only one person might see them. Each one relates to someone special in my life. A couple of my close friends and my partner likewise have tattoos to represent me. I feel like it's an...

Yes. Tattoos are hideous. A direct quote that was in fact repeated multiple times. That one I'd at least prepared my partner for, so it mostly just turned in to eye rolling. My mom grew up in a house where time stopped in about 1960 and she just kind of doesn't understand the world outside the...

There shouldn't be much more than enabling it and telling it to use Unbound or Unbound Python mode. You can add more block lists if you feel like it. Easylist et al. There's a nice guide here.

uBlock on Firefox and uBlock Lite on other browsers + some form of network-level blocker everywhere I have control over the network. I use DNS66 for Android, which functions as a VPN but exists entirely to redirect DNS queries. I like this better than Samsung's built-in DNS redirector, which for...

re: Phone plans. I switched to US Mobile this morning. They're offering a year of service for $167 until the end of the day today (10PM EST). They're primarily a Tmo MVNO, so the only major issue I can see from switching is that my data service might be deprioritized in an emergency...

PfSense supports pfBlockerNG, which is as good or better than running PiHole. It's just a service you can enable in DNS configuration on your appliance. In theory you can use both by making the Pfsense DNS the upstream provider for Pihole but that's needless complexity IMO.

I'm just curious what PC systems y'all have that are in active use in 2025. Some of you guys have a PC in their signature, but I'm curious to get an idea of what's out there being used, and what they're used for. The oldest PC I'm still actively using is a Thinkpad T420 with an i7 2640 in it...

Is it possible that you have computers with significant time drift?

I don't drink and I'm about to start. Sed, something I've found to watch out for is that some MVNOs don't support RCS chat yet. STILL. Also I am almost positive there are degrees of deprioritization, based on some experiments I've done between Tmo, Mint and US Mobile and a (gross!) iphone 13...

Rather than improve overall Windows Explorer performance, it looks like Microsoft is going to set up File Explorer to preload on low-end systems. Something that actually endlessly pisses me off is that the 9950X I use for a desktop hitches for a couple seconds when I launch an Explorer window...

This is the first year my partner is coming to Thanksgiving. We did not talk about her doing this and I just found out maybe 10 minutes ago. She's going to meet my family, who will no doubt have many opinions about her tattoos and piercings and many questions about her ovulation cycle. I am...

Here's a set of directions to switch back to OG notepad, if you don't want the increasingly stupid one Windows 11 is using now. Also it's winget install microsoft.edit If you want a normal-ass text editor and somehow can't be bothered to set up Notepad++.

One of my customers brought me this thing, asking why it was weirdly slow. They didn't realize it's a Qualcomm SoC system. Once I explained how it works, they were happy with it; it has a very nice screen and better construction from any consumer HP I've seen and the price, $450, is about right...

Yes. A new Windows account. Firefox puts crap in a bunch of different places under %appdata% and it's hard telling what's left behind after a reinstall. I don't think your PC is slow, but there could be a weird addon or setting causing you problems.

Consumer notebooks are hard. My Ideapad 1s came from visiting a Walmart and a Best Buy to see what's acceptable at less than $350, because so very often, that's as much as people are willing to spend. I have a prejudice against 17" models and their breaky, breaky screens, and the moment I bring...

I'm thinking that the fresh (Windows?) user account is a good idea just to avoid the possibility that there's some accumulation of cruft from past installs generally. Maybe even sanity check from a bootable Linux ISO or something.

I have the additional aggravation that my health care is non-traditional, so my meds are at least partially selected for what can be obtained for cheap.

This does not align with my experiences with Firefox. Even on something deeply pathetic like a 4th gen i3 with 4GB RAM, Firefox and Chrome are subjectively similar with Chrome being maybe a hair faster generally (with the caveat that it also isn't blocking as much, either). What if you try...

As an aside, Firefox and Brave are the only two mainstream browsers with ongoing support for thorough ad blocking. I've found no combination of settings on Chromium derived browsers like Chrome or Edge that actually work to provide the same level of safety. Of course I can put an ad blocking...

Look under Settings --> Privacy & Security --> DNS over HTTPS. Try turning that on or off to see if that makes a difference.

Just blood pressure management. Both my parents needed blood pressure medication by my age so it's not surprising that I do too. I'm still having a hard time with the idea that a common medication would be in short supply nationally, but I did finally get some overnighted to me.

There's a stray I've been feeding for the last few years. She's had a litter of kittens every June like clockwork. She kind of nests with her babies under a car that only moves a few times a year; the guy who owns it can't drive it any more, but his son uses it maybe the second week in August...

Decent CPU and nice screen is an extremely solid recipe for almost everyone's day to day needs so long as they aren't doing gaming, engineering or content creation. Which kind of explains why Macbook Airs are somehow seen as acceptable. A couple months ago, I observed that I couldn't get a...

I'm more than a little concerned that an entire generation of educated people and actually untold natural resources have been diverted to work on this instead of doing something that helps humanity as a whole. Between this and the commoditization of every system and resource on Earth by Fintech...

Ed Zitron just published some leaked internal revenue data from OpenAI. This company that wants $70 billion this year from VCs and partners to build itself spent almost $9B on running its models on revenue of $2.3B. They're spending $3 to make less than a buck and apparently lying to everyone...

New Steam Deck thing was announced today. It's a 30W Zen4 6c/12t CPU with 16GB RAM and either 500GB or 2TB of internal storage. That sounds to me like a less powerful version of the HX 370, although I suppose it'll have newer and fancier GPU cores than that. It will purportedly be able to...

I lost a cat to breast cancer at the beginning of 2024 and a kitten to brain cancer in 2020. The kitten absolutely killed me, because I spent so much money and went through so many different diagnoses that offered varying levels of hope for improvement. He literally passed while he was on the...

Softbank announced that it is divesting itself from nVidia, currently the most valuable enterprise in human history, to fund OpenAI, a company that seems to do nothing but spend money on nVidia GPUs and datacenter construction contracts. Softbank is literally taking its holdings in nVidia to...

It's been brought to my attention that it's possible to buy an Asrock BC250 SBC for around US$100. These things are 6c/12t Zen2 APUs with somewhere around Radeon RX580-class GPU cores and 16GB of all GDDR6 RAM. They're crypto-mining hardware and they don't have a bunch of traditional PC ports on...

Tiny baby roommate is finally gone. I don't know how parents do it. I've never letting one of those things in my place again.

The Canon R6 III was unveiled today. The new one has a 32MP sensor, a CFexpress slot and the ability to shoot video horizontally and vertically at the same time. I'm definitely intrigued.

Chris Thile was the replacement host for Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion, which was a very gentle and Midwestern part of my Saturday afternoons for around 40 years. It was more or less the last thing I made it a point to hear on the radio every week.

Flyby11 works by using the Windows Server 2025 installer to unpack and run the Windows 11 .wim file. All the hardware checks are in the Windows 11 setup. You can also use the Windows 10 setups file to do the same thing. Those products are already out in the world, so short of constantly checking...

I have a milestone birthday in a month-ish. The plan was originally to spend a week in Jamaica or Cancun, but my partner forgot to renew her passport and my best friend can't get away from her job for more than a three day weekend anyway. So we're now talking about New Orleans, where even the...

I don't know if anyone caught this, but AMD has started calling mobile Ryzen 6000s "Ryzen 100 series" and mobile Ryzen 4000/5000 series Ryzen 10s. There's no change in the actual hardware. They're just naming them differently to match their high end branding. Thanks, guys.

I'm still trying to figure it out. I think the Xbox brand will still exist for software and maybe input devices. It sounds like Microsoft doesn't want to be in the console business. Maybe it'll be branding on Asus or Dell PCs? Just not a dedicated-function gaming device.

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)...