Aaron44126

Oh, apparently Microsoft also trademarked "X" a few years back and "social networking" is on the list of uses. https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch (I saw this on a news article stating that Facebook/Meta owns this trademark, but the documents all point to Microsoft ...?)

The police stopped this sign demolition, leaving the letters "er" in place for now ... https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/24/23140317/twitter-sign-sf-hq-removal-demolition-police Saw that a Japanese band has a local trademark on "X". https://www.npr.org/2023/07/25/1189902006/what-will-twitter-be-named-in-japan-since-x-japan-is-already-taken-by-a-rock-ban

Twitter is rebranding to "X". Tweets are to be called "x's". The logo change has happened already but it looks like the transition will be gradual and not all at once. https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/24/23804973/twitter-x-logo-brand-replacement How much of Twitter's remaining value is the "brand" which is now getting tossed out?

Suspend BitLocker. Disable the TPM device in Device Manager. Reboot to BIOS setup. Clear the TPM. (You check the box in BIOS setup but it won’t prompt to clear until you boot up normally.) Boot back to Windows and try to update the TPM. I’m not sure if you have to enable the TPM device in device manager first, but only do it if it makes you, because Windows might “claim” it right away. If it works, enable the TPM device and then resume BitLocker and you should be all set. Have your BitLocker recovery keys handy just in case.

This wouldn't be on the Windows 2000 side, but rather on the side of whatever system you are trying to talk to from your Win2K box. You need to enable SMB 1.0 on the newer system in order to talk to it from Windows 2000. (If I search "Turn Windows features" on my Windows 10 system, it pops right up. You need to enable SMB 1.0 client and/or server, depending on which way you want traffic to go, but not the one about SMB 1.0 automatic removal.)

Windows 2000 supports SMB out of the box, but it is SMB 1.0 which is not compatible with newer versions of Windows unless you go out of your way to enable SMB 1.0 on the new systems. It's available in the "Turn Windows features on and off" control panel and disabled by default because of unfixable security vulnerabilities with that protocol.

Yeah, from their post on the power supply and they explained that they were shipping the system with 180W, I took that to mean that we can expect specs that will fit within 180W. The 240W capability is there for future-proofing. They were also cagey on future GPU plans other than to say that basically "we built this thing to be modular so of course we are looking to deliver more modules in the future". Nothing about what maximum power envelope they might be looking at, whether they would offer GPUs from anyone other than AMD, or really anything else. Though, technically the specs are public / open source, so "anyone" could produce and sell a GPU module that would work. I think that they're sort of hoping that, if it takes off somewhat, companies that normally produce desktop gaming GPUs (Inno3D, PNY, etc.) will maybe look to sell laptop (Framework) GPU modules as well.

Just saw this. The Verge got their hands on a Framework Laptop 16. https://www.theverge.com/22665800/framework-laptop-16-hands-on-preview-modular-gaming-laptop [Edit] Framework 16 preorders are open, so we can finally see specs!! ...If the site wasn't broken from heavy load, anyway. Can for now confirm that it only has options for AMD CPUs and GPUs, no Intel or NVIDIA. (Interestingly, the AMD guy that they are working with was actually previously at Dell and involved with the Alienware Area-51m "upgradeable laptop that flopped".) It looks like the CPU options are Ryzen 7 7840HS and Ryzen 9 7940HS, and the optional dGPU is a Radeon RX 7700S. The Verge article mentions support for up to 96GB of RAMM (two DIMMs), and also that there is liquid metal under the CPU heatspreader? Very interesting development even if this isn't a laptop that I would actually want (lacking a full 4K display and NVIDIA dGPU). Definitely watching to see how things go forward, though. I hope that this thing is successful and that they are able to offer even more options in the next few years. The Verge also has a video. [Edit 2] Framework post. https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-16-pre-orders-are-now-open

Does it have to be SCP? I use FileZilla for SFTP (I think most servers that support SCP would also support SFTP) and it is free / open source, and works fine on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Easy enough for a dummy to use if if they have basic understanding of files and folders, and you get a server connection bookmark set up for them. You can drag and drop from Finder to the "server" side of FileZilla as well (or vice versa) and it will work. A note -- When going to install it, if you click the download link on this page you will get a "sponsored" version which includes optional bundled software (at least on Windows). Use this page instead for the clean version. For a text editor, BBEdit has a free version that is working well enough so far for me. You can grab it from the App Store and ignore the "30 days evaluation" thing that pops up. It will revert to "free" mode when the evaluation ends. (If you need a hex editor, "Hex Fiend" seems decent and it is also free.)

Eh. Forget third-party apps. You can do some terminal magic. This fully disables sleep. The system will not sleep when the lid is shut or under any other circumstance. sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1 If you do this, you will notice that the "Sleep" command is even greyed out in the top-left Apple menu. Get it back by doing: sudo pmset -a disablesleep 0 The change is immediate, no need to reboot or anything. While sleep is disabled, a script like this can be used to put the system to sleep. sudo pmset -a disablesleep 0 pmset sleepnow sleep 3 sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1 I noticed that while sleep is disabled, the screen will not turn off if you shut the lid. You can lock the system and then the screen will power off after a few moments, so no big deal really. Fortunately, macOS will not activate the screen in this case if you happen to move the mouse. You have to actually interact with the keyboard or touchpad. I added "pmset" to the sudoers config so I can script all of this stuff and it won't ask me for a password or fingerprint scan when I put the system to sleep. I'm also using pmset scripts to switch the system between "low power", "high power", and "automatic" performance modes. One minor annoyance is that the system automatically powers on or wakes up if you open the lid of press any button on the keyboard. (The dedicated power button is kind of pointless.) There doesn't seem to be a way to disable this. There was an NVRAM "AutoBoot" variable you could tweak to disable this behavior for Intel Macs, but the same method doesn't work for Apple Silicon Macs. I ran the system with the screen off (but not sleeping) for nine hours today and the battery level was reported at 89% afterwards. I wasn't really using it for much, but there were about a dozen apps open, and a Windows VM.

Yeah, like I mentioned in another thread, the fact that GPTK is a thing at all baffles me and I'm not sure where Apple is going with it. Putting all of that work in for an emulation environment that devs aren't even allowed to use to ship games doesn't make sense, unless they have some other future plans for it? I am wondering if they will use it to offer a tool to allow ordinary users to run Windows games at some point, but that doesn't fully make sense either, as Apple would definitely rather that devs make proper ports so that their hardware can be used at its full potential. I do think that GPTK being a thing means that Apple intends to keep Rosetta 2 around for a good long while. (Otherwise, again, why would they put in this effort if it is just going to be thrown away in a couple of years...?) I did see that there was an updated 1.0.2 version (I think that the original version would work in Ventura but the new one will not), and I also saw that people have worked out how to get it working within CrossOver, though that currently seems a bit hacky to me (even though it "works"). I am hoping that between now and the release of Sonoma, some tooling will build up around it or maybe CrossOver will offer official support. CrossOver is due to release version 23 in "late summer" and they are clearly paying attention to GPTK. There's another new project called Whisky that seems to be getting some attention. (It is basically a Wine/GPTK GUI frontend.) What would be amazing is if Valve would wake up and offer something similar to what they have going on Linux to allow Windows versions of games to be fired off through Wine right from the native Steam client; I'm not holding my breath for that, though, as the Mac Steam client seems to be an afterthought for them at this point.

Gaming first impressions. No issues connecting a PS5 DualSense controller. I had to toggle support on in Steam before it would work with Steam games. I do find it a bit obnoxious that gamepad input causes the keyboard backlight to illuminate, if you have it set to time out on inactivity. I'll have to do something to disable the keyboard backlight while gaming. First off, I started Shadow of the Tomb Raider which is a few years old at this point, but a reasonably high-end game (graphically speaking) and has a Mac version. At 2336x1510 resolution, and graphics settings at the "highest" preset, it runs fluidly at ≈70-90 FPS in all scenes. Not bad, considering that the system doesn't even have a "discrete GPU" and it is also running through the Rosetta 2 x64->ARM emulator. "ProMotion" (VRR) seems to work fine and the game looks great with this setup. I did find that loading times seem a bit longer than I would have expected, though. Some games use the "modern" full-screen API introduced in Mac OS X 10.7 and they get launched isolated on a separate "virtual desktop", but some games use older APIs and behave more like Windows games, taking over the main desktop for the duration of the run. (You can still Command+Tab out in most cases to get to the desktop while the game is running.) Games that want to run using the entire display (rather than at 16:9 ratio) can blow up into the camera "notch" area, and to avoid this you can set a compatibility flag on those games to "scale the app to below the camera area". When you do this, the entire desktop is shrunk down a little bit while the game is running so that it can fit below the camera notch. The effective resolution and aspect ratio do not change when this happens, so this also means that some black border is added to the left and right side of the display in addition to the top. (It looks pretty black with the mini-LED system in place so it is hard to notice unless the game is running a dark scene and the backlight bleeds out into the cropped black area a little bit.) I ran a number of Steam games that have Mac ports and didn't have any issues firing them up. I also installed the Battle.net app and StarCraft and StarCraft II, those work fine. I have not tried running Windows games through CrossOver or Apple GPTK yet. I will probably hold off on that until macOS Sonoma is out, since it looks like that is a requirement for the current version of GPTK. I did try running Switch games through Ryujinx. Compatibility is a bit lower than it was for me with yuzu on Windows, but it looks like macOS support has been improving rapidly over the past few months so hopefully that trend will continue. There are a number of games that work fine ... once the shader cache is built up a bit. Shader stutter is much more apparent than it was on Windows with either Ryujinx or yuzu. That probably can't be avoided unless they add a proper Metal renderer, which I would not expect any time soon, but maybe it will improve as MoltenVK and SPIRV-Cross mature. One nifty thing is that as the Switch also has an ARM CPU, Ryujinx can run some games in "hypervisor" mode, so the game's ARM instructions run natively on the Apple CPU without a CPU emulator/interpreter/JIT thing in between.

Yes, you have to boot into safe mode once for the system to “realize” that the disk controller has changed and thus not BSOD at boot with “inaccessible boot device”.

If it is set to RAID mode, are you able to switch to AHCI/NVMe mode and see if you can boot install media? This is in BIOS setup in the storage section. If it works, to switch your existing Windows install, you will need to take some steps. https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/precision-7560-7760-owners-thread.836381/page-64.html#post-11112315

There is no display whitelist. You can install any display that will fit and is electronically compatible. (M6800 has limited eDP bandwidth, 20 lanes instead of 40 or something, so high res displays like 4K are out.) PanelLook is a good place to see what options are, but sourcing one would be through aftermarket parts sites or eBay. I believe that you can install “any” PCIe device in the WWAN slot, including an NVMe drive if you can fit it in with an adapter, but the BIOS won’t look there for a bootable drive. So, using that drive as the system drive would require the boot loader to be on a different drive.

Yes. The same options are available in the “Dell Power Manager” app, and in the BIOS setup on some models. (My names for each mode might be a little bit abbreviated.)

"Optimized" is factory default.

Try an external monitor first. Your display might be dead. …Odd that you got a BSOD to set that off though. AMD or NVIDIA GPU? If NVIDIA, and you had Optimus disabled, enable Optimus and see if it works. You can do that by removing the bottom panel and unplugging the coin cell battery to reset the BIOS settings.

There is a Windows “reset” feature that you can access from Settings that basically does this. There is an option to keep your files. You won’t be able to keep installed programs and achieve the “fresh reset” that you are looking for. You might have to install some drivers but just one run of Windows Update should take care of that. (If the WiFi driver is required first, you can get that from the Dell support site.)

I’m sort of confused about the target audience and purpose for Apple Game Porting Toolkit. It might leave “some performance to be desired” but think about what it is doing. Converting x86 to ARM, and converting DX11/12 to Metal, obviously there is going to be significant overhead. And it works. They fact that it makes games playable at all is pretty amazing. They slapped this together in a seemingly short time and it is something that the CrossOver/Wine/MoltenVK/etc guys have been working on for a few years with limited success. So, clearly they have put in some substantial effort. But for what? Not for ordinary users to play Windows versions of games. It is officially so that game devs can “test” how their games “might” work on macOS. But that only sort of makes sense, because obviously they will work “worse” under AGPT than they would native. And devs can’t even use it to ship games (running in the “emulator”), according to the license terms, they would still have to proceed with a full port. I guess it they also have tools to convert shaders to Metal which could speed that up. So, yeah. Will Apple eventually open this up more in some way? Especially after seeing what the community reaction is like? I think they’d really prefer people to be using optimized game ports, so I don’t know. Anyway, not complaining too much. It opens up a whole new set of games to macOS users even if that was not Apple’s intent.

@Sandy Bridge I tried Amphetamine and it did work, but it had another issue which was causing the screen saver to trigger when it shouldn’t (like while watching a long video). The preferred solution these days seems to be an app called “NoSleep” which I am trying next. There is also a built-in terminal command called “caffeinate” whose job is to prevent various idle/sleep conditions from triggering which might do the trick. The new “scissor switch” keyboard is a step up from “butterfly” for sure. I wish it had more “depth” but otherwise don’t have a complaint with it yet. ….Other than that I basically have to learn a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts. And that I’d still like a numeric keypad. The headphone buzz issue did not occur when running on battery. It also disappeared when I hooked up the grounded power cable. So, easily solved for an extra $20 😕 I’m now traveling so I don’t have time to mess with it much but I will eventually be back with more observations.

There was some trick to do factory reset and get undervolt back after upgrading to a newer version of the BIOS that blocked it. Maybe you just figured out a “more specific” way to accomplish the same thing …

Storage details are out. https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-16-deep-dive---memory-and-storage Framework Laptop 16 has two NVMe slots, one 2280 and one 2230. You can add two more 2280 slots with a rear expansion module (…in place of a dGPU). Two SODIMM slots for RAM, and they are starting to offer Framework-branded memory modules made by ADATA. In the article, they detail the specific NVMe drive and memory modules on offer.

Fed up with Windows. Tried Linux for a while, and while successful in using it, I found myself frustrated a bit by the lack of professional software (MS Office, Adobe, etc.) and just the amount of tinkering that I had to do to get things working the way that I wanted. Now, I've decided to give macOS a go, so I went and bought a MacBook Pro. Background: I'm familiar with macOS so I don't feel like I am going in blind. For many years I was a sysadmin and managed a bunch of Macs, even though I never used one as a "daily driver" myself. That's been a while ago now, though, and I have not spent any serious time with an "Apple Silicon" Mac before now. Following up on the Linux thread, I figured that I would start this one and just sort of write about things that I've run into, positives and negatives. Maybe it will help out anyone else who is considering a similar transition. First impressions — positive. Setup is super easy, as you'd expect. But, it did offer to transfer data off of a Windows PC and I did not try using that function to see how well it works. The mini-LED display is easily the best laptop display that I have ever seen. Super bright, good colors, deep blacks. (Though I will mention that I've never used an OLED laptop display.) I poked around "Settings" and mostly was able to set it up to behave how I want, with some exceptions mentioned below. I did find the Settings app to be a bit odd, with stuff not being in the place that I would expect or hidden behind secondary menus that you have to press a button to access. The battery life, holy cow. I'm not used to a system with an "all day" battery. I spent the better part of an hour sitting on the couch, detached from an outlet, and figured out how to install VMware Fusion, build a Windows-on-ARM ISO, and install it. I was not being especially careful with regards to battery life and had the display brightness turned up pretty high, but when I was done, the battery was still reporting 94% capacity. (So, I do have a local Windows VM set up now.) It seems like it could last through a workday on battery power. At this very moment I am on my work PC but SSH'ed into the Mac, which has been sitting unplugged with the lid shut for over an hour (not sleeping), and it is reporting 100% capacity with 20 hours of life remaining. We'll see if this holds up over time or if the battery starts draining "more quickly" as it gets lower. I haven't heard even a whisper from the system fan yet (except while running Cinebench), and yet the system is cool to the touch. (My Precision 7770 would definitely be warm, even if it had just been sitting idle with the fans running at low speed, and I never felt comfortable running it with the lid shut because the display panel would get hot.) I got a Cinebench score of just under 15,000 (multi-core ten minutes), which is in line with what I got on the Precision 7770 before tweaking. The fan was only barely audible during this test so I wonder if there is some "kick it into high performance" setting that I haven't found yet. Unlike with the Precision, the score went up slightly as the ten minutes went on rather than down, so it doesn't seem to be hitting a short-term throttle limit. I've been using brew install --cask (app name) from the terminal to install a lot of things. This should give a "Linux package manager" type experience for keeping stuff up to date. Homebrew has tons of packages, for full commercial apps in addition to UNIX-y command line tools. I do have an iPhone so I am enjoying the integrated experience with messages, photos, maps, and even weather settings and content being just "the same" on both devices. First impressions — negative. Plugging in wired headphones, I noticed a sort of "hum" or "low buzz" noise in the background. It did not matter if the headphones were connected by 3.5mm or USB-C, so at first I thought that the headphones were at fault, but further testing indicated that it was definitely the MacBook. The buzz would stop if I touched my hand to the chassis, or if I disconnected the power cable and ran on battery power. Grounding issue! As it turns out, this is a common MacBook issue. They shipped the system with a two-prong power adapter that does not include a ground connection. You can swap out the end bit with a cable that includes the ground connection, which "should" take care of this issue (...if they offer one for whatever outlet type you have in your region — I saw someone post that the UK version of this cable does include the grounding pin on the outlet side, but it is not actually connected to anything on the power brick side). I am picking one up today, so we will see. Apple is stubborn about the way that they want the system to work in some ways. For example, the system automatically goes to "sleep" shortly after it hits whatever idle threshold you have set for the display to power off. There is an option to disable this behavior when on AC power, but no option to disable automatic sleep on battery power (without also disabling automatic power off of the display, which I do want). I had to install a third-party tool to have system stay awake "forever" on battery power. (.......If the battery can last all day, why not? I might leave the laptop unplugged somewhere in my house and want to access a file from my work laptop, or from my phone.) ...At least "sleep" actually works well, something I never had success with under Linux. They also stubbornly adjust the display brightness down when I connect or disconnect from AC power. It will not remember what I had set for either state. This despite disabling all of the "automatic brightness" / "dim brightness on battery" toggles that I could find in Settings. I should be able to work around this with a background shell script. (...Really used to doing this sort of thing from Linux...) Similarly, I had to fight with the "scroll direction". There are two toggles in the Settings UI to reverse scrolling for the touchpad and for the mouse, but it is the same toggle (flipping one also flips the other). So if you want scrolling to work one way on the touchpad and the other way on the mouse, you can't do that. This was also solved with a third-party app which inverts the mouse scroll wheel. There is potential for some funny backlight issues with the mini-LED display's different dimming zones. I noticed it most clearly when observing the mouse cursor over a completely black background. You can see a "glow" around the cursor as its zone is lit up but not the surrounding zones. Microsoft problem — I installed Microsoft Office using the installer from their web site and all of the Office apps crashed immediately on launch. Couldn't figure out how to get past that. I uninstalled it and installed the versions of the apps pulled from the App Store instead. Those seem to work fine. Haven't tried any games yet. I'm not planning to mess with the "Apple Game Porting Toolkit" until Sonoma releases in the fall. I'm hoping that some third-party tooling around it matures (looks like they are working on support in Heroic Games Launcher for example). There's enough stuff that I can run native or in an emulator to keep me happy until then.

There's a trickle-down thing going on as well. Most distributions don't ship the latest Linux kernel available right away. So when new hardware comes along, you have to wait for proper support to be added to a new version of the kernel (which might not happen until after the hardware's launch) and then you have to wait for your favorite distribution to ship an update which includes that kernel. The time that you have to wait depends on the distribution's release cycle. "Rolling release" distributions (i.e. Arch) will get it more quickly. I ran into a similar thing with my Precision 7770, which I picked up at launch in July 2022. Ubuntu is my distro of choice. Ubuntu didn't have a kernel that supports the Intel 12th gen iGPU until October 2022 and they didn't have a kernel that supports a 120 Hz display on said iGPU until April 2023. (Despite both being supported immediately at launch on Windows.) Bleeding edge issues, but something to consider if you're buying/building a brand new PC and plan to run Linux on it.