Aaron44126

Playing with Linux again. Did a Linux Mint install. Worked fine, but unworkable; high-DPI support in Cinnamon is just not there. Everything was tiny despite being set to 200% scaling. So, I did a stock Ubuntu install with GNOME 3. I don't really like GNOME 3, but it is pretty solid when it comes to just "working well" with plenty of settings and good high-DPI support. Observations: I tried Ubuntu 22.04.1 some time back and it would boot the live media but fail to boot after an install was done; Ubuntu 22.04.2 installed and booted fine. I was not able to select 120 Hz for the display, it was locked at 60 Hz. Before I could mess with that more, I did package updates (which included a kernel update) and also installed the proprietary NVIDIA driver (525). After rebooting, the system was dead with just a black screen and blinking cursor. (Note, graphics switching enabled so it should have been running off of the Intel GPU.) Alas... Don't have more time to mess with it right now.

Framework posted some articles about improvements to the Framework Laptop 13. https://frame.work/blog/whats-new-in-this-years-framework-laptop-13-part1 https://frame.work/blog/whats-new-in-this-years-framework-laptop-13-part2 Matte display, better battery, louder speakers, new thing for the WiFi antenna cables, all cool… One interesting surprise is that they are omitting the RTC battery in new builds of 13th gen and Ryzen systems, so you will lose the system time if the main battery is ever disconnected. They have given some reasoning, but I wonder how much of it is “saving some money”. You can source an RTC battery separately if this is a concern. (They’ll be offering it on the marketplace, but it’s a pretty normal battery that you could find elsewhere.)

In most territories, they will not sell these directly. @Ionising_Radiation has been able to get them from Dell Singapore ...

You can try this. This is supposed to start a BIOS recovery tool where you can do things like reset the NVRAM or flash a different BIOS image. (I've never actually tried using this before, but if it does happen to work then it might be the starting point to get somewhere else.) https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000132453/how-to-recover-the-bios-on-a-dell-computer-or-tablet Under "How do I start the BIOS recovery on a Dell computer?": The procedure on laptops appears to be, shut the system down and disconnect everything, including the AC adapter. Then, hold "Ctrl" and "Esc" on the keyboard, and while doing that, connect the AC adapter.

Poking around, I found a reference to single amber blink indicating failed BIOS update. (This was in reference to a desktop XPS, though.) Did you happen to update the BIOS before this happened?

Can't think of much to try, other than ... Reset the BIOS / NVRAM by holding the power button for a long time (30+ seconds). When I have done this in the past, the power LED will blink white a few times to indicate success. It might not work if your BIOS had an admin password set. .............Motherboard replacement.

On the subject... https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter-government-funded-media-label NPR decided to quit Twitter because of its concerns regarding the platform's unpredictability. (Individual NPR journalists will make their own decisions about how to engage with the platform with accounts tied to them personally, but the various "global"/"official" NPR accounts not tied to an individual will be going dark.) The article linked here does mention Musk's comments in the BBC interview, including a comment that the "publicly funded" label will be applied to NPR as well, but apparently the "quit Twitter" decision had already been made before the label change went into effect (it still has not, as of now) and the concerns over how Twitter is being run are still there regardless.

I think that Substack recently introduced a Twitter-like “notes” feature, and Elon isn’t ready to handle any sort of new competition… (They were also blocking Mastodon links at some point, not sure if they still are.)

More Twitter news. Twitter has been merged into a new company set up by Musk called "X Corp". This seems to have been set up as a "holding company" specifically to hold Twitter, but it's possible that Musk could merge in some or all of his other companies as well. There's also talk about Musk wanting to launch an "everything app", similar to "WeChat" in China, that would be called "X". In any case, this basically means that Twitter as a company no longer exists. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/twitter-no-longer-exists-as-a-company-merges-into-musks-x-corp/ Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has filed a lawsuit against Twitter to get reimbursed for his legal expenses. Twitter (and many other large firms) have agreements in place with executives and directors to get paid by the company if they end up dealing with personal legal issues relating to their time with the company. Twitter is (no surprise) thumbing its nose and refusing to even acknowledge its obligations. This might make it difficult for Twitter to attract a new (qualified) CEO or people to hold other top-level positions, if there is no trust that Twitter will actually follow through on commitments made to them as a condition of their employment. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/ex-twitter-ceo-who-was-fired-by-musk-sues-company-over-unpaid-legal-expenses/ (I found the comments section on this one interesting, where some people explain what this actually means; I never really knew that this "employment benefit" was a thing.) Musk might not want to pay the bills, but that doesn't mean he can't buy 10,000+ datacenter-grade GPUs to use for AI projects. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/elon-musk-buys-tens-of-thousands-of-gpus-for-twitter-ai-project

I mean, I'm sure 4K looks really cool on a nice external 27"+ display, but on a laptop 17" it seems to be overkill.

@Dell-Mano_G has made statements indicating that they are not worried about OLED burn-in anymore, but I kind of want to wait and see what a system is like 3+ years into its life before we can really be sure about that. They did offer OLED in Precision 5000 some years back and ended up removing it in later systems because of quality issues like image retention. (I think that microLED is supposed to address many shortcomings of OLED but that technology being ready for laptops is still some years out...) Dell typically doesn't offer a huge number of display panel choices... so we aren't going to see, for example, 1200p/1600p/2400p each offered in your choice of LCD or OLED. They aren't even offering a non-OLED high-DPI display on the Precision 76X0 systems right now. And, for their business laptops Dell seems to avoid offering a choice between FHD and UHD, so I sort of doubt that we'll see a 1600p option at all. I do think that 18" 16:10 could make an appearance whenever the refresh the chassis again. Personally, I prefer that 4K or 2400p sticks around so that I can run at 200% DPI scaling, as I can see an improvement (vs 1440p/1600p) in static content and I have some applications that behave better at 200% than they do at non-integer scaling ratios. Though for gaming (or other types of "dynamic" full motion content), I've been experimenting on my Precision 7770 and found that I can't really tell any difference between 1440p and 4K, so I've stopped trying to run games at 4K to save ≈50% on the GPU load (unless maybe DLSS is an option and it performs decently).

https://www.theblock.co/post/225497/sam-bankman-fried-alameda-report One of the more eye-catching items concerned Alameda Research, the trading firm that allegedly had access to billions of dollars in customer funds stored with FTX. The report states that Alameda “often had difficulty understanding what its positions were, let alone hedging or accounting for them.” Former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, now under house arrest and facing a litany of criminal charges, described Alameda in internal communications as “hilariously beyond any threshold of any auditor being able to even get partially through an audit,” according to the report. He went on: “Alameda is unauditable. I don’t mean this in the sense of ‘a major accounting firm will have reservations about auditing it’; I mean this in the sense of ‘we are only able to ballpark what its balances are, let alone something like a comprehensive transaction history.’ We sometimes find $50m of assets lying around that we lost track of; such is life.” ... The management of private keys and seed phrases — used to control access to crypto assets — was shambolic, according to the report. In one example, private keys for over $100 million in Ethereum assets were stored in plain text without encryption on an FTX Group server; in another, single-signature-based keys that controlled access to billions of dollars in crypto assets were stored in AWS Secrets Manager or a password vault, each accessible by numerous employees; and many private keys were stored without back-up procedures, meaning funds would be permanently lost if the associated key was. The list goes on.

PBS also got the same label in the US. And, there are some issues with the implementation. For example, clicking on the "government funded" label takes you to a help page about the "state-affiliated" label which says that the state exercises control over the content. Also, both NPR and BBC operate numerous Twitter handles and so far only their main handles have been given this label. It seems like things are being slapped together haphazardly (par for the course).

I've been thinking about picking this one up, but I'm hearing that the PC version is pretty riddled with bugs so I think waiting a month (or several) for patches might be in order. Up to about 65 hours with XC3 and nowhere near the end. There's just so much to do. Still enjoying myself (or else I'd just make my way to the end and stop doing side stuff). This will probably end up being the longest amount of time I've ever spent with a JRPG.

Meanwhile, Musk decides NPR is "state-affiliated media", the same label given to propaganda outlets in Russia and China, going against Twitter's own policy (subsequently updated to remove references to NPR), despite the fact that NPR operates independently and receives around 1% of its funding from federal sources. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/twitter-labels-npr-state-affiliated-media-contradicting-its-own-policy/ ...But realizes that perhaps it was a mistake. https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-npr-state-affiliated-media-label-2023-4 https://www.npr.org/2023/04/07/1168728804/musk-asks-basic-facts-about-npr-after-labeling-it-state-affiliated-media-on-twit Apparently yesterday, they switched the label to "government funded". https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/08/twitter-changes-label-on-npr-account-from-state-affiliated-to-government-funded/

Dell has consistently done two generations per chassis since the Precision 7000 series launched. We could be due for a chassis refresh next year. I think that, if they do that, they will go ahead and change the naming scheme as well.

Yes. Apparently, it switches which controller your device gets plugged into internally based on what you connect. So, if you plug a USB1 device in directly, it will go to the USB 1.1 controller which will not work. Going through a USB2 hub is a “hack” to force it to go through the system’s USB 2 controller. I have since connected my Discord and Facebook Messenger accounts to Beeper and those are working fine as well. Having everything in one spot is nice. And I saw on GitHub that they are working on a Google Voice bridge; I use Google Voice as a secondary phone number so it would be nice to have those SMS messages in there too.

WWAN version uses a different screen enclosure/back panel as well. Instead of all aluminum, there is a separate plastic bit at the top where the antennas are.

Another cool thing I noticed with Beeper. Inbound SMS messages with 2FA codes (i.e. that you get when logging into a bank web site) are automatically identified and it copies the code to your clipboard, so you can just paste it into the web site without having to go through any additional steps. Slick.

They haven’t announced any specs for Framework Laptop 16 yet, but are promising a full reveal later in the spring.

MS Defender definition updates will continue while Windows Update is paused. (I pause it every month and just open it up when I want to run monthly patches, and I have checked on this.) Microsoft has become more aggressive with the Windows 11 upgrade, I’m not surprised to see it being installed for people who didn’t really ask for it. (This is exactly why I prefer the LTSC version…)

Backwards compatibility with games/apps is fine and not something I really hear complaints about. Personally, my main issue with Windows 11 is that Microsoft feels fine changing/adding stuff in monthly updates rather than waiting for the yearly feature updates, and their update QC doesn’t seem to be as good as it used to be. I have other issues (some of them “philosophical”) which I have written about in the article linked in my sig. But for most people, Windows 11 will be fine. You have 10 days to roll back anyway, so you can give it a try.

It absolutely did. I did not hear them cycle on at all when I first powered it up which is a big change from what I normally got from the Delta fans. I have done close testing to see if I can hear them turn on at all, since I rarely reboot and the fans are just always on rather than cycling on and off now …..

Microsoft update aggression at its finest… After the first reboot, you’ll be at a screen where it is spending a while doing the update and giving you a % progress. Just force the system off (hold the power button down) during this and start it up again. You might have to do it twice, but it will give up and dump you back on Windows 10 with an error saying the upgrade failed. If you don’t want to do that, then you have 10 days after the upgrade to roll back to Windows 10. I’ve done this multiple times without issue. The option is in Settings under Recovery.

Yeah, I was thinking that this could be an issue with the battery not being able to provide high power output. The system should not abruptly power off, no matter what load you throw at it. I’m still thinking the battery is the most likely culprit and I would not be the least bit surprised if it is a poor-quality non-Dell battery put in there by your refurb vendor, which would explain its apparent healthiness but poor behavior.