I have been a creative content creator for years now in both video and photo, as well creating graphics, writing stories, how tos etc. 

I have been trying all of the photo/video software (besides adobe as they are satan). I have settled on a couple of different programs because they are lightweight and you don't need stupid expensive systems to run them on. 

For photo work I mainly use Affinity Photo. This software is straight forward, easy to use and don't make your images look "processed".  just like a digital darkroom should. For more "creative" edits I am using Corel Paint shop pro ultimate. This software is awesome. It is super light so you can easily run it on older hardware, and it includes the right amount of AI for this type of work. Best part it can use photoshop plug ins, LUTs etc without issue. 

For video editing I use Pinnacle Studio Ultimate. Again, this software does everything the "big boys" can do, but in a very lightweight way. Only needing a decent spec computer to run it on.  I chose this because of the availability of quick sync for my laptop, and how it has all of the features that premiere or Davinci has. 

For Graphic work I use Affinity Designer. I have created numerous graphics for our clothing business which we are finally getting off the ground, and it's easy and straight forward. 

For publishing and writing, I use a combination of word and Affinity Publisher depending on what's needed. Word needs no introduction and Affinity publisher is easy to use, I can take graphics and images from Photo and designer and merge easily into publisher to use without issues and it makes creating things fast and easy. 

For our new podcast/vlogcast, I have a Behringer audio interface, mixer, mics, headphones going to my laptop via USB-C then into Audacity. Free is great. It has everything I need to make our recordings sound really professional and dialed in. I am an audiophile so crisp clear audio is a must for anything we produce. I will be renting the "studio" to others in the area who want a podcast/vlogcast produced as well.  The mixer has 6 channels on it so I have one set for me, one for my wife Kelly, and the other 4 will be the "others" who use our system.  Mine and Kellys are not touched. I have photos of the settings incase one gets bumped during setup etc. 

All software mentioned is buy once, cry once or free. I refuse to pay subs anymore for software. I got rid of luminar Neo because of the subscription fee for it. And the prices adobe charges for their entire suite is bonkers. 

Hope this gives some insight to people who may want affordable great software to create!

Anyone?

Well almost a week since my bowl surgery, I am sitting at home, cannot do any consumables since I don't want to cough. ha ha.  But here is a mind blowing, face melting performance for Ya'll.  I really just stumbled on this and HOLY POOP. My favorite group now!

I have two different ad blockers on my iPad and neither block ads in Youtube via edge. Many other websites are brutal as well. My laptop with edge and ublock is great. 

4 hours ago, Mr. Fox said:

On October 14, 2025, Microsoft will end support for Windows 10.

 

Ironically, October 14 is also International E-waste Day.

 

You just can't make this stuff up.

I am going into surgery tomorrow, it better work good while im in there.  I am not happy that ad blocking do not work in Edge on my iPad but it works on every other device I own. I am going to have to deal with it as it's going to be the only device I have with me while recovering.  So it's going to be my tv, magazine and what not when im in recovery. Hopefully im only in there 3 or 4 days and then I will be home where I can use my laptops again. 

Nailed it for sure. Both the chargers I had were 2 prong. One was the apple charger though.  But 100 percent grounding now that I think about it.  And the hotel probably didn't help matters either. 

I was away with my family this weekend and took my laptop with me. So I plug in the notebook for the night after using it for awhile and have this funny "sensation" when I was charinging it on the right hand side of the machine where my wrist stays.  Like tingly sensation but not quite.  In order to feel it you have to move your finger across the notebook.  So I pulled out the charger and it stopped.  

I then tried with a otterbox USB C charging block and apple cord I have to charging both our phones at the same time.  That charging solution produced the same "sensation".  I get back home and plug into the original charging block and cable and low and behold, no "sensation".  

Can anyone give any reasons why two other chargers would do this and one does not?  I have another dell laptop charger in my office I have to try as well. 

Picked up my iPad because we are going out of town for the weekend and I like taking some goodies with me.  Turned it on and it froze on the settings app for like 35 seconds, then it froze on the Home Screen for another 20 seconds.  

It’s a 10th gen iPad so it has enough power to run it no problem so I would assume being it’s just one year old. 

I thought iPadOS was supposed to be light and snappy all the time.  

Well. In a major turn of events, we are downsizing our home. My wife and I will be sharing an office space now.  So what we are doing is going to have two of the same setups for the new office.  Same desk, same chairs same monitor.  Different keyboards and pcs.  I am going to be keeping my Dell XPS for the foreseeable future to do my work.  I am going to get Kelly a new mini PC for her desk. 

She's going to have the pink Logitech Keyboard and mouse to complement her Logitech mouse pad she already has.  I am going to have the "space grey" Logitech setup for my desk.  We are both going to get the 40 inch Alogic ultrawides. Hers will be silver and again, mine space gray.  I think we are going with large sit/stand desks and good quality chairs. 

I will have to get a multiple printer, scanner stand for my photo printer and scanner and our Multifunction unit for general duties. Everything is about compacting space to a way more reasonable level. Right now we have two offices and they are both huge.  But with that comes insane living expenses.  So chopping our house, property and expenses in half will make it way easier for us to retire when we want.  If we did stay here, I would be working forever.  Moving to the new smaller property we can retire in 10 years and have just basic living expenses.  

On 5/13/2025 at 10:14 PM, Papusan said:

 

Nice. Spectre CPU bug returns to haunt Intel processors again. Expect lower performance even with 14th gen Intel Core processors.

 

New Intel CPU flaws leak sensitive data from privileged memory

 

The firmware-level mitigations introduce a 2.7% performance overhead, while software mitigations have a performance impact between 1.6% and 8.3%, depending on the CPU.

Forgot to quote so you see it.  If you were building a system today what CPU would you use? 

Update. The "repair" to outlook lasted 1 day. I had to run repair again this morning.  No wonder I am ditching windows and moving to linux. There will be a few growing pains I am sure, but this crap is ridiculous. Microsoft is not even hiding the fact they sell your data to places like McAfee even if you don't have it installed on your system, let alone various 3rd party "companies".  NO THANKS MS.  GFY!

2 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

You can get the passcode yourself right out of the BitLocker control panel. It is also stored in your Microsoft account, assuming that you set one up and use it to log in to your PC, and you can fetch it through a browser. The idea is simply to prevent someone who steals your system from being able to access your data, and I’m not really sure how they could do disk encryption better, a trivial workaround would defeat the purpose. Though I agree that activating it by default without informing the user of what is going on first is not the best approach.

Yes, I had to go through it with my moms laptop.  It's a huge inconvenience.  Plus, I am ditching windows for security reasons too.  They like scraping your data and sending it to places like McAfee, and other third party bidders.  I don't have McAfee on my systems why is my data going to them.  NO THANKS.  I broke the news to my son who has autism and does not like change that change is coming on his gaming PC.  For the better however. 

So, I was just reading about the bitlocker bull.  So MS holds your pc hostage with bitlocker encryption so if you have to install a new drive, or want to upgrade, the data on your current drive is locked and unable to be read unless you get a passcode from them?  that's next level.  

I am wondering if anyone knows if I can get the fans to shut up on his MSI cyborg when not gaming?  As soon as you power on the laptop they start screaming.  Don't kick in performance mode fans.  WOW.  this laptop is great other than the fan noise. 

On 2/15/2025 at 3:22 PM, raptorddd said:

 thanks.

thats what i have read that it gets a bit hot. have you used honeywell thermal paste.? on my m4600 it lowred by 4'C.

 

I have Noctua NH-T2 on all my dells and it dropped temps ALOT.  The fans do not kick in near as much now.  Works great, easily available and not stupid expensive.  

I was having alot of laggy system issues with youtube and my outlook opening like 2 mins after starting it.  Did some research.  On edge, there is a setting that allows hardware acceleration.  That is on by default and caused websites, videos etc to lag, stutter etc.  I turned of that hardware acceleration in the Edge browser and everything is as smooth as my linux system now.  Happy again.  I thought it was something I was going to have to live with, but it fixed and I am happy.  

For the outlook program taking ages to load.  That was fixed by a software update and repair.  It's all super fast again now.  thankfully!

If you were building a PC today. What would you use?

On 5/9/2025 at 5:07 PM, Aaron44126 said:

In-place upgrade to Windows 11 LTSC 2024 (from Windows 10 LTSC 2021) on my work PC, the Precision 7560.

 

It's mostly fine to use. Windows 11 LTSC doesn't have any major cruft that I have observed. It does of course share some design issues with "regular" Windows 11 that I do not like, but, meh, for my regular workflow it doesn't make that much of a difference.

 

I did have some issues immediately following the upgrade.

 

First, trying to patch from the September 2024 patch level (which I was originally dropped on) to the April 2025 patch level didn't work. It kept getting "almost to the end" (literally right before dropping me back on the login screen) and then it would show a message that "something went wrong" and it was rolling back. A couple of reboots later, I was back at my desktop, unpatched.

 

I tried other patches. December 2024 worked fine but anything newer did not, so something "broke" in the January patch. When I tried the February patch, it was even worse. It did an update to the USB 3.0 root hub driver which didn't get rolled back properly when the patch back-out process happened, leaving me with no USB support. (They must have "fixed" that in later patches because I didn't have the same problem when trying to install the March or April patches.)

 

I ended up just making new install media with the April 2025 patch integrated and then did another in-place upgrade to that. That went fine. We'll see what happens when May patches drop next week.

 

Second, it trashed one of my secondary data partitions which was using the ReFS file system. I have no idea why, but after the upgrade it just would not mount that drive, claiming in Event Viewer that there was "corruption". I was able to use the "refsutil salvage" command line tool to get the files off... and now I'm not using ReFS to hold those files anymore.

 

Overall, the most shaky Windows upgrade I would say that I've been through on one of my own systems, but I think that I have things settled, as long as there isn't any ongoing trouble with the monthly patches going forward.

 

...Not that it matters for that much longer. I'm working to get my daily drivers off of Windows and this is the last system left. It should be replaced with a Mac later this year, but I'm waiting for the IT dept to finish some prep work before I can make that switch. (I won't be able to completely ditch Windows, it will just be relegated to being used remotely or in a VM.) I was sort of hoping to avoid using Windows 11 on a daily driver altogether, but with the company trying to get everyone moved up to Windows 11 during the next several months, I figured that I should take the plunge so that I can understand what issues might need to be addressed as the rest of my team moves over.

At this point in time, moving to MacOS is no better. Both are basically spyware now.  Apple claims security and privacy are number one in their OS but it's quite the opposite.  I would push towards a good linux distro. 

As an aside to that, I hope hypersync is available in software for linux.

On 12/14/2024 at 1:52 AM, Papusan said:

 

Battlemage is a lot better card than the old Arc. So Intel have improved a lot and finally can compete in low/mid end. 

 

Intel Arc B580 “Battlemage” Graphics Cards Review Roundup

 

 

I am waiting to see what the 770 brings to the table for creative work. Supposedly hypersync is awesome for video editing. 

My family is moving away from MS and Apple. We will be using a combination of Zorin and Garuda. Unless I can get the gaming emulators and games in garuda on Zorin I may go that route as well.  I am looking for a few forums where I can ask questions, get some ideas and tips for getting our linux systems up and running.  

It's time, between Microsoft making deals with "Space Karen" and Apple spying, ripping off and having unsecure platforms, It's time to embrace the Open Source where what I own is MINE, not rented trash. 

Recall is completely disable'able as well. 

On 4/29/2025 at 12:02 PM, Linux said:

The same reason i start testing it. Rather easy to use, since a lot is accessible via system GUI, which normally would need terminal wizardy in Arch.

So, in theory, it should be the same as zorin to use since it's all GUI now.  I am new to linux.  I am loving Zorin on this little laptop that is replacing my iPad.  I have some issues with waydroid and apps accessing the network and Bluetooth.  This week I will be getting that sorted.  But it's better at being a PC than the iPad while being about 90 percent as good as being a tablet as the iPad.  Win win for me.  

On 4/26/2025 at 2:55 PM, Papusan said:

 

Windows Recall is too risky for your Copilot+ PC. Turn it off, now

Windows Recall offers an easy way to search your history on your PC. It's simple and convenient — both for you as well as bad actors. Remove it.

Agree. The dumbest concept ever.  Besides, windows already watches and records everything you do on your system. WHY give bad people easy access to this.  

Oh, btw.  Gone to linux, FCK M$.  ha ha.  I am on linux right now and it's SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better than windows 11.  I currently have it on my old dell 3169 with M3 processor 4gb of ram and 615 graphics and its WAY faster than my 1165g7 with 64gb of ram on windows 11.  

I went and put both systems on desktop with the system monitors up.  My linux system 1-2 percent cpu, 1gb of ram and no network processes.  On my win 11 laptop on desktop 30-40% cpu useage, 11.3gb of ram being used and lots and lots of network access spikes.  What the FK is MS  doing behind the scenes?  Time to remove them from all my systems.  It will take my wife and son a few days to acclimate to Linux, but they will love it after as it's SUPER fast and secure. No spying.