Sandy Bridge

This has reminded me of Beeper's existence, so I'm now on its likely-long waitlist. I'd love to see chat returned to its '90s/2000's glory days. Being able to chat from computers with real keyboards, and without all the baggage that social networks bring. Having a Pidgin equivalent so I don't need 15 applications to reach all the people who use Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or Signal or Telegram or eleven other options. They've certainly got the right idea. Not sure if they're going to succeed on the iMessge front against the 8000-pound gorilla, but even if they don't, the other networks probably make it worth it. Though I would love to be able to have extended iMessage conversations from my PC, like I used to have on AIM. It's just not fun typing that much on a virtual keyboard; if a conversation is getting lengthy on a phone, I give up on text messaging and make a phone call. But there was something to be said for the AIM/Yahoo! Messenger/Live Messenger/gChat experience, especially when it wasn't convenient for one side or the other to talk out loud on the phone.

Fish and chips from the place with the best fish and chips in the area. That Maverick sounds nice. I was going to say that if I were to buy a new pickup, or maybe a new car in general, that would be on the shortlist. Although with that long of a backlog, I'd have to have something else in the meantime.

I like the John McAfee analogy. Both obviously talented at what they were known for in their early-mid adulthood... anti-virus software, and PayPal/electric vehicles/rocket companies. Both going increasingly off the rails as they get older, and have no need to stay focused on what they focused on earlier. It can both be the case the Elon Musk is/was a genius, and that he's a loose cannon nowadays. It can be both that he was very disciplined fixing the Model Y production scaling issues, living at the factory, and that now he's basically winging it with running Twitter, and really doesn't have a plan. Who hasn't had areas of their life that they focus on and do well at, and others that receive less focus? And those areas can change over time. For all the money he spent on it, Twitter probably is the least important of his three major companies in terms of its impact on his self-perception if it fails. He's staked his reputation on Tesla and SpaceX, and has had great success at them. He only staked a decent chunk of his fortune on Twitter, but not so much that he'll be bankrupt if it folds. Of course it does have carryover impacts on his reputation as well, but "complicated legacy with two successful and impactful companies" is still better than what most of us will have on our Wikipedia entries, even if his former reputation may have remained more intact had he not bought Twitter.

When I looked up the trailer a couple days ago, YouTube gave me the wrong trailer first, some fake fan trailer made earlier this year. It had me for a while too - I thought, huh, I kinda would've expected higher-res character models, but okay, they're focusing on scale and story and interaction. I realized it was fake when it ended with, "Arriving in 2045." The trailer was probably made with GTA V. Despite the hype, IMO we still know basically nothing. Which also applies to Take-Two's other major franchise - Civilization VII. Released a trailer way back in... March? And nothing since then. It'll be interesting to see if there is any more frequent communication with GTA VI, or if they just want people to know, "We're working on it. It'll be released when it's done!" Which is still preferable to rushing it out the door.

Yeah, along with upfront cost, charger maintenance is a concern I'd have. My friend who owns a PHEV said the ChargePoint ones are the best around here, and they are not very good. Chargers will go down for weeks before they get fixed - usually just one of a bunch, but still annoying, especially when their number isn't that high yet and the others might all be taken. When the local gas station had a couple pumps down, there were more just a few feet away. Though one positive thing is the Biden administration has required that all federally-supported chargers will have to include credit card support, which should reduce the need for 17 different mobile charging applications. There are still a lot of legacy ones that don't support that, but that's another inconvenience that will hopefully be going away. I think that regulation also included some reliability standards (e.g. it has to be up X% of the same or you owe the money back), but would have to check on that. ------- I've played around with RAMdisks in the past. Ultimately, my conclusion was the need to load everything first kind of defeats the point for me. I could set my computer to put Steam and LibreOffice and Vivaldi and whatever all else on a RAMdisk when it starts... or I could just launch whichever thing I want to run off the SSD and not have it have to load all the other things. If all I ever did was play Rocket League, it'd be perfect, but that isn't my use case. Add in the need to write everything back to disk if you want it to have permanence... it's a cool toy, but even with 64 GB of (very cheap) DDR4 in my laptop, I think I'll stick with my PCIe 3.0 SSDs as my main storage method.

What part of how things have been going with them? The main change I've seen in 2023 is the move towards the North American Charging Standard, which seems like a good reason to potentially wait till 2025, but a net benefit after that. Though I also continue to be disappointed in the small selection, particularly towards the lower/midrange part of the market. Personally, I think the plug-in hybrid, that gets 30-50 miles on electric but has a petrol engine for extended range, is the sweet spot in the short term while charging infrastructure is built out. With the same amount of raw battery materials, five to ten times as many vehicles could be mostly-electrified, and a corresponding number of people would get the benefits of electrification - quieter ride, better torque, lower fuel costs - in the near term. And range/charging anxiety wouldn't be a concern, either. All-electric is what captures the imagination, but the more I've thought about it the more I've concluded that Mazda is right, and pursuing all-electric now is missing the forest for the trees. At a tree level, all-electric with 270 miles of range is great. At a forest level, seven times as many vehicles with 35 miles of electric range with a 10 gallon gas tank does a lot more good until the battery supply chain can be expanded. Now if only Mazda would actually release a wide lineup of plug-in hybrid vehicles...

The actual article linked is more nuanced than the thread title. The gist of it is that stainless steel is not the same as traditional automotive steel, or aluminum. Ironing out dents, in particular, is not as simple, which means labor required and thus repair costs may be higher. It's more likely that you'll hit the threshold where replacing the whole part is cheaper, and more likely that the repair cost will equal totaling the vehicle. Tesla also has an imperfect history of making spare parts available in sufficient quantities, and due to stainless steel not being a common material for building cars with, the availability of third-party parts may be lower than is typical. Tesla also encourages using its own ink repair technicians, which can reduce competition and thus drive up costs and wait times. Overall, a good reminder that much like the aluminum F-150 and the DeLorean, a new material means uncertainties, and also a reminder that Tesla likes to control everything. I wasn't in the market for a pickup, or a Tesla, regardless. Though if I did buy a pickup, I'd buy a Ford Maverick. The right size for what I'd use it for, a good price, good fuel economy, and from a company that I like more than Tesla.

Some of the categories are very large, and not all of them have been paginated. Give it a minute (literally) to load, and it will. If there's a sub-forum you plan to visit frequently, it may be a good idea to save its page offline. For example, it takes about 30 seconds to load the Dell category for me, but if I save it locally, it only takes a second or two to load locally, and the links to the archive from my locally-saved copy still load up over the Internet.

One of the many stories: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21177/amd-unveils-ryzen-8040-mobile-series-apus-hawk-point-with-zen-4-and-ryzen-ai In short, pretty much the only difference is enabling an AI part of the chip that was present but not enabled on most of the 7040 series. Beyond that, clock speeds, core counts, and everything else is the same. No news on a potential 8050 series, which would use a new architecture and thus offer improvements rather than a rebadge. All in all... I have a hard time thinking of a less exciting launch. Sure, there have been rebadges before, so there is competition, but... I still posit that the correct naming scheme would have had the first digit be the architectural generation. That way you'd know you're getting something new when you buy the highest first digit, and from a marketing standpoint it would still push people to buy the latest and generally priciest chips. I'll be sticking with my Ryzen 5000 chip... it's actually still pretty darn fast, too.

All right, Black Friday is coming up, seems like a good time to bump this thread. What, if anything, do you want to buy for Black Friday, and will you likely buy it? I probably will buy a game or two off my Steam or GOG wishlists; which ones depends on which are on sale and by how much. I probably won't buy an AM5 gaming system. Prices are more reasonable than they were a year ago, especially with some lower price motherboards finally being available, but the notebook I bought last year has obviated the need for a new desktop for the foreseeable future. I mean, sure, part of me still wants a dodecacore 7900X, but would I be able to tell the difference in practice over my notebook's 5800H? For what I do, nah. Hmm, that e-bike that ryan linked is $700 off its $1500 (CAD) base price... $800 is pretty darn good for an e-bike with any range, which it appears to have. If I had the storage space for another bike, that might be pretty tempting. By and large I'd rather ride my traditional bike as the exercise is if not the goal, at least an appreciated side benefit, but having injured my knee a while back... yeah, having an e-bike as an alternative at that point would have been keen.

I keep forgetting that Vivaldi is available on iOS now, it's my primary (> 95% of the time) browser on desktop, but I'm still using Firefox when I browse on mobile, which is admittedly much less often and mostly to check football scores on Saturdays. One of their nice, small new features is allowing you to change the order in which auto-suggest suggests sites. Do you want it to suggest bookmarks first? Search suggestions? Frequently visited pages? Directly-typed URLs? By putting "Directly-typed URLs" first, I've solved the problem where if I bookmark a page on a site, that bookmarked page was the default rather than the top-level site. DuckDuckGo is my main search engine but I guess I'm just not convinced that I need to use their browser versus just their search engine in my favorite browser, with uBlockOrigin installed for tracking protection. Which happens to still be working just fine for YouTube after an update to its block lists.

Probably because they cost twice as much in Canada as the U.S., so it's only actually half of their brand-new value: https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Rocket-Internal-Performance-SB-ROCKET-4TB/dp/B07ZQSDQDB?th=1 https://www.newegg.com/sabrent-rocket-nvme-4tb/p/0D9-001Y-00013 $300 US new at both Amazon and Newegg. Some good deals on the SSDs, I upgraded mine in June but I'm surprised these haven't sold yet.

It will be nice that when iOS and Android friends visit each other, they'll be able to charge their phones even if they forgot to bring their USB-C/Lightning cable. I've had to bring my car's Lightning connector in for charging at Android houses, and haven't been able to help friends with USC-C Androids charge if they're visiting as I only have Lightning and whatever type of USB phones used prior to USB-C. Theoretically, this transition might happen more quickly than the USB-A to USB-C transition as well, since theoretically no more Lightning-specific devices will be released.

PC Gamer has published a glowing review of the AMD version of the Framework 13: https://www.pcgamer.com/framework-13-amd-mainboard-review-performance/ If I hadn't bought a laptop last November, I'd certainly be considering pulling the trigger on the Framework 16. With all the ports relying on the Expansion Modules, the 13 doesn't have enough ports for me, but I could probably make the 16 work, would be nice if there were some expansion modules that added, say, a headphone jack and Ethernet. But aside from that minor quibble, it's an attractive proposition. I'd probably even buy it without the dGPU to start with, see if the integrated 12 CUs were sufficient (which for my uses, nowadays, they probably would be), and then maybe add a dGPU in a generation or two when the 12 CUs aren't quite adequate for me anymore. Something that would be virtually impossible with other laptops. There is a bit of a price premium, but I got almost 11 years out of my desktop, with upgrades, before it was replaced as my daily driver, and if I could get close to that out of a laptop with a few upgrades, it would be a better option than buying a new one every 4 years. Now Framework just needs to still be around in 2026 or so when I need a new notebook... and maybe add an input module with full-height arrow keys in the interim. --- Edit: They've pre-announced an SD expansion card too (https://frame.work/blog/pre-announcing-the-sd-expansion-card-and-a-new-youtube-series). Makes sense, and from the blog post it seems I wasn't the only one thinking that would be a logical addition to their expansion card portfolio.

Apple has announced that the new iPhone 15 and 15 Pro will switch from the Lightning connector to USB-C. The regular 15 will operate at USB 2.0 speeds, and the Pro will operate at USB 3.0 speeds. The SE, as far as I can tell, isn't being refreshed and will continue to use Lightning for the time being. Thoughts? Feelings? Will you miss Apple's proprietary ports, or have you already adopted USB-C for everything else? --- I have a small collection of Lightning cables for my SE, but never bought any Lightning-based accessories, so I'm not heavily invested in Lightning. On the other hand, I don't have any USB-C accessories either. So overall I guess I'm pretty neutral on this one. But I do wish they'd have the courage to add a headphone jack to one of their future models.

I like the idea of the Fairphone, but it would be nice if there were options for lower-end/less expensive configurations (and ideally, a second, smaller model). I don't need multiple cameras, and while nice, I don't need an OLED display. And while it may be considered a slow CPU by today's standards, I'm probably fine with a slower CPU, too. But the upgradeability/maintainability is really nice. I also wish they had the courage to include a headphone jack, but sadly, few companies seem to be that courageous these days... In an ideal world, I'd probably buy such a midrange/smaller-screen, de-Googled but headphone-jacked Fairphone... but given the direction of changes from the 4 to 5, I'll probably just stick with an older iPhone.

Real picks make a big difference. The plastic tabs are still annoying and even so often I still break one so it doesn't reattach the same later, but having used credit cards and makeshift picks, and then used a pick from an iFixit kit, there's a huge difference when you have the right tool for the job. I have two inexpensive kits I acquired over the years, a set of about 20 mostly-small-Philips-head-and-flathead screwdrivers from Amazon and a roughly 35-piece kit of various types, all small sizes, from Micro Center. They are not bad, might not last a century but for my level of use will last a decade, but lack picks. (Not linking them because it's been years and I'm not sure I could even find them online today) When I needed something that neither kit had, I finally got an iFixit kit, and they're higher-durability steel, and include picks. In retrospect, it would have been best to just start with a high-quality iFixit kit and not need to buy another. But I don't think they had their kits when I got my first Amazon kit. It's not so much about using all the bits, as not needing to acquire a few bits this year and a few more the next year. Especially if ordering online, shipping can make the piecemeal approach more expensive over time.

Eh... I tried 8.1 on my MSI GL63 8RE back when it was new, with its i7-8750H, and GeForce 1050M. It installed, but was flaky when it came to booting up, only succeeding a fraction of the time. I decided to give Windows 10 a chance and it turned out to not be that bad after all. Never went back to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get it to work. There was a time when I would have been in the target audience for this thread, but at this point I'm only really interested in more recent or older OSes.

I checked and I'm actually using SFTP rather than SCP with WinSCP. So, yes, SCP would work! Thanks for the tip on the "clean" version, too! I'll take a look at BBEdit. I see it's related to TextWrangler, which had come up during my search. Not sure why I hadn't tried it before, my first thought was that I try to avoid the App Store (which wasn't a viable option when I was forced to use a Mac at work), but I see you can download it from outside the App Store as well. Probably I thought there was only a paid version. I did try Hex Fiend, and found it to be generally satisfying, though I haven't used it intensively enough to give it a fair comparison to HxD, or the old A.X.E. hex editor for Windows ME+. Edit: Ever try Synalyze It! ? (https://www.synalysis.net) Its syntax support reminds me of my favorite A.X.E. features; you could tell A.X.E. the structure of the binary document and it would be able to work with it at a higher level. Sadly I didn't buy a pro version of A.X.E. before its development team went defunct, but the concept looks similar for Synalyze It! - if it works well enough I could see myself potentially using it even though it doesn't run on my preferred OS.

I'm a big fan of the strategy genre for good thinking-power games. The classics are Sid Meier's Civilization - I'd recommend III or IV if you don't care about modern graphics, and want an AI that will be a challenge rather than a pushover. Purchase from Steam or GOG, and try to built a civilization to stand the test of time. Turn-based so no reflexes and plenty of time to consider your moves. But if you want something that you can play in a half hour to an hour, I'd recommend Ozymandias: Bronze Age Simulator, which is on Steam and GOG. It's the best focused strategy game I've played in a long time. The rules are simple, but achieving victory is not. Definitely start with the easy nations. Probably try the free demo, and on that Near East map, try either Mycenae or Egypt as they're the easiest options on that map (and IIRC, the only ones I've won with). You'll lose your first time, but then the goal is to figure out what you might have done differently. If you like chess, 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel is a nice mind-bender that will keep the neurons flexible. But, so long as you don't mind a bit of written profanity, so is Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate. I think I prefer the latter, the concept is a bit absurd (one king with a shotgun versus the other set of pieces), but with contantly-changing rules as the game goes on, and the ever-present threat of checkmate, it does make you think about your moves, in a way that is different than the ruleset you've known since childhood. I've seen Hikaru (a well-known grandmaster) play 5D Chess and be flummoxed by it at first; I'd be curious to see what he or a similar top-level player thinks of Shotgun King. While there is a shotgun in Shotgun King, and you technically are shooting-em-up, it's not a shoot-em-up from a genre standpoint. It is entirely turn based and you just aim your shotgun in a circle around your current position, and fire, no time pressure or reflex-based gameplay. Or you move to an adjacent square. Or you use the soul of a knight to move like a knight. Or you move two squares if you have that special ability. Or you fire and move in the opposite direction if you have the sawed-off justice modifier. Or some other crazy action that wouldn't be possible in regular chess. It's a weird game, but engages the brain. They'll all run easily on your computer, I've run all but the chess-related ones on my 2011 desktop with no issues, and I can't imagine they wouldn't run there as well.

Nooooo, you are going to the dark side! Although homebrew is nice. I think I like it more than apt/yum/apt-get/etc. because I don't have to think about which distro I'm on ("is this an apt distro or an apt-get distro?"), and I don't have to type sudo. How's the keyboard nowadays? My trust in Apple's ability to design a keyboard evaporated the first day I used a butterfly keyboard, and has yet to return. It hasn't helped that employers keep issuing me Macs with butterfly keyboards, it's like if I kept getting pre-SP1 Vista machines, or was always running Windows ME. The headphone issue is both surprising and not surprising. Apple always used to have top-notch DACs in their iPods and iPhones, until they took the "courageous" decision to remove the 3.5mm jack. Apparently they have not kept up the quality on the remaining devices that still have them. Does it have the issue while it's on battery as well, or just on AC? Annoying though, I'd have thought as expensive as Macs are they could get that right, Dell has it figured out. But maybe they think everyone is always using Beats by Dr. Dre bluetooth headphones. And yes, the sleep settings while on battery (and while on AC, but connected to an external display that has been switched off) can be infuriating compared to Windows. I've left a work Mac running with its screen on all weekend in the laundry room so it would finish a long-running script; no actual reason for the screen to be on besides the settings not allowing me to set it to turn off the screen but not go to sleep. I tried giving it Caffeine (a third-party program that worked well back in the El Capitan days), but by Monterey macOS appears to have built up a tolerance. One of my colleagues tried Amphetamine (a different third-party program), I can't remember if it worked better for him than Caffeine did for me. But such strong drugs shouldn't be necessary when one more option in the Settings are would solve the problem.

I think it's fair to say that Apple is taking gaming on macOS more seriously than they did previously, whether that meets the standard of "seriously" remains TBD. But after so many years of neglecting gaming (have they released an OpenGL version from the 21st century yet? joking! but only half-joking), I'm split between, "maybe they're realizing that this is limiting their market share" and "do they actually care enough to follow up with everything else they'd need to compete with Windows (and these days, Linux) on gaming?" The "while performance leaves something to be desired" hints at why I'm not sure that the "seriously" threshold has been reached. Not just that there may yet be optimizations yet to be made in the Game Porting Toolkit, but that Apple has gone all-in on Apple Silicon, without dGPU options. The standard M2 chip is about the same as a Radeon RX 6400, AMD's lowest-end dGPU, the M2 Pro is a bit below the RX 6600 (but for $2500; you can get 6500 XT performance for $2000). The M2 Ultra really does have specs that can give high-end GPUs a run for their money, but on a $7000 machine it ought to. So I think it's more, "Apple doesn't want someone who would otherwise pay the Apple Tax to not do so because of gaming", than "Apple is taking gaming seriously". Gamers tend to be value-focused, and you can get a PC with an RX 6600 easily for half of what Apple charges for the same level of performance; I got mine for a third of what Apple charges. If you're going to pay $2500 for a gaming laptop, and buy a PC, the performance is going to leave very little to be desired.

Hmm, so the max storage is: 8 TB from the internal 2280 2 TB from the internal 2230 6 TB from the maximum of six 1 TB expansion cards 16 TB from the dual 2280 expansion module = 32 TB. Which is actually quite a bit of storage. They say they attempted to fit two 2280's, so it's a bit odd that they wound up with a 2230 instead of a 2242 or a 2260. But then, I'm not sure that many companies are releasing those intermediary sizes, the last I looked at 2242 options a few months ago, there weren't a ton of recent drives.

My company went Twitter and laid off my entire team, including management. We don't think they thought it through all the way though, our product generates millions of dollars in revenue per year. The application itself seems displeased, the very next day it had a support page go out, and everyone who would normally answer it was gone. So it went to the guy who'd made the decision to lay off everyone under him related to this product, interrupting his holiday vacation. We knew we'd added some self-healing routines into one of our applications, but I hadn't realized we'd taught this one karma as well. Could be worse though, one of the affected people is close enough to retirement that it likely amounts to starting retirement early, and I've already been actively exploring outside roles (got another interview lined up next week), and can connect affected people with recruiters. Wouldn't be surprised if a year from now, we're all in better shape and the company's in worse shape.

The nice thing about regular chess is that there are only about a dozen rules. How pawns, bishops, knights, rooks, queens, and kings move, count the pawns twice as there's a special case, that's 7. How checkmate works. Castling. Promotions. That's 10. Maybe check separately from checkmate, and stalemate? That's 12. 5D Chess adds a few more wrinkles in the space-time continuum, but I look at it as similar to picking up a city builder or strategy game - there's a bunch of interacting layers and sometimes they can influence each other in subtle ways, but it's learning something new and hopefully having fun with it. Although usually I can't travel back in time in city builders, other than save-reloading, that is a rather unique aspect. Some adventure or RPG games allow time travel though. ---- I've also started up Constructor Plus. Still undecided on it. Though I followed its advice to take a break and have a cuppa (tea) after the second mission, and that was a good life choice.