Sandy Bridge

Oh, that is good news. I didn't find it earlier when looking at their website, but their GitHub seems to describe it at https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/ExpansionBay - it looks like the Expansion Bay includes GPU, heatsink, and fans (which answers the question of how is the heatsink connected to the fan). That is nice as it really would be plug-and-play. Like eGPU but integrated into the laptop. It's also good to know that Quadros were pretty consistent with MXM. I had an ATi FirePro card and going from FirePro to Quadro would not have been straightforward heatsink-wise, at least on my HP. No idea whether FirePros are heatsink-compatible, maybe they are but HP's BIOS whitelisting shenanigans meant upgrading to a newer FirePro wasn't feasible. Shouldn't have to worry about that with these Expansion Bays. I would be happy to see socketed mobile CPUs again, but in the short term the "whole mobo" approach is the only viable one, unless it's using a desktop class CPU. I would be interested in "Framework 18" with a 65W AM5 CPU, but they probably are making the correct progression for the market by going for a 16-inch dGPU option first. Any reports on which CPUs the Framework 16 will be using? I see they've added an AMD option on the smaller one but haven't found info on the 16. I still favor AMD for power-efficiency reasons, even though I know Intel isn't as far behind on that front as they used to be.

What saturnotaku said - and also, not just the GPU itself, but also the heatsink needs to be easily swappable. I have an older laptop with an MXM 3.0b module. Great, so it's upgradeable! Well, from a GPU standpoint, yes, it is. From a heatsink standpoint, it's not so straightforward. It meant grinding down heatsinks to fit new GPUs and different VRM layouts, or conversely adding new materials so it maintains contact when the GPU or VRMs aren't as tall. If a straight GPU swap was something 20% of people might try with supporting documentation, the GPU swap + manual adjustments to the heatsink takes it down to 2%. I'm sure Framework is aware that they need to have the heatsink aspect also be plug-and-play to really deliver on the promise, but the proof is in the pudding as they say. Now if they can deliver that, and the specs are compelling (which based on the 13 I'm cautiously optimistic they will be), this looks really cool. The 16 would be essentially what I wanted to buy last fall in that case. I'm also really happy to see the 16 will have 6 expansion cards instead of 4. That'll make it a lot easier to use as a DTR.

Hot in from Tom's Hardware: Pricing starts at $85. Personally I think it's a sensible move not trying to support all the high-end TDPs, and IMO AMD probably should have set an intermediary target for B650 as well (105W? while leaving B650E for the full range), to keep its prices more moderate. I may wind up buying one depending on the feature and price comparisons of the individual boards to B650 alternatives.

That is good to know; I was not aware of that. I'll keep that in my back pocket just in case I need it for some reason... unlikely now since the old XP LAN machine is currently out-of-commission, and I should be fully migrated by the end of the year, but good to know about. Also good to hear Firefox is keeping 7/8.1 support for another year, that was TBD last I'd heard. Now for seeing if I can get the March 2023 8.1 updates installed, finally got January installed after downloading it manually, for some reason it always failed via Windows Update for me.

I remember when Steam dropped XP support. Pretty sure it was the same thing, Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) dropping XP support. CEF is the bane of old operating systems as it's embedded in so many applications. Good news, the end of support isn't for another 9 months, and it's also somewhat fungible. I kept using Steam on XP intermittently for another 6 months after support was dropped by always starting it with my Internet connection disabled starting shortly before the end of support, so it never downloaded the client that broke XP support. I expect the same should work on 7/8.1... the problem is if you slip up once, your Steam will break. According to https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/1639788130289877816/, you can also block updates this way: This is supposed to prevent the client from installing updates, which would give you full Steam functionality in 2024 on the end-of-2023 client version, at least until something changes that breaks compatibility. My eXPerience the last go-round, not knowing about Steam.cfg, was things kept working for half a year until I forgot and let the client update, but of course there's no guarantee, things could break in two weeks or they could work for two years, and my guess is different parts of Steam would break at different times gradually. But it should at least allow locally installed games that check for the Steam client being present to continue running indefinitely, even if things like chat and buying new games and updating existing ones gradually break.

Ah, HD-DVD. I had a friend who bought that same XBox 360 HD-DVD drive a few weeks after HD-DVD died as a standard. They went on sale cheap, $50 I think, and he reckoned he could buy the discs pretty cheaply too, which turned out to be true. I thought about doing the same but there weren't quite enough films out on HD-DVD that I wanted to buy.

We all print stuff all the time, right? Right? Well, maybe not as much as we used to, but I'm probably not the only one with a printer. But it's an old printer, an HP DeskJet from 2004, that would be old enough to drink substances other than ink in most countries. It's slow, it's almost impossible to keep the color ink from drying out (black ink never seems to dry out), it doesn't know what WiFi is, and it somehow keeps working. It's also relatively compact, which is nice as it lives on a bookshelf rather than a permanent location on a desk. I've considered replacing it with newer one that would be faster and more convenient, but haven't found a nice small inexpensive one that checks all the boxes. HP does have a nice all-in-one printer/scanner/copier that's remarkably small, but it's subject to their ink DRM program, which disqualifies it from consideration. Anyone else have a printer they're happy with and would recommend? I'm particularly interested in small ones that can also scan (my scanner is roughly equally geriatric), but it seems there should be a thread on this type of accessory regardless.

https://www.microcenter.com/site/stores/indianapolis.aspx Coming this summer to Indianapolis is a brand new Micro Center location! Two more, in currently-undisclosed locations, will open "by 2025" according to Tom's Hardware. I'm excited for Indianapolis. Micro Center is great. I live close to one and it's my go-to computer store. They don't quite have everything, but they have a lot, at reasonable prices, and no one else offers anything similar. As someone who generally doesn't enjoy shopping, but likes computer hardware, it's my favorite store. Anyone live in Indiana and looking forward to not having to drive to Cincinnati or Chicago for a good PC shopping experience?

I didn't really understand just how bad LastPass's security practices were until reading this post on Mastodon from a Yahoo! security engineer. It's a bit long and a bit technical, even as a professional developer with some interest in security, but he's not kidding when he says they committed essentially every crypto 101 sin. Roll their own crypto... use outdated encraption rather than modern encryption... store the entire vault unencrypted in memory... tracking all the sites you log in to... I could go on (and the Yahoo! guy does), but it makes you wonder what they spent all their revenue on to have so many flaws. Meanwhile, KeePass, which doesn't have a revenue model, has none of those flaws, and not just because it's offline but because it's designed with security in mind. It sounds like 1Password and BitWarden are significantly better-designed as well. Maybe LastPass was always just an service that had a good user interface and the idea of only having to know one password, but they never really did know anything/care about security? Now the question is, will it do enough reputational/financial damage to make a difference? Will the tech press stop recommending LastPass, or even call out "whatever you use, don't use LastPass?" I'm skeptical. It wasn't until I read the Yahoo! guy's post that I realized how bad the rot goes, so how's the average person going to realize it's a house of cards? Though there is a class action lawsuit about it now, so that's something... Edit: There's also a great breakdown by a Polish guy that's not as technical as the Yahoo! one but still does a great job of conveying why this is a big deal. One of the takeways is the longer you've been a LastPass user, the easier your database is to crack! Not a good way to reward their customers!

If you work in IT long enough... or is it read enough articles about companies being breached? - then you tend to start working how secure data will be before uploading it to the cloud. If I were a hacker looking to profile someone, their bookmarks would be a nice piece of information to have. Although speaking of bookmarks, anyone who uses LastPass has already been pwned in that regard. Apparently they don't encrypt the URLs of sites that users store passwords for. My takeaway isn't "the cloud is doomed", though, but that proper security practices do matter. Of course identifying whether proper security practices are followed is not easy, so the easy option is, "don't trust the cloud"... but being able to sync passwords cross-browser is useful enough that if there were such a service that I trusted to be storing the data more securely than just tossing it in an S3 bucket or AWS database unencrypted, I'd be tempted to try it.

I would be curious about this topic as well - I use both Vivaldi and Firefox for various reasons, and it would be nice to have synced bookmarks across them. Everhelper seems to offer this. I did some research on them and found they've based in Cleveland, Ohio (so at least they won't be selling my bookmarks to Russia), and they neither say they will sell your bookmarks to advertisers, nor that they won't. They do note that they'll share your e-mail with their partner who manages their e-mail list. They do note that they use BCrypt hashes on passwords, which is a good thing, but they don't specify whether they encrypt your bookmarks in the data center used to sync them, which means they probably don't. By comparison, Vivaldi has a great blog post where they show how Vivaldi, Brave, and Firefox securely encrypt your synced data, whereas Chrome does not (as of November, 2018) unless you dig into the settings to enable that option. Firefox's post on the same topic notes that Opera also doesn't encrypt bookmarks (as of November, 2018). Based on that, I'm inclined to conclude that Everhelper isn't as secure as the built-in bookmark syncing tools in most browsers (by browser count, not market share), which is a shame as it sounds legitimately useful.

Simple, how old is your desktop's oldest working component? Do you always build brand new, or do you carry over components, and if so what has survived the longest? For me, the oldest component is an internal floppy drive from 1995. It still reads floppies just like it's the '90s! It'll probably get carried forward to my AM5 rebuild whenever that happens, thanks to a floppy-to-USB-header adapter I bought a few years ago. It did have a nearly 20 year vacation, however, so the oldest parts in terms of time connected to a power supply are my mobo, CPU, case, oldest fan, and oldest hard drive, which all date from 2011. The SMART stats tell me that hard drive has 8.5 years of power-on hours. Don't worry, it's a backup drive, and there are cold-storage backups of that backup! Anyone else rocking some reliable vintage hardware in their main rig? I know there's got to be someone on the forum who bought a PCI expansion card in 1997 that's still working today!

I have two friends who have gone projector-first over the years. The first was back around 2007, when monitors were smaller. Got a killer deal on a projector and life was transformed. I think it was 1280x800 but who cares when you have a 100" screen when most monitors are 5:4 1280x1024 17" screens? Only downside was the risk of an expensive bulb replacement. The other friend was a couple years ago, I think he still uses it primarily for games and movies. Like the 2007 instance, basically a 100" screen with it pointed at a wall. It does make for a pretty great setup for a film or gaming with a couple friends over. It's a 240 Hz 1080p projector that uses some fancy optics and mechanics to simulate 4K 60 Hz. Downside is it hasn't been the most reliable one in the world, I think once due to dust and once due to a mechanical issue, and he's had to send it in for repairs twice, I think once was covered by warranty but not the second time. My friend who has a basement man cave really should have a projector down there, or at least an OLED TV to take advantage of the lack of outside light, but instead has a more commonplace LCD TV. Not making full use of the space yet!

I happened to just be looking at 2 TB SSDs and saw that the local MicroCenter has an Inland 2TB drive that is rated as 3600 TBW, higher than any that have been mentioned here. Now it isn't the world's fastest SSD, Inland has those too but the TBW ratings on them aren't as high. I'm sorely tempted to pick one up for my old desktop where the PCI Express is too slow to benefit from anything faster and it could replace an ancient hard drive for cheap.

Twitter decided it still had too many employees: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/twitter-payments-chief-is-out-as-layoffs-cut-10-of-twitter-staff-report-says/ Definitely not a good sign if even Extremely Hardcore employees are being let go! Although Slack going down might be the worse sign. Always choose where to work in tech based on whether they have a working Slack instance.

It never occurred to me until seeing your annotated screenshot, but `ls` really doesn't label anything, does it? You're just expected to read the man page to figure out the output. Which is fine if you're in that "upper threshold" that Aaron mentioned, but I can see how for the average user very little would make sense out of the box, maybe they'd guess what the timestamp column meant, and the file name, but that's probably it. I've used `ls` for years and didn't know what the "Number of links or directories inside this directory" meant, and still don't know what the number next to the "total" means. If I were the UX designer for `ls`, I'd add a header column. Privileges/???/owner/group/size/modified date/name. Other than the # of links it seems like it would all fit. I also never knew I could use -h on `ls`, as I can with `du`. That's kinda neat, I have learned something useful. And now I see that the "total" appears to be "total size of this directory (without subfolders)". Well at least on my system, which is an oddball as Windows running `ls`. I'm not sure it jives with the "88" in your screenshot.

Is "le cordon chicken" similar to chicken cordon bleu? One of my favorites if so. ---------- Tonight's dinner was mostaccioli, an Italian-Ohioan dish that may or may not exist elsewhere. It's essentially baked ziti but with way more flavor and protein. Baked ziti ain't really that special, y'know? Pasta, tomato sauce, lots of cheese, baked in an oven. Mostaccioli, besides using the titular pasta shape if available (it's penne without the ridges), adds ground beef (or substitute veggie crumbles, I prefer the vegetarian version as it's less greasy, even better Italian sausage veggie crumbles), lots of oregano and basil, and an onion. Another Italian-Ohioan variant of baked ziti that we had growing up was Johnny Marzetti. It lacks the spices (which is why I prefer mostaccioli nowadays), but adds more meat and mushrooms. Next up is probably chili, they had a great sale on bell peppers the last time I was at the store.

You are a connoisseur! I hadn't heard of those Utopias, it sounds more like a fine whiskey than a beer! I think the most I've ever paid is about $28 for a 750ml of Founder's Canadian Breakfast Stout. Which is definitely near the top of my favorites list. Rochefort 10 and Westvleteren 12 are probably the top of list. Haven't had them in years though, for obvious reasons for the latter. Favorite brewery overall is New Glarus, I used to live in Wisconsin, and nearly every one of their beers is really good, I often even like their takes on styles that I typically dislike. Wisconsin Belgian Red might be their best overall, those Door County cherries are so good. Sadly my yearly resupply of New Glarus hasn't been feasible since the pandemic. But most of the time I can find something local and less exotic that's really good too. I tend to favor wheats on hot summer days, some variety of non-coffee stout in the winter, or a gose any time of the year. If I want something more bitter, I'll take a pint of English bitter over an IPA any day (unless New Glarus's Scream IIPA is available), although sadly that's often difficult to pull off on this side of the pond. --- Today's beverage du jour was some green tea with Moroccan mint, from Trader Joe's. Good but not as good as Bigelow's Perfectly (née Plantation) Mint, which has black rather than green tea but more importantly a stronger spearmint flavor.

That is excellent taste in beer! I didn't know about Chimay Green, and it sounds like it was a limited edition. You can't go wrong with Trappist.

If Linux had a User Experience designer, this would probably be my first example of something they need to improve. I say this having experienced this same frustration in the past. In Windows, if you plug in a drive that is formatted in a format Windows can understand, within a few seconds it's visible in My Computer has has a drive letter assigned and you can access your data. If it's not formatted, Windows will give you a pop-up saying "The drive you just inserted is not formatted. Would you like to format it?" and if you choose yes, then a couple minutes later it says, "Formatting is done, which drive letter would you like to use?" Or something to that effect. I don't know why Linux (using the term to refer to the OS as a whole, not the kernel) couldn't do something similar, saying, "hey, I see you've got a new drive, how do you want to format it? Where do you want to mount it? Has to start with /mnt, here is some additional info on conventional names if you want it" Mint basically does do that via a GUI in its installation, with sensible defaults, so why can't it be done for a secondary drive? And remembering that info if the drive is connected again seems like a no-brainer, at least as the default option. I sort of know why Linux doesn't do that, unlike Windows it's a decentralized project, with no one in charge of the overall product and user experience. But I think having that coordination is one of the key things that is necessary if the Year of the Linux Desktop is ever going to arrive.

Well, this thread has won Off-Topic for me, I filled out the "contact us" form on Club-Mate's U.S. importer's web site, and found out there is in fact a local source for it, at World Market. They don't list it on their web site, and Club-Mate's store locator doesn't show it, but they have it in store. It's too late in the day to have one now, but I know how I'll be caffeinating Friday morning! Gotta bring 'em into the office too and see if we can form our own Club-Mate-powered hacker collective!

For the second time in three days, I broke out Uncle Snoop's cookbook, this time whipping up his Tha Next Level Salmon. He ain't frontin', those flakey fillets really be next level! Five stars easy, it's right up there with what I'd be looking for at a nice restaurant, and is the best salmon I've ever made at home. Pair it with Snoop's suggested greens (nah, not his usual green "herbs"), and you've got yourself a right healthy and tasty dinner. Sorry Coolio, I broke your first Cool-mandment ("Thou Shalt Have No Other Chefs Before Me"), but I ain't regrettin' it.

The red team, they beat the green team. Red team = Kansas City, green team = Philadelphia.

But shouldn't it be 2MP and 8 MP if we're going by pixel count? My point is that the "1" in "1k" and the "4" in "4k" are deriving their names from different dimensions. If it were "4x" as in "4 times as many", it might also make sense for it to be "1x" and "4x", but it isn't. And if it were, "8k" would have to be "16x" or "16k" since it in turn has 4 times the pixels of 4k. Moreover I'm 99.9% sure the term "1k" never existed before 4k TVs hit the market. Can we find an example of "1k" meaning "1920x1080" or "1080p" or "full HD" from before, say, 2014?

Haha, I agree... my colleagues thought I was joking when I asked them, "So who won?" but I hadn't a clue. On the plus side, it's a great night to go out to eat at a restaurant that doesn't have any TVs. Very quiet and good service since there aren't many customers.