Snakecharmed

The experience of using a PC to communicate and transfer data to and from a smaller device using a system/protocol that isn't regularly encountered by the general public always adds a degree of difficulty that someone might not want to invest their time in doing. For instance, I've rooted enough Android phones over the years that you'd think it's no big deal for me to do it, but it's never a simple affair. It's tedious and time-consuming to make sure you're doing everything right with the proper software lest you brick the phone by doing something incorrectly or out of order. Even when you do it exactly according to the guide, a minor error code somewhere in the process causes minor annoyances later that nobody can help you with because nobody else ever encountered that issue and documented a fix. Then you eventually forget the process after some time and you have to relearn everything when you want to do it again years later. With phones, it's even worse because the rooting process differs from one phone to another, and sometimes even between two of the exact same model phone because each one started with a different firmware version, so you're not even able to use your memory to recall a certain step of the process to save some time. I can see why the vast majority of people wouldn't have the patience for things like this. It paints a damning picture of how things are going today with technology outside of core computing devices that auto manufacturers are pulling this nonsense on systems where it's completely unnecessary. Of all the parking brakes I've ever used in any car I've driven, none have been electronic. Any savvy car owner wouldn't rely on a dealership for anything after the sale, but what Louis is describing is the path that manufacturers are trying to convince their customers to follow, and they're obviously succeeding to some degree when combined with their attempts to demonize independent mechanics.

You shouldn't have to employ workarounds to deliberately hostile anti-consumer acts by auto manufacturers who have engineered solutions to previously nonexistent problems. Parking brakes have worked for generations before this garbage. Anyone could have seen this coming after BMW tried to charge subscription fees for heated seats. The contemporary automotive industry is built on greed and attempted entrapment of consumers into the manufacturer's product and service ecosystem, as well as financial debt if you're crazy enough to take out a loan (I could just stop the sentence there, but in this case, a loan offered by the dealer). I realize I'm not contributing much with respect to the poll because I won't buy a car that phones home or has unnecessary bullshit systems to complicate functions that had been working fine previously for decades.

Since Fluxmaven mentioned the Mazda3 as an option, there's also the Mazdaspeed3 if you want to step it up a notch. Personally, I'm biased against GM for anything not Corvette, Camaro, or Cadillac V series because they cheapened out on everything else over the last couple of decades, so I'd simply drop the Cobalt SS from the shopping list.

On some level, the battery ecosystem plays a factor as well, or there's one particular tool by that brand standing out well above the competition that it justifies buying into the rest of the ecosystem. I bought into the Milwaukee M18 ecosystem, but the only tools I got new were a multi-tool that isn't even from their brushless Fuel line, and what Project Farm calls the "knockoff Milwaukee" handheld vacuum cleaner that outperformed the genuine Milwaukee in his shootout review. My Milwaukee Fuel hammer drill, impact wrench, and hatchet pruning saw were all bought lightly used at very sensible prices. I never would have bought any of those at full retail. I don't have any particular affinity for Milwaukee or its parent company TTI, which is notorious for being ass about honoring warranties. I think buying into the 18V battery ecosystem of one of the big three is more important than anything else so that you can also buy off-brand tools that use those batteries. Back when some folks were on here looking at USB air dusters, I checked to see if there was one that was compatible with M18 batteries, and indeed there was. Now Milwaukee has since made their own version at an exorbitant $180, but I'd gladly opt for the M18-compatible duster for a quarter of the price and more powerful than any USB-charged equivalent in that price range.

I upgraded my NVR's CPU from a Ryzen 5 5600G to a Ryzen 7 5700G. Why? I don't know. Because I could and their respective resale values are almost at parity on the second-hand market. Once I account for the fees to list my 5600G for sale, the CPU upgrade might cost me about $25. The 5600G was running just fine before. Running substreams of my seven cameras in the Blue Iris main window keeps the CPU utilization low regardless. Getting an extra two cores was a nice-to-have feature even though the machine based on its current use patterns will never come close to needing them. The slightly faster iGPU is also nice for the games that I will never play on this NVR because it's a freakin' NVR.

The last computing purchases I made were my 96 GB memory and 7950X CPU upgrade at the end of last year. Those were advance purchases made to fend off any uncertainty in the retail market for PC components. I haven't been paying very close attention to the news because the manic, ever-changing chaos of the tariffs is tiresome to follow and nobody has time for that crap. I've been looking to upgrade my laptop as well, but I noticed one retailer on eBay jacked up their price from $980 to $1200, then later to $1350 on a refurbished model I had been eyeing for months. The first price hike happened one day after the initial tariffs were announced. I missed out on a normal(ish) price because I was ready to buy that day, but took a break for lunch. Refreshing the page afterward led to the sticker shock. Considering that I distrust most laptop makers for one reason or another, this isn't a good situation. Ideally, I'd go for a 16" Framework laptop, but I'm not spending that much money on something I don't use often apart from watching some YouTube videos daily and may use more heavily when traveling. Now I'm shopping used laptops and it's a lot harder finding something with acceptable specs and pricing (if some sellers can be trusted to provide that info accurately), and that still doesn't address how previous gen laptop prices remain high because the RTX 50 series disaster launch did nothing to bring down the prices of laptops with the RTX 4060+ or 3080 mobile.

Go * yourself, Microsoft.

Kickstarter-style vaporware product announcements are so 2015.

It appears that the RX 9070 XT is sold out at the two Micro Centers closest to me, with limited stock remaining of the RX 9070. They supposedly had hundreds in stock on launch, but I didn't bother to check yesterday since I wasn't planning on getting one. The 3080 Ti lives on due to me making no time to play games in the last two years. Even when I do get back into it, I've got a backlog of older games to go through that pose no challenge to the 3080 Ti at 4K. It's a lot less stressful not being on the cutting edge because it really sucks out there right now if you are.

Yes, Waterfox defaults to the same user agent string as the Firefox extended service release now.

There are several more privacy-conscious forks of Firefox that I trust more than main line Firefox since probably over a decade ago when whichever one of Mozilla's earlier privacy controversies came to light. Floorp - Most customizable UI LibreWolf - Most privacy conscious, rendering may break on some websites out-of-the-box because all privacy-focused settings are enabled by default Waterfox - My daily driver for over 7 years now, best balance of privacy and customization of the two above, has Widevine support

The fiber plans I've seen are typically symmetrical. There isn't really a good reason for them not to be. Have they published pricing in your area yet? AT&T recently finished laying fiber in my area. It's $65/month for 500 Mbps symmetrical and I think $85 for 1 Gbps. I'm not on it because I want my neighbors to be the guinea pigs, plus the installation of the fiber ONT would not be completely straightforward and clean because my network closet is on the second floor, although one wall of the closet is an exterior-facing one. Alternatively, I could have the ONT enter my network via my downstairs MoCA, but that will add a small amount of latency to the rest of the network. There are ways to make a second floor install clean, but I have no expectation that their techs would spend the time doing a bespoke installation. I also don't like AT&T, although it's hard to say whether I dislike them more than Comcast. Probably not at this point because at least AT&T isn't playing a bunch of BS games with their pricing. I had to figure out what was going on with my 1 Gbps Xfinity plan late last year because the price went from $65/month to $88. Apparently, they stripped away more of the auto-pay discount with credit card (and I refuse to switch to debit or ACH when dealing with them) and I must have forgot that I'm on a two-year contract with a reduced second-year discount compared to the first. Mid-split is available in my area which would give 100 Mbps upload on the 1 Gbps plan instead of 20, but I would have to buy a supported modem because they are stubbornly dragging their asses on certifying the Arris S33 for mid-split, if they ever do at all.

Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber DARINGFIREBALL.NET Siri with Apple Intelligence gives confident but embarrasingly wrong answers to sports trivia questions, both famous (Super Bowls) and... [...] It’s just incredible how stupid Siri is about a subject matter of such popularity. If you had guessed that Siri could get half the Super Bowls right, you lost, and it wasn’t even that close. I have a family member who demonstrated this in real-time with Siri giving two conflicting answers to the same question about a card game's rules just minutes apart. The scary thing is that he and his wife think they understand consumer AI and trust it blindly. No wonder the stories he tells are full of fabrications and lies. The article also looks at Google's AI overview search results, which are already infamous for being easily manipulated by trolls. To that end, I leave this gift for you guys to enter into your uBlock Origin custom filters:

Loosely related, I hate how insurance companies nowadays tie an optional tracking device to your auto insurance as a way to pitch savings on your premium. I tried one of those things once and the app that was on my phone was a battery killer. That was the official reason I stopped using it anyway. Either way, never again. The truth is, I'm not okay with being tracked and held hostage to driving in a manner that is more unsafe to my surrounding environment to satisfy the app/tracker's arbitrary definition of safe driving. For me to be a "safe" driver and get the maximum benefit, I would have to always drive at or below the speed limit, accelerate like a centenarian (assuming one would still have the fine motor skills to smoothly regulate the pressure applied through their right leg), and overwhelmingly rely on engine braking. Nobody with any street sense drives like that. If you drive like that, you will get run off the road by other drivers. They claimed my insurance wouldn't ever go up as a result of using the tracker, but I don't believe it, and either way, that data is getting stored on someone else's computer and probably shared with other insurance companies as well. I'm not super adamant about protecting every single piece of my data. It isn't always convenient, and I accept that giving up some of it will happen in modern society, but the insurance tracker was where I decided to draw the line as far as sacrificing my liberty for a monetary benefit. That garbage can only be used against me and screw me when I switch insurance companies, and it isn't worth $100 per 6 months. By extension, I refuse to own a newer car where such data is being collected without my enthusiastic consent. That hasn't made the driving experience better for anyone. There is no benefit to a purchasing consumer for their car to phone home to the manufacturer. This wasn't needed for a century of driving and it isn't needed now. Software-as-a-service was Pandora's box to individual liberties, and who benefits from that? Not you and not other people. It's corporations whose primary objective is to separate you from your money in the most insidious ways possible.

Similar tasks, different tools, related principles. I ended up getting the Project Farm recommended "knockoff" Milwaukee handheld vacuum which replaced an ancient Black & Decker Dustbuster with a weak battery that I hadn't used in years. It's also a much more portable alternative to my Miele canister vac, which is a much more portable alternative to my Kirby upright vac. Anyway, the handheld vac has taken on everything that was too cumbersome for the Miele, from my car interiors, to my furniture, to chunks of drywall and wood dust from doing some electrical work. I also used it to vacuum dust from my case when upgrading the RAM and CPU a couple of weeks ago. I rarely have a need for dusting with compressed air. The last time I needed it was when I was selling off my old GTX 1080 Ti and needed to reach the inner fins of the heatsink. For lighting up lump charcoal, I use a 1500W, 1150°F hot air gun and it works great. 45 seconds of direct heat gets them going without needing a chimney starter. I first tried the wood shaving and wax fire starter pellets, but those get too hot too fast. I would have tried a chimney starter next, but I was trying to not buy a single-purpose tool.

They did fix it shortly after those issues were making the rounds since that was where the first Asus warranty-related firestorm came from because they used boilerplate warranty language for flashing a beta BIOS. I think the fix may have been rolled into AGESA so no board manufacturers should be allowing excessive SoC voltages anymore with their latest BIOSes. Before all of this, my Auto SoC voltage was at something like 1.35. With the earliest BIOS updates containing the fix, Asus only got it down to 1.3 on the Auto setting with EXPO/XMP profiles enabled, which is still high but within AMD's spec. I manually tested it at different voltages between 1.15 to 1.23, and eventually settled on 1.19. With the latest BIOS and my new 1.35V XMP 96 GB kit, I left it on Auto which resolves to 1.28.

What's the current state of things, are we back or are we just waiting for expired/canceled services to be turned off at the end of their billing cycle? There seems to be enough community support to keep things running as is if nothing else, but I think a lot of us are looking for a sign that the lights will stay on first. Depending on what the plan is going forward regarding traffic and storage needs, dedicated hosting is most likely overkill, so that largest expense of $133/month could be mid to low double digits if you pick a reputable host for shared servers that isn't a fly-by-night operation. I was the victim of a fly-by-night host 20 years ago and I have plenty of hosting stories to tell. If needed, I can offer some advice and suggestions as well regarding some aspects of hosting a site and forum since I've been doing it for many years now (currently at a minimal level of effort), but I wouldn't seek to be involved in the administration or maintenance of EHW myself.

Well, who knows if we'll still be here by the time this is scheduled to be delivered. I also proudly came up with lyrics to celebrate my purchase. 96 gigs of RAM in the board 96 gigs of RAM Windows goes, “Gimme those” 95 gigs of RAM in the board

Interesting, I didn't even know about that CPU's existence, and now I'm sad that I missed the deal because a 7950X is exactly what I had in mind. My mind wasn't on PC components at all over Black Friday, but now I'm beginning to pivot back because of speculation about incoming tariffs. Anyone else foresee a spending spree for themselves over the holidays? 7950X and 96 GB DDR5-6000+ is what I'm currently planning.

Intel Announces Retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger :: Intel Corporation (INTC) WWW.INTC.COM "Retired" Can't say I'm surprised. He talked a bigger game than what he could deliver (which feels like part of the job description for working at Intel nowadays), and he presided over some major blunders recently in both product and corporate, but Intel still remains lost without a clear direction. As for the immediate short term, interim co-CEOs with backgrounds in finance and marketing. Yeah, that will go over well.

So more mediocre-at-best parts will be flooding the market then. NZXT's reputation has taken a hit for some time now in the case market (in part because of how they handled the fire issue), and Corsair quality seemingly has taken a dip with their increasingly disappointing portfolio of cases, cooling solutions, and sloppy/overpriced/underperforming custom-built Origin PC systems. All I have from Corsair in my current build is their older 2018 version RM850x PSU which has a quieter fan than the newer version. Hardware-as-a-service is the worst consumer idea to come along since—and the obvious evolution of—Aaron's and Rent-A-Center in the retail world. I'm glad NZXT is getting called out for this garbage, as if car manufacturers locking mechanical features behind a subscription paywall wasn't bad enough on one end of the absurdity spectrum, and insane payday loan interest rates on the other.

Well then, it looks like by extension most of my criticism for FC1 would have been intended for Crytek, and what still holds are the gameplay experience quirks that knock down good-to-great visual design and generally good writing down a peg with mediocre mechanics and execution. By all standards, AC1 wasn't a bad game; I've played, stuck with, and regretted playing far worse. The problem was that I picked up MGS4 and then Red Dead Redemption before I had a chance to finish it, and after all that, diving into haystacks for the umpteenth time wasn't going to get me back into the game. I guess the series got better with subsequent games, but if you fail to nail it on the first attempt, retaining a player base becomes a far more difficult endeavor. I haven't played anything made by Ubisoft in a long time. What I don't find so easy to dismiss from afar are their anti-consumer business practices that have generated significant controversy in recent years, though I have similar if not stronger criticisms for ATVI—namely Blizzard, leader of my most hated game developers list—for the crap they actually do (or don't do) in their games.

I remember how BS the Far Cry 1 AI was. I was "hiding" in brush that apparently only existed for client-side rendering because the enemy sent over a half dozen mercenaries in a beeline at me from 500m away firing assault rifles with marksman precision after I took out a mercenary with a single round from a sniper rifle. The AI was so nonsensical that a 5-year-old could script more realistic combat strategy and logistics. After the garbage experience that was Far Cry, I was done with that series and any Ubisoft games that involved guns, which essentially meant that I played about a third of the way through the first Assassin's Creed and got bored with that or something—partly due to the repetition—because I never went back around to finish it. Granted, the game that pulled me away from AC was Metal Gear Solid 4, and AC wasn't going to compete with that. About the only thing I can say that Ubisoft did well is that Rabbids were the precursor to Minions. I'll even say their storywriters are generally pretty good from the select few games I've tried out of their catalog. As far as game development, leave that to studios that know how to make games that don't include glaring, immersion-breaking idiosyncrasies.

I had small business owners tell me about how Kudzu and Yelp did the exact same thing before Google took over the reviews space. This isn't behavior specific to Google. This is about them leveraging the ubiquity of their brand and entering markets occupied by other unloved incumbents and doing the exact same thing. The problem is, there isn't likely to be a successor because who is bigger than Google that wants to invest the resources to compete with them as well as overcome the fact that most users have an active Google session in their browser cookies?

I got the M18 pruning chainsaw and an HO 6.0 battery to go with it recently. The HO 6.0 battery doesn't get that much use since I have a pair of CP 2.0 batteries for my hammer drill and impact wrench, so I'm just finding new tools to go with the 6.0. Project Farm on YouTube got me interested in a handheld vacuum using M18s to replace my ancient B&D Dustbuster vacuum that I never use anymore due to its low suction power. I have a couple of great corded vacuums, but have needed a solid cordless one for quite some time now. The nice thing is that the M18 batteries charge very quickly and the battery packs, being the size that they are, can dissipate heat much better than a compact battery inside the chassis of the tool can.