Snakecharmed

I still do this. One of my cars' head units can play FLAC, but the reason I don't load it with FLAC is because I know I can't hear the difference between 320 Kbps MP3 and FLAC while driving—if at all, to be honest. Also, the head unit's interface for its USB ports and SDXC card slot is USB 2.0. Indexing all FLAC files would take forever. If the head unit were USB 3.0, then maybe.

The title length issue on the home page is pretty straightforward. I'm guessing the same code is used on the forum index page, but I haven't checked that page specifically. .info a { display: -webkit-box; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; } Anyway, the display: -webkit-box; CSS property causes the latest activity columns to have equal height (which looks clean) and the next two properties cause the thread titles to be width of the container and then display overflowing text as ellipses. I think text-overflow: ellipsis; is being set elsewhere other than .info a because toggling that doesn't flip the text overflow style between ellipsis and clip. Since the -webkit-box display property is proprietary, I wasn't seeing it happen in Gecko-based Waterfox which I use more frequently than Blink-based Vivaldi. Widening the largest viewport for the home page which Diffident suggested above isn't a great solution because that involves making changes to the theme's grid system, and also wouldn't directly address the fact that the three-column layout for that component is used all the way down to a viewport width of 768px. The collapse into a single column should happen at a higher breakpoint. Playing around with the font size of the thread titles and/or the height of div.topic would be a better way to go. WebKit/Blink-based browser: Gecko-based browser:

I think my memories of D2 are better left as memories, although to be honest, if it weren't for the 90-day login rule on the old Battle.net, I'd still give my old characters a brief run every now and then. I had a 96 javazon, 96 spearazon, and a party-favorite 95 freeze/immolate max attack speed M'avina's bowazon that I rebuilt once from 95 before the stat reallocation patch. All three of them were built to solo Uber Diablo and the javazon and spearazon could facetank him. I farmed so many Annihilus charms and later Hellfire Torches to fund my trading for some ridiculously valuable items including enough high runes to re-roll my spearazon's ethereal Breath of the Dying +3 Matriarchal Pike to 390% and create Chains of Honor and Enigma runeword armors, as many 40/15 jewels as I needed to outfit my characters' open-socketed items, and an ethereal 199% damage/9% leech Titan's Revenge (the ethereal 200/9 was a non-permed dupe, so I made sure I traded for a safe one). I also had some rare dual leech jewelry from D2 classic, some that I found myself and some that were permed dupes I got when a guy quitting the game gave away his stuff. I had so much fun with my spearazon especially that my weapon switch was an ethereal Lacerator in order to cast amp damage so even physical immune monsters were no problem. Any of my three amazons could solo hell difficulty with no regard for monster immunity and I even gave my Act 2 hirelings runewords like Delirium, Doom, Eternity, and Infinity. I wrote so much damn jargon in the previous paragraph that it's obvious I basically broke the game and had fun doing it. Those were some great memories that I haven't thought of in years. Nowadays, I don't really have time for online gaming anymore, but I no longer trust Blizzard to do anything right anyway. There isn't as much for them to possibly screw up in Diablo II Resurrected, but still...I read about the Warcraft III Reforged fiasco, quietly SMH at the PR gaffe that was the Diablo Immortal reveal, and am still bitter over how I quit D3. The clowns running D3 didn't synchronize the end of the first ladder season with the new game-changing patch at the time, which screwed all of season 1's greater rift rankings up to that point because everyone who got the ideal post-patch loot drops were suddenly able to gain another 5-10 tiers in the greater rifts with less than a couple of weeks left in the ladder season. Therefore, I got knocked off the leaderboards with what would have otherwise been a ticket easily punched into the Battle.net record books. At least I still got screenshots. I wish I had screenshots from D2 way more though.

There are several use cases where a hard drive still makes more sense. I hit on three of them myself: Ultra-high capacity storage, file backup, and continuous writing. I have a 10 TB Seagate BarraCuda Pro for storage, a 6 TB HGST Ultrastar for backup, and I'm planning on a 4 TB WD Purple for my NVR setup hopefully later this year. My backup drive is almost always an older repurposed drive I formerly bought for storage. Anything that has to do with loading applications into memory rightfully gets put on an SSD, but transfer speed and seek times aren't always the most important factors.

If you guys really want to see how far back this cascading effect reaches, I bought an EVGA 980 Ti Classified for $297 including shipping in May 2017. Out of six 980 Ti Classified cards sold on eBay US so far this month, including shipping, four of them have sold for more. The range is $260-327. Also, sales tax is now mandatory as well, which I didn't have to pay on eBay back in 2017. Of course now I wish I had snagged a 2080 Ti when they cratered down to $500.

It's kind of funny how bringing back rounded corners is such a big deal with Windows 10 and that's what they call a major design overhaul. The Metro design language is a lot of things, but attractive is not one of them. They took flat UI to the extreme in Windows 10. It's clean, but it's also lifeless. Adding rounded corners will help, but the UI still has very little visual depth or interest. Before I installed 10 for the first time on my gaming laptop, I already planned to run Open Shell and Glass8. Now I can't daily drive 10 without them.

Oh for sure, definitely just a tangential thought I had and not what you were suggesting. I do recommend getting some shares in AAPL for any new investor though, and it's also a fine choice for the times when you want to buy into a stock and don't know which one to buy. It's funny because it's not an exciting pick and it's not a pure growth stock, but it still behaves like one thanks to Apple being so damn big and a market leader in a outperforming sector. I wish I had simply bought more AAPL instead of making some of the dumb experimental picks I've made over the past few years.

I can recommend both Fidelity and Vanguard. Sure, their UIs aren't as simple and easy like Robinhood, but honestly, Robinhood is a terrible brokerage on many levels. It took a kid committing suicide for them to get their heads out of their asses and stop dishing out margin accounts like subprime mortgage-backed securities in 2007. They've had inexplicable service outages. Their app is buggy and exploitable. They ran out of liquidity during the recent GameStop fiasco and their CEO looked like a complete idiot trying to talk his way out of the mess they got themselves into by being as disingenuous as possible on TV. Maybe I'm being a bit old school and elitist, but I see Robinhood as a toy for trading. I need multiple browser tabs and windows open to handle my investing and research, not a tiny phone screen. No serious investor uses Robinhood and they further tanked their own business with their recent self-inflicted PR wounds. The only real change they brought to the industry was making trades free and forcing traditional brokerages to adapt to the same model. Everything else about them has been a circus since day one. You know, that has me thinking, even though it flies in the face of every piece of traditional investing advice, I can't really argue against someone treating AAPL as their bank account and going all in on it. There are quite a few people who have done that. I can't recommend it as a strategy, but it works if you have the stomach for it.

In terms of sectors, beyond just battery technology, I think there are growth opportunities in green energy in general. I went with Enphase Energy as a solar play last April. Without having done a whole lot of research at the moment that I'm typing this, I'd look into green energy ETFs and look at what their top holdings are. That could be a starting point for researching the individual stocks, or I might simply buy the ETF itself. I'm not an investing expert and my risk tolerance is probably higher than a lot of people (even though it's nowhere near the YOLO insanity of wallstreetbets), but I do feel like green energy has more growth potential than the entire market for the foreseeable future. I'd also be game to try to invest up to $1K per crypto (the minuscule amount of BTC I put into a crypto wallet at $8K USD/BTC for playing around two years ago doesn't count), but if I were making a move right now, I wouldn't like seeing them at all-time highs.

Thanks. I got PayPal back in 2017 when it was still $43. My thought at the time was Venmo was going to be a huge driver of their future growth especially with the Gen Z crowd. Meanwhile, PayPal was still growing with e-commerce, even if they were going to eventually part ways with eBay. Every online checkout other than Amazon has PayPal as an option right next to the credit cards. Their move into crypto payments was always a possibility, but I hadn't imagined it having the impact it did. Square occupies a similar space as PayPal and Shopify in consumer payments, but they're all a bit overbought at this point. Even at their current prices though, I think those three are not bad buys in smaller quantities over the next year, but they won't have the explosive growth and returns they've had for the past 3-4 years.

You can't get too bogged down on the what if scenarios, especially with a stock that was part of the retail meme stock movement a couple of weeks ago. You might not have quintupled your money, but you did almost triple it, and you certainly didn't lose like most people who jumped on the bandwagon late did. I have to tell myself this or have a friend remind me every time I think of when I had a stop loss that triggered on Shopify in 2019 and I passed on a couple of opportunities to buy back in. I originally bought at around $100 a share in 2017 and the stock got up to around $380 in late 2019. At that time, I set a stop loss at $320 thinking it would be safe, but it triggered one morning and I continued to sit it out for another year. I really never should have set that stop loss. I was worried about a short-driven downtrend triggered by the infamous Andrew Left of Citron Research, but I really didn't need the money at any point between then and now. I still didn't re-buy Shopify at the start of the pandemic when it dipped back under $400. I finally bought back in at $992, but I missed a large chunk of growth. I did triple my original investment in them and now they're up to $1300+ so I'm decently ahead on Shopify again after buying back in. I do lament missing out on that growth in the mid and upper-hundreds that would have made it the biggest holding in my portfolio now, but at least I still made money on it. The other way I keep myself grounded about missing opportunities is by telling myself that I could otherwise have all my non-retirement account investments in a high-yield savings account instead, where a pathetic 0.5% APY counts as high-yield these days. Seeing the performance of AMD throughout 2016 was also what got me into investing, but I didn't buy AMD. As much as I'd like to believe that Ryzen's success was predictable, they were getting trounced by Intel and Nvidia on different fronts at the time. I bought Nvidia instead because their moat is bigger with their hands in datacenters, AI, autonomous driving, graphics cards, and now CPUs with ARM. My portfolio is heavy in semiconductors and half of FAANG+M in large part due to years of familiarity with computer hardware and software, but my biggest and most successful holdings by far right now are Enphase Energy and PayPal.

The theoretical limit of copper as a medium is effectively irrelevant for home networks both today and for the foreseeable future. Cat 8 cable supports 40 Gbps over a maximum channel length of 30 meters. Switches that cannot do 10 Gbps are still the overwhelming majority of the consumer market. I agree with tictoc in that 10 Gbps gear probably won't gain mainstream consumer adoption for up to another decade if not longer.

One of the reasons I resisted Windows 10 for a long time was the UI. However, I have mine sufficiently customized with Open Shell, Aero Glass, RocketDock, and Rainmeter. Rainmeter is the least essential of those, but I can't stand 10 without those apps. What the tech-savvy among us consider a good operating system UI will be drastically different from what Microsoft is going to roll out for the average computer user. When it comes to making UI changes in Windows, I always expect the worst from Microsoft now.

Hardware Unboxed's video is out now.

The biggest problem in the GPU and CPU spaces is a lack of competition. GPUs are effectively a duopoly with Intel basically being noncompetitive at the mid-high end for the foreseeable future, and x86 CPUs are a duopoly due to licensing. AMD is looking good right now in both areas aside from supply issues, but it wasn't that long ago that they were committing a bunch of unforced errors as well. If the GPU landscape looked like it did in the old days, Nvidia wouldn't dare pull this kind of crap. Actually, thanks to a source I found off of Wikipedia, I see that Nvidia has been pulling this crap forever. They've been watching politicians for decades learning best practices on mudslinging. Anyway, it's not sustainable in today's market, but it was nice having the choice between 3dfx, ATI, Matrox, Nvidia, and PowerVR in the old days.

It's important to realize that any company is capable of doing these types of things if they have the market share and hubris to pull it off. Usually, their PR isn't this incompetent though. As consumers, this only goes to show that a company is not your friend. There is no reason for the consumer to be a rabid fan of a company. They are in the business of making money. They don't know your name. They don't know that you contributed a tiny fraction to their revenue. So why do free advertising for them when their product should be able to speak for itself? Furthermore, in this case, it's clear that if Nvidia does know your name, they feel that you are obligated to shill for them.

https://twitter.com/HardwareUnboxed/status/1337885741389471745 Nvidia walked it back, but the damage is done. GamersNexus also pointed out the obvious. https://twitter.com/GamersNexus/status/1337905467079741451 They only went back because they got caught, although it's monumentally stupid for Nvidia to think that they weren't going to get raked over the coals for this. JayzTwoCents made a good point at 4:40 in his video about how that damn email read like a press release that was meant to be shared. I don't have words to describe that level of PR idiocy. Was Nvidia getting bored with merely being shady under the table that they had to crank the difficulty up to 11 and get the entire PC and tech community to become aware of their disrespect for hardware reviewers and independent journalism? Incompetence and hubris is a deadly combination.

I have two laptops in addition to my workstation, so I'm thinking that probably contributes to why I've never felt the need to keep around parts for another system. I used to keep around an extra GPU (first a GTX 560, then a GTX 760) for an eGPU setup to use with one of my laptops several years ago for a gaming HTPC. After I got a newer laptop, I got rid of the extra GPU as well. Now the newest of my laptops has an RTX 2060, so I'm clearly done with eGPUs too. I can't even claim to use the desktop computer I built for my parents as a parts dumping ground anymore because their build is newer than mine. I put together a Skylake build for them five years ago with a Core i3-6100 on an ASRock Z170A-X1/3.1 motherboard. The only hand-me-downs in that machine now are my old SeaSonic S12-380 380W PSU from something like 12-15 years ago and one of my old 500 GB SATA hard drives as an external backup drive. I do have a box of old-ass cables that need to be sorted through though. A few months ago, my neighbor asked me if I had a spare VGA cable he could borrow for a few days. I did, and for all I care, he can keep it. I think there's a 15' USB 2.0 A-B cable, a few CAT5 or 5a cables, and a couple of older HDMI 1.x cables in there as well, but probably nothing that uses obsolete connectors that can't work with newer hardware at the older revision's throughput. However, I know I won't be using any of it again, so I'll have to go through those soon and take another haul to the electronics recycler.

Is that really hoarding or just having enough space and not enough motivation to toss it? I usually sell off an old part as soon as I'm done with it if it's worth anything, or else I'll take it to my local electronics recycler. If it's something that can be put away in a closet and not take up valuable space, I might forget about it for years. Generally though, I don't keep many PC parts around. A couple of years ago, I took an old Socket A Albatron motherboard and Athlon XP-M 2400+ to the recyclers. They also rebuild and resell computers, so I figured it wouldn't go to waste. I think I may still have the Thermalright heatsink for it though. I have 3.5" floppy disks and Zip disks in a couple of boxes that I haven't opened in years. I also have an 80 GB and a 160 GB Western Digital IDE drive that I can't be bothered to hook up with my SATA-IDE adapter because I just don't care, but I need to wipe them before getting rid of them. I also have a spare Chaintech AV-710 sound card. I'm not sure why I bought two of them years ago, but I did. They only cost me about $15 each at the time.

I'm sure some contrarian is going to find the new BMW design language inoffensive. I think it's a matter of splitting hairs to define what your threshold is for something to be "universally" hated though, but it's still not on the same level as the Fiat Multipla. I haven't been interested in any new car for nearly a decade now and I'm not in the market for one either, so I could probably criticize contemporary automotive design until the cows come home. What BMW is doing now hardly even registers any emotion in my book because I've become jaded over the past decade by stupid designs from Toyota/Lexus, Nissan, GM, and even Tesla. Seriously, take a cue from Porsche and stop making front fascias that look like someone used the Photoshop eraser tool where the grille would go.

Some things I would consider first are your budget, the size of your room, the amount of physical space you can make for the sub, what the other components of your sound system are, what you listen to with that system, and what your expectations for the sub are. That Klipsch is frequently on sale at Newegg for that price and it’s not a sub that’s worth the $250 “regular” price. I have a 10" ported downfiring sub/footrest for my desktop workstation, but it originally spent a few years as a home theater placeholder sub before I bought what I really wanted. It's ideal in its current arrangement for listening in front of my computer especially because I’m literally on top of it, but it was nowhere near suitable for a 19'x16'x9' family room that's part of a 40' wide open floor plan.

Congrats to all the winners!

I don't know that these designs ever become liked so much as normalized. A lot of people hated the Lexus grille at first and I still think it's hideous today. If anything, it got worse as newer model refreshes led to bigger grilles. The difference is that there are more of those cars on the road now. I think Toyota/Lexus designs have been awful ever since the 4th gen GS. The 2013 GS was just bland and generic apart from the grille, which was still small at the time. Everything after that was drawn under the influence of hard drugs. Incoherent kinks, creases, and sharp angles are what you draw when you're trying to be edgy (pun intended). The current generation Camry offends me more than any soulless commuter car I've seen before it, especially in the SE and XSE trims with the fake exhaust tips, fake rear bumper vents, nonsensical blackout roofline (XSE), and Predator 2.0 (or Stormtrooper if in white) grille. Also, I would differentiate between innovative design and incoherent design. Tacking a ridiculous front and rear fascia onto what is an otherwise normal car shape isn't innovative, it's incoherent.

Technically, this wasn't working on the computer so much as it involved an external component connected to my computer, but it was a bad mistake. I used to have a Virtue Audio TWO.2 amplifier for my desktop. I bought it used and with extra accessories, but it was something like $449 new if I recall. It was a very nicely crafted piece of audio hardware. What happened was that in the midst of moving my desk and reconnecting all kinds of wiring after I had a carpet installer restretch the room's carpet, I had bare speaker wires that were still connected to the back of the TWO.2 amplifier sitting on the desk. The speaker wires fell from the desk to the floor, shorting out and landing right on the coaxial terminals on my uninterruptible power supply. I definitely should have taken more precautions, but that was some BS luck of the highest order. The speaker wires sparked on the coaxial terminals, fried the amp, and tripped the circuit breaker for the room I was in. Virtue Audio had already stopped selling new products when this happened. Their website didn't have any functioning email addresses or a phone number despite them saying they were still providing customer service for their existing customers. I eventually just sold the dead amp for parts on eBay. I ended up getting an SMSL Q5 Pro to replace that TWO.2. It's not as elegant of a piece of hardware as the TWO.2, but I do like that it has an LED display and a remote control.

I've been on board with the idea of a GTA set in London for years. For me, it would be the novelty of driving on the other side of the road as an extra layer of difficulty, although it would probably become second nature rather quickly. I'd also like in-game pedestrians bringing slang like git, plonker, bellend, and wanker to a global audience.