Snakecharmed

Ever since Nadella took over Microsoft, they've been in an echo chamber about how great their ideas that have no respect for customer privacy are. The insane part is that their user base has such a high concentration of enterprise customers.

That'll be a printed ticket fee, you environmentally unconscious heathen.

Service fee: You pay to help keep them in service.

I set up my first camera last night after getting the motivation to do so after reading this thread. It's a white label Dahua 4K (8MP) varifocal Starlight sensor PoE turret camera with ePTZ from EmpireTech. I haven't started recording with it or doing anything else other than network and video setup. All I've learned so far is that my front porch area is so bright at night that the camera never switches to IR mode. Either that or I don't know what I'm doing yet. Also, I'm glad I got an auto-tracking PTZ camera as well because I'va already been wanting to zoom this varifocal turret but not at the cost of having a wide angle view.

I'm just glad to no longer see BS sponsors like BetterHelp and Masterworks. Some scammers had to occupy Established Titles and Kamikoto Knives' vacated places in the porta-potty though. I regret not using SponsorBlock sooner. I also have more appreciation for channels that either self-sponsor or are entirely funded through Patreon supporters.

Not only budget, but usage scenarios would help too. This was a whole new domain for me to research and I'm still not sure I have it all figured out yet. I have one auto-tracking 4MP PTZ, one 8MP varifocal turret with ePTZ, and I plan to buy four more of those turrets. The auto-tracking PTZ camera was completely unnecessary, but one neighbor was hoping someone in the neighborhood would be able to capture license plates... After all my stalling, the most important suggestion I can offer is to get Blue Iris first if that's going to be your control center, then set up one camera through the camera's native IP web interface and get Blue Iris to recognize it. All the other reading on setting up VLANs on my switch or VPN on my router, both of which I've never done before, has been exhausting. My budget started at <$100 per camera when I first started planning it until it grew to "I can't blame my equipment if the system doesn't work well."

Adding another vote to the return bucket. It's worse than either a 7800X3D or a 7900X. It's basically a 7600X3D with extra baggage. If nothing else, I would expect Zen 5 to cause some downward pricing pressure on Zen 4 next month.

Meanwhile, this is not the case with the Ryzen 9000 series desktop parts as the spec sheet of that says: OS Support Windows 11 - 64-Bit Edition , Windows 10 - 64-Bit Edition , RHEL x86 64-Bit , Ubuntu x86 64-Bit Don't care about Ryzen AI. It doesn't apply to Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs, which is presumably what would be the most relevant to people here.

I set up EAC to export both at the same time too. I used to manually switch between each one and would often forget the command line variable I was supposed to use for exporting to FLAC when I had been using LAME MP3.

I don't see myself going for this generation since my rig is the least of my concerns for the first time in years, but 9950X/3D would be the move for me among the Zen 5 chips. Maybe AMD will do something better with the dual-CCD X3D chips this generation, but I doubt it. They're going to wait until Intel stops Sideshow Bobbing over rakes before they engineer something stronger for gaming than a Ryzen 7 ?800X3D.

To be honest, I'm surprised you went with the 7900X3D in the first place, since that was the 7000 series CPU that reviewers recommended not to buy. It either functions as a 6-core X3D CPU or a slower all-core 7900X, so it was a compromise on both ends of the gaming-productivity spectrum. I don't foresee stability being an issue for a non-X3D CPU. If anything, it's been fun trying to find the undervolt limits of the 7900X at the 105W Eco threshold to maximize benchmark performance at that power limit. At some point in the future when I have the time or desire, I may delve into the memory overclocking which seems to produce more meaningful performance results anyway.

In general, taking more pictures is important to get a shot when you otherwise wouldn't have, but a phone isn't going to give you the shot when you're trying to capture something under highly specific conditions that exceed its physical limitations. No amount of post-processing is going to fix the resolution or flash overexposure from a Motorola Razr V3 VPotato. However, a modern flagship phone is also no potato. I don't consider myself a great or even good photographer, but I own the least amount of mid-high quality gear that is good enough to cover most shooting scenarios to the point where I can only criticize myself (and the full overcast cloud cover during last month's solar eclipse, until the miraculous final minute of totality when I fired off 7 auto-bracketed shots during the longest cloud break window of about 15 seconds) if the results aren't as good as I would like. I'm of the mindset that I strive to minimize/remove technical impediments so the onus is on me if I don't produce a good result. But that doesn't mean I go out and buy a Canon EOS R3 or an RF 100-300mm F2.8 L IS because there is no way I can maximize that body or lens on my best day. I actually hate it when people think that I must be good because of my gear. My gear sets the ceiling, not the floor. The floor is still going to be leaving your lens cap on. My actual abilities are somewhere in the middle. In my case, the only reason the body looks more substantial is because of the battery grip so I have portrait shooting controls and more battery power. I have to give credit to people who excelled (or still excel) as film photographers, because they can't fire off hundreds of shots blind to their memory card, pick out the best one, and post-process it to look as ideal as people's imaginations.

Old parts from my LG G4, including all available backplates (white, blue, gold, and the original factory leather). I have everything except the phone itself because both my original and warranty replacement G4 bootlooped. The ThinkPad T43 that I benched to the lowest score in the CPU-Z competition here a couple of years ago, loose Cat 5E cables that have no use anymore because I now use unbooted Cat 6 cables going into my new network switch, and a USB floppy drive that I actually plan to keep around as long as I still have several boxes of 3.5" floppy disks that are probably unreadable anyway since they're magnetic media that have been in storage for 25 years. There's far more junk lying around that I haven't taken pictures of yet, but I intend to take most of it to e-waste recycling. I don't like keeping things around for the maybe scenarios that never actually come to fruition. I've already taken HDMI 1.1/1.2 and random odds-and-ends coaxial cables cut by the cable company to recycling. I don't want that crap.

I'm still using a rooted V60. It's still perfectly capable as a daily driver, unlike my V20 which was extremely sluggish before I switched over to the V60 in 2022. I only use the V20 as a remote control for my lights now. At some point in the future when apps widely deprecate the version of Android I have on the V60, I'll get a used Sony Xperia 1 that's a generation behind the latest and deal with whatever modding necessary to get it fully functional on my carrier network.

Nice, I didn't know Enhancer for YouTube was available for Chrome now. I have it on Waterfox, but I've been using Improve YouTube! on Vivaldi/Brave. Enhancer is much better. My favorite feature is the finer playback speed, since 1.25x is usually not fast enough and 1.5x is too fast. This is a native Firefox feature, but I was glad an extension exists for Chrome as well: Type-ahead-find CHROMEWEBSTORE.GOOGLE.COM Find text or links as you type

No skimping out on memory (although the -90 cards wouldn't do that anyway) this time. 32 GB 5090 incoming for...$1999? Because I simply expect generational price hikes from Nvidia at this point.

If I had the guts (or the recklessness, take your pick) to invest 10x what I already have invested in them, I'd be retired by now. As a Millennial. There was never a realistic scenario in which I would have done that though. At most I might have put in double.

A camera that supports ONVIF, controlled by the desktop software of your choice, effectively turning one of your PCs into an NVR. For Windows, that's more than likely going to be Blue Iris. Despite how their mobile app looks like it was designed 15 years ago, everything else about Blue Iris seems to work well enough for it to be the software of choice in many IP camera communities. Personally, I'm only going to use wired cameras, but I know there are wireless ones as well that can do the job. Just don't allow them to communicate outside of your LAN. Even better would be to put them on their own VLAN with your NVR PC. I don't trust the security of, nor do I want to pay the monthly fee for cloud-based cameras. Ring is notorious for security breaches, whereas the other brands just have crap hardware with limited functionality masked by modern app design.

Trash solution from a trash game company. The entire thing can be circumvented by running Windows 10. That's the worst part about this half-baked idea. Force honest players to jump through hoops while the cheaters, who we can presume are more tech-savvy, have a mere speed bump of an easy circumvention. About a decade ago, I quit LoL after being on the winning side of an ARAM game and getting 1 game above .500 in that mode to never play again. The game had its moments and one of my best gaming memories even came from that game, but on the whole, it was tedious and unfun largely due to the constant meddling by the devs nerfing everything to death, and I was a support main of all roles.

Seeing Grandpasnorz's response and comments about OLED in Cerebus's TV thread reminded me to revisit this thread and my original comments. For all the reservations I have about OLED as a daily driver monitor, I finally figured out how I plan to make an LG OLED TV work for my family room, which will be primarily driven by my Ryzen 7 4800H/RTX 2060 laptop and consequently be showing my Windows desktop for not insignificant amounts of time: Wallpaper Engine, because I hate the idea of having a boring black background and hiding all desktop UI elements for the sake of preserving the OLED pixels. To me, the point of having an OLED is to show it off whenever it's turned on even when you're not really using it. Or I could just not care, but I've not cared to the tune of having the same 52" Samsung in my family room since 2008. I don't go through monitors and TVs that often. I can barely resell my old monitors, but I can still manage to haul them off in my car to FedEx Office for shipping. Big old TVs are practically e-waste to me. Knowing me, I'm going to end up keeping a new TV for a decade and I don't want burn-in to be present for the latter half of its occupancy in my home. Maybe I'll have a 65" LG C/G 6 or 7 by the time I get around to refreshing the family room space and start making an effort to use it more frequently again. When that time comes, I can't continue to use a 52" 1080p TV anymore. I imagine by then, either LG's MLA panels will have reached the C-series or the M-series will actually distinguish itself from the G-series beyond its wireless capabilities to move the G-series more mainstream.

As far as I know, these TVs aren't "always-on" like Battle.net or cloud apps, so I would imagine that it should be fine. Personally, I'd avoid Roku at all costs because of that patent for showing ads while no motion is detected on screen. They may not have implemented it yet, and they may not be able to implement it if you don't give them access to push OTA updates, but I wouldn't be surprised if the code is already in their firmware. I have infinitely less trust in Roku than I do with Asus motherboards and their damn Armoury Crate default-on switch in the BIOS. As much as I've griped about my motherboard, I don't think Asus intentionally disrespects their users like Roku does. The TCL Q7 that Rtings rated well in my link appears to have Google TV for its OS instead of Roku TV, so it seems that Roku has nothing to do with that model or any current TCL TVs anymore. Beyond data privacy, I'm not convinced of the build quality, QC, or sales support of the Chinese TV brands. From what I've read, Hisense build quality is awful. I haven't read about the same issues with TCL, but they're not established like legacy brands in the space. As far as a retail experience, I'd also consider shopping at Costco and leveraging their 90-day return policy by playing panel lottery if necessary. I get the sense that shopping for budget TVs isn't too dissimilar from shopping for ultrawide monitors. QC seems severely lacking in either segment.

Good to know. I was not aware of that since I ignore the lower end of the TV market and have never used Roku, although I do remember seeing TCL/Roku co-branded TVs. Roku patent invents a way to show ads over anything you plug into your TV ARSTECHNICA.COM System would detect paused content on external devices and show ads on top. Roku disables players and TVs with attempt to coer... - Page 55 - Roku Community COMMUNITY.ROKU.COM Mon 4 Mar 2024 18:23 EST: The title of this thread was changed from Roku disables player with attempt to coerce arbitration... Roku disables TVs and streaming devices until users consent to new terms | TechCrunch TECHCRUNCH.COM Roku users around the country turned on their TVs this week to find an unpleasant surprise: The company required them to consent to new... This is how a data mining company uses a data breach as an excuse to exert control over their customers. I guess that makes the Samsung Q60C the best less anti-consumer option. All my QN85A does is show a dialog to accept terms and conditions for connecting online when I turn it on, but I can decline or it also goes away on its own after a few seconds like a splash screen.

Here's a Rtings custom-filtered list of 2023-24 55" models under $600 sorted by ascending price. TV Table Tool - RTINGS.com WWW.RTINGS.COM Out of the options on that list, I would not consider Roku because of their anti-consumer business practices. TCL seems to have the best TV in the class by far, but I don't trust Chinese electronics that can connect to the Internet, so I'd make sure it functions as a dumb TV. I mean, I'd block a Sony, Samsung, or LG as well, but I'd be even less willing to let a Chinese brand phone home.

To me, resolution, especially vertical resolution reigns supreme over everything else. I like my 38" 21:9 ultrawide but that's mostly because the screen resolution works out well to match 4K's 3840 width and has a respectable height of 1600. My previous 3440x1440 ultrawide was annoying in that regard, and 1440p ultrawides are a dealbreaker for me now. I hate all these ultrawides coming out now that are still 1440p despite being 39", 45", 49", and beyond. Meanwhile, 1080p ultrawides are so useless in my book that they may as well not exist. My monitor isn't without its flaws though. Ultrawide LCD monitors have unacceptably awful QC compared to any LCD TVs. I played panel lottery to settle on my current one, which was the third unit I had shipped out to me. As far as daily usability goes, I have no issues with 3840x1600 ultrawide at all. A properly configured Windows PowerToys FancyZones makes multitasking and window management almost as easy as discrete monitors, and then I use Sizer to force application windows to specific dimensions and XY coordinates if needed. Would I be better served with a 40" 4K on my desk, if such a thing existed? Maybe. I hadn't thought of that before because I don't want too much extra physical height for nearfield viewing outside of games. The 38" ultrawide works because I still have two zones configured on it with lots of extra height over 1080p. The reason the height of my 55" 4K TV isn't an issue is because I have it divided into 2x2 1080p zones to make it tolerable for nearfield viewing. The main problem with my workspace is that this 38" ultrawide at 34.6" cabinet width is about as wide as I can realistically go on my desk, so even a hypothetical 40" 4K's physical dimensions would make the monitor/TV wider than the available space. The closest fit is a 42" LG OLED, but the cabinet is just a bit too wide at 36.4". The next smaller, common 4K screen size is a paltry 32" with a too small cabinet width of about 27-28". As for the PG49WCD in the review, the built-in KVM is convenient. That's about all that I like about it. Otherwise, I'd find that 1800R curve obnoxious if you're trying to work while simulating two 2560x1440 screens that would typically be flat. I've yet to read any reviews that mention how Samsung has addressed the awful burn-in issues of first-gen QD-OLED technology beyond any vague burn-in prevention techniques that clearly didn't work well enough for first-gen QD-OLED displays. Above all, I hate the vertical resolution. I'll also say that "No internal speakers" as a con is the most utterly laughable con I've seen for a high-priced monitor. Imagine spending $1500 on a monitor for an immersive OLED gaming experience and then deciding that you're going to cheap out on proper speakers. FOH. I can't tell you what either my monitor or my TV sound like, but I guarantee they're both crap.

Just that I have a few lines in mine that exceed 45, and my longest is 63.