Anyway, nice update of the 13" Macbook -- now Pro -- today I thought. $100 price cut and FireWire makes a comeback, adds LED backlit display, support for 8GB of RAM, and the new uber-permabattery (OK, not unmixed blessing).

Also thought $30 for Snow Leopard upgrade was pretty fair. Leaner, faster and (allegedly) fixed fucking finder would be well worth that to me.

There are three separate buildings in the compound, the main house with the cable internet connection is down slope from the three story shop/garage/loft set into the slopes and lastly another cottage across from a garage. The in-laws have hard-wired ethernet cables running to two both ends of the main house and the top floor loft in the middle building. The biggest challenge is getting a decent signal to the third building from the second story loft. We do not have major demands or multiple smart devices -- people just want to be able to stream video in all three locations.

Either I just leave the main house the way it is and try a modern mesh system between the loft and the cottage or I try to have a single mesh system with at least one unit in each building and hope they bridge. I'm not sure if it makes sense to connect mesh units by ethernet where possible or if they only are meant to bridge between themselves wirelessly. 

Any thoughts are appreciated on the approach and favorite brands/models. 

VoidLink was detected around 2026-01-13: Cloud-Native Malware Framework; Linux-based; extremely sophistocated; stealthy; modular, adaptive behavior based on detected environment; Go/Zig/C (dammit, now I have to learn Zig); highly in-depth knowledge of Linux internals... 

As I saw said about about it elsewhere, "targeting Windows, hackers were in the lobby; targeting Linux, hackers are now in the vault".

Has anyone bit on the MS free upgrade? Any war stories? Curious...

Since many of you're mostly iPhone users and long distance travellers, you could possibly shed some light on this issue. Thxs.

I have never owned a PC laptop.  I don't particularly like Windows.  I mean, it's fine for video games and a few specific audio apps (Exact Audio Copy, Foobar 2000) but as a primary OS?  shudder  With all of this said, I'm seriously considering making my next laptop a Framework.  There have been a bunch of positive reviews of them from prominent tech toobers.  A certain Bob-the-Tomato-sounding Canadian who is prone to making heaps of cash and dropping things liked Framework so much he invested in the company.  

I don't have the operating capital of that high pitched hyperactive YouTube content machine, but as I said I do have a strong need for a new laptop.  Linus squeaks out some good points in this video and the other one he made.  iFixit did a far less, ahem, infotainment focused review, but they also really liked it:

So far I have one beef with Framework's design and it's not a small one.  The keyboard:

What. The. Fuck. Are. Those. Arrow. Keys.  It's 2021, not 1985.  This is a laptop, not a shitty wireless keyboard meant to be used with smart TVs.  That arrow key arrangement is utterly unacceptable. I'm so bothered by it I'm almost not willing to make a purchase.  Keyboards are an important matter for me.  I learned to type on an IBM Model M in the 1980s and the buckling spring permanently affected the way I interact with and view keyboards.  Also, I have freakishly large hands (Canon pro DSLR bodies feel too small for me) and tend type with entirely too much force.  I have broken ...3 laptop keyboards, including my current one.  Again, Apples "fuck you" attitude about repairs is sufficiently annoying that a model with a replaceable keyboard (even with horrid arrow keys) is basically a necessity to me at this point.

Framework's prices aren't too bad either, at least for someone who has been in the Tim Apple ecosystem for the last dozen+ years.  I have a few major fires to put out in the next week including property tax (see above), car insurance (ibid) and two Eat Static album re-issues (a man has to have priorities.)  When the dust from the above as settled and assuming our short-bus-on-bath-salts elected officials manage to raise the debt ceiling and not crater the world economy, I'm probably going to buy one.

Yesterday a friend on a flash sale bought a new PC based on I9 12900K with a 3080 graphics card. Ok, his old PC is a 7700K/1070 so just for the graphics card it's worth the change 

We tested it (mode stock, non overclock) and I have the feeling that, except for getting a better score in Benchmarks, for "normal" use (web, mails, youtube, some games...) there really wasn't much difference compared to my 9900K/3080:  yes, yes, my 9900K takes a second longer to load some applications, it gets a few FPS less in some games...  single core tasks it does seem somewhat superior (such as DCS in VR) but in general, I did not notice a "radical" change.

Something similar happened to me when changing from I7 8700K to I9 9900K... 

The seller has recommended that I change the motherboard and processor now (When I told the guy that I still had a 9900K his look was shocked) but I am not entirely convinced.

what do you think?

The problems are-

I cannot access any apps. The startup icon and search bar do not work,

When I hit startup button+R, I can see the HDs with some documents but no apps, MS Office, Windows Accessories etc do not appear on the HD tree,

When attempting to pull up saved docs I get error messages which makes me think that somehow the links to the apps were corrupted or vanished, 

What "fixes" I have attempted so far-

Since my computer skills are as limited as my woodworking and amp building skills I have just stayed with the basics. Restated the computer, shut the computer down and turned it on, attempted reloading Win 10 Pro from disk. I cannot roll back the computer updates because I am unable to access any apps which limits options for further trouble shooting. Screen shot of error messages -

When attempting to pull up old jpgs from my desktop I get this error message causing me to suspect the link to my apps was corrupted.

Any ideas or suggestions? Hopefully there is a solution other than doing a complete wipe of the main drive and reinstalling Win 10. BTW when I searched MS they stated that my system was not compatible with Win 11. Thanks for any advice.

My google mojo seems to be really bad for this, everything I find are conventional 3.5" drive RAID boxes (large, noisy and pricey), single drive enclosures or in the best case, those docks that can fit 2 internal HDD drives (I've had one already for four years) but are large for they can hold either 3.5" or 2.5" drives. In the worst case two boxes for two drives each would suffice, OSX could handle them for a single RAID-1 array, but it'd need two USB ports instead of one. I haven't found that either.

Any ideas will be much appreciated.

I know there are a lot of options, and I don't know what makes each one better or worse than the others. 

Can someone give me a really quick "get this one, stupid"?

My wife uses Turbo Tax and this year the pricks require Mojave as the minimum version. I know that Mojave supposedly supports 32 bit apps, but does it really? Someone suggested that I might want to install it on a separate drive to test before doing so on the main SSD.

Any recs for an external drive (SSD?) of probably 2T to use for this (as well as backup/Time Machine duties)? The original 1T HDD is partitioned; 1/2 used for additional files (not very full) and the other 1/2 for Time Machine. The SSD was a big boost in performance, so I don't think I want to go back to a HDD as a boot drive.

Thanks!

I think I'd save my money for a 10 Gigabit switch instead.

I purchased this display for the project
https://www.buydisplay.com/5-inch-tft-display-arduino-touch-shield-ssd1963-library-for-mega-due

There is a download with examples in it here
https://www.buydisplay.com/arduino/Libraries-Examples_ER-TFTM050-4.zip

I want to test the 480x272 demo.  I see the ino file and have downloaded the UTFT library and added it to Arduino IDE.

Do I open the ino file in sketch then include the UTFT library and complile then upload?  Or am I missing steps?

Thank you.

 No especial needs of HDD size, RAM, connectivity... Wifi, good screen and lightweight, that's all, she won't be playing games or editing video. These are my candidates in no special order

Dell Inspiron 15 7000 (i5, 256SSD, 8GB, ips screen, GeForce® MX150) I think it's the only one in pink.

Acer Aspire 5 (i7, 8GB, 125SSD+1TBHDD, Geforce MX130)

Lenovo Ideapad 330 15ICH (i7, 8GB, MX1050, 1TBHDD,)

The Toshibas I've looked at are more expensive than the allotted budget, and honestly I have no idea or any references about current Asus, Huawei, Medion or other brands completely new to me. Any suggestions, not only of brands/models but features that could be desirable are very welcome.

Then I looked for 2004 update problems and got a long list... what do you guys think about the latest major update? I'm inclined to delay this for as long as possible on my personal computer. Microsoft's track record with major updates has been truly terrible in the last few years, going from bricked computers to lost data. I'm afraid to estimate how many millions of dollars of productivity and data have been lost from these problems in enterprise and home computing.

The Windows laptop is used only on-occasion for more mundane tasks. Predominant PC use-cases include iTunes library base/backup, and creating/sharing documents for the local Rotary club (MS Word & Excel files). So, she needs an HD capacity bigger than her phone, as well as the latest Microsoft Office suite.

Given her leanings toward other Apple products, she is considering a MacBook to replace her aging Windows laptop. OS-differences aside, my main question has to do with MS Office file compatibility across operating systems (assuming MS Office 2019 on both sides). Word-compatibility should be pretty easy, but Excel functionality needs to match nearly 100% between Mac & Windows versions.

Can anyone who has switched operating system platforms, or use both, AND use Microsoft Office on both, comment on issues, caveats, etc. when it comes down to file sharing?

Looks like Sony and Panasonic have been working on yet another optical standard: Archival Disc. They don't plan to sell them in the consumer market, but anyone who lived through the 90s is going to get déja vu reading this article... the same ambition, the same complex, expensive jukebox solutions, the same media/library customers...