Bananasplit_00

My strongest recomendation as someone who own way too many headphones: buy used, maybe vintage even, and replace the earpads. The highest end stuff from the 70s and 80s can sometimes be found silly cheap and is comparable to the best stuff around today in sound quality at least imo.
 
I've found high end orthodynamics(other/older word for planar magnetic) headphones for €10-€30 in good condition, with sound worlds beyond what my >€100 Sennies would put out 🙂
 
If you dont want to get used, find a store that lets you try the headphones before you buy. Makes it a lot easier to find what fits your head and what you like the sound off.
 
I would also get headphones first and then evaluate the need for an amp. My laptop can drive 150 ohm headphones without much problem so you might not even need an amplifier.

From what I've gathered, yes. If you disable the "App Center Download & Install" feature on the motherboard this gets solved (edit: you need to also do the steps below to fully get rid of it in an already installed version of Windows).
 
What happens is that if you have that function enabled in your UEFI, the motherboard injects a program called "GigabyteUpdateService" into your system32 folder. Then it registers the program as a service, and when it is running it checks for updates from Gigabytes servers.
All that is in and of itself not really a big deal and is probably done for non-malicious purposes. However, the process doesn't check the validity of the downloaded files (at least not during downloading) which is a big no-no.
 
If you want to completely reverse and disable this you will need to:
1) Disable the app center function in your UEFI.
 
2) Delete this registry key:
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\GigabyteUpdateService
 
3) Delete the file located here (might not be possible if it's already running, in which case you need to stop the service from task manager or restart your PC):
%SystemRoot%\system32\GigabyteUpdateService.exe
 
 
 
Also, I already see people talking about how Gigabyte are terrible, please note that all companies mess up every once in a while. I don't see any indication of this being done maliciously but rather an oversight. 
It's getting pretty tiring seeing people go "company X is now on my shit-list" whenever any company messes up. The same company reported a breach at MSI about a month ago. Less than a month ago people were outraged at Asus for the AMD processors burning up (although that seems to have been an AMD issue that was fixed for everyone, not just Asus even though they were mostly affected). Last year ASRock motherboards were used in a large-scale attack because they contained vulnerabilities.
My point is that if your instinct is to always blacklist companies whenever they mess up, regardless of the circumstances, then you will have blacklisted pretty much every single company within a year. There needs to be more nuance in the conversations. The world isn't a Saturday morning cartoon where everything is either fantastic or the worst thing ever.

Another budget laptop thread, another recommendation for used laptops from me.
 
Thinkpad or a surface device would be my picks. I got a surface laptop 2 for about that money in great condition and I am very happy with it. Does everything I've wanted so far for my engineering studies, not going to game especially amazing though as there is no dedicated graphics card

Local streaming have proven itself to be an amazing thing, and people have paid devices for that purpose only. Steam Link, Nvidia Shield lineup, you name it. The issue is that just like Steam Link, its paperweight without its main device.

The Ham community is actually somewhat interested in this, but not for its direct effect. The reason many EVs don't have AM radios is because they have motor control electronics that aren't shielded that great, and as a result produce a lot of interference that can mess with AM signals. This interference doesn't just cause problems for electronics inside the car though, it can also produce adverse interference for radios outside the car, including some ham spectrums. If this legislation is passed then it is possible that EV manufacturers would end up having to better shield their nterference-producing electronics, making things better for everyone.
 
 

Nothing is going to explode, it's gona work, but there have in the past been some strange performances issues using daisy chained cables on specifically NVIDIA cards. Not sure if those are still around, just check that you are getting the expected performance once you've got it all plugged in and new drivers cleanly installed

Well yes cos x86 and x86-64 are CISC ISAs. RISC is separate and is a different thing.

That's what we're really excited for too! I've been using the ESP series for as long as I can remember (back to the early 8266s) and it's a great maker platform.
 
I have even better news for you:
 
1) The ESP BOX uses the ESP32 S3, which is the highest performance of the ESP32 series.
2) The ESP BOX exposes 16 GPIOs on the back! We don't currently allow users to configure/use them but there's no reason we can't. We just want to make sure we come up with a good configuration, etc mechanism to use them.

I completely understand what you are saying and your skepticism. I have been using Linux on the desktop since 1997 and needless to say the "year of the Linux desktop" has never happened and likely never will.
 
Mycroft is interesting but I think there are a couple of crucial differences between Mycroft and Willow:

- The Mycroft hardware is $400. That's completely ridiculous and totally out of line with the rest of the market in terms of price point. I don't know why anyone would ever buy one. The Willow hardware is actually cheaper than Echo when factoring in devices with a display, and this is before they're actually mass manufactured in earnest which should drive the price point down further (more on that later).
 
- Mycroft and previous open/open source related efforts have been failures because they made the same fundamental mistake I've seen in engineering products over the course of my > 20 year career: re-inventing the wheel and doing too much "hard stuff" at once. They did their own wake word. Speech recognition. Hardware manufacturing. These three blunders alone are the trifecta for a new effort that is doomed to failure.

Willow is a month old, and the "announcement" yesterday was really intended to be a release "by hackers for hackers". We are not even trying to target end-users, we are currently targeting developers and early adopters that will actively work with us to improve Willow. In the coming months we will have much easier onboarding and potentially even devices that ship with Willow but this is another key mistake people make - they don't understand that Wi-Fi devices are regulated and need to be certified by governments around the world. Espressif already has the distribution and worldwide regulatory stuff worked out so we will work with them and their existing distribution to make pre-flashed, ready to go Willow devices available anywhere in the world.

The ESP BOX isn't currently available because the excitement around Willow caused them to (practically) sell out worldwide in roughly 24 hours :).

The ESP BOX is manufactured by Espressif, which has tremendous manufacturing capacity. Stock has never been high because until Willow there really wasn't much practical use for this hardware. We anticipate Espressif will significantly ramp up manufacturing to meet demand.

Hi, project creator here.
 
This is the thinking exactly. Willow is so new, and moving so fast, if we provided an extremely easy way to flash/install/use now it would be disastrous. The users would end up frustrated. They would end up thinking they wasted their money. They'd call it all a scam or who knows what. Perhaps worst of all, as the saying goes "you only get one chance to make a first impression".

We are catering toward users (pretty much developers, really) who look at our build instructions and think "Oh that's not bad". The build process is almost deliberately intimidating as a kind of filter to scare away those who aren't prepared or able to build, flash, and contribute. I don't want people going out and spending money on hardware that they won't be happy with because we're not quite ready for them.
 
This post from HN kind of "broke out" by making it here, to Ars, etc. There's a lot of excitement going around but unfortunately (though not surprisingly) a lot of misunderstanding too.

Summary
The good: voice detection is competitive with voice assistants from Nest and Amazon The bad: still a rough experience, DIY, lots of steps Only costs $35 to $50 depending on the ESP-32 box chosen but also needs the backend "inference server" code running on a PC somewhere in your home  
Quotes
 
My thoughts
It can't play youtube videos yet (or even just stream the audio). But once that happens Amazon Prime music gets crossed off.
 
Sources
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/willow-is-a-faster-self-hosted-diy-voice-assistant-built-on-50-gadgets/
 

Too long didn't

oh boy, i sure do love cars tracking us...

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