DrMacintosh

Is there any particular reason you need 4K displays? 1440p is the sweet spot imo. 1440p at 27" has a PPI of ~109 which qualifies as a retina display from a normal viewing distance (about 30").

No, because the difference in quality is entirely noticeable to anyone with a critical ear. Perhaps older people with failing hearing. A well mastered track is incredibly important, but if that master gets shoved down the Spotify pipeline, its going to sound worse than at full lossless quality on Apple Music, it just is. While 256kbps is perfectly fine (this was the previous standard for iTunes purchases), and most won't notice a difference, there is improvement to be had, and Apple and Tidal offer that improvement as part of there service. Except they are doing significantly better than someone not streaming at 16Bit/92Khz, and I didn't have to pay anything extra to get that experience, I already had the equipment and the audio quality was a free upgrade. What you must realize is that Lossless Audio is no longer a feature used to upsell consumers, it's just the standard for streaming audio in 2024. Or at least it is if you are using a real music streaming service.

Except you don't need high end equipment to get a listening experience that is significantly greater than Spotify or YouTube. A $9 adapter and a nice pair of wired headphones is all you actually need to have a superior experience to those options. If you want to splurge, $250 will get you a really great paid of over-ear headphones and a decent USB DAC capable of 24Bit/192Khz.

If you want lossless audio, your two real options are Tidal and Apple Music. Apple Music has an iOS, Android, Mac, and PC app, all of which can playback lossless audio. To do that, you'll need to be using wired headphones. You'll also need a dedicated DAC (can be connected via USB) to playback Hi-Res Lossless (ALAC up to 24Bit/192KHz), at least on an iPhone. Most devices, flagships anyway, should be able to playback lossless 24Bit/48KHz files natively. The way I listen is my iPhone 13 Pro Max with the Apple Lighting to 3.5mm audio jack adapter connected to my Audio Technica ATH-M50X headphones. My lossless quality is set to 24Bit/48KHz because the apple audio adapter (Lighting and USB-C) support up to that bit rate. With iPhone 15, the USB-C port allows you to use almost any DAC you want, assuming it works with iOS. On my PC I have a little USB audio dac that can do the full 24Bit/192Khz quality.

Do you have a screen protector installed and/or is night shift on?

Roku is cheap and works, the cost is it spies on your home network and there are ads in the home screen. AppleTV is expensive ($129), but the performance is unrivaled. Only really works if you have at other Apple devices. Nvidia Shield is the only Android streaming box out there worth anything, but its hardware is old, though its software has been getting updates.

I recommend this guy for anything NAS related.

Purchasing extra SharePoint storage through Microsoft is crazy expensive, its $0.20/GB/m. So for 350GB, that's an additional $70 per month on the M365 invoice. But if they absolutely need it, at least temporarily, follow these steps: Go to the M365 Admin Center -> Go to Billing -> Purchase Services -> Click Add-Ons in the "View by Category" section -> scroll to the bottom and click the Details button for "Office 365 Extra File Storage" -> Connect with your subscription -> Purchase as many licenses as you need GBs, in this case, at least 350 licenses. There may be options to increase your available storage via third party vendors, but I know we didn't pursue that option in my office. Instead I deployed a Synology NAS and Synology Drive to host our archive of cold data, thus freeing up about half of our 1TB SharePoint storage. Synology NAS devices running DSM 7.0+ also have access to a program called Active Backup for M365 which can backup your whole M365 tenant, including SharePoint, OneDrive, and emails.

I don't think there is anything wrong with TP-Links routers. That being said, I have 2 Linksys MX4200 routers and they are great. They have some nice Wifi 6, 6E, and 7 mesh routers. The Atlas Pro and Velop models are great.

I bought this DAS from OWC and have had 0 issues with it. It's USB 3.1 Gen2, its on 24/7. I have it connected to my home media server. https://www.amazon.com/OWC-Mercury-Elite-Storage-Enclosure/dp/B09SC124GS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1FEAY25LR9Z0M&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.NRFr9JYi3rpdyvJFp_WESEOK9nRntOAouA76qLdo-DRC5jtpKTwOkogPoR1HGtdb8VVF4dLIkY2t1fxK5s62dt3wO_1MXF3cGMWroUTgXXI65FIXssk6451bYlZdgDPTIcGXWD52W1zjfyraAc1uxpeKySN4FVDgjOr9nwEObgmAR07CP8DUP5_ji_A3vmXrbbnUv-UJfcSpwwgNSYb_ZtVm9cMCSOtgllD65uFbSNd2CbBEB550DMcV1ccvWoownRfSriRIj8KLiNxf5JKDUM_FLvHRjTO-lbpkFrWXOy0.7cw39pn6nGAeqhvs87x3pwWwHOYWuWG6k-cuqRwztpY&dib_tag=se&keywords=Mercury+Elite+Pro+Quad&qid=1708545137&sprefix=mercury+elite+pro+quad%2Caps%2C152&sr=8-1&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.f5122f16-c3e8-4386-bf32-63e904010ad0

Do you have any idea how close I am to having a Mac as my desktop and only firing up my PC for playing games?

Hi all, so I noticed that in Windows 11 Home 23H2, when formatting drives, Windows will now add 3 folders to the root directory of every drive you format. Those folders are: Program Files, WindowsApps, and XboxGames. See below: So my questions are: #1 Why? #2 How do I stop Windows from doing this? When I hit delete on these folders, Windows does not let me and Program Files and WindowsApps remain. Only the XboxGames folder can be deleted. When I hit format on a drive, I want that drive empty. I don't see why Microsoft feels its ok to start arbitrarily changing how computers work.

They are absolutely the best streaming box on the market. The real question is, do you have an iPhone or other Apple Devices? Because if not, your experience using it will be sub optimal, if not downright difficult. If you do have an iPhone, it's an unrivaled product. It's significantly more powerful than any other streaming box considering it's just an iPhone with an HDMI port.

I have 4 of these, 2 in use, one as a spare, one doing a local backup in an external enclosure: ST8000VN004

Hi all, we have recently finally started using our DS923+ at work for more than just a backup solution for Microsoft 365. We've freed up almost 500GB of our available 1.15TB on SharePoint. So now we have some breathing room and are no longer paying Microsoft's insane $0.20/GB pricing. That's all great, but now that data (mostly archival data that does not get touched) no longer lives in the cloud, it's no longer being backed up by the NAS, so I need a method to back it up. Our DS923+ is currently loaded with 2x8TB Seagate Ironwolf drives in an SHR mirror. We have 2 more identical drives as cold spares. We have 4.4TB of free space with 2.6TB used. I do not foresee us filling up this NAS for at least 3 years. We do not have the budget to buy another NAS. I could buy one personally and backup the work NAS, but I already have a small home media server and do not need the features of Synology NASs. I have a 4TB WD Blue drive that I could put in an enclosure and do USB copies regularly (or I can use one of our cold spare NAS drives). (This is my leading option right now I think.) I could convince work to pickup yet another subscription, and use a provider like Backblaze B2 storage at $6/TB/m. The problem with this is we have cable internet at the office, with only 40Mbps of upload, so this is not optimal.

What version of Thunderbolt does your laptop have and what version of Thunderbolt is your dock?

Get an NVMe enclosure and pop the drive in. Really nice ones are like $20 I think.

Well, can you pop the drive into another Mac and extract the data?

Try making a macOS installer USB, booting off that, nuking the drive, and starting over.

What device is actually controlling the lights?

The problem is your mom has an iPhone 8. This year is the last year that doing that is viable. Pro tip, if the phone does not support 5G, its too old.

400$ is what currency exactly?

Pretty sure there are countless web hosting providers that can do this for a nominal fee per year. GoDaddy has a website builder, Squarespace is a frequent sponsor of LTT.

I think your best option is to hibernate your machine. This should dump your memory to disk, which Windows will read back into memory when you boot up.