indrora

I have a few thoughts on this, tempered from my years of tutoring college students on basic IT. Not all of this will apply to an 8th grader. Use your best judgement. IMNSHO, topics like media literacy ("is this real? How do I trust it?") and core skills like file management, organizational skills, etc. at one point, I developed a checklist of "Essential shit you will need to know in order to be competent in the world of computers". Identify the following ports: USB (A,B,C, Micro/Mini B), ethernet, HDMI, VGA, SD/"removable media". Discuss at some level the difference between a desktop application (e.g. Word/Excel/VLC) and a web application (GoogleDocs, office online, Gmail, Twitter, etc) identify and discuss the differences between RAM and storage, "fixed" disks vs portable storage, etc. Troubleshoot "is it me" - that is, is this website slow, are all websites slow, is my computer slow: I constantly hear people who complain that their computer is slow because it takes a very long time to load a specific webapp, such as one from a university that is being inundated with every student trying to register for the same 10 classes at once. Importance of updated software (security, at least) and occasionally rebooting your machine. In some form or fashion, be able to store, in some long-term form, information you don't want to remember now ("exobrain" type work) -- I don't care how. it can be Google Keep, OneNote, Notion, a text file they keep on their desktop. Whatever. Some form of digital notebook. I will occasionally accept bookmarks. Print/Save to PDF Using the Internet Archive at some level. I specifically start with "what if I wanted to see the front page of CNN on September 11, 2001?" Two-place backups. Easier if they're a Mac user -- I just tell them to get a 2TB external SSD and the Apple usb-hdmi dongle, keep it plugged in when they go to bed. Windows users I generally point to "Make regular backups on a flash drive." I'm not going to go into 3-2-1 rule type stuff. Password managers and how they work. How to touch type. This is, no shit, one of the most powerful things I have gotten people to learn. Being able to transcribe something you see into words is supremely useful. How to manage files: copy/paste/move/rename/etc. Saving your work. Citing sources digitally (even if it's just a URL) That's most of it. The ends are the most important imo. I would hear people come to me and go "My phone is so slow" and I'd look at it and the reason wasn't that they had too many pictures, as they would claim, but instead because they had a ton of backgrounded apps. I'd ask "When's the last time you rebooted your phone" and they'd look at me like I had grown a third eyeball. There's some good reading to be had about this topic, too, if that's your thing: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ -- Older, but still somewhat relevant study on how well people handle various tiers of tasks with computers. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844023020856 A review of mechanisms for teaching and quantifying digital literacy (open access, even!) If I were to design a "thing" that covered a lot of these, it would be the following: You can get bulk packs of small size flash drives -- I don't know what your budget looks like (knowing America, bad) but if you can, you can get massive quantities of flash drives cheap now that are good enough for keeping high school stuff on.

Apple beat you to the punch. There's an Apple-made version of Wine/Proton in the Game Porting Kit. One of the devs behind [a switch emulator] has released Whiskey, a wrapper around the Wine environment that Apple built: https://getwhisky.app/ It's pretty good. I stopped using the "real" macos install of Steam and just run it on top of the GPK.

If you don't have one, it should return an empty string: This could be as simple as the software license service is stuck for some reason, or as hard to diagnose as disk corruption. It could be something weird with a microsoft account misapplied during setup, or it could be something like TronScript, Shutup10, or any of those "anti bloatware" tools breaking something in collateral damage. By far the simplest option, without having a lot of possibly-relevant information, is to back up everything you care about, then pave the install clean from media you get from Microsoft directly.

If you do need to retrieve the windows key burned into your motherboard from a major OEM like HP/Dell/etc, you can do so with this at an Admin powershell: (Get-WmiObject -query 'select * from SoftwareLicensingService').OA3xOriginalProductKey If there is one baked in, you'll see it here. If there isn't, you'll get nothing. Seconding however the comment to get clean, fresh windows media. If you're uncertain and you need some guidance, https://rufus.ie/en/ -- Rufus can guide you through it and download known clean installation media (the download option is enabled if you allow it to look for updates)

Knowing what module caused the failure is helpful, but I'd start by trying another drive if I could. Doesn't need to be fancy, just needs to be known working. I've had drives that write fine but then kaboom, fail on read. This can cause all sorts of Fun Problems. What version of your system firmware are you on? Asus says the most recent release is 1801 (released 2023/12/22) and support for the 14th gen i9 was added in 1303 (released 2023/08/25). Depending on your motherboard's manufacture date, that might have something to do with it: 1402 specifically has an update for 14th gen processors, and a previous one mentions specific support for some DDR5-7200 ram kits. It's been a Hot Minute since I did memory tuning, but I do know that the more sticks you cram in, the slower the clock speed needs to be. If my memory is correct, clocking it down to 4200mhz might be the best option at least for testing. This *is* a validated kit, however, so that shouldn't have much to do with it. I would suggest testing a pair of sticks just to try.

A friend of mine recently asked for recommendations on a new PC build. I mentioned that I was just going through the LTT secret shopper series and I'd get them my thoughts. I was doubly impressed at the positive review from GamersNexus, who had one major complaint about some thermal pads. That's high praise. I have a few give-or-take things for smaller shops. HP and other Major OEMs are monoliths that have big corporate faces. Smaller boutiques though? I look a little into them. I look into their leadership, and Starforge, for all their dumb logo is forgivable, is very big on how they're sponsor-y-paired with OTK, who raised my eyebrows when I saw a clip from one of AsmonGold's streams that made me say "Man I don't want to be associated with him." In the clip, Asmongold starts badmouthing some VTubers: Then I noticed the name. That's one of my friends he's talking about. That's a human being who he's badmouthing. That's a streamer who has worked her ass off to build a positive community of people, responding to another streamer who has worked hard to have a supportive community. Even if that wasn't someone I know personally, I'd absolutely consider this a black mark. On top of that, it's a shitty comment, completely ignoring the point that people are trying to make (it's not actually about Palworld, but about its leadership, who are hard into the NFT/Crypto/AI-art world, which a lot of people aren't okay with supporting) just to hate on furries. (It's worth saying: furries make the internet go) Okay so... where there's smoke, there's fire. There's some really bad takes I don't agree with ("artists opinions don't matter" when it comes to things like copyright infringement, for one) but okay, let's do some background research. If I'm going to form an opinion on one group of people, I should probably consider their actions as a group/whole. What's Asmongold and the rest of OTK like? Asmongold has some amazingly bad takes about artists and creatives... Okay, so, Asmongold is a jerk, what about the others? It gets complicated. There's plenty of snapshots of various OTK members being vaguely sexist, laughing about poor people, being jerks on twitter, having some skeletons in their closet, getting banned from twitch for a few interesting reasons, saying racist and homophobic things. I'm only somewhat going to bring up straight up accusations of terrible behavior, like manipulation and gaslighting, as too heavy a weight, as I don't know how much context you need, but it sure adds to the fuel for the flame. Then there's the... tasteless naming of the supplement flavors that many of the OTK crew bring up, one of which is named by an OTK member. All this sums up to "The people who are in some level of power, culturally, aren't the kind of people I want to support." I guess the final straw was reading that OTK as a group are worried that being called out for shitty behavior is somehow going to ruin streaming. Hassan had it right. I was disappointed when LTT got their time in the spotlight of unpleasant drama, but LTT took ownership and righted the ship. I dunno what OTK does, but Starforge has them as their front line big names. Puts a real bad taste in my mouth.

Linus et al at the end: But in all seriousness, it's not incorrect to say that the MIL STD standard testing is a little... "lacking". It's meant for the 95% use case, which generally isn't going to be "Hucked off a humvee onto the highway at 80mph", it's going to be "dropped out of a second story window" or "knocked off a road case and smushed into the corner of the carrier". As others have noted: The plywood is there to make the impact last longer: It's weirdly easier to survive hitting a hard surface than it is a soft surface because as you're decelerating, you feel all the resistance to slow you down *over a longer period of time*. There're also other places where these are super useful: Airport refueling stations (Jet fuel! Bad weather! Carts that whip around!) Dockside environments (corrosive, salt-laden fog!) Industrial environments (like a place known as The Worst Place On Earth, a steel mill and radioactive, toxic tailings pond) Basically, anywhere you would go "yeah that's probably dangerous for normal tech". A friend of mine bought a Toughbook competitor (Getac) a while back and would regularly sit in the tub with it watching youtube videos before he sold it. One important feature of a lot of these is the IP6X rating: Full dust sealing. One that you might not think about is Salt Fog protection, as seen in the Getac X600 Pro specs: In ocean environments, such as on docksides and in areas where you have saltwater fog coming in, electronics will slowly corrode themselves to death if they're not protected against the certification. Also noted here is a milstd 461G -- A series of tests that is more akin to "A more robust version of the FCC part 15 certification", making sure that under heavy RF noise environments there are no mission-stopper failures. Normal laptops do weird things when you drag them into adverse RF environments like on the top of radio towers. And it's important to consider: Mission-Stopper failure is the key for all the MIL-STD spec stuff: If I can pull the hard drive and RAM out, slap it into a new machine of the same type, kiss any booboos that might have occurred on someone's head/foot/etc from the fall, slap them on the ass and tell them to get back on the field, that's super duper. The critical part of the mission is the data on that disk. The fact I don't have to do that *every* time someone leaves their laptop on the top of the jeep? Only once out of every 10...ish times someone does it? That's savings in the bank right there.

As a developer, this sort of processor is really appealing for a few reasons when you get into the more complex tasks. Anyone who works on OS-level work, browser development, or even just the typical Gentoo user, will appreciate the high core count and high memory throughput. Why? Because it will rip through code. Most of the time, code compilation is I/O bound, but with the sort of memory bandwidth and capacity that this can handle, it's enough that holding your entire codebase in memory is now possible and you have enough left over to do whatever compilation you need. One of the hard parts of compiling software is a part called linking -- taking all the intermediate compilation bits and binding them together. The issue is that most linkers are single-threaded, but newer advances in linkers such as one called mold take advantage of every CPU core available. Like Linus said: This is targeted right at the end of the "I need a desktop system" but where desktop-class Xeons are either non-performant enough but sticking an Epyc Genoa or Xeon Gold system underneath someone's desk isn't practical. For systems where you're CPU-bound but multithreaded to make use of as much compute power as you can get, these are nice big hammers for a very stubborn nail. These also make sense outside the HEDT space specifically. Certain virtualization workloads will benefit from these sorts of chips, especially ones that need a few cores but access to a lot of RAM alongside some specialty hardware like a GPU or dedicated accelerator card.

Gotta give it to Jordan here: * Competent choice in processor, storage, GPU, RAM. I wouldn't have chosen that display, but what the heck, I'll go for it * Clearly hit 100fps in Crysis. * Way cuter than Linus. (+1000 points)

You may have actually hit the limit on what your hub/root controller can handle from a single stream. Unplug everything except audio devices and turn their recording/playback quality down to something like "CD Quality 41kHz" in Windows. What isn't mentioned is that a four port hub has to *evenly* divide the amount of bandwidth. That means that if you have a hungry enough device (like an audio DAC or two) it can soak up an entire hub's bandwidth.

You might find one "junk" on Yahoo Auctions Japan. You'll definitely pay a premium getting it over to the states though. SSDs are still "relatively" the same on the Japanese market, yen-for-yen, you're getting WAY better bang for your buck going spinning disk: At the scale that Epson and others are selling at, that spinning rust is far cheaper than the SSDs, especially when you have... Complicated relationships with China: Japan would much rather have something produced in Japan (as that chassis likely was) than something produced in China unless it's going to be seen as of inferior quality anyway. I'm spitballing here, but I'd bet that the drive that was included was also a local brand: Toshiba or HGST. a Toshiba drive would absolutely make sense given the market and the consumer cost: Most of my Japanese friends and coworkers have mentioned that they would rather go for something lower cost and slightly older than something higher cost and top of the line. Many of them have picked up Xbox One X as they've become quite cheap and can still play many of the games that the Xbox Series S can play. One even congratulated me on building a sleeper PC with slightly older parts instead of very high end parts (I had a third gen ryzen chip floating around, plus an rtx2070) and went as far as to say "you should have really gone for a 1650 if you were buying parts."

It's worth calling out that outlets in China are a... bit of a mixed bag at best. There's no less than 3 different kinds of outlet you can encouter on a daily basis, depending on where the thing was made, who it was made for, what kind of thing it is, etc. You can encounter: Type A plugs (two prong ungrounded outlets, similar to the US non-polarized ones here) Type C plugs (two round pin plugs, aka Europlug) Type I plugs (two angled with a ground pin, which is also used in Australia and other similar countries) Type A is also used in Japan. Type I looks eerily similar to the US NEMA5-15 when plugged into the wall. It's a mad rush to the point that a power strip might well look like this:

It's been years since I actively modified my UI outside of the occasional font tweak. Stopped somewhere around the win8 era because I got serious into college and decided "getting things done" was more important than tweaking all the knobs. Stability over cool factor made a huge difference, especially when it comes to usability. The oldest active screenshot I have is from the laptop I started college with, a hand-me-down Dell that I ran Debian on: Later, I picked up another hand-me-down in 2012 that I could do more work on -- it had I think four total gigs of ram. And here's a ca. 2012 shot showing Rainlendar on a different laptop I had at the time Nowadays, my customizations are minimal at best. Using Oh My ZSH's nanotech theme on unix boxes and the occasional UI tweak here and there. Customization for me now mostly involves stickers, which are a constant collector item, and things like keyboards. I have something in the ballpark of over 250 stickers -- around 80-100 unique ones if I had to wager -- in the collection of stickers that I apply to things. As for keyboards, here' one half of my daily driver Ergodox:

A bit of golfing: Barring DOA drives, what's the fastest you've had a hard drive die? Add a point for every month the drive survived. Subtract 2 points each for: High Capacity (8TB+) High Speed (10kRPM) Enterprise (Seagate Exos & Enterprise Capacity, WD Gold, HGST Enterprise) Drive Eaters (controllers that you discover cause drives to fail) Cascade failure (one drive failing causes another similar-age drive to fail due to increased usage) "It's new, I swear" ("new" drive discovered to have had >1k hours on-time before you got it) SMART full test said nothing was wrong but read error rate kept going up Subtract 4 points each for: Firmware fuck-up caused the drive death (for instance, HP enterprise drives) Explosive and otherwise unusual failure modes Data Recovery service discovered mysteries Monkey's Paw/Butterfly Effect tier shit (environmental change causes a cascading failure) Vendor says "No Problem Found" Hole-in-zero is under 1 month before failure, but not DOA drive. Negative scores win by default. Standard par: 36 points (3 years of service) Business par: 48 points (4 years of service) Came up recently because I had a Seagate Ironwolf Pro drive go from 0 bad sector reads to every sector reading badly in a span of 6-8 months & just sent it in today to be RMA'd. 10TB Seagate Ironwolf that survived about a year and a half nets me a wonderful 16 points.

Once upon a time I heard the following phrase: (This also implanted upon me the concept of "Open Sores", what you encounter when dealing with Open Source software) While you can go and do this with TrueNAS Core and the like, unless you're good at it, you're gonna spend a lot of time figuring out what you want and need. It is 100% true that I can build a storage server with more density for the same price... If my time is worth nothing. At my salary, that thing would cost over $30K more, simply from the time I would have to put into it. The fact of the matter is that Jellyfish devices come with three things that are worth the cost: An out of box experience that starts with "plug it in" and ends under 5 steps later with "dump content onto it" Support for when things inevitably go south with warranty service Out of the gate integration with the common tools without hassle. And that's where you're paying for the decade-and-some years of experience that the team that puts together the Jellyfish hardware, software, and integrations has. In the wise words of a consultant friend of mine: