aard

Some years age when I was still using some more google stuff (like an account for calling out from my PBX) I had each service assigned to its own google account to limit the impact of google doing something crazy to an account.

Apart from playstore youtube red is now the only service left - and that’s about to go as they now made it too expensive, especially taking into account that they enshittified it so much that we’ve blocked it on the TV, and “adfree on TV” was the main use case there…

You can drop that as far as clause.

Long time ago I got a small screw driver from a D-Link employee with the comment that this is the only non shit item with D-Link branding.

It’s not just cores - it is higher performance per rack unit while keeping power consumption and cooling needs the same.

That allows rack performance upgrades without expensive DC upgrades - and AMD has been killing dual and quad socket systems from intel with single and dual core epycs since launch now. Their 128 core one has a bit too high TDP, but just a bit lower core count and you can still run it in a rack configured for power and cooling needs from over a decade ago.

Granite rapids has too high TDP for that - you either go upgrade your DC, or lower performance per rack unit.

For people who weren’t looking for a developer workstation back then: Threadripper suddenly brought the performance of a xeon workstation costing more than 20k for just a bit over 2k.

That suddenly wasn’t a “should I really invest that much money” situation, but a “I’d be stupid not to, productivity increase will pay for that over the next month or so”

Just wanted to comment that this should happen faster than in a few years… and then checked the calendar

So CrowStrikes strategy is “you installed CrowStrike while TSA told you not to install it, as was clearly proven by us taking down your network, so we’re not at fault”?

I’ve let my google developer account expire quite a while ago after they kept asking for more and more stupid stuff. Nowadays if you don’t get paid a lot for it you must be either a masochist or a bit stupid if you upload to google play.

If you can afford it see if Eaton has a smaller tower UPS suitable for you.

Recall is a legal term for the car industry which includes stuff like reporting obligations. So if the defect meets the severity level of a recall it should be called as such, even if it is ‘just’ a software update. Ambiguous terms for safety violations are dangerous and may cost lives.

Performance of the snapdragons is roughly that of an i7 from a decade ago - so yes, it’s a good machine for office tasks and light development, but in no way suitable for gaming. That’s not a Windows problem, though, just the hardware is not suitable for that.

I’ve been using an Arm notebook with Windows for over a year now (not as main system, but development system for a customer project). I’m running a lot of x86 software (like Emacs) as a gcc port for Windows/Arm is being developed only now - with no problems. It integrates nicely into the native stuff - which is one area where you run into issues on the Mac: If you start a shell in rosetta it’s annoying to make calls to native arm binaries.

The only issue I ran into were some drivers not available for Arm - emulation layer (unsurprisingly) just is for userland, not kernel drivers. Also x86 emulation isn’t working well if Windows is running in a virtual machine on MacOS - but supposedly that’ll be fixed in the upcoming Windows release.

All of this only applies to Windows 11 - if for some reason you decide to run Windows 10 on Arm you’re in a world of pain.

Screen is another thing - but I can live with that, mostly - it’s a bit hard to find x86 notebooks with decent resolution (not talking retina style, just better than “1080p on a 14 inch display”). And while the screen itself is nice on the apples I’d prefer a lower resolution one if I can get a matte screen instead.

But fact is that nobody wants to sell you a proper x86 notebook. It’s almost impossible to find something with more than 32GB of RAM, and while there are a few with more than 64GB they’re all xeon based monsters larger than 16", as far as I can tell can’t really be ordered, and have a price tag equal or larger to a full spec 14" mac book pro. And obviously you can’t really think about battery life with intels space heaters.

It’s especially sad as current mobile Ryzen CPUs could very well compete with Apples ARM CPUs - the one thing Apple is better at is the absolute low power state, as soon as it has too actually do something the power (and TDP) curve is very close to mobile Ryzen. But pretty much every manufacturer fucks up the thermal design, or gimps it in other ways.

Windows 11 has pretty good x86 emulation, both 32 and 64bit - imo better than what macos does with rosetta. Windows 10 for arm is just a pretty broken tech preview, though.

One exception nowadays: Business notebooks - and that’s only because the rest of the notebook market went to shit. If you want a somewhat compact notebook with more than 64GB of RAM, decent CPU performance and good battery life Apple currently is the only one offering something.

Helsinki is getting out of the “burning stuff to make electricity” business. It used to have coal power plants - last ones closed down in 2023 and 2024. There are some dedicated plants for district heating still, but also there’s the trend to move away from burning stuff.

The problem is - is it just a mass storage device? Or is it maybe also a USB keyboard that will try to enter some payload? Or maybe it even contains a radio, and can communicate with an attacker nearby?

You can’t tell from the outside which protocols a USB device implements.

You can fit all of that functionality into the space of a USB-A plug - so if it is a thumbdrive you have way more space to work with than you ever need.

At minimum restrict your computer to only loading mass storage drivers - but as you quite likely habe USB input devices it is just a lot easier to investigate such a device on something like a raspberry pi.

The space used by the smallest solar charger I’ve seen on Amazon seems to be similar to 6 or more batteries in the format the N900 was taking - so if you look at space, slow charging from solar charger, and reliance on sun conditions taking individual batteries seems to be the better option for a few days hike. It’s also easier to stow individual batteries to wherever you still have space left.

With my N900 I used to travel with 6 to 10 charged batteries to have a few days of runtime. Things got better now with powerbanks - but for something like hiking just carrying a few spares would still be smaller and lighter.

About 20 years ago I made a script that converts pictures to HTML tables. Back then RAM was a severe problem for this, and even for more powerful hardware browsers tended to just crash on larger pictures.

I checked it again a few years later, and things looked way better. I guess using CSS it’d be rather trivial nowadays to do the same with a short video by just cycling through showing/hiding tables of each frame.

x230 with x220 keyboard also is pretty nice - but unfortunately no longer suitable as main notebook. As nothing useful came out of lenovo after that, others are even worse, nobody has a decent trackpoint and sensible amount of RAM only exist for macs I ended up with one of those for work few months ago.