Circuit City on the Edge of Forever

Apple announced “conversation boost” speech enhancement you can combine with active noise cancelling

They did so with this image so I’m still embarrassed but I can’t overstate how helpful it will be

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took me like 2 days to remember why “universal control” was sticking in my head, just figured out it’s from 13 sentinels

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I received a box with a new modem in it from my ISP and a flyer saying that it is mandatory which got my hackles up but it’s a free (no rental) upgrade to DOCSIS 3.1 so they can move the entire neighborhood over for more bandwidth

I am still vaguely suspicious of the box that is featureless and Spectrum branded but it’s faster than the Netgear it replaces

It has 2.5 Gb ethernet which seems optimistic

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most last mile fibre can do 2.5Gb it’s just that they aren’t selling it yet because there isn’t upstream capacity and no one really needs it

I’m just happy that my fibre provider continues to give me modem-only boxes on request so I don’t have to worry about bridging or NATs or shitty routers

I do not think docsis copper could possibly do 2.5Gb but it could maybe exceed 1Gb (asymmetrical) under rare circumstances

good: I (seemingly) have gotten a new GPU

bad: it’s AMD

neutral: I’m out 500 bucks but also I’m only out 500 bucks

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Good news: with new modem getting 484/24 up/down

Bad news: router is apparently doing something to cut that download down 90% over ethernet ???

edit: rebooted router and now it’s full speed :ghost:

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Has anyone been checking in on this new company/project for lapotops?: https://frame.work/

Their laptop is explicitly designed to use discreet parts and be user-serviceable in all respects. They’ve also made their expansion card slot design completely open source, and are encouraging third parties and hobbyists to develop and sell their own expansion cards. Seems really, really cool.

I don’t have a pressing need for a laptop right now, but if I do decide I want one, I am strongly considering going this route.

the thing is, I’d rather just have an M1 than one company’s idea of “every colour your want, as long as it’s black” – the point of having an interchangeable ecosystem is that it has to be supported by multiple vendors, and since these never achieve critical mass, in practice they’re actually less repairable than the huge breadth of ifixit wiki pages antagonizing and complementing apple’s massive scale advantage

market dynamics mean that it’s sometimes more useful to parasitize ostensibly bad actors than it is to do everything idealistically

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Maybe I misunderstood your overall critique, but they would presumably be supplying the parts to repair it themselves. So if your LCD cracked, you’d buy another one from them and it would be simple to replace with standard tools, rather than having to buy a whole new laptop or paying an arm and a leg to have some repair shop do it.

A pitch on repairability puts them in Dell’s backyard, doesn’t it? Even the modern XPS laptops can be pretty easily disassembled; I’ve replaced the keyboard, wireless card, re-pasted the CPU, added thermal pads to the VRMs with my hate-object XPS 15. It’s like opening the hood of a Toyota; you can tell it’s designed for someone to service it.

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If I end up with an M1 Air I want to put thermal pads to connect it to the chassis and make it illegally hot

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As someone who used to work in a repair shop, Dells are fucking heaven. They are definitely easier to repair than shit like HP, nevermind a Mac. But it’s variable depending across series, some of their models are a bit of a pain.

Besides, Dell won’t sell you the parts directly, you have to go on eBay and look for decently priced parts from a trustworthy account/vendor, and that isn’t always a given depending on how old or exotic your laptop is. If you have to replace a motherboard, and your PC is a bit of an odd duck? In many cases, you may as well just buy a new laptop, the price is so high.

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title

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Hope Lady Rude has time to complain about our new apartment’s internet which is supoose to get Gig speed and instead we are getting 45Mb and really spotty service.

The old place which we had a tier down in service got 400Mb wirelessly.

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if this mousepad can somehow charge this mouse even without me moving it, why can’t they just make an extra wide version that their wireless keyboards can set on and also charge off of

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My motherboard doesn’t have an M.2 slot. If I buy a PCIe adapter with an M.2 NVMe slot, will I be getting basically the same performance as if it was native on my mobo, or does the adapter inherently introduce a meaningful amount of overhead, and if so, how much on the spectrum between SATA SSD, and native NVME/M.2 SSD?

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it should be pretty much native

sata is 600 MB/s, NVMe is currently up to around 6x that on average

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I’m not sure it matters much for non-server workloads though. I got a NVMe pcie card and M2 SSD for my work desktop and compared my compile times with a regular SSD and it proved only a few percent faster at that task.

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yeah, you’re pretty likely to be CPU bottlenecked in most cases where ultrafast storage really, really matters.

NVMe is at a point right now where like, if you’re building a new machine, no question, there’s your boot drive. but otherwise? as an upgrade? meh.

the general belief right now seems to be that SATA SSDs are actually likely to become obsolete faster than hard drives which are getting dense and faster with multiple platters and such, but you can definitely still buy them now.

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actual best thing about nvme is no cables to manage

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