yeah I switched my server to an N100 after seeing the best low-cost AMD CPU was “the 6-year-old chip in my desktop”
I wouldn’t run an Nx0 on desktop but for always-on and video transcoding it’s spectacular. though I see there’s a new series of Nx50 with a graphics upgrade
Looking for a new tablet computer to draw on. things I want
Everything I look for seems to be $1000. The ipad air with pen is about $1000. The newest Surface Pro is about the same. So is the Asus Proart PZ13.
One major problem is a lot of these manufacturers use the Microsoft Pen technology, which has jittery lines when drawn diagonally and slowly. I never had a problem with my Surface Pro 3 so maybe this won’t be a problem. But like, I really don’t wanna spend that much on it, but I might have to.
The other option are android tablets which…android is such a shitty operating system ecosystem. I’m not saying windows is great but it’s the least worst option.
I think I just hate that the surface pro 3 has an unreplacable battery due to being glued together. It does everything I need it to, forever, except not anymore.
Maybe i’m looking in the wrong spots. if I can find an older one that’s new in box that would be sick. an older surface pro from like 2-3 years ago etc.
If you don’t find a great deal elsewhere, I’d go with an iPad. That’s the platform that you can trust definitely has good battery life & definitely has pleasant stylus behavior. And stylus behavior especially is the kind of thing where even if you can find reviews saying that aspect is good, it might just mean the reviewer is not very sensitive to the nuances of it.
my main problem with apple is their lack of file system access for ios. I think i’m also salty on them arbitrarily deciding when to break backwards compatability with older versions of ios. but yeah aside from that it might be the best option, especially since I don’t need a 2nd laptop.
also for some reason the apple pencil pro is the only one with pressure sensitivity? weird. the cheapest option is $728, which isn’t terrible
i am finally going to wipe out my ancient system76 install because the laptop that runs it can no longer detect an external display no matter what i try, but linux running from a bootable usb stick can do it just fine. the precipitating event was that i pressed the cursed presentation mode button on my keyboard by accident, and that fucked up something deep inside the guts of the operating system, causing the monitor to be invisible to xrandr and all associated utilities forever
landmine buttons on your keyboard. landmine buttons. on your keyboard.
every time someone describes something like this happening i feel my eyes widen and tremor. this is true fear.
i get paid to help people with computers when computers do fucky shit. in capital terms, being good at computers is near to my entire worth. if anyone should able to dehumanize oneself and face to bloodshed, it should be me. but this is just… i don’t need that kind of shit in my life, you know?
i have figured out the root cause of this kind of thing before but now it seems like a complete waste of time since it’s possible to just wipe the whole install out and start over in much less time and it is very unlikely to put me in a better position to handle random stupid bullshit in the future. but i am going to find a way to disable the “press f8 to fuck up your x server configuration” as soon as the install completes
life is too short for technical deep dives into legacy bullshit pursued for non-aesthetic reasons
I still think about a vaguely similar problem I had over two decades ago. Instead of a landmine key on the keyboard, it was a landmine CD I booted into that made the monitor go black.
the brightly-colored imacs from '98 are the beginning days of open firmware + bootloader. that shit is horrifying even in its later, more-mature forms. 90’s open firmware is downright hellish.
hmm i can’t run the popos installer because the computer appears to be sending it an errant hardware signal of some kind that causes the latest version of popos to shut itself down after a minute or two, it pops up “shutting down in 60 seconds” and then shuts down immediately if you close the dialog
time to try another distro i guess, or take this thing to microcenter
The funny thing about these nightmare OSX 1.0 experiences on soon-to-be-but-not-deprecated-yet hardware was how well the OSX betas played with these machines.
I ran the betas on my beige G3/266 for a really long time, and they were not only stable as hell but wayyy faster than the 1.0 release.
If I do end up replacing my CPU and motherboard but they are both working fine, really, what’s the best thing to do with them?
If you want familiar get the surface pro. If you want standard get the iPad + pencil. Doesn’t hurt that Mini/air/last gen will suffice and be cheaper. The file system access on an iPad is fine. Annoying but fine.
build a NAS
own your backups
850 w Power supply
Thunderbolt Mobile Monitor 15.6"
I’m trying to set up Retroarch to emulate a few games and I’m having so many weird problems… first of all, the screen was flickering black on every core. I eventually fixed it by switching the video driver from GL to DX11 (why’s GL the default on Windows!?)
Then, I had incredibly bizarre battle glitches in Phantasy Star 4. The monster group onscreen would sometimes change to a totally different set of monsters the first time I moved the cursor, and struck-dead characters sometimes came magically back to life with like 3HP on the following turn. It took a while to figure out the right phrasing to google this, but eventually I found this thread explaining it’s an interaction of two-instance runahead with the game’s RNG. That’s supposed to be the most compatible runahead mode…
In 2025, the open-source community has finally succeeded in making 8-bit/16-bit emulation as complicated and messy as 32-bit emulation
basically every “advancement” in consumer emulation techniques in the last decade, from retroarch to FPGAs, has made me progressively less interested in emulation. I understand technically why they’re still improvements on the previous state of the art but the problems that they unsolve to get there are just hard for me to take seriously
and I’m one of like a half dozen people in the world (all of whom I know personally) who premised my career on the intersection of “conversant with hobbyist emulation techniques” and “willing to get the terminal degree that gatekeeps this field” so I am very mindful of the usability tradeoffs here at the best of times
I wonder if my name is still on the new textbook coming out this year speaking of which
no need at all for runahead on something like phantasy star, you can just turn it off.
if you’re anything whatsoever like me you should get a MiSTer and uninstall retroarch forever