Tom's Hardware of Finland

Snippet from my .vimrc

" Disable annoying F1 key nmap <F1> :echo<CR> imap <F1> <C-o>:echo<CR>

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mostly this is for Microsoft products that want to launch a web browser every time I fat-finger F2 for cell-edit

hmm, maybe I could use AutoHotKey to capture the input first, though

edit: found a script:

#SingleInstance force
#NoTrayIcon
DisabledKeys := ["*F1"]
Loop % DisabledKeys.MaxIndex()
    Hotkey, % DisabledKeys[A_Index], DoNothing
Return ; end of autoexec section
DoNothing:
Return

I have never in my entire life learned the solution to a problem from F1 documentation

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Discovered the setting where you can make the “resolution” 1680x1050. This rules.

I just tried it in chrome and it opened in japanese

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I just remembered I had an unopened modular PSU in my garage for a 2-3 years now, sitting in hot summers and cold winters. Is this thing still going to be reliable after sitting in an environment with no climate control for a few years?

Almost certainly still good.

If it’s possible for a human to be in your garage for 10-20 minutes at a time during peak summer and winter, most electronics should be fine. PSUs I expect would also be hardier than normal electronics, so that should help too. Unless the garage gets below freezing or above 60C (140F) [getting these values from a random spec sheet here, extrapolating that storage temps should be at least somewhat beyond operating] , I think you could be sure the PSU is still ready for use. Even if the temperature pushed beyond those extremes, the PSU is still probably fine.

The bigger issue about the environment is probably humidity (and the corrosion it might cause). But as long as your garage isn’t sopping wet, you’re probably fine there.

Lastly, you might still have some slight loss of long-term use just due to simple age. I don’t know enough about electronics to understand how likely this is to be an issue, but tin whiskers seem to just grow with age in some circumstances, which can lead to eventual failure.

Thanks a bunch. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t wasting my time with something that would fail quickly.

never ever try upgrading an ITX desktop from a 2.4ghz-only wireless N chipset to a 2.4/5ghz wireless AC chipset

I’ve had to buy so many chinese parts individually

I started with just the card itself, after doing enough research to learn that there’s exactly one 1300mbps mini-PCIe AC card available, knowing that this new one has three antenna pots rather than two, but figuring I could just hook up two of them for now

well, nope, that won’t work, because the old N card that came on the mobo uses MHF3 antenna connectors and the new one needs MHF4 which are like half a millimeter smaller and the old ones won’t clip on properly

wait three months for $3 set of MHF4 coax jacks to arrive from china because there is no way to get them delivered any faster to a canadian address or anywhere to buy them locally, they finally get here with a declared value of 30 cents canadian

with great wrenching effort I’m able to replace two of the three of them on the mobo itself because they come with fasteners to do this; I don’t have anywhere to put the third one so I just poke a hole in the I/O backplate and glue it on where it sort of fits.

I hook it all back up and it works but my wireless performance is not great and my bluetooth performance is dismal and now I learn that I need to buy dual-band antennas because the old-style antennas aren’t wired for 2.4ghz and 5ghz simultaneously.

those are supposed to be arriving later this week, in the meantime the glue fails to hold and the third antenna just flops off the back of the I/O plate, I realize I should’ve got one of these to go with the other two coax MHF4 wires: http://www.ebay.com/itm/2-x-IPEX-MHF4-Laptop-NGFF-7260-7265-Card-Wireless-Wifi-Internal-Antenna-TMPG-/152121450968?hash=item236b2521d8:g:LFgAAOSwQupXWId0

so I buy it and look forward to another two-month wait for a four dollar chinese part which I’m probably going to tape to the side of my PSU to arrive

this has all been relatively cheap and is the only way to get my beloved perfect Z77 ITX mobo to support 1300mbps AC and WOL since the latter can’t be achieved with a USB dongle and I got the mobo with the mini-PCIe slot for a reason but my god it’s had so many logistical impasses that take months to resolve and I feel dumb that I’ve been completely unable to use my bluetooth at intervals

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this is the only real time I’ve really hated ITX in the four years I’ve had this machine and it doesn’t outweigh how much I enjoy admiring the form factor and the lack of wasted space but it is a hell of a lot dumber than just “replace wireless card which has the antennas built into it”

like even when I had to cut away some of the sheet metal in front to fit a modern Nvidia GPU (that’s still just barely short enough not to prevent the plastic front from clipping on) that was still more fun than anything else

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it’s 2017

buy a board with an M.2 slot

it’s okay to let go

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I have negative desire to drop the mobo + CPU combination I got for $250 in 2013 for a pair that would cost more than twice as much for a <20% improvement

I’m waiting on 10nm iris to replace my haswell notebook but I can’t see getting rid of my desktop mobo + CPU until at least 7nm at this rate

I moved my old computer guts into my backup server and now this hard drive sounds like someone poured gravel in it

But debian took me replacing the mobo/cpu/video card in stride and it worked 100% the first time I turned it on so that was cool

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In my last apartment where my desktop was out of range of wifi and it was too annoying to set up an ethernet cable, I got a powerline network adapter. Worked like a charm, and I’ve felt since then it’s a weirdly ignored and underrated home networking approach. The clerk at the store I bought it at didn’t even know what I was talking about at first, and then insisted that was absurd and that I should buy a long ethernet cable instead. (Weird experience, although probably familiar to women.)

Looks like the latest generation of it is http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-powerline-networking-kit/ , maybe it would fit your situation.

(As for Bluetooth, I’m still happily not using anything Bluetooth. When I do occasionally come in contact with a Bluetooth thing, I never failed to be impressed by its flakiness and difficulty of pairing.)

yeah, people who’ve used those seem to swear by them. In my case I think I’m just going to finish what I started – nothing I’ve bought so far has been a waste, I just keep needing to buy more $3 parts that take months to arrive, plus I do actually get a fair amount of use out out bluetooth, so I’m not going to abandon my wireless outright.

update: the new dual-band antennas arrived and I’m good now; bluetooth performance is where it should be and I’m getting 900mbps to the router and 11ms pings to google. yay!

hopefully moving the third one that’s currently just hanging out the side of the case to a notebook-style internal antenna when it arrives doesn’t completely fuck everything up

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apparently the pcie bus is really sensitive or something, my cat just gave my shouldn’t-be-external antenna a tug and it resulted in some of the weirdest display corruption I’ve seen in years

Extremely high speed busses tend to be, yeah

My cat made more use of my touchscreen laptop than I ever did. Like rubbing its face on the top right corner of the screen and closing my windows.

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Hello fellow computer enthusiasts and people who don’t appreciate a sexy form factor like ATX

Yesterday was new build time

(like I keep telling my sister, Microcenter is dangerous)

I have joined team Noctua. The fan is nice and quiet and keeps my trusty old 212 Evo cool. In fact, my fan setup is noticeably quieter than it used to be despite the Noctua fan being the only new addition. Maybe it’s because my R9 290 is so fucking loud the motherboard is doing a good job keep fans running.

Also, yes, the fan is sitting on top of the RAM. No, I won’t move them to the other slots. No, I don’t give a shit.

(2 hours of case surgery later)

End result after nonsense and tinkering: 1700X running comfortably at 3.9 GHz, manually dialed in DRAM timings and the left side of the board is no longer spewing a goddamn rainbow

what the fuck do I do with all these threads though

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