gerry wrote on 2025-12-01, 17:59:

ah, i can see that when getting the latest tech might inadvertently create problems. I use linux on some older circa 2010 PCs and even windows 10 is on similar machines. my smart phone is always some budget one. i leave most things default, just make sure i'm happy with any basic settings and privacy etc. I suppose in a way thought i'm dealing with the modern stuff by not actually being all that modern.... Still, i cannot change the rest of the world nor the immense inertia of the masses in their choices.

Staying a little behind in tech is not a big sacrifice, really. What is considered “low end” today can do almost everything the latest tech can do with ease except for very specific use cases (like playing some specific AAA game, or using some very specific software for a very specific job). It looks to me that basic tech already evolved enough to do 99% of the really cool/useful stuff that could be done with a computer.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that high end hardware is almost the same as low end. It is definitely much more advanced and faster, but the practical applications for all the extra power are getting more and more limited over time.
That at least feels like a good thing for me… you can enjoy the computer you bought for much longer without feeling the need to upgrade, and that is true even considering all the bloat and programmed obsolescence from the industry.

UCyborg wrote on 2025-11-30, 20:28:

Regarding being disillusioned with modern world, same. I feel like I'm the only one who isn't crazy.

I don't feel that bad, but it feels like sane people are outnumbered by assholes or people who started accepting everything.

gaffa2002 wrote on 2025-12-02, 00:35:

Staying a little behind in tech is not a big sacrifice, really. What is considered “low end” today can do almost everything the […]
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gerry wrote on 2025-12-01, 17:59:

ah, i can see that when getting the latest tech might inadvertently create problems. I use linux on some older circa 2010 PCs and even windows 10 is on similar machines. my smart phone is always some budget one. i leave most things default, just make sure i'm happy with any basic settings and privacy etc. I suppose in a way thought i'm dealing with the modern stuff by not actually being all that modern.... Still, i cannot change the rest of the world nor the immense inertia of the masses in their choices.

Staying a little behind in tech is not a big sacrifice, really. What is considered “low end” today can do almost everything the latest tech can do with ease except for very specific use cases (like playing some specific AAA game, or using some very specific software for a very specific job). It looks to me that basic tech already evolved enough to do 99% of the really cool/useful stuff that could be done with a computer.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that high end hardware is almost the same as low end. It is definitely much more advanced and faster, but the practical applications for all the extra power are getting more and more limited over time.
That at least feels like a good thing for me… you can enjoy the computer you bought for much longer without feeling the need to upgrade, and that is true even considering all the bloat and programmed obsolescence from the industry.

My "old" i5-8500 can do almost everything I want, but there are a few things where a faster CPU would be nice. That's why I got the Ryzen. My laptop is still a ThinkPad P53 with an i7-9750H and Nvidia T1000 GPU, and it's still my only modern computer with discrete graphics. My phone is a "budget" model, but I don't need anything better (and it has USB 3, unlike most iPhones).

For what I did today, I got confused by the Windows calculator at work. There are certain cases where pressing the equals key on the screen or the Enter key on the keyboard will add additional operations based on your history. I don't know of any real calculator that works that way. I'll just do basic math in MATLAB then.

I also got confused by Windows 11 not giving any indication that more than one window is grouped into a taskbar icon unless one of those windows is active. I had the same file open multiple times.

Yesterday, I finally got EndeavourOS to start updating again. It has spent weeks saying that everything is up-to-date. I ranked the mirrors again, and then it updated. However, the old problem of downloads randomly failing reappeared. Then I got Fedora installed in a VM, and my first impression is good. People don't seem to talk about it much anymore, but it has a recent kernel for current hardware support and looks like something I could recommend to Linux beginners at the same time. I've heard that it has built-in hybrid graphics support, so I'll have to make live media and run it on my laptop.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-11-11, 14:29:

Released a fifth part of my Building an Enterprise Data Access Layer series: Composable Multi-Tenancy Filtering.

It's getting to an end slowly. I have just 2 more articles in this series to publish. After that the main goals have been achieved.

...

And here are the last 2 articles completing the series:
Building an Enterprise Data Access Layer: Composable Row-Level Security: https://byteaether.github.io/2025/building-an … level-security/
Building an Enterprise Data Access Layer: Automated User Auditing and Series Wrap-up: https://byteaether.github.io/2025/building-an … series-wrap-up/

I don't watch much things in general, but I watched Building the PERFECT Linux PC with Linus Torvalds recently.

Linus Torvalds wrote:

People are strange and you can't fix people.

That's relatable.

lti wrote on 2025-12-02, 05:27:

Then I got Fedora installed in a VM, and my first impression is good. People don't seem to talk about it much anymore, but it has a recent kernel for current hardware support and looks like something I could recommend to Linux beginners at the same time. I've heard that it has built-in hybrid graphics support, so I'll have to make live media and run it on my laptop.

Linus apparently likes it for having it easy to change the kernel. He only cares about compiling the kernel, not other things.

UCyborg wrote on 2025-12-02, 22:27:

lti wrote on 2025-12-02, 05:27:

Then I got Fedora installed in a VM, and my first impression is good. People don't seem to talk about it much anymore, but it has a recent kernel for current hardware support and looks like something I could recommend to Linux beginners at the same time. I've heard that it has built-in hybrid graphics support, so I'll have to make live media and run it on my laptop.

Linus apparently likes it for having it easy to change the kernel. He only cares about compiling the kernel, not other things.

Btw, I, also a Linux n00b while windows poweruser, half-accidentally jumped into the Linux world with Fedora after trying out Mint for a week or so and was also pleasantly surprised how everything "just works". No bad surprises, you need something to happen, you'll figure it out and it's done for good. Been on it with my lab machine for almost half a year. (Before that I never daily-drove Linux in my life. And some times in the past when i experimented slightly with linux as desktop operating system, i somehow always broke it in less than a week.)

I do plan to try to switch to pure Debian just for the reason it has bigger ecosystem around it and i would sleep slightly better because of that. But who knows - i might come back to Fedora, if i feel frustrated with Debian. And Fedora has been so good to me that i have prolonged the switch for at least 2 months now. 😁

I saw this news about Micron exiting the consumer market:

https://www.reuters.com/business/micron-exit- … ess-2025-12-03/

I wonder if the traditional RAM pricing swings can still be followed reliably at this point.

I saw that. Maybe it's worse than I thought when I predicted that prices will never drop.

My computer crashed while I was eating. The journalctl logs show that it was the graphics driver (amdgpu). I had to force power off by holding down the power button, but the logs showed that it recognized me short-pressing the power button in the hope that it would safely shut down. I also had to shut down a second time and cycle AC power to get it to recognize my network card.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-12-03, 10:56:

I do plan to try to switch to pure Debian just for the reason it has bigger ecosystem around it and i would sleep slightly better because of that. But who knows - i might come back to Fedora, if i feel frustrated with Debian. And Fedora has been so good to me that i have prolonged the switch for at least 2 months now. 😁

That was one thing I thought about. It seems like Ubuntu and Arch have the largest ecosystem.

Sorted and tested all my 64 memory cards:

1x MMC, 15x SD, 8x SDHC, 3x SDXC
2x miniSD, 3x microSD, 7x microSDHC, 2x microSDXC

8x CF (FAT16), 1x CF (FAT32)
1x MS, 2x MS Duo, 2x MS PRO Duo, 1x MS Micro
3x SM, 5x xD (those should be "retro" cards though)

I was surprised that SM cards, originally designed for "floppy replacement" and with slow writing speed (<1 MB/s), scored whooping 8.2 MB/s reading speed, outperformed contemporary CF cards based on PIO mode of parallel ATA. CF cards gained speed dominance (and kept it till the end of FAT32/SDHC era) only after UDMA was integrated.

MS PRO Duo were expensive but only reached the speed of SDHC Class 4 but could be outperformed by cheaper Class 6 or 10 cards.

Some modern cards with large capacities and "high speed" have rather lame writing speed, much slower than advertised (reading) speed; sometimes even slower than older cards with smaller capacities and slower advertised speed.

Here's my graphics driver crash:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/4737

To be honest, most of my Linux problems on this Ryzen desktop are related to either KDE or Qualcomm WiFi. I really need to see if I can get fiber Internet now, and if I can, I'll also see if I can wire this shack for Ethernet. At a minimum, I can swap out the WiFi card for an Intel or Mediatek one (or even just swap cards with my laptop since it's my last modern Windows machine).

I saw the Gamers Nexus video about Crucial, and he's the right level of pissed. I didn't think about his view of big corporations wanting us to all use cloud compute and turn our home computers into thin clients.

I want to finally try to understand what all of those CPU supplies do so I can undervolt my 9700X. I thought about getting a KVM switch to keep both of my desktops, but the only ones that work are expensive.

I also need to see if my headphones are buzzing because they're full of hair or if I need to replace them. Maybe I should finish the notch filter for those Peerless 2" drivers and have computer speakers instead of using headphones all day. I even have other computer speaker ideas that I might try building. There's nothing available that I know of that will fit on my desk and have even remotely usable sound quality, so I have to build it myself.

I know Quantum is expanding all over Denver. I'm REALLY REALLY holding myself back from spending $175/mo for 8gig symmetrical fiber. They just finished laying the fiber like last month...

lti wrote on 2025-12-06, 23:16:

Here's my graphics driver crash:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/4737

So it's fglrx all over again. 😜

So, I wanted a "cool" desk clock. Something different. Not a simple LCD/LED clock. I considered quite a few options, even considered designing and making my own. Perhaps a fake Nixi style (real ones are far too expensive for my liking).

Well, a co-worker of mine, who happens to be a crypto miner, showed me "Lotto Miners". They are called this becasue you have a better chance of winning the lottery than these things have at completing a block. Roughly 1 in 3,800,000,000,000,000 (Billion) vs the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot here in the US is roughly 1 in 292,200,000 (million). Make no mistake, these are really just cool toys, just for fun. In may case, it's the "cool" desk clock I wanted.

If it did hit a block, in some crazy alternate universe, it would be worth about 3 Bitcoin. 🤣

Side note, if you buy one off Amazon from China, they come with some random wallet id and a Chinese pool. You're going to want to change that. For these little toys, public-pool.io is your best option. Also, probably not necessary, but mine is isolated in a guest network.

Either way, I like it. It does what I want, it tells time, in a cool way. Though, I think I'm going to design my own stand for it. 😀

I switched over to the Windows SSD I made for the Ryzen so I could screw around with undervolting in Ryzen Master. It didn't help.

The curve optimizer made a difference in power consumption in a few cases, but not enough to matter for most of what I do. The automatic tuning ran it all the way down to -46, but that wasn't stable. It seemed stable at -40. There was also a curve optimizer (I keep calling it a curve tracer) for integrated graphics, but it did nothing until I hit -4. At -4 and -5, power consumption increased, so I turned that curve optimizer back off.

Reducing the VDDCR SOC voltage made a slight difference at idle in Windows (from 48W at stock 1.2V to 40W at 1.17V for the full system), but it had no effect when I swapped my Linux SSD back in. That value appears to be set in the BIOS since a restart is required to apply it, and there's a "VDD MISC" voltage in the BIOS reflects the change.

luckybob wrote on 2025-12-06, 23:19:

I know Quantum is expanding all over Denver. I'm REALLY REALLY holding myself back from spending $175/mo for 8gig symmetrical fiber. They just finished laying the fiber like last month...

I think I'd be lucky to get 1Gb symmetrical up here in Windsor, even though we voted for 2Gb municipal fiber a few years ago. I doubt that there's fiber available yet.

sunkindly wrote on 2025-11-07, 23:04:

Nice! I've been contemplating a RAM upgrade to 64GB as well as I do a lot of stuff with Adobe products. […]
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darry wrote on 2025-11-06, 08:19:

I upgraded my primary personal workstation to a Ryzen 9 5900XT ( from a Ryzen 7 5700X), its GPU from an RX 6600 (8GB) to an RX 9060 XT (16GB) and the system RAM from 32GB to 64GB.

Except maybe for RAM, this is the likely the final upgrade to this platform. AM4 is on its way to Valhalla.

My main current use case, these days, is photo processing and I was getting tired of waiting for DXO Pureraw to finish doing its things. Other use cases are virtualization based.

Nice! I've been contemplating a RAM upgrade to 64GB as well as I do a lot of stuff with Adobe products.

But yeah, I've been holding off because I'm on a Ryzen 9 5900X and it seems somewhat likely I'll be switching to AM5 (or 6?) at some point. Although I have no complaints with the current system whatsoever.

Decisions...

I ended up biting the bullet and getting two more sticks of 32GB DDR4 just in case things get worse. I was at least able to find the same so that I wouldn't have to get a whole new kit.

I wrote a script to kill copilot permanently

Simply copy and paste into a powershell .ps1 file, and then run as administrator.
If you can't figure out how to do that... maybe this isn't for you.

I recommend not trusting me. Read the code. Test it in a VM before committing.

As noted:
This script uses NTFS file permissions to, in practical terms, make all copilot executables inaccessible, inert, not-replaceable via updates (unless microsoft really try) wastes of space on your drive.

It is trivial to change to target different files - look at $filelist=

1#This script uses NTFS file permissions to, in practical terms, make all copilot executables inaccessable, inert, not-replacable via updates (unless microsoft really try) wastes of space on your drive.
2#MUST BE RUN AS AN ADMINISTRATOR!
3#MUST BE RUN AS AN ADMINISTRATOR!
4#MUST BE RUN AS AN ADMINISTRATOR!
5#MUST BE RUN AS AN ADMINISTRATOR!
6#MUST BE RUN AS AN ADMINISTRATOR!
7#get the current username and set it so it is the new owner.
8$currentuser=$env:USERDOMAIN+"\"+$env:USERNAME
9$newowner = New-Object System.Security.Principal.Ntaccount($currentuser)
10#set blank arrays for starting and finishing permissions
11$beforelist=@()
12$resultslist=@()
13#look for any files containing "copilot" and ending in ".exe"
14$filelist="*copilot*.exe"
15#Then we set where to look - in this case whatever you call your main drive. Most likely c:, but if it's not, it doesn't matter.
16$rootdrive=$env:SystemDrive
17#Now we do the looking. We look in the root drive, recursively, for the desired files and put them in a list.
18$exelist=(get-childitem $rootdrive -Recurse -filter $filelist -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) 
19#Now we loop through the list so we can show the permissions before changing
20foreach ($file in $exelist) {
21    $beforelist+= Get-Acl $file.fullname
22}
23#Here's the permissions before changing
24Write-host "Permissions before changing"
25$beforelist |format-table -Property path, owner, access
26#now we change them
27foreach ($file in $exelist) {
28    #get the current permissions into an ACL variable (Access control list)
29    $acl = Get-Acl $file.fullname
30    #change the owner to the current user
31    $acl.SetOwner($newowner)
32    #then we ammend it to disable rights inheritance, and remove all inherited rights. 
33    $acl.SetAccessRuleProtection($true,$false)
34    #Then we apply that to the file
35    $acl | Set-Acl $file.fullname
36    #record the new permissions in a list
37    $resultslist+= Get-Acl $file.fullname
38}
39#the result, unless the files have permissions explicitly applied, is the removal of all file access rights from all users including system.
40Write-host "Current Permissions"
41$resultslist |format-table -Property path, owner, access 

"permanently"

* Dr. Evil air quotes gif goes here *

If you understand file permissions, it requires specific deliberate measures to undo that.
I doubt Microsoft will take that route, but it is possible.

Tested my new 5800X.
I need to buy some AIO because it goes to 90°C like nothing.
I'm currently learning about undervolting.

They're designed to do that these days.
Straight to the redline and stop perfectly there.

myne wrote on Yesterday, 12:31:

They're designed to do that these days.
Straight to the redline and stop perfectly there.

I guess a AIO will do the trick, I'm on a Frozen Notte or a Aqua Elite - 360mm.
Yes, it stops at 90°C and stays there undervolting as required. I'll try to do that in BIOS to see if I can spare the cpu unneeded watts.

My first time doing this kind of stuff, learning time 😀