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The lonely tech post thread.

Saul Goodman said:
I prefer three screens for doing my work stuff. The bezels don't bother me at this stage. It's how I've been doing it for about 15 years. I think I'd struggle to change to any other way.
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What games do you play out of interest that 3 screens benefits?

I need multiple monitors to work, in fact it drives me crazy when I'm in the office that all I've got is 2 1080 screens and my laptop. My WFH home setup is so much nicer.
 
Anyway passed the AZ900 exam with 901. I know it's an easy exam, but there's always a worry they throw something else at you or I didn't do enough study as it's easy. Beyond 365 I barely use Azure at work, so it's a bit pointless, but it was on a list of things to pass to become a full member of the team and I wasn't going to question that as it's easy and they paid. :)

Fucking OnVue stopped halfway through as apparently WhatsApp was running. It wasn't, but had started some service in the background. I think next time I'm going to get an old SSD and do the cleanest installation of Windows I can do, with all the features disabled, and take it from that. I should probably turn vitalisation back in bios as well. :mad:
 
UnderOpenSky said:
What games do you play out of interest that 3 screens benefits?

I need multiple monitors to work, in fact it drives me crazy when I'm in the office that all I've got is 2 1080 screens and my laptop. My WFH home setup is so much nicer.
Click to expand...
I mostly play racing games, but it's not so much that the games benefit from them, it's that I like the peripheral vision thing going on. It's much more immersive.
I bought a Quest 3 recently, and that's about as immersive as it gets, but they're not really something you can spend hours at a time on, which is something I tend to do when a game must be finished.

Unfortunately, I'm having to use two screens at the moment, as I only use my main PC for things that require it. I'm using a Beelink N100 thing for most stuff, but it only has two HDMI ports, so it's a sacrifice. Although it does run Solidworks, to an extent, which surprised me, so I don't even bother firing up the PC for small stuff. There's just no point using it for rendering, as you'd be waiting all day.

The graphics card in my PC is actually a GTX Titan X, the 12 gig version. If it was anything less I'd have upgraded it before now.
I think the only reason I haven't upgraded for so long is because I'm not gaming, and the machine is still capable of handling anything else I throw at it... I think I might be getting more sensible in my old age :(
 
Would I be right in thinking that modern little 'laptops' don't have a fan? I'm looking to replace my aged 10" Chromebook with a little Windows machine.
 
Sasaferrato said:
Would I be right in thinking that modern little 'laptops' don't have a fan? I'm looking to replace my aged 10" Chromebook with a little Windows machine.
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Depends on the laptop. Most of them will still have a fan, bar the absolute cheapest and the base Macbook. But my son's N100-powered Chromebook doesn't need one. It's just that Chromebook and cheapest go together in general.
 
I'm working in the data center this afternoon and like an idiot didn't bring a coat or at least a jumper to work. :facepalm:

On the plus side I bought my noise cancelling headphones. Can't believe how well they work at bringing the noise right down. :)
 
Nivag said:
I made that mistake once, had to pop out at lunch time and try and buy a jumper in the middle of summer. The shop thought I was mad lol
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Yeah. My walk to work is up a hill the whole way, so I never think in the morning to take one. Mind you I've worked out if nobody cares if I where my uniform polo shirt in the office, so I've just stashed one at work in case I need to visits, so should probably do the same with a fleece. I'm also working above an AC vent, so might have to stash some cardboard to block it.

I'd also forgotten how painful bare metal windows installs are on servers that take that long each restart.
 
I was reading an article on El Reg about Microsoft moving LinkedIn to their new in-house Linux, Azure Linux. Someone had said they always thought that Microsoft buying out Ubuntu seemed a better plan than rolling their own, even if it wouldn't go down well in the Open Source community.
>I'm personally not sure how well it would go down with the OSS community

I'm guessing somewhat similar to an Al-Qaeda / Boeing merger ?
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:D
 
UnderOpenSky said:
To my shame I didn't even know they owned it.

As someone who doesn't do much Linux is it that bad?
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Well they thankfully don't own Ubuntu. Ubuntu just acts like they're Microsoft in the Linux world. AFAICT, Azure Linux is a spin off of some more scientific distribution that's based ultimately on Red Hat. (or at least uses RPMs rather than PKGs) Which makes sense as they're moving LinkedIn off of CentOS.

Ubuntu has done a number of "We've made this change for your own good. You will like it. If you don't, you can fuck off elsewhere."

Which is why 95% of our machines are Debian.
 
Lazy Llama said:
You’re okay, they don’t own it, Canonical is privately owned. Microsoft have a partnership with Canonical so that the WSL is Ubuntu-based and Ubuntu seems to be their preferred 3rd party distro.
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It's based on their older CBL-Mariner distro (which is ultimately RH) from their Azure containers, and it's what runs the graphical side of WSL2. CBL is really basic, just exists to run containers, so I'd guess AzLin is more of a fully formed distro. The one thing I have to agree with MS on is that they actively seek out anywhere that they've giving money to or promoting competitors and try to replace it from within. That's sensible.
 
I finally found a use for the Raspberry Pi 5 I accidentally ordered a few months ago.
I'm working on a project that involves monitoring and controlling some temperatures to pretty tight tolerances of ~1/10th of a degree.
I don't know why, probably because I have lots of them, but I decided to use ESP32s and Arduinos to control it all, and a PIC18 microcontroller thrown in for good measure, but the amount of wires and components involved has gone beyond a joke.

This is the rat's nest of shite I'd thrown at it before stopping and thinking "Fuck that!", and rethinking the whole thing.

rat nest.jpg

We were talking about ultra small form factor 'puters on this thread lately, and I mentioned I had a Raspberry Pi going to waste, so I decided to replace all of it with the Pi and web based GUI, and rather than have another rat's nest of wires, I thought I'd have a go at a 'Pi Hat' PCB, that plugs directly into the Pi's GPIO header.

Gerber.png

Board-Blue.png

I sent the Gerber files to a PCB manufacturer in China on Tuesday afternoon, and ordered 10 boards from them. The boards arrived today :eek:

Finished Board.jpg

10 boards, including 3 day delivery, minus a $10 new user discount , came to just €18. 🤯
I always assumed it wouldn't be financially viable to get PCBs made, unless you were buying large quantities, but this is a game changer. I'll never again use jumper wires for anything other than a prototype.

Next problem is that since moving to this house over 3 years ago, I still haven't unpacked and sorted my electronics stuff, so I have to go through 6 bags of components to find the parts I need... starting with this one :facepalm:


components.jpg

I may be some time...
 
Later comments on there seem to suggest that it's a youtube issue despite Firefox coming in for an early hammering. I've not worked my way through them though. I wonder whether it's a Firefox for Windows thing, too,

Firefox does leak memory somewhat so use System Monitor to keep an eye on memory and swap use and I close Firefox down and reopen which solves it. .
 
I'm at the Science and Industry Museum with my Nephew in the gaming exhibit. It's quite cool. They've got so many historical consoles including stuff I only read about and never knew anyone who had one. Things like the 3DO, Neo Geo, Mega CD, Atari Jaguar, CD32 etc.

My nephew on picking up a NES controller asked me if he could move the pad to move....
 
Work has given me a stupid laptop. I'm not totally sure I want it, it's a proper gaming laptop, Ryzen 7 with 3060 and a 2560x1600 display. It weighs a ton and I've already got a gaming PC of my own.

My request for better screens was denied as apparently there's no budget, but they had this spare and it will drive 4 shitty 1080p screens which my nice lightweight HP won't.
 
So I've ended up in charge of backups. :(

It's quite a slick product, but I've not used it before and its not as common as say Veeam which I've used before. Got an email from them offering a half day training which I gladly accepted. However its basically a technical sales pitch, intresting to learn some of the stuff it can do (restore VMware to Hyper V for example), but no actual training, just PowerPoint slides.
 
I put this in the crafty thread but it probably belongs here, as I doubt many people read both threads, and it's a bit techy, so I'll copy/paste it here.

A friend asked if I could make something steampunk for a party they're going to.
I'd already had an idea for something a few years ago, and this gave me an excuse do it.
I had some ''steampunk' welding goggles with spikes, so I added some electronics and a bit of trickery, and made infinity goggles.
They're only thrown together loosely, as a proof of concept, but now that they're working I'll tidy it all up and make it remote control from an RF key fob.


View attachment goggles+hat.mp4
 
Saul Goodman said:
I put this in the crafty thread but it probably belongs here, as I doubt many people read both threads, and it's a bit techy, so I'll copy/paste it here.

A friend asked if I could make something steampunk for a party they're going to.
I'd already had an idea for something a few years ago, and this gave me an excuse do it.
I had some ''steampunk' welding goggles with spikes, so I added some electronics and a bit of trickery, and made infinity goggles.
They're only thrown together loosely, as a proof of concept, but now that they're working I'll tidy it all up and make it remote control from an RF key fob.


View attachment 441670
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Wow! This is wonderful! I salute you.
 
I'm finally going to replace my ancient Chromebook with a little Win11 machine.

Pretty much all it will be used for is web browsing and posting on here.

What is the minimum processor I should be looking at? Indeed, if anyone has a recommendation for a machine, 10" to 12" or so, it would be welcome. £300ish max (I have £60.00 in Amazon vouchers).
 
Sasaferrato said:
I'm finally going to replace my ancient Chromebook with a little Win11 machine.

Pretty much all it will be used for is web browsing and posting on here.

What is the minimum processor I should be looking at? Indeed, if anyone has a recommendation for a machine, 10" to 12" or so, it would be welcome. £300ish max (I have £60.00 in Amazon vouchers).
Click to expand...

Is this new or reconditioned? I see there is a lot of recon stuff on Amazon.

The generation can be more important then the model. A modern i3 can be more powerful then an older i7.
 
Ignore anything Celeron or Pentium. They're both low-end and a few years old. The names have been retired in favour of the N100 as the low end, and it's perfectly decent enough for your use case.
(the best and newest Pentium Golds were as good as an N100, but it's just easier to not buy the damned things)
Literally anything current is powerful enough, just avoid the older generations unless they're i5+. Just run it past us sos you're not overpaying.
 
Chz said:
Ignore anything Celeron or Pentium. They're both low-end and a few years old. The names have been retired in favour of the N100 as the low end, and it's perfectly decent enough for your use case.
(the best and newest Pentium Golds were as good as an N100, but it's just easier to not buy the damned things)
Literally anything current is powerful enough, just avoid the older generations unless they're i5+. Just run it past us sos you're not overpaying.
Click to expand...
I will do.
 
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