efaardvark

Got the 2nd season of The Witcher on the to-watch list.

On 9/2/2021 at 10:17 AM, pathospades said:

I want the Steam Deck to be my new computer. I'm holding out until it becomes available, but I fear scalpers are gonna scalp.

I don't think it could be my main computer but it certainly is intriguing.  As a portable gaming system it looks awesome.  My last portable is/was an old(!) NIntendo 3DS & I've thought of replacing it with a switch several times but never pulled the trigger.  If I had more time for games I would probably get a Steam Deck at this point but I just don't.  (I have 2 games sitting untouched in my steam library that I've been trying to find time to play for several months now as it is.  )

5 hours ago, KrutoyChuvak said:

Apple MacBook Air - M1 processor @ 3.2Ghz (4 performance + 4 efficiency cores), 16 GB RAM, 256 GB internal SSD + 1 TB external SSD

I have a coworker who just bought an M1 Air and loves it.  He almost got me to buy one too as an upgrade to my old MB Air.  They're nice systems but I've kind of moved away from Apple since I bought my MBA.  When I set up my current desktop - an AMD 2700X-based "PC" system - I put linux on it so I decided my next laptop needs to be linux as well.  I've always been a unix guy anyway.  (Or at least since the '90s when Commodore went out of business.)

Anyone here tried Amazon's New World (beta) yet?

18 hours ago, efaardvark said:

Looks like System76's "pangolin" laptop has been updated.  It now has either a 6/12 core Ryzen 5 5500U or an 8/16 core Ryzen 7 5700U mobile APU in place of the "old" 4000-series CPUs.  And a bump in the base price from $900 (iirc) to $1200 unfortunately.  (Not that it matters since you still can't buy one anyway.)  I think the keyboard might have been updated as well.  I didn't save the old specs and I'm too lazy to go dig in the archive but I don't recall it being multicolor.

Went back today and it turns out I lied.  You can buy one!  Or at least order one anyway.  So I did.    I hope this works out.  The last time I bought a new laptop was my old 2013-vintage MacBook Air so I'm looking forward to having something a bit more modern to work with.

Looks like System76's "pangolin" laptop has been updated.  It now has either a 6/12 core Ryzen 5 5500U or an 8/16 core Ryzen 7 5700U mobile APU in place of the "old" 4000-series CPUs.  And a bump in the base price from $900 (iirc) to $1200 unfortunately.  (Not that it matters since you still can't buy one anyway.)  I think the keyboard might have been updated as well.  I didn't save the old specs and I'm too lazy to go dig in the archive but I don't recall it being multicolor.

On 8/27/2021 at 10:17 AM, Ohayotaku said:

She’s back

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/daily-briefs/2021-08-27/teasing-master-takagi-san-anime-listed-with-3rd-season-film-in-2022/.176741

Too bad for Nishikata.   

I did find this review about the dead-tree version.  Not the anime info I was looking for but cool nevertheless..

Thanks for checking.  I did find pieces of it on YouTube.  Not the whole thing though.

I try to keep them as a last resort but in this case I might have to go for an “alternate” site.

I am searching for “Buki yo Saraba (Farewell to Arms)”.  It is one of the shorts in the “Short Peace” collection.  I saw it once upon a time but I’d like to revisit it and I’m not finding it streaming anywhere on crunchy or Netflix, the only two (legal) sites I have access to at the moment.  Anyone know where I can find this one?

TIA…

Just some classical... 

OMG the hair!
 

Just finished bokumachi.  (aka Erased.)  Had it in my queue for quite a while now but just recently rediscovered it.  Glad I did.

Hi, my name is John and I am totally addicted to sudoku.  If there were a sudoku anonymous then I would be at all the meetings.   

Seriously though, Sudoku isn’t really about math.  It is 100% logic.  You can replace the numbers with any arbitrary set of 9 symbols.  My sudoku app lets me use numbers & letters from several languages, plus pips (like on dominos), etc.  

There’s even an insanity-inducing mode that rotates through all the possible symbol sets, changing them about once per second while you are playing!     

And the cool video just keeps coming...

13 hours ago, RZ. said:

Were things really so different before the Internet though? It may have been different here in Europe, but it's hard to imagine the US education system had much time for critical thinking or teaching people "how" to think during the height of the Cold War.

I think so, or at least in past days it was a lot easier for the average joe to understand enough to get by and be an effective voter.  The flip side of there being so much cool technology available these days is that it is harder to understand it all, both at the individual subject level and as a %age of the overall body of human knowledge.  At the same time as society has been getting more complex and more dependent on technology, schools have been backing off from requiring actual skills or knowledge for academic advancement in favor of "participation" and the like. 

Even in my day* there was a requirement to take both a "shop" class like wood- or metalworking, and a "science" class like physics, biology, or chemistry.  This at the middle-school level.  There were also electives like "home economics" that were available (and encouraged).  These days the middle school I went to doesn't offer anything like a shop or home-ec class anymore, and subjects like physics or biology are only available to the "university track" students at the HS level.   It becomes a problem when people can graduate from HS without decent adulting skills, sometimes even without being able to read and write.  How can we expect those people to be able to resist the latest 'Net meme?  Never mind effectively exercise their management & oversight responsibilities as voters and politicians in a world that's increasingly dependent on science and technology!

*I graduated HS in '82 so this was definitely before the 'Net.  Even (mostly) before the personal computer era.  I think I touched my first personal computer - an Apple ][ - in the late 70s.  The IBM PC didn't come along until the early 80s.  Windows didn't exist until '85 or so.  The "world wide web" - what most people would consider the beginning of the 'Net - didn't come along until Berners-Lee invented the concept in '89.. and web browsers weren't in common use until around the mid 90s.

So, any geologists in the room?  I'm not but I've been following this volcanic eruption in Iceland and I must say it has me hooked.  Some very good stuff being posted on places like Youtube, including 4k video from drone overflights of the vigorously-boiling lava as it overflows the vent and flows out to fill the surrounding caldera.    Very photogenic if nothing else.  I'm in the habit now of queuing up the latest and just having it running as background while I'm doing other things.

There's also cool stuff like this 3d/GIS model/dataset online if you want a more interactive experience.

30 minutes ago, RZ. said:

Internet caused politics to regress in a way. Well, more like it caused electorates to regress. People used to believe whatever they read in the newspapers or saw on the TV, which isn't good, but it kept things relatively harmonious when it came to the ballot box. The Internet has opened up us up to unfiltered media, both truthful and false. It's created a world where we're forced to question everything and trust nothing, except for that which reinforces our existing beliefs.

I don't think it was the 'Net that created that world.  I mean, there's that saying, "Believe nothing of what you hear, and half of what you see", that predates the 'Net by a century at least.  It has always been the case that people had to decide what to believe and what information sources they were going to trust.  It is certainly true that the filtering is much more easily bypassed in the Internet era but the only thing that I'd credit(?) the 'Net with is making it a lot easier for people to find the "echo chambers" where they could connect with other like-minded individuals.  Ultimately the only thing that the 'Net is good for is facilitating communication after all.  It doesn't itself create the ideas - good or bad - it just makes it easier for them to be communicated.

If we're playing the blame game I'd blame an education system that switched from teaching people -how- to think to telling people -what- to think.  (That and the fact that the "what" was so obviously false and self-serving of the powers-that-be that people rejected it in favor of narratives pulled from said echo chambers.)  IMHO we would be in a lot better shape if we'd had a culture that valued - and enforced, socially-speaking - critical-thinking skills before the likes of Facebook came along.  As it is, most people are no more prepared to protect themselves from the cesspit of viral memes that they're exposed to online than the natives of the Americas were able to protect themselves from smallpox and other diseases brought over from Europe.

I really want to do a build like this.  With GPU prices still ridiculously high and CPUs with built-in GPUs like AMD's 5700G it seems like one ought to be able to get some pretty good performance even in the under-$1k build category.  In a case like this one you still have the option of adding a discrete GPU in a PCI slot if/when prices come down.  Likewise AMD's A4 socket supports upgrading the CPU if/when the need arises as well.

On 8/7/2021 at 10:49 PM, Q-Tip said:

This looks interesting, and I need something new to watch, what's your opinion of it?

Final verdict - on the first season at least - is "go for it".  Fantasy isn't really my thing but even so I got to the end and decided it was interesting enough to put the second season on my to-watch list.

3 hours ago, RZ. said:

I didn't realise it was so expensive to browse the internet back then.

The 'Net itself was actually pretty cheap, once you were on.  Places like Compuserve and GEnie had additional usage charges over and above the carriers' (AT&T, etc.)  Once you were past the gatekeepers however the 'Net was actually one of the cheapest hangouts.  That's why GEnie, Compuserve, etc. aren't around anymore.  I liked GEnie's Dragons Gate a lot, but at between $6 and $25/hr (depending on time of day, etc.) to play it just wasn't within reach of most people.  Then the 'Net came along and offered telnet access to free MOOs & MUDs running on computers in enthusiasts' basements for no additional charge over whatever your carrier was charging.  Wasn't that hard for people to set up their own server either so there were 1000s of them.  (I even ran a CircleMUD of my own once upon a time.)  A lot of people could connect to those basement servers for "free" via their work or school 'Net connection too.  Employers even often used "free internet access" as a lure for employees, especially during the "dot com" years.  (At least until the crash came.)

3 hours ago, RZ. said:

The technological advancement in the last 20 years really has been astounding.

This is quite true, and not just in communications.  RNA vaccines, 100% reusable orbital rockets, 3d printing... the list is long.  If only our politics had made similar advancements over the same time frame.   

Welcome back!

13 hours ago, RZ. said:

I sometimes I wonder what it was like back then in the late 90s..

Online?  Not so great tbh.  In the late 90s/early naughties for most people bandwidth was measured in kilobytes per second.  (My own 'Net connection was a unix-based NetBSD system with an on-demand dialup PPP link through a 56k modem.)  Being on unix, my main browser was Mosaic.   Yahoo was basically just a collection of symlinks.  google as we know it basically didn't exist either. Archie and gopher were the go-to protocols for search & download.  Youtube didn't exist until 2005.  Streaming of any sort really didn't exist.  Certainly video was painful, if you can even call grainy, postage-stamp sized slideshows "video".  Lo-fi audio (32kbps mp3) was just barely possible on higher-end consumer hardware.  Even 64kbps encoding doesn't fit through a "56k" modem that usually didn't get anywhere near that in practice.  Neither did social media exist until Friendster came along in the early/mid naughties. 

My main hangouts in the 90s/00s were usenet and IRC.  (Undernet mainly, since EFnet had issues).  There actually were some decent anime channels, but it was all text based.  Again, typically available bandwidth pretty much precluded downloads or streaming.  Even the occasional posts of (uuencoded) pictures was often frowned upon as too bandwidth intensive for the main channel and the .binary channels/groups were always full of .. stuff.  Interesting, but often quite, er.. well, let's just say "off-topic" material.  Email was still pretty primitive too - often text-only - and I actually was still doing a significant amount of online activity via BBS through my local  fidonet node.  That and GEnie.  (Anyone ever play a text-based online RPG called Dragons Gate?  At $0.10/minute in data charges and 1200 characters per second probably not, or at least not for long.)

Welcome!

12 hours ago, Q-Tip said:

This looks interesting, and I need something new to watch, what's your opinion of it?

Not quite sure yet.  Not bad so far.  It started a bit slow for me.  No complaints about the acting, effects, or other technicalities.  I haven't read the book(s) so the usual book->screen conversion annoyances aren't noticeable, just a bit of confusion over some of the details.  I suspect they might have glossed over or reworked a thing or two. 

At this point I'm only about halfway through however.. done with most of the set up and just getting to the actual story, but not yet into the good stuff. 

Started bingeing Shadow and Bone this weekend.

On 7/10/2021 at 7:35 PM, Kohloo said:

I’ve wanted to build my own computer for a very long time now. I think it would be amazing. 

Sadly, I most definitely do not have the money or the space for it. 

I use some Asus laptop (I have no idea which one) that has served me well for several years now. 

They don't have to be big.  I have a system in an ASRock "Deskmini" case that I'm typing this on and it is only 155 x 155 x 80 mm (or 6.1 x 6.1 x 3.1 inches if you prefer).  You can even get a mount for attaching the case to your monitor's VESA mount so you don't have to lose any desk space.  Put one of AMD's 5000-series APUs that they just released yesterday in there and you don't have to pay for a discrete GPU, so you save some $$$($$$$$$) too.  The APU's built-in GPUs don't have the performance of discrete GPUs but they do beat anything you'll find in a laptop.  Mine has an older, 4-core  Ryzen 5 3400G in it and it'll still run things like Minecraft, Valheim, and Kerbal Space Program.

The other thing I'd like try is start with a mini-itx case such as Cooler Master's Elite 130.  That case is somewhat larger than the deskmini - though still pretty small for a desktop PC - but would let you use desktop parts.  It also gives you a full-length PCI slot.  Again, put an APU in there and leave off the GFX card for now.  The desktop RAM would be faster and help a lot with an APU's performance, but you could still add a GFX card later if/when prices come down.