Apple is allergic to proper cooling on Apple silicon in the first place, at least based on the Macbook Airs I've had to deal with. The graph of CPU activity winds up looking like a saw blade, with the CPU ramping up and immediately dropping once it hits its thermal threshold, if you give it something taxing to chew on, like Prime95.

I understand the limitations of Apple's SoC and the reasoning for not allowing RAM and storage upgrades, but IMO at the very least they should offer the option for some sort of high speed caching tier, lest the low spec versions of its hardware turn in to e-waste years before the higher end versions.

It just sucks to see that on $1000+ computers.

Recording Engineers generally try to master separately for vinyl if they are allowed to do so, but whether or not that is actually done depends on the record label and artist's wishes. Most of the time, the label wants to do the thing that costs the least. Given the opportunity, those same engineers will also create separate mixes for mono and stereo and possibly some flavors of multichannel (e.g. Atmos) as well.

I don't like the way vinyl sounds and I hate the idea of a medium that degrades every time it's used, but my much-younger partner generally thinks of vinyl as decorative anyway. It's the only physical audio media she owns and we definitely don't have a turntable, either.

Panasonic definitely wins for video features overall but someone used to shooting on a contemporary hybrid mirrorless camera from another manufacturer will definitely have a "WTF is this?" moment for dealing with its contrast-based autofocus system.

I've never seen a Blackmagic camera in the wild, but I do have a couple Panasonic MFT cameras and every time I use one, I'm reminded that I have to be so much more deliberate in my shooting compared to the "point in vaguely the right direction" of my newer gear.

As I understand it, the best you'll get out of a prosumer body like a Sony a1 or Canon R5 is 14 stops of dynamic range, while the state of the art for cine cameras is more like 18 stops. 14 stops is still pretty insane, but cine cameras have continued to improve as well.

You also have to consider that the big boys use sensors that deliver uncompressed 444 chroma subsampling while consumer mirrorless cameras generally only offer 422.

Even a "crappy" secondhand $10000 Arri Alexa FHD camera is going to have that output advantage in terms of color data, plus all the inputs and outputs for secondary monitoring, timing sync, zoom-by-wire et al that more or less aren't seen on prosumer cameras.

Fuji and Hasselblad have "medium format" sensors that aren't crazy-exotic. You can get a 100MP GFX100 with a 44x33 sensor for about $6500, although it's primarily a still camera.

Beyond that, you really have to look at Arri, Sony and Red cine cameras for large format digital. Even then the digital output will be 4.5k to 8k, something you can also get on pretty mainstream Canon (R5), Sony (a1) and Nikon (z9) cameras.

This got labelled a troll but Nikon buys all its sensors from Sony and has third-rate subject detection compared to Canon and Sony, which trade back and forth for superiority in that area. It's basically a lens company that hasn't given up on camera bodies yet in the way that Sigma has. There is some validity to the idea that it's a very pedestrian company. Maybe buying Red is its trip back to full relevancy, but I know a lot of enthusiasts who migrated to Sony or Canon when they went mirrorless and the only people I know are still on Nikon bodies have done so because Nikon is the system with the best overall selection of long zooms for wildlife photography or are still shooting on older SLR bodies.

European-like typing detected.

Rail travel in the USA is extremely limiting outside the northeastern USA. Boston to Washington DC, OK, fine. Do you want to go west of that? I hope you wanted to go through Chicago or New Orleans.

There are some states in the continental USA that are barely or not served at all by Amtrak (Kentucky, Idaho, Kentucky, (east) Tennessee, South Dakota and Wyoming) and there may not be any rail services that connect to metropolitan local light rail. In some place, such as Las Vegas, the "Amtrak Stop" is a bus depot that takes travelers to a completely different state before they get on a train.

I lbought an ORD to LGA round trip flight for $60, inclusive of fees, yesterday. The flight takes an hour and a half. Amtrak wants ~$170 and needs 19 hours to go one way. If I were to try to take Amtrak from relatively close South Bend, Indiana and Kalamazoo, Michigan, I'd need more than 12 hours for what is at most a 90 minute drive.

The USA screwed up by not prioritizing rail as a way to travel. I'd love to take trains more places. But trains tend not to go places Americans need them or on anything like a desirable schedule.

Man I just don't want people to have my cell number. I registered for Signal on a VOIP line used by my office phone, but I have SMS blocked at the carrier level and only give my personal phone number to people who have a live or die need for it. Signal dropping the phone number visibility requirement is great for me. I can finally tie it to a device I use more than once a week.

The fact that I have relatively anonymous encrypted chats to plan my international terrorism is just a nifty bonus.

I fly Spirit around a dozen times a year. I'm single and it's easy enough for me to get on a train that takes me to O'Hare and just go. Spirit flights are cheap enough that I can spend under $100 to do 36 hours in New Orleans or Tampa on a whim.

Spirit charges for everything, so I've just gotten good at fitting every single thing I need in a carry-on. Since I mostly travel domestically within the USA, there's really no place I could go that I can't buy anything that isn't in my bag or can't have the same day I get to my hotel or aribnb. I've been known to pack for two weeks, including my mirrorless camera and lens and a notebook PC, in just my carry on. I can stop by a UPS location if I need to ship something home. Not a big deal.

I understand that it's a little different for someone whose wardrobe needs involve multiple pairs of shoes or something, but it still stuns me to see people wheeling in multiple bags specifically for a Spirit flight.

I pretty much figured that everyone else would wind up in this same place sooner or later. I have stuck with Spirit because its planes are generally newer and in point of fact I've never been on a flight with a mechanical delay.

That's bizarre.

My experience with DDG is that search results are 99% identical to Bing for at least the first couple pages. VERY RARELY I'll see a variance on the second or third result. I would have put money that DDG functionally mirrors Bing results.

Proxmox is free. Windows Server Hyper-V is (surprisingly enough) free as well. I haven't used ESXi in ages, but last time I did, I remember that I had to do a whole bunch of extra work because X or Y key feature found in Vsphere wasn't supported on the freebie version.

The world doesn't explicitly need ESXi any longer and it sounds like the move to cater to Broadcom's biggest customers will just lead to a world where fewer professionals are familiar with its platform. Good luck with that.

My favorite is Windows 11 changing the authentication to make it much harder to use RDP between stand-alone workstations with the same Microsoft Account as the login.

Event Logs have always been slow and terrible.

The context menu is a one-shot fix, at least,

reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve

from whichever command line you prefer will make it work how it used to.

You can install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, but the install doesn't accept the semi-annual version upgrades. It's possible to find media that can be used to manually upgrade your install, or you can do a completely new Windows installation every six months. Either way is kind of a PITA.

The workstation I use in my office is a Xeon E2288. I've just reinstalled Windows 11 to get it up to date a couple times now; it's way too nice of a machine for me to scrap but I also don't need it anywhere else.

On a related note, I've gotten a small monthly payment from a business that still uses FoxPro 2 and Netware for its most critical application. The owner is finally retiring in October and I've already done all the work to move his actual data into another format, but this dude insists that he paid tens of thousands of dollars for this system and it's the only one he's ever gonna buy.

He's had three IT guys retire on him; I'm the youngest person he could find who can claim Novell experience (I'm 48), so he's been paying me for the last four years to keep his system up and running. The only thing I've done in all that time is clone his old drive to new ones, replace his DLT drive and make sure Legato is still working.

Chicago's violent crime rate isn't REALLY that high. On a per-capita basis, it's kind of middling; Danville, Illinois is a vastly more dangerous place for its residents and nearby Elkhart and Goshen are similarly worse than Gary, Indiana, where I live. Coverage of crime in Chicago (and Gary) drives a particular narrative among those of a certain political bent that some community with a majority of non-white residents are the equivalent of Robocop's Detroit or post-occupation Fallujah. It just isn't so.

While I'm at it, one of the biggest current drivers of violent crime in Chicago right now is the redevelopment of the Robert Taylor and Cabrini Green public housing facilities. Both of those communities were turned into mixed income housing without any plan or thought given to how the diaspora of their residents would impact the area. What happened in actuality was that Chicago's majority-black street gangs lost their longtime strongholds, which allowed LatinX-majority gangs funded by Mexican and South American cartels to move in and (violently) compete for territory. The ongoing territorial disputes do make some areas of Chicago dangerous. I am not denying that. It's just something a lot deeper than "Chicago has all the crime." Street gangs exist in every big city. Violent crime exists anywhere there are human beings. Chicago does not need or deserve to be singled out when the godless urban hellholes of St. Louis, MO and Omaha, NE are both much, much higher in terms of violent crime rates per capita.