Dammit, I was looking forward to SoT seeing as it plays pretty janky now compared to modern standards and I was hoping they’d fix up the combat a bit. That said, I only have the Xbox version to go off of. Is the PC version any good? Maybe someone will do a Black Mesa on it.

Tell that to Michel Lotito who, allegedly, ate an entire Cessna 150.

Synology walked back their requirement of using their own branded drives.

First I’ve heard of this but you’re right.

It’s really interesting how far I had to scroll down the search results to find it, as the top page or so of hits are from April when they added the restriction in the first place.

Vivaldi is Chromium based, that’s like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

There are plenty of Firefox forks that will be actively removing the AI crap. Waterfox, Pale Moon, Librewolf, Zen, Floorp to name a few. And these will all continue to support Manifest v2 and therefore adblockers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_based_on_Firefox

OMG the tower even has a lock and a turbo button! My first (self-built) media PC was in a Silverstone case with a VFD display. They make some good stuff.

Bit of a catch-22 for me there. I want to run a local LLM for Home Assistant voice stuff and most of them are heavily optimised for Nvidia. At least the ones that don’t take a ton of effort to setup.

Yeah I’ve recently got back into buying and ripping physical CDs so an internal optical drive would’ve been great, but it seems the fronts of modern PCs are dedicated to massive RGB fans. Gonna have to make do with something external.

Good to know. Last time I tried to share a partition between Windows and Linux it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing but that was a number of years ago now.

Yeah agreed, and that’s what I always used to do when it was just for myself. I did actually have a grand plan of buying parts and trying to get the kids involved in building it, but I’m in my 40s and out of the loop, and really I need something that kinda “just works” and that the rest of the family can use without me incessantly tinkering with it.

That’s why I talked myself into a pre-built, with the mindset that a project PC that takes time and effort to spec out and build just right can come later. But the fact that that pre-built isn’t exactly how I would spec it is likely causing some of this angst!

I do already plan to shrink Windows down to a bare minimum (or possibly just clone it to an external SSD) and use something Linuxy as my daily driver. I’m mostly a Mint guy but I’m interested to give ZorinOS a go since they’ve just released v18. Might even try Bazzite for shits and gigs.

Thanks. I always manage to do this to myself with any expensive purchase. Yesterday I watched a ton of video reviews of it and came away pleased with my decision, and then this morning I started second guessing the whole thing. Been telling myself all day that the CPU thing isn’t a big deal, it’s leaps and bounds more performant than any console, and could still get fixed if Dell releases Intel’s patch, but there’s always that little nagging demon on my shoulder!

Recently finished another playthrough of Half-Life 2, and now I’m back on Hades (not 2, waiting for that to go on sale). I’ve just had the first successful run but I’ve got a long way to go before I’m up to the same point I was at on the Xbox.

It’s more like £150/year, but it’s charged every 3 years. Still very expensive compared to .com for sure!

This looks really good and I’m enthused with how responsive you’re being, will definitely give it a try.

It is a bit of a shame you didn’t call it Jott as jo.tt is available as a domain, but then the tt TLD is pretty expensive so maybe not!

It’s niche but I like to point it out whenever I get the opportunity: if your workplace uses Bitwarden Enterprise, every licensed user gets a free family plan that can be linked to any account. I haven’t personally paid for BW for years.

Bit late with a reply but I bought one with this use case in mind, thinking it could be a cost effective family PC, but immediately fell foul of the lack of proper user switching. You can sign in to different Steam profiles but on the desktop everything runs under a single predefined user with admin rights. Fine for a single person but no good for a family needing multiple distinct user profiles and access controls.

I’ve installed Windows as a dual boot setup but it makes the whole thing much more of a faff, so it doesn’t get used. It’s back to being exclusively a handheld gaming machine.

This right here. In the UK we have a little box (ONT) where the fibre comes into the home that essentially acts as a modem and converts the fibre to ethernet and back again and then they provide a separate wireless router that plugs into it. Other than for my current ISP where I had to specifically request that they enable bridge mode (which they did for free), I’ve never had any issues plugging my own router into the ethernet side of this box.

If your ISP’s wireless router plugs directly into the fibre then you should be able to request that it’s set to bridge mode so that it becomes just a dumb ONT box like we have here. Albeit a large and clunky one.

Contacting the registrar is worth a shot and could be your best bet. I recently did a similar thing except the expiring domain was on a pretty obscure country-TLD with only one registrar. They told me how long the grace period was and then I setup a script to check the availability every minute and alert me when it came up.

Probably not feasible with a .com or similar but they might be able to help in some regard. Edit: though having read about drop catching, that’s definitely your best bet if it’s likely to be sniped!

This is very impressive and I’m highly likely to give it a whirl. My question is, though: would it be something that my very non-tech savvy wife could use?

Eg. I’m thinking setup the app on her phone with a default location and when she asks me for a file I can just tell her that I’ve “put it in the app”, and she’ll be able to easily retrieve it. Also same thing but vice versa, though the video seems to cover that via the Android share menu…

Again, super impressive. Good job!

I used to work at a games studio that would get these delivered fairly regularly, usually paired with a particular motherboard and presumably a custom BIOS.

I think we were technically supposed to return them but the manufacturers never enforced it, so once the chip was actually released to the public - and assuming the sample was stable enough for general use - the PC would rotate into normal stock and eventually get sold for cheap to staff or end up in the spare parts bin.

While it was cool at first to get pre-production chips before anyone else, it became pretty mundane and I’m not at all surprised to see them out in the wild decades later. Interesting piece of history though!