Posts

So its been a few months since I have posted anything here and the reason why is simple: I just haven’t been feeling all that chatty lately. Now you might be thinking, “Has Jay finally run out of tech things to talk about?” and let me assure you: This is absolutely not the case. It is the case however that despite all of the tech things that I’m embroiled in right now, real life is forcing that to mostly take a back seat at least when it comes to spending the time crafting some long winded diatribe about said tech things. Long story short: My father-in-law has lung cancer and my wife has been mostly living in Augusta for almost two months acting as his home healthcare nurse. I’m managing my father-in-law and step-mother-in-law’s finances for them and handling all of the household duties that Annette and I would typically split amongst us. ...

Some weeks it sure seems like things are always changing, doesn’t it? Well these past few weeks have definitely felt that way for me. Just when I think things in my tech landscape are solidifying to the point where I won’t have any more material for tech related blog posts here, lo and behold the universe delivers some. So last week I decided, in a huff mind you, to dump Pop! OS and replace it with Fedora. Now those of you who know my Linux history should be shocked by this as the last time I seriously used an RPM based distribution was back in the early 2000s before I got hitched. It has been a VERY long time. ...

So ya’ll have been following me on my hardware journey for awhile now and you have probably noticed that I keep focusing on different facets of the hardware experience. Well today I have some good news: I have finally found the exact combination of factors that are required to bring me joy on this front and I’m about to reveal the details of that secret sauce. Once upon a time, I used to be your typical PC Gamer type: I valued performance at the cost of everything else. When I met my wife in 2003, I had just built a dual Xeon workstation with an ATI Radeon 9700 that was huge and exceptionally loud. I loved that machine. It was fast and it did everything I wanted. Sometime after getting married, I discovered that my wife didn’t much care for me spending hours on end in a separate room playing video games, so I transitioned to gaming laptops. ...

This is a post that I will probably come to regret writing and publishing in the future. The reason for that is simple. This post is going to make a lot of former, current and potentially future co-workers feel like idiots. That’s because the topic for this post is scams being pushed by our friends in Big Tech. So it gets somewhat awkward when you realize that I work in tech and plan to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. It gets way more awkward if you know that when it comes to tech scams / fads, nobody is more susceptible to falling for this stuff than people who work in tech. That’s where all this stuff starts and builds momentum after all. Without buy in from the tech community, almost none of this garbage would exist. ...

So long time readers will remember that about four years back, I posted a diatribe entitled “Repeat after me: Games are supposed to be fun” that basically railed against the realization that a lot of the new games floating around weren’t actually all that fun to play. Well today we are going to revisit that topic, freshly inspired by the time I’ve been spending with both Diablo 2: Resurrected and Minecraft: Dungeons. ...

So anybody who is even remotely paying attention to processors knows that Intel is in some really deep shit. Back in 2014 they were essentially riding high above all of the competition and nobody could even come close to challenging their vice like grip on the market. My my how times have changed. Fast forward to the present day, seven years later and you’ll find a situation that is almost unrecognizable. Intel is still pushing processors built on the same tech as they were in 2014. They just have more cores, generate more heat and suck down way more power. To be fair, their integrated GPU (Intel Xe) is actually a bit better nowadays. But only if you ignore the woeful state of the drivers. ...

As some of you may have heard, yesterday Microsoft announced the upcoming release of Windows 11. As an early build had leaked last week and Microsoft had dropped a number of hints this did not shock anybody in particular. What was rather shocking was how little Microsoft seems to give a shit about the normal everyday average computer user. Now if you are a frequent reader, you know that I wholeheartedly believe that Windows is a Legacy Operating System. The core of my reasoning can be understood by quoting a single part of the post: ...

I assume most of you didn’t already know this, so I’m going to clarify it up front. One of my favorite sci-fi trilogies is comprised of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Obviously they weren’t meant to stand alone as a trilogy as they are three movies plucked out of a larger group of films, but I don’t care. They share a coherent story arc between them which begins with the second film and is resolved at the end of the fourth film. There are parts of these movies that inspire much debate among Trekkies, but as a whole, short of a few exceptions like the Matrix trilogy, they are my favorites. ...

Anybody who has spent any amount of time reading my content over the past few years knows what my small server project is. For those of you not in the know, it was basically my attempt to stop using an old desktop as my home server and transition all of its duties to SBCs (Single Board Computers) which are smaller, quieter, cooler, less performant and most importantly, use way less power. That project was a success. I eventually ended up with four ODroid XU4Qs handling various tasks. After I finished that project I started to get more ambitious. Could I actually take this project to the next level and curtail the power usage of my home office? ...

Over the last few months, I have been having trouble with the stability of my home internet connection. This became evident to me while live streaming to Twitch as my stream would begin dropping a lot of frames in a really short amount of time. For a time, recycling the power on the cable modem would make a positive difference, but after a few months that stopped working reliably. This post is about my subsequent experience trying to write a scheduled cron job that would let me know whenever my internet connection was having issues. ...