I share some posts from my blog here, and almost all of them have a meta-discussion regarding “self-promotion”. The latest prompted me to bring up a proper meta-discussion on the subject.

Tildes' Code of Conduct says:

If you have your own site/project/channel/etc. that you'd like to share on Tildes, that's generally fine (in moderation), but it shouldn't be the primary reason that you post on the site. Tildes is a community, not a free advertising platform. Sharing your own content is welcome as long as you're involved in the community, but don't just treat Tildes as a source of an audience.

I guess we need to address what constitutes “moderation” and sharing one's own stuff as “primary reason”. Am I abusing this rule? If so, why? If not, what am I doing to avoid abusing it? (Using myself as a “control group” for the discussion; feel free to bring made up examples.)

As I said elsewhere, I like the discussions that happens here, try to engage in topics other than mine, and I share my blog posts candidly.

Dear Tildesterites: my trusty PC has led a dutiful life of eleven years and, along with my keyboard, has finally met its earthly doom (total organ failure). I wish it luck across the ultraviolet lithographic bridge, at the other side of which we'll someday reunite to play Skyrim together again.

In the meantime, I would like another PC on which to play various modern AAA games except for The Elder Scrolls VI. I'd intended to replace my machine ~4 years ago when it was in fairer health, but other efforts took priority. Since then, the product market has inflated in price and all the SKUs have changed, so I'm back to being mostly clueless about the state of the industry.

I put together a parts list from some basic research and would like a gut check. I'm coming from an i5-4460, GTX 970, and 16 GB RAM at 1080p 144hz, which may as well be neolithic. I only really need this PC to play video games smoothly and to do standard workstation tasks (nothing remarkable).

PCPartPicker Part List

Rationale and notes:

• 60hz to 144hz was the greatest upgrade I ever made and now it seems like 180hz or 240hz is the new 144hz. I've also wanted to move to 1440p for years. I reviewed the Gamers Nexus GPU benchmarks and it seems like 120fps+ is broadly possible at this resolution.
• Nvidia's cards seem unreasonably priced. A friend of mine offered me his RTX 3070 for free, which I would be happy to accept as a stand-in to keep the initial cost down, and in a year I might come back to get a newer card like the 9070 XT or whatever replaces it?
• I'd like an M.2 to keep cable management to a minimum.
• I will not overclock or undervolt the CPU. I'd just like it to run.
• I'd love for the thing to be quiet.

My questions are:

1. Does the build feel balanced? Are there any egregious oversights?
2. How much RAM is prudent, at what speed/latency? Do we expect prices to drop anytime soon?
3. M.2 PCIe 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0 x4? Does this matter for games? Is a dedicated OS drive still best practice?
4. IPS or OLED? WOLED or QD-OLED? Is Freesync Premium sufficient? (@AugustusFerdinand we spoke about this some time ago; has your opinion changed?)

I thank you in advance for your insights. I'm not going to buy this immediately (this summer at the earliest), but I'd like to know how close to reasonable I'm being.

Hi! My partner and I want to follow this guide and add LED strip lighting to bookcases we're putting up. Partner has significant experience with assembly/DIY home improvement projects, I have minimal but nonzero experience with soldering. We are both a bit lost on how to pick LED strip lighting and a controller.

Info about our setup:

• We will have several bookcases next to each other
• We would rather drill a slightly bigger hole in the side of the cases to pass the strip itself in between the cases rather than deal with extra soldering joints
• We have picked out conduit already (basically all of the non-electrical components)
• There are seven shelves on each case so we'll need seven LED strips
• There will be roughly 10 feet (a bit less) of strips per shelf, collectively across all the cases
• We would like to have RGB controls, but we don't care about syncing to music

Questions:

• What LED strips would you recommend? Longevity being probably the most important part
• What controller/power supply should we use? Keep in mind neither of us is super experienced with this kind of thing so the less complicated the better
• Anything else I should be asking that I'm not? Any advice in general?

Edit: Realized I sent the wrong link originally. This is the guide we're following.