I hope I am blind to something here... but every time I want to wipe a USB that had a linux distro on it (Mint, in this case) I have to hop into Windows and use DISKPART. Just now the stupid thing didn't say it was read only (by flags), but I had to clear that anyway before it would clean

I am wiping this to create a macOS installer. I tried to clear it on MacOS, EndeavourOS (with partitionmanager), and Windows (Explorer before DISKPART)

All this said, I love DISKPART and I will never speak ill of it. Its simple and effective and just works.

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I have been so lucky, so careful, and yet today I realised I have been compromised: my mac was compromised (i assume) by a shoddy version of Maccy (a clipboard manager!!!) which installed something called PamStealer on my computer.

What twigged me to it was a very very strange pop up notification, telling me Finder had lost access to Files, with a prompted button to grant “Finder” full disk access. I’ve used Macs for more than thirty years (twenty years with any real zeal) and the notification gave me pause bc it simply did not make sense. I didn’t give the access and instead searched for the exact wording of the popup, and the first result was a Apple community post explaining which malware this was. Further searches gave me more info.

There went the rest of my day, attempting to purge the machine without a clean install (which, miasmatically, I may still do). I think I’m clean now, but fucking hell.

Hi all. I'm working on an idea for my next desktop/workstation build since I stumbled into some resources that make something more awesome than what I currently have a reasonable option.

What I want to use (because I already have these and thus can save money - got a bunch of rackmount computers at auction and got pretty lucky): infinite sticks of 16GB DDR4 3200 (ok, so I have 20 sticks left after selling a bunch, not exactly infinite but good enough for wanting a single maxed-out build) and 4 RTX A4000 16GB cards. Probably I only intend to use 2 of those and sell the other 2. I also am spoiled for options with various 4U rackmount server cases and a couple of them have 1,000W power supplies (the 2 computers that each had 2x A4000 cards had 1kW power supplies).

My current desktop is an i9-11900k / 64GB DDR4 3200 / RTX A2000 6GB. At first I was interested in just popping a couple of the A4000 cards in but then research banged my head into the issue of PCIe lanes being limited by the CPU.

Options I'm currently considering are Threadripper Xen 3 generation (since that uses DDR4 3200, lets me use 8 sticks depending on motherboard, and gives me 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes), EPYC of some variety since some of those also fit into the 'can use tons of RAM and have tons of memory channels + more than enough PCIe lanes' or..... dual Xeon? AMD seems like the better choice though - but correct me if I'm missing something there.

If I've missed any other options that would give me enough PCIe lanes for at least 2 A4000 cards both connected at full PCIe 4.0x16 and the ability to utilize as much of the RAM as I have (and have the advantage of more memory channels than standard desktop processors) please let me know.

Also looking to not break the bank too much, something that fits into the sub-$2K range, or close to that, would be preferable (and cheaper being more preferable). Anything that goes past $3.5K is almost certainly not up for consideration.

Last point of consideration is that I'm not looking for any part of the new build to be less capable than what I already have, and am not looking to spend significant money for a non-significant capability increase.

Use-cases relevant to my desire for the horsepower: video rendering with Blender (I certainly wouldn't mind rendering going a lot faster when outputting H.265 or rendering hour+ videos), and dipping my toes into local AI (have been interested in this but until I lucked into the A4000 cards it wasn't really possible. With a couple A4000 cards I should be able to run some of the lighter-weight models, at least I believe so (I have, as of yet, no experience running local AI). Would be running Linux (I currently use Linux Mint). Gaming is an afterthought and I don't play anything AAA / ultra-high graphics. Mostly for gaming I just enjoy playing Magic: The Gathering Arena as I drink my morning coffee, so no major hardware requirements there.

Thoughts?

Edit: the DDR4 3200 is non-ECC RAM.

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I just got the newer version of Firefox (v157.0) and I'm amazed at how snappy it is. It feels like Firefox does when you have 0 extensions, except that I have uBO and a few others.

It used to feel so sluggish, pages took 500ms or even 1 second to display anything after typing the address, but no more; they render almost instantly.

A very nice surprise indeed!

If you left Firefox because it was too slow, now's the time to ditch Chrom{e,ium} and reign Google's chokehold on standards and utter contempt for privacy in!

Ran some benchmarks on an X230 (i5 3rd gen):
FF 156
speedometer: 3.27
jetstream 3: 65.3
motionmark: 456.52 60fps +-7.50%

FF 157
speedometer: 7.16
jetstream 3: 68.49
motionmark 593.57 60fps +- 8.93%

The speedup is quite noticeable

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.

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The prices have increased, and even before people called it too expensive.

I am just wondering - do you have one? What do you use it for? I've been thinking of getting one (as a business expense, I guess the price is high, but then again - what other option do you have for compute? renting GPUs is quite expensive, any comparable amount of VRAM is very expensive - ok if you have space and mostly want to do inference, I guess you have better options (3090 or 5090)

For me, I have just been considering having some more compute available for robotics, finetuning, trying out selfhosted and fine tuned LLMs, among other things. My other setup (M1Pro 32GB and a 1070 Mini) could work for some stuff, but especially for the robotics part it's mostly about NVIDIA...

Curious about any experiences.

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My friend owns a circus performance company, and she got a very real-seeming request to discuss a possible wedding gig. "Client" requested that she join a meeting link at h​tt​p​s:/​/​joininivite​.​es/egooglemeet​.​us to discuss (several zero-width spaces are pasted throughout that to make it unclickable). Friend joined the call and it asked her to update software in order to join, she didn't follow any links from the site directly but tried updating Chrome through Microsoft Store etc. This sounded fishy to me so I asked to see the URL and this definitely seems like a scam.

This seems extra concerning because:

1. Initial outreach from scammer seemed genuine even when I read it specifically looking for signs of phishing
2. Initial outreach from scammer was specifically tailored to friend's website content, this is exactly the kind of gig she would get booked for
3. There were several back-and-forth legit-seeming emails before any meeting was agreed to

Friend now wants to make a post within her artist community to protect others and I'm wondering if anyone has already heard of this particular type of attack and has additional details that could help for informing non-tech-savvy performers about it (more specific than "have intuition about when URLs seem dodgy and never click install links that originated from email")

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I wanted to put out a more complete guide than what's currently available for people who may want to do this in the future; welcome to my blog.

Love the mouse, but the battery wasn't lasting more than 3 days.

Here's a pic of the original battery (602030 300mAh 3.7V):
https://drive.proton.me/urls/TT7GVDNG5C#BKMx0MHmSwvg

I bought a replacement battery from AliExpress:
902030 550mAh 3.7V JST 1.5mm 3pin

Here's a pic of the final result:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/BEMDHJH668#I2ZixElmwv7E

There's plenty of height clearance, but no wiggle room with length and width.

The most important tidbit is the polarity of the wires; I had to swap red(+) and black(-).

On the original battery (all black wires) you can see the P- and P+ indicators on the original battery circuit board. In summary, the "bottom" of the connector (on the mouse) expects a positive (red wire), middle is the sensor (yellow wire), top is negative (black wire).

The battery arrived with the red and black wires the other way around. I used the smallest flathead screwdriver to, very slightly, prop the plastic "prong" (where you see the three plastic 'prongs', not the flat side) of the red/black wire and gently pull them out. Take note of the wire's positioning (the metal bit). The top has a very tiny metal bump that "clips" against the plastic prong you lifted. Putting the wire back into the housing should be "like a glove"; no forcing.

Everything is working without issues so far. The Pulsar software is reporting the battery level, but can't be sure if it's accurate. I also haven't had a chance to measure how long the new and improved battery lasts.

Another tidbit, I tore the "ribbon" when taking the mouse apart.
https://drive.proton.me/urls/DE33WP907M#Xc4A2qfEoMat

The cable connects the side buttons. I found a replacement (no thanks to Pulsar support who told me to either pound sand because they wouldn't even hint on tech specs of the cable or pay to ship to Korea and wait months for it to get sorted which it wouldn't because me disassembling the mouse isn't covered under warranty [fair enough]).

The exact title of the cable I ordered is: "uxcell FFC Flexible Flat Cable 10 Pins 0.5 mm Pitch B Type 80mm". The most important specifications are:

• 10 Pins
• .5 mm pitch
• B Type
• 80mm (perfect length, but can go a little shorter if you must)

Hi all,

I just finished building a static webpage for a local artist. She's been generous and sociable, paying me $100/hr for my work. Despite some reservations toward taking responsibility over other people's hosting, she's asked me for a monthly rate to host the site. Right now I'm looking at renting a basic Hetzner VPS for $10/month. This would come at the added benefit of scaling up over time for other clients.

I want to work toward establishing good business practices, and that means charging people fairly - i.e. never simply because I can. Aside from the cost of hosting, how do you measure the cost of responsibility over a static site? A one-time setup fee? Hoping for some input from people who have more business experience than myself.

Edit:

Part of the goal is to host multiple artist pages on the same site, and apply some server software I've developed that allows for event coordination etc. I need a VPS for that.

I've run this idea by my client, who is part of the art collective, and she's in favor of it. I'm going to charge $50 for setup and $10/month for the first three months, then adjust in the new year based on how it's going.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

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I am helping a small business owner make and host a static website. What are the best options for hosting the site and paying for the domain?

For hosting, I was considering GitHub Pages, since it's free and just built in to GitHub.

For the domain registrar, I see a lot of people on places like Reddit discussing Namecheap, Porkbun, Cloudflare, and Ionos. I was originally considering GoDaddy, but I saw a lot of posts were saying that was the #1 place to avoid. I saw a lot of older posts recommending Google Domains, but I see that has since been killed by Google.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?