Yes, yes, I know, the classic blunder 😅

I just have to say though, the difference is insane, I mean what the actual fuaæosiuhrfjk!?

I have been on 60 hz screens my entire life, only upgrading to 1080p in 2015 or so, and I bought my current screen from a friend a year or two ago -- I guess that's why I never realized it was 144 hz, not 60 hz!? But playing WoW with another friend yesterday, we started talking about specs and refresh rates came up, so she even offered that I could borrow her second screen because she felt so sorry about my only having 60 hz. So for fun and just to be sure, I went to check my settings and yup, it said 144 hz in there! "Surely not", I thought... so I clicked it and absolutely surely fucking yes, it instantly looked a million times better??? I laughed so hard because it is both amazing and I am an idiot because I have seen this exact meme dozens of times and I cannot believe that I am a victim too 😂

The colors are so much richer, the movement of everything was so much smoother. I mean seriously, my mind is still completely blown now a day later. This is a great christmas present for myself, and it was free!

I don't think any other computer upgrade has ever had this big an impact. Blew my mind!

I am and have been on a bit of a quest to make my computing devices suck less.

Over the last few years I have migrated all of my laptops and desktops over to various Linux flavors. My experience with this process is that each flavor has their own quirks that need to be ironed out, but after getting things running there is little in the way of maintenance. Things kind of just work nowadays.

I have been looking into getting something like (but not necessarily) LineageOS on my phone. As I am looking into this and reading forums on the subject, it seems like a perpetual arms race between application developers and application users. One puts in a way to check for root, then there are root hiders, then there are root hider checkers, then there are root hiders that you build with custom names, etc.

I want my device to not suck.

I don’t want to be going in and fighting with my banking applications every time there is an update. I am totally willing to fight a painful setup once.

Is a custom phone OS something that is essentially only viable to use if you are driven by spite? Am I reading too much into the struggles that are posted in various forums? I am looking for any input for anyone that has used a custom OS short or long term.

I happen to be in possession of a 2013 MacBook Pro that runs macOS 11 Big Sur and it's decent for that.

Let's say I wanted to run the latest apps and macOS on it, things that don't work on Big Sur. I know there are unofficial ways to get those on the MacBook, OpenCore Legacy Patcher is what most articles recommend that I've seen.

Has anyone here tried that, and were there any big problems with that setup? Were there any broken apps or features after upgrading? Did everything become slower?

This link gives some useful detail about Dell Latitude model numbers.

https://en.tab-tv.com/dell-latitude-identification-and-decoding-of-the-laptop-model/

Unfortunately, it only goes up to 2017.

The first digit is the "series". There are several series, higher numbers are better.

The second digit is the screen size. 1=11", 2=12", ..., 7=17".

The third digit is the year. 1=2010, 2=2011, ..., 7=2016, 8=2017.

The forth digit is connected to form factor - standard, removable screen, transformer.

My question is whether there's a similar decoder ring for newer models.

EDIT:

Okay, so, newer models appear to follow similar convention, with slight changes to last two digits for year.

eg, Dell Latitude 9510 = premium ultrabook, 15" screen, released 2020.

eg Dell Latitude 7440 = ultrabook, 14" screen, released 2023

The first digit identifies the range:

• 9 = premium ultrabook
• 7 = ultrabook
• 5 = mid range
• 3 = entry level

The second digit is the screen size:

• 5 = 15"
• 4 = 14"
• 3 = 13.3"
• 2 = 12.5"
• 1 = 11.6"

The last two digits give the release year:

• 90 = 2018
• 00 = 2019
• 10 = 2020
• 20 = 2021
• 30 = 2022
• 40 = 2023

I'm in the market to hurl at a wall upgrade our badly ageing general use family laptop (Lenovo V110).

I've used ThinkPads in the past for work and due to their ubiquity there is a value to be had, I believe, in corporate refurbs.

However, it's been a good few years since I used one - think it was a T440 - and am looking for some advice on what the most recently obsoleted gen is that I should be looking for, or where people have found a sweet spot on price/performance. Any pointers?

Desk space at my home is very limited.

Right now I have a set of speakers hanging out behind my external monitor, but I'd really rather get rid of them entirely and just have the speakers/soundbar built-in to the monitor itself. It would give me a lot more room to work with because I'd be able to push the monitor back further on the desk.

Also, presumably (and correct me if I'm wrong here), having the speakers powered by the monitor and fed audio through HDMI would free up a lot of cabling clutter as well. My setup is already very messy (2 laptops and a KVM switch), so cleaning it up will give me some relief (my theme of 2023 is "Simplify").

I know nothing about buying computer monitors. When I look them up, I'm not even sure which type I should be looking for (IPS? OLED?).

I do plan to game on it, but most gaming-focused monitors seem like overkill for someone like me who will primarily have it hooked up to a middling 5-year-old laptop that plays mostly indie stuff. I do occasionally play the more intensive/prettier game, but those are usually usually far between and definitely not a priority that's worth spending a bunch to target. I tend to tank the graphics settings on games like that anyway to keep my laptop from becoming a cooking surface, and I'll take a smoother framerate over better eye candy all day, every day.

What are the trusted brands (if any)? What pitfalls should I look out for? If anyone can help point me in the right direction, I'd appreciate it!

My use case: general browsing and (mostly casual) gaming

My computer: System76 Oryx Pro 5 (2019), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Mobile, Pop!_OS 22.04

My budget: ultimately whatever is necessary to get a quality product, but hopefully no more than $300 USD or so?

Preferred Size: 24" -- absolute maximum I could do is probably 27"

Key Feature: built-in speakers or soundbar

Let me know if there's any other key information I can provide that would help.

Questions I Have:

• Will buying a higher resolution monitor (e.g. 4K) tax my graphics card more because it's rendering at a higher resolution, or can I just scale down the display resolution to something less intensive?

• Same question as above, but for refresh rate.

• Would audio be transmitted over HDMI, or would I have to have a cable from the headphone jack (or some different method I'm not aware of)?

I doubt I'll find any new ideas, but maybe someone here has one. I'm running out of places to turn, with no solution.

I have been in a fight with Fitbit support for a few weeks now over their push to migrate everyone to a Google-linked Fitbit account. I'm pretty sure what I've found is a rare edge case of a bug, or rather, an unaccounted for set of conditions when trying to migrate.

A long time ago, 2017 I think, I created a Google-linked Fitbit Account (via oauth, "Login with Google"). I used it briefly and then stopped, and completely forgot about its existence.

In 2022, I got a Pixel Watch and created a new/second Fitbit Account with a different email address, as I did not remember I had a Fitbit account already and I wanted to use a masked email address through my personal domain.

With the push to migrate all Fitbit accounts to Google accounts, I decided to try to do so last month. When I attempted to migrate my second account to a Google account, I got an error that I already had an account registered under my Google account. So I logged in to that old 2017 Google account and initiated its deletion. It told it me would take 30 days to delete it, so I waited 31 days.

31 days later, I tried to migrate my second account to a Google account. When I try to do so, I get an error:

Can't use Fitbit with this Google Account
This could be because you're using a Google Workspace account, or because your account is supervised.

My account is neither a child account, nor a Workspace account, it's a standard (adult) account I've had for something like 16 years.

So I tried to see if my old Google account was perhaps not deleted after all. I tried to log in to my old account via oauth (Sign In > Continue with Google), and I get a different error:

Sign in again to continue
Since you deleted Fitbit from your Google Account, you’ll need to sign in again as a new user.

I suspect that what happens when I deleted my old/original Google account is that it wasn't actually deleted, but made inactive with some "deleted" flag, but the account hasn't been purged. As a result, I'm unable to migrate my new account to the same email address I used for my old Google account.

Reaching out to Fitbit, they continually put the blame on Google for reporting my account as a workspace/supervised account, and the only solution they'll offer me is "You should create a new Google account". Google has also been unable to help, but that doesn't surprise me, as I don't think it's an issue on their end. Requests to Fitbit to escalate my case to a higher tier of support and/or someone from some type of database team have been stonewalled, and I think that Fitbit support has now just stopped responding to me entirely.

Does anyone have any idea where I could turn?

Hello, as the title says: someone registered their phone subscription using my email. It doesn't make sense as I (obviously) never permitted this stranger to use my email for their subscription.

I say stranger but I now know their first name, their last name, their billing address, and their phone number by now. It's crazy.

I would just like the emails to stop coming! I know I could just make a filter to forward everything from this domain to spam but is there a way to actually make the phone company to stop sending me things?

The emails are coming from a language that I don't know how to speak (so calling customer service is not an option here).

I tried using the "forget password" option but for some reason that's not arriving to me. Probably it's pinging their phone first to verify that it was them who initiated it.

The best customer service I can find is by WhatsApp but it's a robot that always asks the stranger to verify that it's them.

So as the title states, I am realizing that most folks don't have CD readers. I do, and I can burn my phone's videos to one, but... I also use Linux these days. I have a CD burner somewhere around here, but honestly I just want to do a "zip file" type option, where I can just group the videos and get them on a usb stick to send out.

Everything I find on the 'net is about burning CDs and whatnot... which isn't my goal. Honestly, I think windows did this just easy-peasy with select and "burn to image" or whatnot. But I dunno how with Linux (Arch/i3).

Edit: I'm asking because I don't see any options in pacman. It may be in yay, but it's my bedtime...
Edit 2: Lots of folks asking why I want an ISO and not just copy the files; my dad states their TV will play videos 'in a DVD format from a USB stick' (and I don't know how accurate it is, but it's what was requested).

I have an external drive (3.5" hdd, SATA) in an enclosure (usb 3) (purchased separately), connected to a thunderbolt dock (OWC) connected alternately to an iMac and a macbook pro. The HDD goes to sleep, and causes problems. Freezes, weird internet access problems, kernel panics.

I have done some research, and can't seem to figure out:

how to know whether it is the drive, enclosure, or computer causing the sleep, although, fiddling with various settings on the mac seemed to have no effect, although it may have increased my battery usage :(

how to adjust settings on the drive, or in the enclosure.

How to determine what the sleep behavior of prospective drives will be.

As a workaround, I tried to write a zsh script to touch the drive ever few seconds. This kinda worked, but was a struggle to figure out appropriate permissions issues and how to make it run automatically.

I welcome all guidance, pointers to resources, clarifications, incantations, well-wishes.

I'm hoping I might have some recommendations for a computer chassis. So far I've gotten away with using a couple of Fractal Designs, even got my hands on an old Cooler Master XB Evo recently that I never got to put into use.

Basically, I'm looking for a chassis with something like 6-10 hotswap 3.5 drive bays. Preferably horizontal, but vertical is begrudgingly acceptable. Are any of you aware of such a chassis, or am I forced to start looking at racks instead?

Alternatively, do any of you have experience with hacking together a case and installing drive bays?

Bit unrelated side-note: The front micro-jack in one of my cases has broken off (headset wire looped around the office chair) and Fractal Design wouldn't sell me a replacement. Any idea where I might find a female audio connector? I'll happily do a bit of soldering if necessary, I just don't know what the part called or where to look for it.