Recently, I built a new micro server for my home lab based on an ASrock DeskMini X600 with an AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU, one stick of 16GB DDR5 5600 SODIMM RAM, and a SATA 3.84TB SSD. I had an Alpine Linux virtual machine (VM) installed with minimal packages and with one CPU core, 256MB […]
Since the first week of November, I was helping a friend of mine shop for computer parts to build a new desktop computer since his current one was around nine years old; while helping him shop, the prices of RAM, particularly DDR5 had skyrocketed in such a short duration due to an announcement of wafers […]
I was chatting with a friend earlier about the state of smartphone brand choices in the U.S. being limited to mainly Apple, Google, Samsung, and Motorola. Although Sony and OnePlus are technically present, they are not regularly stocked by any of the major mobile carriers. The Chinese market is magnitudes more diverse, in addition to […]
The latest video generating model of OpenAI, Sora 2 is quite impressive in blurring the lines between real and fake media. My greatest surprised was the Sam Altman did not opt out of the training data to be used for Sora 2. In the above example of the Sora 2 generated video of Sam Altman, […]
Last week, Nvidia announced they planned to invest $5 billion into Intel amounting to around four percentage of total ownership of the company. As of this writing, although Intel is struggling financially, they still have about 67-80% in various degrees of the desktop, laptop, and server markets. I fear that this partnership will be a […]
I was browsing some computer cases on Amazon and noticed this obvious mistake in this product listing; the country of origin of the computer case was Afghanistan. Apparently this product has been around for over eight years, and I’m assuming this obvious mistake has been around just as long. Fractal Design is relatively a popular […]
I recently built a new PC and forgot the obnoxious advertising, invasive content, and poor privacy settings enabled by default in Windows 11. Below are settings to change to mitigate that as much as possible. Privacy & security > General Folder Options > General > Privacy Privacy & security > Diagnostics & feedback Privacy & […]
For about 2 months I’ve been struggling to install the Windows 11 24H2 on my main PC. Initially, I attempted to install the update through the default built-in Windows Update utility, but eventually the update disappeared. Later, I downloaded the ISO of Windows 11 24H2 and even launching that repeatedly failed. It wasn’t very critical […]
Lately, I’ve been shopping for a new motherboard platform to build a new daily driver desktop PC, specifically AMD X870E chipset-based. To my shock and dismay, most motherboards with that chipset only had two or three PCIe slots since many of the other PCIe lanes have been allocated for M.2 NVMe slots instead; it seems […]
I recently learned that Intel’s latest generation desktop CPUs (Codename Arrow Lake) will be all fabricated with TSMC instead of its own fabs. It’s quite disappointing that Intel could not fabricate the most advanced chips in volume for this generation of desktop chips despite being the largest recipient of subsidies from the Chip’s and Science […]
Below are some simple commands that work for ImageMagick 7 and later. I haven’t tested them to work on the older ImageMagick 6 which surprisingly is still being supported and the default installed version for many Linux distros. Batch Compressing Images Batch Convert Optimizing PNG Images
Windows Chocolatey As of this writing, Chocolatey doesn’t have a build-in cache cleaner so the best way is to install the unofficial Choco Cleaner which creates a Windows Scheduled Task to run Choco-Cleaner.ps1 every Sunday at 11:00 PM. macOS Homebrew Linux Flatpak Linux Snap Ubuntu APT Arch/Manjaro Pacman
Just a few days ago, Huawei revealed its Mate XT smartphone with stunning specs in regards to its custom SOC, camera, and tri-fold display. The famous veteran Hong Kong actor, Andy Lau even made a promotional video for it. This device is likely going to be a China-only release due to sanctions and the massive […]
In order to reflash a Sony Xperia phone (one that has its bootloader unlocked) to stock, one first has to download and install Sony’s in-house flash tool called Emma; as of this writing it’s only available for Windows, not Mac or any Linux Distro. The conventional app, Xperia Companion won’t work because it’ll complain that […]
I was a bit surprised despite HDR displays having been released to the consumer market since 2017 that taking screenshots that correctly captured the HDR tone mapping was very limited in terms of software availability; JPEG XR (JXR) is the most readily available HDR format in Windows via Xbox Game Bar and NVIDIA App for […]
GNOME is included as the default or as a installable desktop environment for most of the popular Linux distros out there such as Fedora, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Arch, Manjaro, and more, but I find it lacks expected basic functionality and polish for users accustomed to Windows and macOS. One can argue that GNOME is trying […]
Lately, I’ve been playing with the AI art/image generator, Stable Diffusion (webUI version) along with models/checkpoints from Huggingface and Civitai; to my astonishment, this stuff was free/open source and relatively easy to run with cheap consumer video cards since I’m primarily using an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 and an AMD Radeon RX 6600XT. However, documentation […]
Since I am somewhat of a diehard fan of the Final Fantasy series, especially games related to 7, I wanted to test how well Crisis Core Final Fantasy 7 Reunion worked out-of-the-box on Arch Linux with a non-LTS kernel installed and possibly lots of unstable packages; to my amusement, I didn’t encounter any speed bumps […]
UPDATED 2023/03/31 My list of packages to install for Arch Linux after freshly installing the OS since it’s extremely bare . General base-devel git filelight tree reflector vim filezilla wine wine-mono obs-studio steam htop python python-pip bluez vlc handbrake veracrypt noto-fonts-cjk (East Asian Fonts) gparted xampp remmina yay (AUR) visual-studio-code-bin (AUR) ttf-ms-fonts (AUR) […]
So I recently bought Halo Infinite on Steam through a Black Friday Sale and for the heck of it, decided to try to run the game on few different Linux Distros with a PS5 Dualsense controller. I tested this on Kubuntu, Manjaro, and Linux Mint and was extremely surprised that the game ran out-of-the-box; the […]
After a few months from hearing about repurposing Nvidia Tesla Datacenter/AI computation cards for PC gaming, I finally decided to buy an Nvidia Tesla M40. Technically the item is e-waste, but still is very useful for my everyday use-cases. The experience wasn’t without some bumps along the way, but was still relatively easy in setting […]