Nobara is just Fedora with a heavy layer of gaming-focused polish applied. In that regard it’s quite a bit more familiar than something like Arch, which makes a point of not holding anybody’s hand, and (just in terms of ease of use and overall userbase) feels a lot closer to what Gentoo was like back when I last was in this space.

I was heavily in the camp of Debian-based distros back in the day, but Debian proper has never been a great choice for desktop, and Ubuntu’s star is much faded of late, so I decided to give an RPM-based distro a chance before jumping way off into the deep end. I don’t have the time to fiddle that I used to, and (at least until yesterday’s hiccup) Nobara was much closer to “it just works” out of the box than anything like Arch would have been.

I’m an ex-sysadmin so I guess I get to be the middle head, but blundering my way through the current distro scene after not having touched a desktop Linux install in, oh… twenty years or so, I feel more like the right. I suppose on the one had I had the good sense not to jump right into Arch or Nix, but even more familiar territory like Nobara has its pitfalls. Just today I had to clean up a botched release upgrade because the primary maintainer had left conflicting packages in the repository for an extended period. Not laying blame per se, that’s what you get when you sign on to a one-man effort, but it was a real pain in the butt to diagnose and correct.

I’d been planning for a new HVAC system for a while when that video came out, and it gave me the idea to cross-check the thermostat data with the Manual J calc I’d already done. They were in general agreement, though the Manual J block load was more conservative than empirical data for a design day.

In your case, since you don’t have data from a healthy system on a representative heating design day, I’d suggest using a web tool like CoolCalc to simply calculate an approximate Manual J total heating and cooling load, and use that to guide your choices.

A little headroom ain’t bad, but it had three times the required heating capacity for my area’s “design day” low, which meant that for most of the winter it was kicking on for maybe 5-10 minutes per hour and then leaving massive cold spots in the house, because the thermostat was smack in the middle and all the walls were bleeding heat.

My new heat pump is just about 2x the design day heat requirement, but that also means it’s got capacity to handle extreme lows without resorting to resistance heat, and in any case it’s fully modulating so the house has stayed quite comfortable so far.

My old furnace was hilariously oversized for the house.

One of the nifty things about smart thermostats like Ecobees is that you can pull usage data from their web portal. I grabbed a CSV file covering a cold snap last year that reached a 100-year record low, and using Excel I summed up the total heat output while we were at that low.

The furnace was only running 50% of the time, even when it was with a couple degrees of as cold as it’s ever been where I live.

Needless to say, when I got a new system installed I made sure it was more properly sized, and given that I had a convenient empirical measurement of exactly how many btus I actually needed in the worst case as scenario, that was easily done.

Tom’s Hardware was on the lowest tier of tech journalism even in its heyday. You never relied on their benchmarks if there was a better source, and their news was WCCFTech-grade rumor mongering most of the time. The real travesty is that it’s the last one standing out of all the early-2000s hardware review sites, when sites like TechReport (who pioneered things like frame time analysis and power supply load bank testing, and did some of the first test-to-failure analysis of SSDs back when nobody was sure how reliable they actually were) are dead or (worse) zombie husks being used for linkspam SEO.

My employer is in the process of decommissioning all their on-premises storage and shifting all data into the many-headed hydra that is OneDrive/SharePoint/Teams/Azure. It’s going… not great. Automatic file locking for non-Office applications doesn’t exist in the context of SharePoint and people are losing hours of work when two people had the same file open all day without knowing. Projects that had large, complicated folder structures have whole swathes of files that cannot be edited because of path length restrictions rearing their ugly head ("C:\Users\Username\OneDrive\VerboseHumanReadableProjectNameAndNumber ends up being quite a bit longer than P:\ProjectNumber, whodathunkit?!). Nobody’s sure of they should be syncing or linking their project directories locally. Some options for file management appear in SharePoint views of shared folders, but not Teams.

As a tool for portable user profiles or casual filesharing or syncing, it’s fine, though I’d prefer if MS didn’t force it into Windows and Office apps by default. As the core of a complex international business operation? Fuck this I hate it desperately, and I cannot imagine any way in which it’s going to save the business money over keeping storage in house.

There are sophisticated and nuanced critiques to be made of Western power projection, soft and hard. “Nuanced” and “sophisticated” are not words appropriate to the average hexbear or lemmygrad denizen’s take on geopolitics, and for those of us who live in the real world rather than living to argue over how many Maos can dance on the tip of the icepick that killed Trotsky, the loud and unrelenting naysaying of anything less extreme than “armed proletarian revolution now!” got to be incredibly tiresome, not to mention the constant cheerleading of brutally-repressive regimes that don’t have any values in common with actual socialists or communists just because they oppose the US and its allies.

This is a reference to upscaling algorithms informed by machine learning a la Nvidia’s DLSS – seems like AMD is finally going to add the inference hardware to their GPUs that will let them close that technological gap with the competition. I’m guessing it won’t come until RDNA5, though.

Inland is (or was, at least) relabeled eSun filament, and they’re considered a decent brand for basic filaments. I’ve only ever used their PLA(+) but it’s always been bulletproof.

Look, some of us old farts started on Linux back before nano was included by default, and your options for text editing on the command line were either:

1. vi/vim, a perfectly competent text editor with arcane and unintuitive key combos for commands
2. emacs, a ludicrously overcomplicated kitchen-sink program that had reasonable text-editing functionality wedged in between the universal woodchuck remote control and the birdcall translation system

Given those options, most of us chose to learn how to key-chord our way around vim, and old habits die hard.

But it did give us a damn fine concert movie from Muse, and that’s indisputable.

On the other hand, Fraunhofer is obnoxious enough about licensing and enforcement that companies like Google invested similar money and effort into developing open-source codecs just to avoid dealing with them.