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  • Weekend Update

    2017 Challenger Hellcat / 1968 Camaro Z28

    Friday afternoon, here at the office, my CFO came in and asked for a ride to pick up his Camaro from the shop – he had the front suspension redone, a motor mount replaced, and other small mechanical stuff done over at ProTech.

    I looked over the work and they seem to have done a good job and the cost was pretty fair.

    He hopped in his Camaro and I followed him back to his place to give him a ride back to the office, and the trip resulted in a lot of turned heads and thumbs up – so that was fun.

    Saturday morning I ran down to the King Soopers in Parker for groceries, and then in the afternoon I drove back down to Parker to have dinner at Hickory House – which is still the best BBQ in the area.

    Parker is a great place to drive around because it’s the last bastion of Colorado’s front-range car culture. So of an evening you’ll see everything from current-year Italian supercars to 1930’s street rods running around.

    Sunday I spent in my home office, sitting in the air conditioning, doing 3D model and texture work in Second Life.

    A friend wanted me to theme the ground level of their two sims, which I wrapped up Sunday evening. And I think I might shift my avatar from an anthropomorphic dragon to a feral dragon just for fun – so I picked up a few parts for this and will work on it over the week as I have time.

    And that’s the update from the weekend. Nothing earth-shattering, but it was fun / relaxing and that makes it worth it.

  • That New Laptop Experience

    Can I interest you in some shovelware?

    I’m in the office today and staging a few Windows laptops for employee use. It takes me about an hour to set up a Windows laptop these days, mostly because of Microsoft and shovelware bloat…

    The image above is what you’re faced with when setting up an HP laptop currently… Whee! And I have to manually delete all of it to ensure the system is clean for testing…

    Microsoft on the other hand is really, really interested in your personal information, and getting a machine set up for testing with a local account gets harder with each update.

    Most of the time you can shift-f10 into a command prompt at the setup networking screen, type in oobe\bypassnro, and wait for the reboot to get a tiny little “I don’t have Internet” link that will let you set up a local account. But Microsoft is getting rid of that too… The only recourse at that point will be to roll my own OS installers and then go dig around in the manufacturer’s website for drivers.

    When I bring this up most people will point out that Apple does the same sort of thing… But not really.

    See, Microsoft is a software company and therefore has to do a lot of incremental sales and tap as many small revenue streams as possible… For example, Windows 11 Home costs $139 and Microsoft still injects ads into it and data-mines you as a revenue stream… And some people think the insistence on a “free” Microsoft account is innocent…

    With a Microsoft account what you get is another vector for Microsoft to sell software and services to you, and acquire data from you to sell… If Microsoft gives you an email address, it’s purely to sell you Office 365 and tell you about how great Edge is because Edge is another sales / data-mining vector. If Microsoft gives you cloud storage, it’s just to rifle through your data for anything they can resell – when OneDrive feels like working at any rate. And the device settings sharing with a Microsoft account simply tells Microsoft what hardware you have and lets them unify your advertising IDs across platforms…

    Apple on the other hand is a hardware company, so their interest is in selling you more hardware for large sums of money. And the Apple Account exists to get people locked into the ecosystem… There isn’t really a need for an incremental advertising / data-mining revenue stream if Apple can just sell people a new $1000 phone every year because all of their photos are in iCloud and their apps are tied to their Apple Account.

    And annoying users with ads and data-mining is counter productive to that “sell more hardware” goal – Apple wants you happy with the ecosystem, so injecting a McAfee installer into the start menu at random is just not something Apple will do.

  • The Current Rig

    As mentioned previously, I generally lean towards Apple computers for my personal computing needs… But I work with Windows professionally and I’m also a bit of a gamer – so I’ve kind of oscillated between the two platforms for decades now.

    For example, three years ago I built myself a no-holds-barred bleeding-edge Windows rig based on the systems I build for work…

    The above is a Supermicro X12SPL-F mainboard, Intel Xeon Gold 6312U processor, 128G of DDR4-3200, and a Zotac RTX 3090. And in 2022 this thing was the 1200 watt ultimate beast of a computer.

    The problem with the machine was three-fold: it consumed about 400 watts at idle and welding current at full tilt, was essentially a space-heater and would raise the temp in my office to unbearable levels which prompted running the central air more often – so even more electrical cost, and Windows 10 was nearing end-of-life and Windows 11 is a total travesty…

    I mean, I dislike Win11 so much that in 2023 I spent about a month turning Server 2022 into a workstation OS just to get around the Win10 expiry issue… And while I got it to work – mostly – the effort required to hack drivers and whatnot prompted me to sell the Xeon-based machine above and just go buy an M2 Ultra Mac Studio.

    Before the fedora crowd chimes in – I use a lot of Linux professionally as well, and I rather like Linux – in the same way someone who has to haul 80,000 pounds of bananas likes a semi truck… Linux is a great workhorse, but I’d rather not use it as my daily driver.

    Anyway, the M2 Ultra was an exceptional machine that outperformed the Xeon computer above in pretty much every way, while using a max of 270 watts… So, when the M3 Ultra was announced I upgraded on the spot.

    That there is my current rig. An M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 96GB of ram and 1TB of storage.

    It’s sitting on a K&N V-Rod motorcycle air filter with an adapter I had 3D printed. This does a great job of keeping dust out of the machine without impeding airflow.

    The monitor is the 27″ Apple Studio display which is amazing as well. And behind the air filter is a Thunderbolt 4 M.2 adapter holding my 4TB storage drive.

    The Liebert UPS supplies backup power to the computer and monitor, and currently shows 71 minutes of runtime because the computer and monitor use so little power…

    And yes, my desktop audio comes from a pair of floor-standing B&W DM640i speakers powered by an Onkyo TX-SR353. So the Mac sounds pretty good too.