New Electronics

[StG58]

Went out this weekend to purchase some ground Bison at Costco for home-made street tacos. It was raining like stink here, like is usually does here in the valley. So, I wasn't disposed to rush in and rush right back out. To make a long story somewhat shorter -

I ended up with a new Lenovo 2-in-1 14" laptop and a new cell phone & plan.

When I got the laptop home, I set it aside until after dinner and chores were done.

I intended to install Windows, make a recovery drive, and install Ubuntu. That didn't happen! I got Windows almost installed, and it started asking me a whole ton of personal questions and wanting me to sign up for this and that. Wrong! I aborted the installation, set the bios to boot from USB, and restarted. 15 minutes later I was up, on the internet, and installing my applications. With NO intrusive questions. I really, really dislike Microsoft now.

The new phone, a Samsung S25, set up and transferred easily. Winning!

Two steps closer to being on the road full time. Not much left to get ready.

Oh, and I found a 2005 TJ Rubicon, speed, stock, 64,000 miles for $16,000. It's in really nice shape, except for tires. Everything on my current TJ will transfer over. Then it's just throwing a set of 275 -70R16 KO3's on it. Or spending almost that much fixing Blue.

 

[Zorba]

I intended to install Windows, make a recovery drive, and install Ubuntu. That didn't happen! I got Windows almost installed, and it started asking me a whole ton of personal questions and wanting me to sign up for this and that. Wrong! I aborted the installation, set the bios to boot from USB, and restarted. 15 minutes later I was up, on the internet, and installing my applications. With NO intrusive questions. I really, really dislike Microsoft now.

Which is exactly why I did pretty much the same thing 2 weeks ago. Purchased a Pile O' Parts, assembled it, and installed Ubuntu. Micro$oft and Apple both can fuck right off.

 

[StG58]

Which is exactly why I did pretty much the same thing 2 weeks ago. Purchased a Pile O' Parts, assembled it, and installed Ubuntu. Micro$oft and Apple both can fuck right off.

Exactly right.

 

[lBasket]

Exactly right.

But imagine all the things you're missing out on with the the fancy new w11!

Have you always hated how the file explorer didn't crash in w10? They fixed that!

Didn't like how the context menu (right click) didn't take a second or two to load? They fixed that one!!

Hated the lack of advertisements on your lock screen? How else would you know what to buy??? Fixed!!!!

I have to use it on my work machine and I loathe it

 

[Zorba]

But imagine all the things you're missing out on with the the fancy new w11!

Have you always hated how the file explorer didn't crash in w10? They fixed that!

Didn't like how the context menu (right click) didn't take a second or two to load? They fixed that one!!

Hated the lack of advertisements on your lock screen? How else would you know what to buy??? Fixed!!!!

I have to use it on my work machine and I loathe it

Bought my wife a W11 laptop - I was able to bypass most of the M$ bullshit, and no ads, but wife hated the thing from the word go. She wanted to be free of M$, and I wanted to be free of Apple, so when the W11 laptop developed a video problem 6 months in, I bought her a Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed. She. LOVES. it. I was more than a little surprised, knowing my wife. So, I decided it was time to replace the 13 year old Mac Mini with something that had a bit more horsepower for CAD and video editing - one of my dance instructor's husband is up on all the latest stuff - so he put together an Amazon shopping list, I bought it and installed Ubuntu on it as well. Loving it so far, and glad to be away from Apple's fucking bugs and "religious items" that I was tired of after using Macs for about 25 years. I still need to transfer over a few calendar events, then I can turn the mini off for good.

 

[lBasket]

Bought my wife a W11 laptop - I was able to bypass most of the M$ bullshit, and no ads, but wife hated the thing from the word go. She wanted to be free of M$, and I wanted to be free of Apple, so when the W11 laptop developed a video problem 6 months in, I bought her a Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed. She. LOVES. it. I was more than a little surprised, knowing my wife. So, I decided it was time to replace the 13 year old Mac Mini with something that had a bit more horsepower for CAD and video editing - one of my dance instructor's husband is up on all the latest stuff - so he put together an Amazon shopping list, I bought it and installed Ubuntu on it as well. Loving it so far, and glad to be away from Apple's fucking bugs and "religious items" that I was tired of after using Macs for about 25 years. I still need to transfer over a few calendar events, then I can turn the mini off for good.

Nice that is awesome you can get non-tech types into Linux. Honestly after using Ubuntu as an "EDC" for almost a decade I got pretty fed up with it and am going to stick with w10 for my laptop as long as I can. Ubuntu is great on a server though!

 

[OldBuzzard]

I've wanted to switch to Linux (would go with Debian) on my main machine for years. One thing holds me back: Photoshop Elements. I've tried every alternative photo editor in the galaxy, but it's a gigantic pain to achieve the same edits as I've done on thousands of photos over a couple of decades. And a virtual Windoze machine with PSE on a Linux box isn't much fun for as much photo editing as I do.

Someday Microsoft will push their stupidity one step too far and I'll make the jump and try to live with it. They're getting awfully close.

 

[StG58]

Set the wife up with a Lenovo X1 Carbon, The 2 in 1 model. With Ubuntu. It's Intel through and through. I just set up a new Lenovo Ideapad with Ubuntu, it's AMD Ryzen and Radeon. Faster than the X1. After some minor settings tweaks, both are purring right long.

I miss Red Hat.

 

[StG58]

I've wanted to switch to Linux (would go with Debian) on my main machine for years. One thing holds me back: Photoshop Elements. I've tried every alternative photo editor in the galaxy, but it's a gigantic pain to achieve the same edits as I've done on thousands of photos over a couple of decades. And a virtual Windoze machine with PSE on a Linux box isn't much fun for as much photo editing as I do.

Someday Microsoft will push their stupidity one step too far and I'll make the jump and try to live with it. They're getting awfully close.

Have you looked into WINE to run Photoshop? The last couple of versions have been pretty good. GIMP has come a long way for editing photos as well. But, Photoshop is pretty advanced.

 

[Zorba]

Nice that is awesome you can get non-tech types into Linux. Honestly after using Ubuntu as an "EDC" for almost a decade I got pretty fed up with it and am going to stick with w10 for my laptop as long as I can. Ubuntu is great on a server though!

Its really a matter of "pick your poison". I got tired of Apple's yearly OS 'upgrades' that really didn't do much other than break everything, and bugs that they seldom acknowledged much less fixed. I had switched to Apple after running the old Red Hat 7.x for several years as I was tired of doing my own support - I figured that Apple was a *nix that someone else maintained. So now I'm back to doing things myself - its MUCH better now than it was 25 years ago although I still have to tweak and fix things. The upside is that things CAN be tweaked and fixed - if its one of Apple's bugs or Microsoft's brain dead implementations, I was pretty much SOL.

Windows 7 was "peak windows" - it was fast, stable, reliable, and looked good. Balmer's touch religion completely ruined windows. 8.x was an abomination, 10 did run a bit faster and was as ugly as homemade sin but it worked, 11 is beyond the pale. Both Apple and M$ are dumbing down their respective ecosystems to the smartphone level - no thank you.

With that said, this latest Ubuntu also contains some smartphone stupidity, but it isn't too bad as far as such things go. I was always a KDE guy in the 90s, I can always turn Gnome off and load KDE if I get too disgusted with it. But so far, so good. Ubuntu is about as close to "it just works" as you can get with a Linux distro. I ran Gentoo on a work laptop for several years about 15 years ago - it was geektastic, but not something I'd want for an EDC.

 

[StG58]

Nice that is awesome you can get non-tech types into Linux. Honestly after using Ubuntu as an "EDC" for almost a decade I got pretty fed up with it and am going to stick with w10 for my laptop as long as I can. Ubuntu is great on a server though!

Working on a media server next. I found some micro PC hardware that is USB-C powered (nominal 12v) UBUNTU, a multi media server for movies, music, and photos. Also a Postgres SQL instance of a local tile server for Open Street Maps. It'll plug right in to the trailers 12 volt system, wireless network and TVs.

Should be a fun project.

 

[OldBuzzard]

Have you looked into WINE to run Photoshop? The last couple of versions have been pretty good. GIMP has come a long way for editing photos as well. But, Photoshop is pretty advanced.

WINE will do a couple of the later "real" Photoshops, but not Photoshop Elements (nothing in the last 10 or 15 versions, anyway). I don't have real Photoshop, and I despise subscription software.

GIMP can probably do everything I want, but making exactly the same edits as I've done on a previous photo in PSE is just about impossible. For instance, if my previous edit was to increase exposure 15%, reduce contrast 10%, and Unsharp Mask 10, 100, 1, GIMP can probably do it, but it will look utterly different. It takes hours of tweaking the GIMP values to match my previous results. Same with every other photo editor, they all have the same functions, but they all use different values and turn out surprisingly different.

My great hope is that Microsoft will botch Windows so bad that the whole company collapses, and Adobe will be forced to port their software to Linux.

 

[StG58]

<snip> It takes hours of tweaking the GIMP values to match my previous results. Same with every other photo editor, they all have the same functions, but they all use different values and turn out surprisingly different.

My great hope is that Microsoft will botch Windows so bad that the whole company collapses, and Adobe will be forced to port their software to Linux.

Gotcha. The most I do to photos is to reduce redeye, and possibly sharpen, lighten / darken them. Nothing at all sophisticated. The most sophisticated thing I've tried is astrophotography with a cell phone and software.

Software as a service and the standard Microsoft BS is what finally drove me away.

The final straw was when MS Combat Flight Simulator 2 & 3 wouldn't run under Windows. It's like WTF Microsoft? Your own games won't run on your own operating system? Then Office became a subscription service. Then they screwed up Access and the Access runtime.

Finally just threw my hands up, and walked away.

 

[lBasket]

Gotcha. The most I do to photos is to reduce redeye, and possibly sharpen, lighten / darken them. Nothing at all sophisticated. The most sophisticated thing I've tried is astrophotography with a cell phone and software.

Software as a service and the standard Microsoft BS is what finally drove me away.

The final straw was when MS Combat Flight Simulator 2 & 3 wouldn't run under Windows. It's like WTF Microsoft? Your own games won't run on your own operating system? Then Office became a subscription service. Then they screwed us Access and the Access runtime.

Finally just threw my hands up, and walked away.

Whoa you used Access!!!!!!

 

[Zorba]

... Adobe will be forced to port their software to Linux.

And they'll charge a subscription for the privilege.

I "get it" though. PSE is a fantastic program, and it "just works" unlike pretty much anything else. It took me years to get GIMP to do what I want it to - and I'm having some painful transitions doing this switch, but its past time I dumped Apple and M$, never mind fucking Adobe and their fucking subscriptions - I refuse to play that game.

 

[StG58]

I've wanted to switch to Linux (would go with Debian) on my main machine for years. One thing holds me back: Photoshop Elements. I've tried every alternative photo editor in the galaxy, but it's a gigantic pain to achieve the same edits as I've done on thousands of photos over a couple of decades. And a virtual Windoze machine with PSE on a Linux box isn't much fun for as much photo editing as I do.

Someday Microsoft will push their stupidity one step too far and I'll make the jump and try to live with it. They're getting awfully close.

Just thought of something...

Dual boot Windows and Debian. It works pretty slick. Had to do that for some advanced ballistics and design software I was using at one time.

 

[StG58]

Whoa you used Access!!!!!!

Yes, and built applications in Access that used the runtime. Small business stuff. A step down from Foxpro, but cheaper and faster to develop.

 

[OldBuzzard]

Just thought of something...

Dual boot Windows and Debian. It works pretty slick. Had to do that for some advanced ballistics and design software I was using at one time.

Nah, rebooting into the other OS several times a day would be no fun.

Same thing goes for a Linux box sitting beside a Winders box. I want my dual monitors on my daily driver, but I also want them on my photo editing machine.

GIMP 3.0 just came out. I suppose I'll take another shot at it, but it's always just ended in frustration the last bunch of times I tried it.

 

[StG58]

Nah, rebooting into the other OS several times a day would be no fun.

Same thing goes for a Linux box sitting beside a Winders box. I want my dual monitors on my daily driver, but I also want them on my photo editing machine.

GIMP 3.0 just came out. I suppose I'll take another shot at it, but it's always just ended in frustration the last bunch of times I tried it.

I get it... Dual boot is a pain in the ass, if you have to reboot several times a day. But my new laptop boots to the login prompt in what feels like 15 seconds or so. It's pretty fast. Don't know what Windows does on this machine...Microsoft pissed me off so I killed it.

I installed GIMP, the utility extensions, and Intel's AI extension. Playing with it will give me something to do.

 

[red02tj]

Yes, and built applications in Access that used the runtime. Small business stuff. A step down from Foxpro, but cheaper and faster to develop.

My first real IT job post college was a jack of all trades supporting a small clinic that ran its client/clinic health records on Access where the password was definitely not the address of the building.

But the real head scratcher was, I could never get my reports to match with the clinicians reported statistics, spent hours debugging.

Finally sat down with one of the users to watch the patient intake from start to finish. She was older, and had a goofy typing style, but it wasn’t hunt and peck so I ignored it at first.

She ran her report, I ran mine, and again they didn’t match. End of the week, my boss is on my case, I’m questioning my degree, and then I printed them out and went name by name until I figured it out.

The predominantly older female staff, all learned to type on typewriters, where apparently the 1 & L and the O & 0 were interchangeable.


And that’s the last time I used Access.