Casual Conversation

So my last TV I bought I pretty much woke up, drank a coffee, walked to the tech store that isn't around anymore and got pretty much what I needed and went home happy and had a TV.

Either it is me in general but I hate having to upgrade tech nowadays. Even if it is just a friggin' smart phone I tend to go to deep into the subject and go through points I shouldnt care about because I'm not the target audience.

Like I don't care how great the cameras are now on phones. Yet when I have to upgrade duo to missing upgrades after 5 years I upgrade and then I read through all that non sense just to get the best out of the money I'll be dumping for features I won't ever use.

Ill compare Samsung S23, S23+ and Ultra and what ever and then read comments about how bad X is and company Y does better for the money and then it's to late.

Then I dump 12 hours into researching on youtube, trying to filter the company fanboys and the real talk people just to find out they are all "bought" and only 5% of the reviews aren't bought.

Now I am sitting here wanting to upgrade my 2011 TV and have to choose between LG G4, Samsung S90D, S94D, S95D and every single one of these tvs has negatives and pros and I am lost.

Might not just buy a tv and go drink coffee and play computer.

I personally would have went with the S95D from Samsung because I personally like matte screens more but funny enough most reviews critics are because it is a matte display and not glossy lol. I have huge windows behind my sofa and thought it might be cool but now I am not sure anymore duo to almost everyone saying how bad matte screens are for OLED TVs.

The dude in the shop said I should go with the S95D because it is cool if I have a lot of light sources and yes it has it's downsides because of the matte screen really bright scenes can create a "white cone" around the edge duo to matte screening but he also said it's something you won't notice or pay attention too when using it. I am not comparing G4, S90D and that TV when watching a movie.

I also don't watch a lot of TV at daylight but when I do I know reflections are annoying. And I also saw that the S95D performs great in the dark as well against other glossy OLED TVs even if it has a matte screen.

This again is probably a subject I shouldn't care about. It's like my TV right now is just displaying grey instead of black and I lived with it 12 years (happy). Either TV will be a huge upgrade for me. I could just save my time and buy the tv and be happy but no, I am here researching way to long for a friggin' TV. I am so deep in the TV subject now that I even know the S90D Series has a Panel Lottery because some TVs have OLEDs and some have QD OLEDS panels... like... honestly, if no one told me I would have been happy without QD panel and wouldn't have known but now that I know.... dunno not gonna buy.

No, I'm not saying all modern music is awful, but majority of the music that gets trending is terrible. Yet another girl that twerks for 3 minutes with a trap beat or some crappy awful rap song. Or Ariana Grande talking about another break up in the most boring cliché way possible. I guess since music is easier than ever to produce, now any clown can call themselves an artist.

Just keep in mind... The trending music in past decades was MJ, Madonna, Cindy Lauper, Cher, many, MANY decent to great rock bands and ballads. And I'm not forgetting the rap, rnb and hip hop, 2pac, salt n Peppa, en vogue, NWA, Biggie... There's an objective quality in these artist missing in majority of modern acts.

Hell, I would argue that decent artists from the 2010s like Taylor swift and Drake are getting lazy with their music as well, their songs being more focused on following those trending kids with awful music.

I am a hobbyist computer and IT guy. Not professionally trained but I grew up with the technology and have been tinkering with them for years. I am still learning new things and enjoy deeping my understanding. Troubleshooting is often a great journey to discovering new insights.

Shelved in the basement was a desktop pc released in 2018. Ryzen 5 2600 6 core CPU, 24GB DDR4 RAM, and an AMD RX580. These days such specs are modest compared to the latest and greatest but still pretty good IMO. If I remember right, it was having some graphical issues probably caused by a hdmi cable or something. It was a long time ago, no idea why such a good PC ended up collecting dust. Oh well, as a silver lining this story is about giving the PC new life.

This week I began tinkering around with local AI. LLama 3.1 8b just got released; I have been having lots of fun learning with it on the laptop. Sadly my poor old thinkpad is just not meant for that kind of work. It was sloow to generate text and process information..

So remembering the 6 core desktop in the basement, the time felt right to dust off the PC and get it to do some useful computing. Unfortunately while the specs are powerful, the things wifi never worked right for some reason. I never thought much about it since the PC was situated next to a router with Ethernet as a connection. Now it needs to live significantly further away and rely solely on wifi for big file transfers.

On an internet connection where my laptops right next to it were getting hundreds of mbps download, the pc was getting 10mbps. Ive had metal cased desktops before and none of them were this bad connection wise. Something was seriously wrong bottlenecking an otherwise great setup. So at first I figured it must have been a linux driver issue or some kind of software bug. Spent hours installing the right drivers for my specific wifi card and troubleshooting via terminal. Didn't help any.

Then I figured maybe the card was bust and researched new wifi cards. I always thought wifi cards were little chips and antennas built into the motherboard. Not the case with this computer.

My first important discovery was that this computer had a huge wifi card mounted just underneath graphics card taking up its own slot in the back. This makes sense, if you want to upgrade to the newest wifi frequency in 10-20 years just pop a updated card into the slot.

My second important discovery was realizing the beastly wifi card had two little brass bits connecting out behind the PC. Threaded bits. Hey I know these, they are male coaxial bits.... For an... antenna.... facepalm

The realization hit me like a club. Oh... OH. YOOO IT NEEDS ANTENNAS, DUDE. I had been using a radio technology with either no antenna or an inbuilt one so awful it might as well be malfunctioning.

I felt like an idiot, have seen the back of that PC many times but for some reason just never noticed or thought about the coaxial bits and what they could be for. Oh well lets just order some cheap sticks and hope it helps.

So I with the cheap set of antennas in hand, I screwed them on. Honestly expected it not to do anything because its never that simple. Fired up speedtest before and after installation. Before antennas was 10mbps up and down After installing the antennas >200mbps down and >100mpbs up. Yeeeeah looks like that took care of the issue right away.

In the future ill look on the back of my big desktops and see if they could be easily upgraded with a set of antennas. The more you know!

I am currently in a really awkward situation. My mother doesn't like my brother but visits him once a week to take care of his child.

But I know they talk trash behind her back and she talks trash behind their back. Both I don't want to be part of and I distance my self from both sides in that case... I have a feeling it is more of my brothers wife that is causing the drama because she is bringing weird stuff up to my wife about me but I don't care.

Either way... I don't want to go deep into that issue because it isn't my issue.

My mother is living in a house and she doesn't want my brother to get anything because I do most of the work. I drive her around, help in the yard,, I help her with her mother (my grandma), I generally have a good relationship with her.

My brother is complete opposite. His wife said they would never want the house because it is in a small town and they like the city more. Now suprise, they are looking for a house but currently unaffordable and they are joking about my house in a small town next to a loud church.

Now that my mother is living in a huge house alone they sometimes say things like: "I wish we had a house for our family": "A house would be so good"- "but not a house next to a church"... etc. so kind of like they are expecting my mother to say "Here are the keys, move in".

I have a decent relationship with my brother and his wife, not awesome but not bad. If he wasn't my brother I wouldn't have anything to do with him though.

Either way I am repairing most of my mothers house, redoing a lot of stuff so my mom can live in a "nice" house with new tiles, walls,... and our wish was to live in that house one day too - basically sell the house that we currently live in that is next to the church lol.

My mother won't talk with him and she said I will get the house and it's already on paper (notary) too but in my country we have a forced 25% inherit. I would have to pay him 25% of the house and thats not really the issue. My problem is he isn't doing anything for my mom and in general it is a totally weird situation because they are both speculating on moving into the house one day (kind of) or using that money from selling the house to buy a new one.

It's like I already know they are getting 25% because of how they are treating our mom (ignoring her, not visiting with the grandson and not calling, not asking if everything is okay etc.) but I feel like I would be happy with 50/50 one day. But from my moms view ven 75/25 is horrible, she'd go full 100% on me.

Edit: I hope it is clear that I don't have an issue with my brother but I feel the inherit of 25% that I already know he will be getting will cause conflict. I didn't choose it and I told my mom to talk with them but she only says: "Normally you don't have to tell your son to visit with grandson if they are only 20 minutes drive away". I mean she isn't wrong though but somehow this is gonna be a conflict one day. The last thing she said was: "I won't talk with him and you are getting the house, 75% of everything I own and he is getting the forced inherit of the law and if you want to give him 50/50 to avoid conflict - I am not here I don't care do whatever you want and give him more money or half the house"

Now just observing of what he is doing for my mother and how inherit should function I do think he doesn't deserve anything. But I mean come on isn't that unfair? On the other side I am sacrificing my free time repairing her house and replacing old stuff with new stuff she is buying (tiles, floor, furniture,...) and he isnt helping at all.

35 degrees and it's just the beginning. I can't understand how anyone can be outside by their own will like this (unless you're forced to work in those conditions, construction workers and similar).

!movies@lemm.ee !television@lemmy.world and !animation@lemm.ee

I don't know how to explain this but now that my house is "done", my wedding is over I am just bored.

Before that I was in stress and always wanted to give up. But now I am staring at a wall with coffee in my hand and playing video games waiting for the next vacation somewhere.

Is this normal?

I’m listening to Audioslave’s self titled. It’s still perfect. What’s yours?

I turned on an old laptop and found a fairly sizable library of videos I accrued between 2013 and 2019. It contains 329 hours of content across 38 movies and 464 TV episodes (of 29 different shows), and that's even after removing 42 corrupted video files (about 14G). There are also 64 standalone videos, mostly stuff I downloaded off YouTube for the purpose of watching on the road (but that's just 10 hours of the content).

I'm kinda wondering what I should do with that. It's 230G, so not really small, but I'm not short on storage space.

A big chunk of the content is current events, like The Daily Show and Colbert Report (including an interview with Bill Cosby from 2014, yikes...) Would you re-watch that?