Jimmycrackcrack

It's way cheaper than the app store and Steam and Humble Bundle

I don't really buy games much these days. I was trying to see what games would work on Mac and was pleased to see a new Assassin's Creed game is coming out on Mac natively. I was pretty stoked with this news, I've never played any of the AC games but they've always looked good.

I thought I'd check the Apple App Store to see if there were any other AC games that might already be out and there was only one option (actually on some 'App Store Preview' thing not the actual app store), called Assassin's Creed Mirage. It was listed as free to play with in-app-purchases. I'm really just not participating in that, can't stand that shit. I don't think I've actually bought any Ubisoft games since the Nintendo 64, are they all like this or is that just some unfortunate anomaly? I noticed also that it'd listed them collecting data about me, which, WTF?

Keen to wait till November for AC Shadows but not if it's going to be any of that nonsense.

I love that game and it's the best RTS I've played. It seemed to basically rip off the CIV games heavily but simplify them and put them in an RTS context. Everything I loved about Age of Empires as a kid but much better and also spanning the ancient age to the information age.

I run an M2 max mac, which makes things complicated, but I'm open to jumping through some hoops if such hoops exist to make something that wasn't supposed to work on Mac, work on Mac, but would need to know if it even can be done for that particular game. Also obviously direct compatibility out of the box would be great.

I really don't want anything that's multiplayer only, as I'm unlikely to ever play online and prefer single player games

I really hate free to play games and just want to buy the game in its finished state outright that will stay the same for as long as I own it and then just pay for any expansions or new additions at my discretion if they get released.

I'd like it to have the same all of history spanning scope for tech.

I like there to be air units and navy units.

I recently bought an external PCIe enclosure so I could make use of a specific PCIe device in an editing setup. One of the nice things about this particular enclosure is that it also happens to come with an m.2 slot for NVME drives as well.

Usually when I edit with my home set up, I'm provided with the storage by the client, and even if not, at the very least, video media, plus backups takes up a lot of room and NVME drives are expensive so I'd usually opt for something cheaper as the actual location for the footage and assets. I figured then that it might be take advantage of an NVME drive of a smaller, more affordable capacity and use it just as a location for video render cache that I just clear after every project wraps. The high speeds of these drives seems like it would be a good fit for this purpose.

However I've heard that SSDs, including NVME are famously short lived and have particularly short life spans in terms of number of write operations. Is that still the case and would the constant writing and clearing of relatively small video files actually be kind of the worst use of one of these drives?

My understanding between TB4 and TB3 is that they're essentially the same, it's just that the standard of TB4 essentially mandates that the device must do all that TB3 maybe could do. Minimum bandwidth is increased and I think I read something about power delivery minimums as well. This eGPU chassis I bought came with it's own TB4 cable, which is actually the first Thunderbolt cable I've seen that specifically says "4" on it.

I assume the reason they supplied this is because, given what it does, an eGPU chassis is going to need to support some pretty bandwidth for a GPU. In my case though, I'm actually using this chassis not for a balls to the wall kick ass Graphics card, but actually to allow me to attach an old and very humble i/o card from Blackmagic. It's currently working just fine for that purpose.

Thing is, the supplied TB4 cable is pretty short and the chassis along with the ATX power supply mounted on it makes for a pretty hefty desk-space consuming setup. I'd like to move the whole setup somewhere fairly far off from the laptop to save me some precious desk space. I looked up 2m thunderbolt 4 cables which I understand is the longest distance you can get for TB4 and still maintain bandwidth and while it's not too bad, the prices are high for a cable. It occurs to me though that since I'm barely using a fraction of the available bandwidth anyway, could I use other, cheaper, long cables. USB4 comes up a lot in my search for 2m TB4 cables for example. (although they are mostly from AliExpress so don't know how good an idea it is to buy from them). If the chassis has TB4 controllers in it, as does the laptop to which it's attached, can one just put a USB4 cable between them? Are they physically different?

For that matter, since my bandwidth needs are so tiny, could I just find cheaper, longer TB3 cables?

I don't know my terminology very well. I just bought this eGPU enclosure. It also comes with an m.2 slot I suspect that's probably what this 4 pin power slot is for.

I have a spare ATX PSU to power this thing with and it's not modular, the cables come out of the PSU box in a big messy bundle and there's no where to detach or attach cables. There's lots of different connectors that come out of this bundle but alas no square arrangement of 2 rows of 2 pins as needed by this chassis.

There are however 2 such connectors that are kind of joined together through a little plastic catch, but in a manner where you can slide them apart. It's clearly intended that you can be able to separate these if you want to, but them being attached to each other in the first place has me a little worried.

The cable from which they each branch has TKG written on it and each of the connectors has L and R printed on it respectively. If I separate them, I can definitely fit one in to the slot, but is there any reason one shouldn't do this?

UPDATE: It works!! Initially the chassis wouldn't power on but I discovered that if I simply don't plug in the 4 pin slot at all then it does. I'm pretty sure that slot is for powering an m.2 drive if you have one and that was one of the things that made me decide to buy this particular chassis so it doesn't look great but I'm hoping that if I actually had an m.2 drive to test it with, that plugging in that PSU connector to the 4 pin slot would work, but at the moment, when there is no such drive connected, the entire chassis doesn't power on. Even better still, the blackmagic card works!! This is great because the manufacturer actually responded to my email asking if it would work too late and I had already ordered it and they said it wouldn't work so the fact that it does is a big relief. Word of advice for anyone testing this with standard computer monitors instead of proper reference monitors like me, it might say "out of range" or similar on your monitor for a lot of standard video frame rates, but for testing purposes, I was able to get it to work at 60p. No good for a real project, but hopefully with a real reference monitor that wouldn't be an issue.

I occasionally do some paid editing work in my home suite. I use a MBP and I just use whatever storage I have left on external drives or buy new ones as the project budget permits. Most of the time, my work is done on-site using a production company's facilities so it's not a big time operation here at home.

I also like to download and watch video over my wifi to to TV or my phone in other rooms of the house (don't typically move the laptop much). I tend to use the laptop's internal drive for that.

I'm beginning to outgrow my storage for both purposes, but only just. I could continue as I am for quite some time, deleting media at home after I watch it, and buying physically fairly small drives to put away in cupboards for work. However, I'm thinking I could fix both storage needs for a very long time by spending a bit bigger (but not MUCH), and getting a proper RAID. My mind immediately went to NAS, but it occurs to me that, that mightn't necessarily be the most cost effective or efficient way to go given the limited scope of my needs.

My home network is very slow consumer equipment, and I have no ethernet infrastructure at all. I thought I could maybe just hook the NAS up to the laptop via ethernet but then at that point, isn't that just DAS with the extra complications of networking? Would I need a switch between the 2? My home streaming is just done over wifi, since everything is compressed media anyway.

If I buy a decent thunderbolt DAS RAID and expose it to the wifi network via the laptop, would the costs stack up in terms of power consumption and wear and tear of the expensive lappy (given it'd be powered on nearly constantly)? Are there NAS devices that I can directly attach to the lappy for editing, but leave on and connected to wifi for home streaming? Would it need any additional networking equipment in that use case? Can I run jellyfin on it? I feel like a NAS doesn't make sense but would like help puzzling this out.

I wouldn't want to find out the hard way. I have a BMD decklink 4k mini monitor PCIe card. I used to use it in a PC, but I upgraded to a laptop. To replace with an external input device is too expensive unless I downgrade capability significantly.

PCIe chassis are more expensive than expected but I've noticed ones that specifically call themselves 'eGPU enclosures'. For some reason when they're marketed to that specific purpose, they cost a lot less, probably because they often don't come with power supplies (which I actually have spare).

I'm looking at 2 such eGPU enclosures and they are a decent price and I think they should work, but I'm a little scared by them specifically saying "eGPU". Would I likely have any problems buying one of those for my PCIe device rather than for a graphics card? Or is PCIe, PCIe regardless?

When I want to find an app I haven't pinned to the home screen I swipe up from the bottom of the home screen to bring up a search bar where I can search for an app by name or scroll through list of all apps on the phone.

Thing is the search bar on my new pixel phone is actually a Google search bar that will search apps locally at the same time as providing web results, especially if it can't find the app by name.

It's a nice idea in theory but in practice I find it annoying, especially if I've just made a typo. Also, I'm just never going to use this search bar for web searching anyway because for that I would want my chosen browser so the web results are of no use to me.

I actually remember my old phone used to do what I wanted it to do, then one day it switched to what my new phone currently does and after a long time I found the solution to return it back to it's previous behaviour except now I've forgotten what I did.

I only want to search my phone's local storage for apps matching my keyword when I access the app drawer. How do I get rid of this Google search bar? (I'd love to get rid of the Google search bar from the home screen itself as well but I understand I can't do that without root on stock android.

It's strange but listening again to music from about 20 years ago, during a time when I was mostly sad and depressed, and where the musical choices reflected that, gives me a weird sense of nostalgia and longing for that time.

I know it's not unusual for music to do that, that's just run of the mill, it's just odd that, it has me longing for a time and associated mood that, on the whole, I kind of didn't really enjoy very much. The angsty tracks were what I listened to because I was so bummed out and dissatisfied.

Back in 2007-ish I told my Mum all about how you could jailbreak iphones and unlock them to make the phone with other carriers. I helped alleviate any concerns by convincing her and myself that if there are any problems after the procedure, nothing physically has been changed on the phone and as long as I made a backup first, we could always switch back.

I jailbroke the iphone 3g she had and it didn't take long before she began to notice a lot of problems, it got hot all the time, the battery drained way fast and animations were juddery and slow and sometimes apps crashed. I restored the backedup image of the phone from before thinking I'd fix everything, but although it improved the situation somewhat, the heat and battery dissipation remained permanent and the phone became useless. Ever since then I've been pretty scared of doing anything of that nature to any phone.

I really want to install Graphene OS on a pixel phone but... well, I also want to be sure I can go back if I change my mind, especially as the phone is expensive. Any risks associated with doing this? Is there any way to screw it up so bad that you permanently brick the phone? If the USB cable breaks or gets yanked in the middle of it or something like that can I always get back to square 1? Is there any known way for things done in the installation of Graphene OS to somehow survive having stock android flashed on to it?

You'd think this would be easier than it seems to be in reality. I am interested in getting a Sony Xperia 5V or Xperia 1V. Where I live, phones can't make calls unless they support VoLTE. The phones in question support basically all the bands I need them to support and I've found several encouraging Reddit posts from people saying they got the Xperia 1V to work here (haven't found any for the 5V). Some confirm VoLTE, others simply say they were able to make calls. The VoLTE requirement for phones is very recent with different carriers killing off their 3G networks at slightly different times the latest being about a month away so it's hard to judge how much I can trust those posts. I've also seen a video from what seems to be an Indian person showing you how to enable VoLTE on a 1V.

The thing is though, these are encouraging signs but Sony themselves have kept decidedly shtoom on the matter not mentioning the capability in their marketing or their web manuals for either phone, it is also not mentioned on GSM arena, however I noticed that this is not mentioned in the information about my current phone on GSM arena either, even though it definitely does support it because I've been using since even before it was a hard requirement. Is there any way to figure this out definitively? I've tried contacting Sony and maybe at some point they'll reply but frankly I'm not holding my breath and I suspect if they do reply they'll say something about the phones not being for sale in this country (which is true), or mentioning some of the other things the phone can do without answering whether it will do this one particular thing, which is what some websites selling the phone did as well. That type of evasive behaviour would normally lead me to conclude the answer was the feature isn't supported but those Reddit posts and that video, while not definitive enough in their own right seem to strongly indicate that it is supported.