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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • I have a bunch of this specific line of Sabrent dock from different generations.

    For some reason, some of them are super finnicky about certain high capacity (over 2TB) drives. What’s even weirder is that I have two identical enclosures purchased at the same time, and for any given drive one dock will be weird but not the other - and it’s not consistently the same dock either.

    If you must use the disk externally, I recommend that you try another dock or enclosure. Probably not a Sabrent one, lol.



  • Static electricity doesn’t mess with wires, replacing the wiring seems to be an odd choice. It can and does mess with integrated circuits, so I would sooner be looking at mainboard replacement.

    Still, this behavior seems almost mechanical in nature. Someone else already asked this, but knowing whether or not the same region of the printhead is consistently affected is going to be critical. You might do a few prints of a 5mm high square with an X through it, using the whole bed.

    If it is consistent, I would be inclined to suspect a reassembly issue - maybe something loose at one end of the gantry?


  • What kind of QoL features do you mean? Gameplay features?

    This past month, I set up JKII to run in super ultrawide with high res textures and fixing the reticule position by dragging and dropping a few files.

    Set up Splinter Cell Enhanced to glow up the PC version of the game.

    There are other examples, like the X-Wing / TIE mods.

    In these cases, my own goal has been to adapt the games to modern systems / formats while preserving the core gameplay.



  • Everything I described relates mostly to motherboards for custom builds (ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, etc)

    Dell doesn’t have an “Advanced Mode” and profiles are limited to one “save as custom user settings” option.

    Unless something has changed with their absolute latest models, their UEFI usually follows a “tree” layout that is super navigable with a keyboard. Arrow keys, spacebar, and the TAB key ought to get you everywhere you need to go - the latter being necessary to jump from the tree on the left over to managing the different settings on the right.



  • I own a repair shop so I’m sure my perspective comes from spending an unusual amount of time in UEFI/BIOS over the course of the years, but I find that they remain perfectly usable with a keyboard.

    Most modern UEFI have an “advanced mode” (usually F7) that is a lot closer to traditional BIOS layout and navigability. I actually get unreasonably bothered when trainees insist on fumbling around with the mouse in “Easy Mode”

    There’s so many options in modern UEFI that there are two features I’m actually incredibly grateful for:

    The “Favorites” systems, so that you can have all of the settings you’ll actually change all in one place

    The “Profiles” systems, so that you can easily hop between configurations

    Without those, the onion meta-game of finding options that are arranged differently on AMD vs Intel or between different motherboard vendors is a rough time.


  • I picked up an old Dell server some time ago and wound up finding firmware that made the RAID card passthrough so that TrueNAS could have direct access to disks for ZFS

    That server was all SATA based so I’m not sure what options you’ll have, but it’s worth looking into.

    Ultimately, my thinking is that just because there’s something “better” out there doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work with what you have.


  • Windows 10 didn’t “die”

    Microsoft isn’t offering support for it, but their help was barely useful to begin with.

    There’s a few small hoops to jump through to enroll in the Extended Security Updates program, after which Windows 10 devices will continue to be functional and secure for at least another year.

    Ultimately, I’m all for folks going out and dabbling in Linux. Unfortunately, most consumers are interpreting this situation as a requirement to rush out and buy a new Windows 11 PC and that’s bad.




  • It’s 2025, most people have had a secondary pocket computer with internet access for the last 15 years.

    Would definitely appreciate a more verbose panic page, but I’m not sure that information exists at the instant of the panic - the percentage is the system compiling a crash dump.





  • This case is due to a logical problem. Cleanrooms are only necessary for physical repairs, like swapping the Head Stack Assembly.

    DriveSavers’ cost of entry for a successful recovery is about $2,000. They’ve even given that quote to an iPhone user who needed nothing more than a screen replacement.

    Their “state of the art facility” is appropriate for hardware cases where money is no object and you need the best of the best to deliver results no matter the cost.

    Realistically, most regular people will be well taken care of using a reasonably priced service like 300 Dollar Data Recovery.