Category: Wandering.Shop

Video card shuffle complete!

After getting the nice new card for the gaming PC, I was hoping to just shift everything downward, but its old card made my main desktop really unstable, and my desktop’s old card physically wouldn’t fit in the ancient box we have hooked up to the TV for media.

Old card is now doing Folding@home in the gaming PC. Medium card in my desktop has been replaced with a compatible one & I plan to sell it since it worked fine in the other box. Left the media box alone.

It’s weird, the Radeon card that was in the Windows 10 gaming PC worked great – no problems at all. I only took it out to get a more powerful one.

But when I moved it to my dual-boot system, it worked immediately on Linux, but it kept freezing Windows whenever I tried to update the driver or tools. And I’d get random crashes during games that had been totally stable on my old, less-powerful Nvidia.

Indications pointed to chipset compatibility problems with the mobo.

Between all the crashes and knowing that I couldn’t update the drivers, ever, it became clear I’d need to either replace the motherboard & hope that fixed it, or just replace the card. Back to the old one? Not after a month of awesome graphics performance! So I looked for a comparable Nvidia. Not as good (or expensive) as the shiny new one, but a lot better than the old one.

Once it arrived, I think I had everything working on both operating systems within 30 minutes.

WHO says corticosteroids really do save lives of people critically ill with COVID-19

Reply to a post about The evidence is in. WHO says corticosteroids really do save lives of people critically ill with COVID-19, finding that they help treat severe cases.

I’m surprised that the article doesn’t say more about the immunosuppressant effect that corticosteroids have.

Some of the articles I was looking at last week (when I was prescribed a course of prednisone for an unrelated condition) were looking at whether steroids might make mild cases worse by allowing the virus to make more progress.

If that holds up, then it’s *definitely* important to save them for severe cases where the anti-inflammatory effect makes a bigger difference!

On Wandering.Shop

Whoa! Netflix is developing an adaptation of the Three-Body Problem trilogy.I’m not sure about …

Whoa! Netflix is developing an adaptation of the Three-Body Problem trilogy.

I’m not sure about Benioff and Weiss, but Rian Johnson is involved, and most importantly, both the original author Liu Cixin and translator Ken Liu are involved.

https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/the-three-body-problem-netflix-original-series

On Wandering.shop

Encountered a weird bug in #PokemonGo: It could find my location, loaded stops, gyms and …

Encountered a weird bug in #PokemonGo: It could find my location, loaded stops, gyms and Pokemon just fine, but wouldn’t show any map features like roads, parks or buildings.

It’s apparently a known issue with the current version of the app. Clearing the cache didn’t work. Neither did going into Advanced Settings & re-downloading the game data. What *did* work was deleting both the cache and the app data, and then re-signing in (and re-doing all my settings, but at least there aren’t too many).

On Wandering.shop

Wow, literal power bricks. Classic red bricks are porous and contain iron oxide…

Wow, literal power bricks.

Classic red bricks are porous and contain iron oxide, which a team in St. Louis has converted into a conductive material for use as a supercapacitor. They hooked up 2 bricks in an electrolyte solution to a AAA battery for a minute and were able to charge a white LED for 11 minutes afterward.

The density isn’t great, but you could use them for things like backup power and emergency lighting.

Turning Bricks Into Supercapacitors
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis made a fast energy storage device out of common building bricks

On Wandering.shop

Slightly related: Took the kid to meet-and-greet/supply pickup with the new teacher, which was all …

Slightly related: Took the kid to meet-and-greet/supply pickup with the new teacher, which was all done as drive-through in the school parking lot.

1.5-hour time slot per grade, with each teacher camping out under a different awning next to the parking lot with grocery bags of books & supplies for each student. Drive up wearing masks, go to the right teacher, roll down the windows, say hi, pick up the supplies, stop by the PTA awning on the way out & go.

Online classes start tomorrow.

On Wandering.shop

WTF, Skype?

WTF, Skype?

Not only does it not have a built-in way of running two accounts on the same device (like, say, putting both my personal and work accounts on my phone), but it seems to think that if I’m signed in on a computer, it doesn’t need to send my phone notifications….even if the computer is locked and/or asleep. That’s literally the whole point of having work Skype on my phone.

Admittedly I don’t really use my personal Skype account for much of anything these days. mostly it’s a way the kid sends me a different collection of emojis and stickers

…

Found an option to turn on notifications even if I’m on another device. Tested it and while it does send notices to both even when I’m sitting at the computer with the session open, it clears the notification from my phone when I look at the message on the computer, so it *mostly* works like it used to.

Hopefully I won’t miss so many work skypes anymore when I break to take care of other things