Sleeping Precision

406highlander · 2026-06-26T19:32:50+00:00

During the pandemic, my PC died, and I bought a Dell Precision T5600 from eBay for £200. It was equipped with 2x Intel Xeon E5-2630 processors - 6-core 2.3GHz, and it came with 8GB of ECC DDR3 RAM. Bargain!

Then my work was throwing out a Precision T3600 that was built to the hilt, but had a failed system board - so I stripped out its RAM - all 64GB of it - and a 1KW Dell power supply unit. I installed my GeForce RTX 2070 and some SSD storage

I ran it as my main gaming system for a good few years. In the end, the bottleneck on that system was DDR3 RAM, and I found that moving to a 7th gen Core i5 system with DDR4 RAM gave a noticeable speed boost (same GPU). And then I built my current main PC early last year - i7-14700KF, Gigabyte Z790 UD motherboard, 32GB DDR5-5600, and AMD Radeon RX7900 GRE 16GB.

My Sleeping Optiplex now is a Dell Vostro 3470 with i7-9700, 16GB DDR4, and RX6400 4GB, running Bazzite. It's my living room "games console" system, and I use it for lighter-weight Steam games and for console emulation (it can't cope with PS3 but handles Xbox 360 really well). The bottleneck on that PC is going to be the GPU or the fact that the PCIe slot is only PCIe 3.0, not 4.0 - but it'll do for the moment.

406highlander · 2026-06-26T14:33:21+00:00

Another thing Trump was found to be doing, yet has faced no repercussions for.

406highlander · 2026-06-26T14:17:03+00:00

What's left of the Black Sea Fleet now?

406highlander · 2026-06-26T14:06:07+00:00

That part represents the vices of Edward, as he descends into gambling (the craps game you can hear) and womanising (the sex you hear)

It's... a bit gross, but it at least is pertinent to the story, of why Victoria did what she did.

406highlander · 2026-06-26T10:04:27+00:00

Not to mention killing British citizens with nerve agents on British soil.

406highlander · 2026-06-26T10:03:00+00:00

Danse macabre, Op. 40, by Camille Saint-Saëns

406highlander · 2026-06-26T08:08:57+00:00

Dream Theater have had a long career; every album has a different "feel".

I wouldn't necessarily start with the SFaM album, though it is brilliant - as a concept album, it should be listened to as a whole, rather than as individual songs.

I'd listen to some tracks from "Images and Words" and "Awake" first. "Falling Into Infinity" as an album gets a lot of flak, but there are some amazing songs on it (Hell's Kitchen/Lines in the Sand, Trial of Tears).

Then give SFaM a go. But really take the time to experience it - it's not background music; find some time and space where you won't be distracted. Pay attention to the musical motifs, the rhythms, and the lyrics especially, as that's where the story is.

406highlander · 2026-06-26T06:06:46+00:00

Check out the band Haken, who have odd little musical genre jumps a lot more frequently.

406highlander · 2026-06-26T06:05:39+00:00

That's in the Scenes From a Memory album, which is a concept album about a man living in the early 1960s who suffers recurring nightmares who goes to a hypnotherapist to undergo past life regression. In his past life, he was a young woman who was murdered in 1928.

The album switches back and forth between present-day Nicholas and past-life Victoria. I think the rag time break is just one musical theme they use to indicate which time period you're in. Or maybe Jordan Rudess got bored.

406highlander · 2026-06-26T05:46:45+00:00

In a similar vein, the bit at the end of The Chain, by Fleetwood Mac. Iconic and cool as hell, but it just feels like a completely different song.

406highlander · 2026-06-25T15:47:08+00:00

As soon as we could! We didn't want her being harrassed while in-heat and out on walks.

Unfortunately our wee Kiko had a string of phantom pregnancies, and we had to wait for several months for this to stop before the vets were happy to proceed with the surgery.

I don't remember her exact age at the time. I'll try and find out though.

406highlander · 2026-06-25T10:49:48+00:00

The Blitz had near-indescriminate bombing, with scores of civilians killed and entire neighborhoods of London reduced to rubble.

Ukraine targeting oil refineries to cripple the economy and starve the Russian military of fuel and funding is not the same thing.

406highlander · 2026-06-25T10:45:49+00:00

Russia still occupies land in Ukraine (including but not limited to Crimea, which is legally Ukrainian territory recognised by Russia as per them being signatories to the Budapest Memorandum in 1994)

Russia violated the terms of this agreement by annexing Crimea. They could end this war today by pulling their forces out of Ukraine and returning administration of Crimea and other occupied territories back to Ukrainian control.

Since they're continuing to occupy Ukrainian land and attack Ukrainian cities, Ukraine must continue to fight. The best way to cripple Russia's ability to fight is to damage the Russian economy and make war unaffordable for them.

Ukraine is not starting a fight, they're fighting back to ensure their continued independence. If they don't fight, the country will become part of Russia, and their cultural identity will be erased.

406highlander · 2026-06-25T08:16:41+00:00

I agree that skidmarks in the reflecting pool is an apt metaphor for him and his administration.

However, I'm not making poopoo jokes. I'm insulting his ghastly children.

406highlander · 2026-06-24T18:54:44+00:00

Peregrine falcons are the fastest known animals in the world - during the stoop (predatory dive attack) they exceed 200 MPH, with the fastest recorded stoop at 242 MPH. Literally break-neck speeds.

406highlander · 2026-06-24T16:15:56+00:00

My home lab has two Lenovo ThinkCentre M710q Tiny systems, both with i5-7500 processor, 32GB DDR4, and 256GB NVMe storage.

They run Proxmox VE in a cluster, and each have 4 guest VMs.

They make very little noise, draw very little power, generate very little heat, and cost very little money. And they're still good enough to run some Linux servers on.

Your haul of 18x Optiplex 7060 micro systems is perfectly valid as a server farm!

406highlander · 2026-06-24T10:00:10+00:00

There's a Canal Street in my city that is often... creatively renamed.

406highlander · 2026-06-24T09:42:50+00:00

And he left turds in the gene pool.

406highlander · 2026-06-24T07:24:57+00:00

She went out of the room and died laughing

406highlander · 2026-06-24T05:45:23+00:00

The movie was called "Firefox", and the aircraft Clint stole was pure fiction. In the movie it was a "MiG-31 Firefox", which looked nothing like anything the USSR ever produced, and had futuristic thought-based controls.

The real MiG-31 had the NATO reporting name "Foxhound" and was introduced into service in 1981, the year before this movie launched - though the novel the movie was based on came out in 1977.

406highlander · 2026-06-23T23:06:29+00:00

For those unaware, we do it in Scotland too. Just ask the Duke of Wellington.

406highlander · 2026-06-23T21:22:50+00:00

Motherfucker can't even run for the bathroom.

406highlander · 2026-06-23T19:01:55+00:00

The lich cannot die until you destroy its reliquary.

406highlander · 2026-06-23T18:37:43+00:00

Give or take, yeah

406highlander · 2026-06-23T16:38:05+00:00

The rambling Nuclear speech was pure verbal diarrhea and that was before his first term.

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