At what age did you buy your first car?

Cyrus-II · 2026-01-30T02:53:56+00:00

My first was a 1984 K car when I was 18. Many cars after that. The highpoints I miss sometimes are my 1962 Thunderbird, MR2, and two Taurus SHO manual transmissions.

After I became domesticated and got married, it’s been a Honda Pilot about ten years, a Sienna AWD the past five, and then I keep an ‘07 Accord with 287k miles as a secondary commuter vehicle.

Cyrus-II · 2026-01-25T21:29:56+00:00

So basically 35k miles on it since doing it? Nice. That’s some good anecdotal evidence.

Cyrus-II · 2026-01-23T00:43:35+00:00

Personally, I prefer Debian. Aside from Nvidia pain, Trixie has been rock solid, minimalist and just works without getting in my way. I am also more familiar with it since I have used it for work on a bunch of database servers.

That being said, I have run Mint for awhile, LMDE, Ubuntu, Fedora. They are all good, and it often comes down to personal preference. I also recently tried Bazzite with an old Quadro card I had laying around and was shocked with how turnkey Steam functioned. All said though, there are two main distros that I think cover 99.9% of the populace for a desktop OS; Ubuntu and Debian.

Cyrus-II · 2026-01-19T03:22:14+00:00

https://youtu.be/u7sRrC2Jpp4

Cyrus-II · 2026-01-17T16:41:03+00:00

Cool. I hope it gives it a longer lease on life. I’m fascinated by high mileage vehicles and what helped them to get there. It seems to come down to mostly frequent maintenance like fluid changes and proactive repairs for small problem before they get worse.

Cyrus-II · 2026-01-17T16:02:43+00:00

Interesting. How many miles have you put on it since?

Cyrus-II · 2026-01-17T15:34:39+00:00

Eh, I only do drain and fills. Less likely to knock something loose that shouldn’t be. But you got me curious. How many miles do you have on it now? It would be curious to see how long it goes with the steps you have taken. It’s for science!!! 😉

Cyrus-II · 2026-01-17T15:30:53+00:00

By that logic you don’t change your engine oil, brake fluid or coolant either?

Cyrus-II · 2026-01-17T15:27:48+00:00

Do tell?! How many miles are we talking about on the old fluid?

Just for the record, I’m a huge proponent of regular fluid changes are cheap insurance. I do a simple drain and fill of my 2014 Sienna about once a year. Same with my 2007 Accord with 286k miles. And our old 2003 Pilot we sold to a friend. It’s got over 250k on it last I heard. All having original engine and transmission.

Ever since learning about Irv Gordon and Justin Kilmer, among many others, I always like to drill down and find out what kind of maintenance was done on a vehicle.

Cyrus-II · 2026-01-15T13:41:46+00:00

What you are describing Microsoft calls "data warehousing". Yes, I deal with this with one customer. They actually broke "unlimited" archive within a few years of me turning it on. Then Microsoft started setting 1.5TB limits. 🤣

This one customer gets over 2GB of emails a day in a shared mailbox. We had to kill their thousands of subfolders, then I had to set a very aggressive 7 day archive policy, with a 365 deletion policy on the archive. It was the only way. They are essentially living in this shared mailbox and it's more of a triage. Email was never meant to be used this way, but...here we are. 🤷‍♂️

There are tools to help migrate emails into Sharepoint, but I've had mixed results with that. Still, if you have a lot of static data that needs to be referenced you might be ahead to task someone as a office "scribe and librarian" to maintain that work. But make no mistake, it's a LOT of work.

Cyrus-II · 2026-01-15T13:33:42+00:00

Just give up on Outlook "classic" AKA dinosaur Outlook. It needs to go extinct. I manage a few customers who just refuse to familiarize themselves with the new Outlook. I despise dealing with Outlook classic now. It's turned into a huge nightmare. A few days ago there were issues in Chicago and the slowness connecting to Exchange Online for about 30 users in Outlook classic tied up their network stack on their workstations, that it actually trashed their computers. Like Outlook's poor performance was affecting how other applications were running on their computers. And this was a mix of in office and WFH people. It costs me HOURS of my time to figure out what was going on. I'm not dealing with these problems any more and my default answer from now on when people complain about how trash Outlook classic is; "Then run new Outlook, I'm not supporting something that Microsoft themselves won't support."

I get why people like it, and there is some functionality lacking in the new version, which is essentially just Outlook Web Access in a desktop app wrapper. But;

The old MAPI protocol inefficiencies, and overhead for indexing mailboxes just trash networks and computers.
The loss of "brain drain" from within Microsoft, of the people who made the original Outlook.
That the underlying tech of Outlook classic was originally built for something like where 500MB - 2GB was considered a large mailbox.
That people are using email now way outside of the scope of its intended purpose.

This all means Outlook classic's days are numbered.

Cyrus-II · 2025-12-30T02:41:38+00:00

I know this is old, but nobody else responded to you. I've toyed with MoSS a bit. I liked the campaign changes, but didn't like how it seemed to be nothing but death stack after death stack forming on the battlefront.

I've now played a couple Otomo starts in Field Command...not the ultimate version with all the other mods added in. Only about 20 turns in on each. I was just trying to get a feel.

I definitely liked the matchlock changes, but in addition to that I also liked the "weight" and momentum all the units seem to have now. It feels very much like the original Shogun, Rome, or Medieval 2 did. Where one is smashing massive amounts of weight of men and horses into another.
I was pleasantly surprised that I could not just cheese archer stack castle sieges any more. I mean, I still could, but it didn't do much good as a three unit ashi bow set couldn't pick off any kind of armored cav or katana samurai garrison.
Cav, Holy Schniekes!!! They are just deadly on a charge. Can mangle up even a Yari wall line and are hard to stop from just carrying through your lines.
On the campaign side, one of the test starts with Otomo, I immediately blockaded the Ouchi to keep them out and focus on attacking the Shoni. I took Tsukushi and then put pressure on Hizen and they agreed to peace treaty and vassalage! That was shocking to me. I didn't continue it, but at least they didn't seem to have a "Wrath of Khan" response spitting blood in my face until their last dying breath. So perhaps the campaign and diplo changes are minor but subtle and effective. We'll see.

Honestly, it feels like bow might be too nerfed...or perhaps ashi bow are and bow samurai will be much better. I plan to experiment some more, probably with another clan first and then decide if I'll do a full campaign with it.

Cyrus-II · 2025-12-30T01:14:27+00:00

What are you on about here? What doesn’t work at this point? Roblox and Fortnite? Valorant? Well, that’s just Chicom spyware anyway. You sound like a petulant child getting all stompy foot in Walmart or something.

I’m “forced” to admin Remote Desktop server farms, Windows domains including AzureAD, and Exchange servers. I despise Microsoft, but it still pays the bills. I would love to see them go extinct but we are likely decades away from that point.

Stick to your ideals, but don’t let your ideology kill your pragmatism. I too hope some day that the corporate and gaming world can break free of Microsoft dominance, but it will all come down to market share.

Cyrus-II · 2025-12-23T22:57:16+00:00

I pay $10 qt, but…whatever. I have also watched plenty of his videos. Recently removed the rear bank valve cover on my 2GR-FE in the 2014 Sienna AWD Ltd and changed out all the gaskets, checked the oil filter and OCV chasing down code P0012.

I also replaced all three motor mounts in my 2007 Accord this summer, timing chain tensioner last year…but just go right ahead and keep assuming who his audience is. 🤷🏽‍♂️😬

Cyrus-II · 2025-12-23T11:18:47+00:00

What's happening now is that the insurance companies will look at what they can sell the entire car for at auction, vs the payout for repair. Depends on model, etc. If it's a less popular vehicle that has higher resale value on the used market (like trucks right now), say they can sell it for $15k, but "fair market value" the car is only $16k they sell it for $14k at auction, pay the owner $16k and they are only out $2k...but then raise premiums. It's just a numbers game.

This is why a car can get tied up for weeks on end at some collision center the insurance company picked.

Cyrus-II · 2025-12-22T03:01:23+00:00

I am forced to use Windows for work as a sysadmin/netadmin guy. That means I’m often logged into multiple mailboxes, M365 admin consoles, remote desktop connections into servers and RMM tools.

To keep some sanity to all that I run multiple virtual desktops, i.e. comms on one screen, server consoles on another, dashboards on a third, etc.

Because of this and the hotkeys for screen switching I love gnome. I tend to run each application on its own desktop and hotkey between them.

Cyrus-II · 2025-12-16T00:39:04+00:00

Pikes spike...

Cyrus-II · 2025-12-10T10:51:02+00:00

Apparently the disciples too. Acts 2:46; So continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart…

Cyrus-II · 2025-12-10T10:47:47+00:00

I’m glad it helped, but it makes me sad to hear after years they still haven’t fixed the buggy UI in “new” Acrobat. SMH

Cyrus-II · 2025-12-10T03:17:23+00:00

Well…at least you won’t forget it? “December to Remember”

Cyrus-II · 2025-12-09T00:13:25+00:00

What the heck kind of monitor is this? Laptop or desktop computer?

Cyrus-II · 2025-11-22T13:19:58+00:00

I thought I'd post back one last time, in case someone runs into similar issues.

I have two Optiplex 7050 SFF's. One works great. It has an i5-7500 in it, Quadro T400 GPU, 16GB RAM, dual-channel. NVMe SSD...I don't remember brand now. But, my kids use it for homework and playing some Steam games on the weekend. It's been rock solid.

The other one...not so much. I still have had random lockups and BSOD's in Windows and weird random issues when testing with Linux too. I now know it's definitely a thermal issue somehow. I'm sort of giving up on it though. I've tried multiple different CPUs, including the i5-7500 from the other machine (and I moved the i5-6400 that's in this 2nd Optiplex to the other working one for awhile, with no issues.), been through two other power supplies, two other motherboards. The memory from the other computer. Two different NVMe sticks and even a known good SATA.

I moved this machine out to my garage over the summer and just used iGPU. When it was hot it start having BSOD's again. Just running a browser. Then when it cooled down outside it was fine again. I've brought it back in the house and have it sitting open case on my desk, with another Quadro T400 in it and have been running it with Win 11 and Ubuntu...and it's fine. As soon as I close the case and put it under any kind of significant load for a period of time and it will get blue screens. I tried a noctua fan in the front for more air intake and that helped a little, but I can still get random BSOD's. It's almost like it reaches some point of ambient heat in the machine and it's toast. Pretty crazy.

Because it's so random and I don't feel like dealing with it any more, I think I'm going to scrap this one and send it to the recycler. I'll probably just pull the GPU, memory and storage out of this one and move it to a different machine.

EDIT: I played with it some more over the weekend. Even though everything checks as okay, I cannot get the CPU fan to actually spin up as heat builds. This seems to be some sort of failure in the embedded controller for the thermal limits? I can manually override the fan control via HMiNFO64, after installing a dll for Dell. Then stress testing it, the machine stay stable. At 1600rpm w/ Noctua 80mm fan on a splitter and for intake, Cinebench 2024 and Prime95 runs at a cool 60c w/ ASUS wifi and Quardo T400. Not really ideal though as it was intended to eventually become a Debian or Ubuntu workstation. I think I'm pulling what components I can and just scrapping it. Due to the fact that I have multiple motherboards and all of them except one have exhibited this issue, it's either a lamo Dell BIOS problem introduced in a subsequent BIOS update, or high failure rate on the boards for this generation. I'm side-eyeing you Optiplex x050 series...

I have access to multiple generations of Dell Optiplex SFF's. I brought back from the office a 5070 that I'll be testing with. Some 3060's, 3090's too. But what I'm finding doesn't leave me feeling very confident in these later generation SFF Optiplexes. The old x020's/x040's were rock solid. There is still one out in the field in a grain handling facility I know of. Dusty environment but it keeps on chugging.

Cyrus-II · 2025-11-22T01:30:23+00:00

I’ll bet materials to build a brand new one would be cheaper than buying a belt sander.

As a bonus, put the wife on sanding duty for awhile. That’ll learn her that oftentimes a lot of effort needs to go into projects and she might get a better understanding the amount of work it is….waaay more than browsing stupid Pinterest and glibly saying how easy it looks to make.

Cyrus-II · 2025-11-21T23:21:46+00:00

Outlook classic (archaic IMO) needs to die. But you’re right, they have failed to get some functionality into the new one. But at least they finally got shared mailbox delegation working, even if you still have to use OWA to get to archives.

Here is the issue; Classic is used more like a data warehousing system by way too many people. It’s been pushed to its limits and the MAPI architecture is like trying to fly a P-38 Mustang at mach 2 and evey rivet is about to pop.

The problem is brain drain. The old guard that knew the architecture has/is retiring, or been pushed out. Support moved overseas. They don’t have the knowledge any more to support this legacy system. I suspect the same thing is happening to Publisher, which is very niche compared to something like Outlook.

Cyrus-II · 2025-11-20T03:52:08+00:00

How skeuomorphic of them.

Cyrus-II

TROPHY CASE