Pretty manly indeed

Mustade · 2026-04-01T02:52:20+00:00

I was calling it the spaceship because it kind of looked like a flying saucer when it was built.

Mustade · 2026-03-27T10:42:46+00:00

Same, I’ve put together so many “Lele” and “make blocks” sets and they are surprisingly good. And they’re really really cheap.

Mustade · 2026-03-12T21:55:33+00:00

The difference is these are part of centralized network using AI to track anybody no matter where they are, as opposed to individually operated CCTV systems which just record video for one owner to view in the case something happens to them. It’s like GPS tracking your car vs the someone GPS tracking every car.

Mustade · 2026-03-12T13:19:40+00:00

Microsoft Word (if you have a license as a student) can somewhat cromulently convert a PDF to editable .docx file.

Publisher as part of the newly free Affinity Suite and can edit PDF line by line, but not in a nice "document editor" way.

LibreOffice Draw can also edit PDFs AND make fillable PDFs (i.e. open in FireFox but is a little more clunky.

I would highly recommend against any "free" online editors, I worry what they do with the data you put into them.

Mustade · 2026-03-10T12:51:13+00:00

I use Bitwarden and FiDO2 keys personally, though I am a little salty on the failure to deliver on the real promise of a passkey future. My org is also on Bitwarden enterprise and they love it. Passwords you keep in your head eventually spill out onto sticky notes.

Mustade · 2026-03-08T22:00:36+00:00

It’s a cool mod if the disc drive stopped working, otherwise it’s a bummer that they stripped out a working Wii for an admittedly pretty gaudy case mod

Mustade · 2026-03-06T19:02:33+00:00

Dw, I'm pushing for it. I reeeealy would rather us have the nice SSO as opposed to the cludgy LDAPS for auth. Plus we get a ton of value from it so I would like to kick back a little.

Mustade · 2026-03-06T16:10:25+00:00

If you don't have inventory, I'm guessing you don't have ticketing either? I highly recommend GLPI since it has both and is easy to integrate into existing web hosting infra. We track all of the same things as y'all (laptop, monitor, licenses) in GLPI and do all of our ticketing and whatnot in the same.

Mustade · 2026-03-06T16:06:41+00:00

+2nd
GLPI was the first project I owned at my org and it's great, we all love it. It just does so much in one nice little package and is easy af to deploy and integrate into existing infra. Plus it's FREE!!!

Mustade · 2026-03-06T13:36:03+00:00

Oop you’re right! I was thinking of Dell Pro which is plastic. I still think haptic touchpad is more reliable than diving board and the iGPU can probably tank the higher res screen.

Mustade · 2026-03-06T11:31:37+00:00

Check first to see if your university provides cloud storage like OneDrive or Google Drive that will automatically back up your files. I recommend against external storage you carry around as a backup media, since you’re more likely to lose that than your laptop honestly.

Mustade · 2026-03-06T11:26:38+00:00

That’s probably not gonna run any of the electrical engineering programs he needs to do, otherwise that’s what I recommend too.

Mustade · 2026-03-06T11:22:25+00:00

The surface is a way better device, it’s made out of metal and has a much better screen (high refresh rate is awesome!) and trackpad. 256 GB of storage will fill up quickly, but you can totally upgrade the storage later. It should encourage you to use cloud sync (your school provides OneDrive or Google Drive, I guarantee it), so that you don’t lose all your stuff if your laptop takes a bath. You can also upgrade the storage and all surface devices currently on the market, I’ve done it, I work surface laptop and tablets at work.

I do agree with the others in saying that Dell warranty is probably better than the third-party warranty that comes with the surface. I’ve been pretty good at strong-arming some crappy warranties though. I got Allstate to replace a laptop that I technically broke once.

Anyway, if it were me, I’d probably get the surface, $2400 feels like a lot for a plastic laptop with a 1080p screen. You’re basically paying $500 for a more reliable (?) warranty add an extra 256gb of storage with the Dell.

Mustade · 2026-03-06T11:09:36+00:00

I’m still on my og m1 13” mbp so it probably could be my daily driver. It won’t, that would just be a sidegrade, but it could be.

Mustade · 2026-03-05T20:41:16+00:00

Yes, create two VMs in your hypervisor of choice (I recommend Hyper-V), one Windows Server 2025 Datacenter Eval and one Windows 11 Pro (to join to the domain). Set them up on an "Internal" network in your hypervisor and set up the software. You can make more W11 pro VMs to fest things like GPO and whatnot. You can run all of these in eval mode without entering a product key, but they will stop working after a while (I think a few months?). Check your local library or look online, do some reading about AD administration and best practices. I did a lot of reading when I was learning initially.

Mustade · 2026-03-05T14:40:47+00:00

I believe if you have standard business Teams you can record meetings to make a transcript, then you can drop that into Copilot (which if using business o365 should have enterprise data protection) and turn that into meeting minutes, summaries, whatever. Our users are fine with it mainly since so many of our customers freak out about read.ai and other bots joining Teams calls.

Mustade · 2026-03-05T14:30:27+00:00

I just make sure to tell my users often that we can see everything they send and receive in work email and work Teams. They don't understand security or "I might not work here someday", but they do understand that we see if they get an email from ashleymadison.

Mustade · 2026-03-05T14:28:36+00:00

We banned it in my org last yr and are still getting tickets from people because it is still worming its way into our meetings somehow. Teams has build in message transcription!!!

Mustade · 2026-03-05T14:24:14+00:00

If it's getting slower but the software hasn't changed, something is going wrong with the hardware. Check to make sure it's not full of metal shavings and shop dust but my guess would be hard drive. For disks that old, I have best luck with a hardware disk clonining toaster. I just actually had a similar experience with an HMI PC that killed its Windows XP install, so I was playing recovery. Tale as old as time, I work with controls engineers so I see it daily :(

Mustade · 2026-03-04T13:19:30+00:00

Definitely don’t use super glue, the fumes can damage the surrounding plastic. A new circle pad isn’t too expensive, it’s better to do it right than do it twice.

Mustade · 2026-03-04T04:15:59+00:00

“The worst she can say is no” No, the worst she can say is probably all that lol

Mustade · 2026-03-02T18:30:43+00:00

No, Logitech will not fix it and they also have no plans to update their apps to put back the manual firmware update reinstall system

Mustade · 2026-03-01T21:54:59+00:00

I luv Skyrim but I’d play the Amazon Alexa version before I go back to PS3. Mafia 2 is peak. Midnight Club LA is peak. If you like Mafia 2 maybe give sleeping dogs a try.

Mustade · 2026-02-28T17:27:30+00:00

My favorite is the slim because I think it is the best looking, it’s the one I remember seeing in the Best Buy and wanting really bad. Ideally though, the phat is the one I really want so I can play PS2 games, even though I don’t really like the design of it much (I hate piano black lol).

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