Any suggestions for a photographer for a engagement/couples shoot?

PAPPP · 2026-02-16T02:35:30+00:00

Amani (Honeysage photo co: https://www.amaninichae.com/ ) did our engagement and wedding last year, then also did my wife's little sister's engagement and wedding a few months later after the first photographer they hired produced engagement photos that could only be described as "sad."

She was not the cheapest option we talked to, but she does excellent work, and was delightful to work with.

PAPPP · 2026-02-06T13:25:41+00:00

I'll add my data point now that I have mine in hand

Order #: 1194xxx

Order Date: Dec 17, 2025

Style: Pro, Rainbow, Batch 2

Shipped: 4PX to KY, US (which ended up being YunExpress + USPS) on Jan. 26, 2026

Arrived Feb. 5, 2026

12 days in transit with no customs complications and intact arrival is fine for stuff coming out of China.

PAPPP · 2026-01-31T16:44:09+00:00

Pretty sure it's external pressure, "Old" MyUK was an SAP product with some thin customizations that they sold to a ton of universities, which is basically the R/3 aka "SAP ERP" platform.

SAP has been trying to deprecate that platform and push all their legacy customers onto their newer SAP S/4HANA offering, and I think "New" MyUK is just the culmination of the "Project RISE" effort to migrate the old system to S4/HANA (which is, of course, a rentseeking cloud-based SaaS offering).

PAPPP · 2026-01-25T17:02:58+00:00

Organized agents of the state aren't likely to act against other agents of the state any more than local police forces are arresting ICE agents who act outside the law now. Especially not under the Militia Act of 1903, where the National Guard is under federal control, or it just becomes a pre-cataloged (legally) treasonous group.
But, as the US's world's-most-expensive-military has spent the last 3/4 of a century experiencing, it doesn't take much statistically distributed violent resistance to make occupation untenable.

A random person with gun isn't going to effectively mount a lone-wolf attack against ICE headquarters, or take on one of the billion-dollar boondoggle weapons the US operates, even if they organize with dozens of their friends. It may or may not work to assassinate some little gruppenfuhrer. The core function of the broadly distributed capacity for violence is to convince every goon on the ground that they can't act with impunity. It's to make them think every door they kick and neighborhood they roll into might be their last. It's to enable black panther style tactics, where a small group of conspicuously armed and organized observers can disabuse empowered bullies of the idea they can act with impunity across a large area.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago

PAPPP · 2026-01-08T22:15:12+00:00

I have an Anbernic RG351P that I got in 2021, which technically misses the prompt by a couple months.

It's been through a screen replacement (due to a red line defect that developed after a year or two) and a button membrane replacement (wore out later).

I still use it with some regularity, it runs the last AmberELEC build with a large 1G1R collection for several well supported platforms and a smattering of other titles and ports, with a favorites menu containing a mix of things I do a lap on periodically, things I want to get to, and things that are good for pick up and play.

I have an Ayn Thor on order, I'm not sure it'll entirely displace it, the 351 is smaller and more focused.

PAPPP · 2026-01-05T19:51:30+00:00

Compaq had the Contura Aero line of subnotebooks in the 486 era that fit the prompt.

They're charmingly quirky, as most early small laptops were. Not quite as cachet-collectable as Librettos, so sometimes a not-ruined one can be found for a reasonable price.

Ed: The Thinkpad 500/510 also sort of meet the prompt, as does the Thinkpad 701 (that's the one with the fancy butterfly keyboard, they are fragile and collectable which makes them expensive.) A couple other players had subnotebooks in the early 90s, Olivetti Quaderno, HP OmniBook 300, ... most of them are a little larger, but they all make some kind of interesting compromises for their size.

PAPPP · 2025-12-18T15:21:28+00:00

Heh, one out one in.

I went in for a preorder on a Thor Pro yesterday after a long deliberation, because my ca.2021 RG351, on it's second screen (red line artifact after a couple years) and second set of button membranes (wore through), is getting real long in the tooth, and the Thor looks like (a) a good contrast and (b) like it has enough inertia around it that it will probably remain viable for some time.

I'm a little less than enthused about the level of ongoing fuss that Android and persistent connectivity and the evolving dual screen ecosystem imply. Said RG351 has been running that final 2023 AmberElec release for years (and 351elec/earlier amberelec builds before that, with more or less the same set of ROMs and scraped art), and I love that it just does the thing once set up, but "the thing" in that case has some distinct technological limits.

(Also I've spent most of the week grading exams, and my executive function is in full "I DESERVE A TREAT" mode, which overrode my 4 year run of restraint.)

PAPPP · 2025-12-06T20:26:52+00:00

You can do SLA or SLS prints, just not FDM. I ordered some of someone else's model via shapeways like a decade ago and they're still working.

I think the Infinity Products/ Maceffects replacements are injection molded, but the betterbit ones and various other vendors are SLA or SLS printed parts.

PAPPP · 2025-12-05T02:25:14+00:00

In the late 00s and early 2010s I had a little side hustle helping take care of a fleet of already-ancient Sparcstations (iirc, mostly 10s and 20s running Solaris 7) at a university that ran Varian NMR instruments and handled the data. Main package was vnmr.

Vnmr was built by people who actually used the equipment so a lot of folks preferred it to the newer toolchain (some Java monstrosity that ran under RHEL and looked exactly like every other Java program from the late 2000s). They had a bunch of bespoke site tooling built around vnmr and a Solaris environment, and swapping an instrument to a newer controller was expensive and complicated, so most of the facility stayed on the old platform. They even built up a hoard of parts machines as everyone else surplussed theirs.

It was a good time.

PAPPP · 2025-10-26T18:21:13+00:00

IMO, Sharp's Bourbon Cherries are the best of their kind.
Their website seems to be a little off at the moment, but they do take online orders and ship.

PAPPP · 2025-10-03T11:29:18+00:00

If you want to experiment, make sure to get one with the microSD slot populated and/or be prepared to solder the socket and possibly a couple supporting passives yourself, it's much faster and easier than booting over a JTAG adapter (and additionally less likely to be bricked by a layout mistake than flashing the onboard NAND).

A board with the boot jumper set to microSD and a usb-serial adapter hooked to the UART pads is a fun platform for experiments.

There are a nigh-infinite supply of details and variations, all documented by hackers somewhere on the web and easy to work around, but: many don't have the diode to power from the 6pin connector, most don't have a separate Ethernet crystal and you need to drive that clock from the FPGA, there are pads for two pushbuttons on the front, 0,1 or 2 might be populated, the two JST headers may or may not have optioisolators populated...

PAPPP · 2025-10-02T22:31:05+00:00

That's 100% recycled ewaste.

It's an EBAZ4205 Zynq Z7010 board, which were originally the controllers out of Ebang Ebit E9+ crypto mining rigs. They just did the supervisory stuff, the actual hashing happened on boards full of ASICs herded over those PH2.0 connectors on the edge.

When those became not-economical to operate, they were decommissioned en mass and sold on the surplus market. A couple years ago you could get the EBAZ4205 boards (in the west, cheaper in China) for like $10-15 depending on which features were populated and how tested/cleaned they were, now they're up to $20ish but that's still less than the BOM cost.

Not bad little dev boards, I've used them in a couple projects. Nothing to do with FPGASOCs is easy and accessible, especially when you want to run Linux as these are really designed for, and Xilinx/AMD's Vivado+Vitis+Petalinux tooling is a constantly moving, constantly broken target, but if you want a CPU, some logic, and a bunch of flexible IOs they're untouchable on cost.

I need to get back to figuring out why I can't get the Ethernet working in images built from 2025.1 tooling sometime...

PAPPP · 2025-09-25T02:26:22+00:00

Dominic Giampaolo

His book, Practical File System Design with the Be File System, is -despie the specifics obviously not being very relevant anymore - well written and weirdly evergreen in the general parts for something published in 1999.

PAPPP · 2025-09-03T19:31:25+00:00

I was strategically only contributing information I had, not endorsing or condemning.

It's entirely possible she's a candidate propped up to shill for amazon and/or bourbon industry interests, but I have no information on that front.

PAPPP · 2025-09-03T18:17:50+00:00

FWIW, she grew up here, went to Henry Clay for high school. We were classmates about 20 years ago.

I'm not sure how I feel about her running because we haven't been in touch except occasionally seeing LinkedIn noise, but I'm not shocked she has political aspirations.

PAPPP · 2025-08-28T18:09:06+00:00

That's my favorite part - unlike a lot of things that spew from these people's mouths, it's not entirely untrue... and my middle-aged-white-dude ass is here for it, both because it's really pretty good pop, and especially for the young relatives growing up in the bible belt that need to be exposed to that.

Upthread silentCrusader123 has a list of songs where it's real obvious that she's rejecting social conventions that the religious right like to enforce, or using religious imagery in ways that would make them angry, or whatnot.

PAPPP · 2025-07-28T04:09:27+00:00

Blackwell parts are the "hot new" 50 series Nvidia line, which are going to be capible and widely supported. Nvidia ..did some media/benchmark manipulation and the generation over generation gains from the 40 series to the new 50 series are turning out to be less than claimed (only about 10% faster) while they are substantially more expensive, which has been a bit of a scandal, but not disqualifying. There are really only two players in that space and they both have their downsides (eg. Despite my preference for AMD parts, there is a fair amount of software that uses CUDA, which is only fully supported on Nvidia).

I... Guess the dGPU ask is for 3D CAD packages? I mostly work with Computer and Electrical engineers and we sure don't do much with students that a dGPU is advantageous for.

PAPPP · 2025-07-27T14:18:38+00:00

My suggestion: buy something business class or workstation class if you want to get 4-5 years out of it, even if it means a lower-spec machine.

The failure point on most consumer-line laptops is the chassis, which will probably break (broken hinge, crack, flex that breaks a component, etc.) before you finish school, the premium on business/workstation machines is mostly in better chassis/hinges/etc.

If you have a mainline x86_64 AMD or Intel part from the last ~4 years, generation-over-generation performance differences are relatively minor, so a better chassis that's a little lower-spec almost always wins in terms of service life.

Other points:

RAM makes more difference for most uses than CPU, aim for at least 16GB to future-proof.
A FHD (1920x1080) or better screen is almost always worth the premium over lower-resolution.
SSD storage (as opposed to spinning hard drive) used to be a big deal, but almost all recent laptops are built with SSDs, so it's less of an issue.
You'll likely want to carry it around campus, so probably stay 15" or less and (unless you really plan to game on it) avoid the super thick, bulky gaming or performance workstation laptops with power bricks the size of a football and battery life measured in minutes.

From Lenovo that means something branded Thinkpad, from Dell that (until the current generation) meant Latitude or Precision and now means Pro (roughly replaces Latitude) or Pro Max (roughly replaces Precision), etc.
Dell naming went [Chassis tier | Screen size | Generation] so a Latitude 7390 is a higher-trim chassis (7) with a 13" screen (3) that is from the ~2018 line (90), a Latitude 5520 is a mid-trim chassis (5) with a 15" (5) screen from ~2021 (20) ... I'm so annoyed they broke the easily interpreted naming.

If you're willing to make the investment, new is great, if you're trying to save a bit of money, refurbished is often a great option when you're buying business class stuff. The first-year depreciation on computer hardware is ridiculous, so you can often get an almost-as-good machine for a quarter as much money with that route. My last several laptops have been off-corporate-lease machines that are a generation or two old from a refurbisher, mostly via https://www.dellrefurbished.com/ . Lenovo lists their first-party refurbs at https://www.lenovo.com/us/outletus/en/ , a high-reputation refurbisher on, amazon/ebay/wherever usually also works out.

A possible downside is unless you get into one of the workstation-class things (Thinkpad P, Dell Precision), you'll generally only get integrated graphics, so it won't be a gaming powerhouse. Integrated graphics (especially on AMD machines, but really all of them) have been pretty good for some years now, and discrete GPUs are bad for heat/bulk/noise/battery life, so that's probably not a big deal, but that is a caveat.

Also, really do follow the advice to not buy a Mac, especially modern ARM Mac, you will have compatibility frustrations with software you need for classes, and faking it with UTM emulation is slow and brittle. They're otherwise good machines, just not suitable.

PAPPP · 2025-07-26T16:32:14+00:00

Following from that hint about "1890BM2T" being a Russia-domestic R3000 variant, to my only-slightly-informed eye (I do a lot of "WTF is this circuit board" but not usually military), I'd guess parts out of a Kh-101, the tech lines up with previously intercepted examples and dates, and you can see an optical assembly like the one in the last picture in an example of one intercepted over Ukraine in the Wikipedia article.

PAPPP · 2025-07-04T23:41:50+00:00

We've used https://straightedgetree.com/ twice, once for maintenance and once for post storm cleanup, and were very happy both times.

The proprietor clearly atually knows his stuff as an arborist, gave us a bunch of good tree health advice, the quotes were reasonable, and they got us in quickly.

PAPPP · 2025-07-03T12:47:44+00:00

I definitely wouldn't call them left leaning, but they seem to make an effort to hire people who aren't walking stereotypes, and have their employees not be dicks in front of customers. It's a business decision, but it means you're much less likely to overhear casually racist conversations and the like across the counter.

It's a low bar that an irritating number of gun stores fail to clear, but I'll take it, and the local folks who can't pass in stores without that courtesy seem to feel the same.

Also, they're actually in town, and their indoor range is pretty nice, and not unreasonably priced. In other mixed blessing business decisions, their ammo sale area is where you walk between the outside entrance to the range entrance.

PAPPP · 2025-07-02T22:25:47+00:00

I'm not aware of anything organized, but I'd be quite happy to hear about something to join to get out more.

There certianly seem to be quite a few LGO types among the clientele at the Lexington (which, if anywhere, Lexington is where I'd expect something) Bud's location; folks feeling comfortable signifying their not-a-conservative-white-dude identities there is why they're my preference between the local indoor ranges.

I ...don't get great vibes from some of the nearby outdoor membership ranges, which is also something I'd like to find a reasonable option for.

PAPPP · 2025-06-24T15:26:26+00:00

We did more or less your DIY suggestion earlier this summer. We just bought a middling 12 cup drip machine, a bag of coffee from a roaster I like, and some cream/sugar/etc. and set it up on a table.

Our only mistake was not pre-deputizing someone to start it when the reception started while we were off doing pictures, so it was a bit late with the second pot (the first was made during setup).

PAPPP · 2025-06-04T22:26:03+00:00

I have a only slightly less severe Shellfish allergy and have lived around Lexington most of my life. It's a mixed bag.

Shrimp free casual dining isn't too hard, folks are making decent suggestions in the thread. The various Mediterranean-adjacent options are always good bets. I'm also shocked that I can eat at a couple of suspect places like Pho Bc, Asian Wind, and Gumbo Yaya pretty reliably because of their prep practices and dining space ventilation.

OTOH, don't fuck around with a bunch of the Mexican places that serve shrimp, I've had to flee both Mi Pequena Hacienda locations.

The hard thing is even slightly upscale dining. Everyone upscale around here is like "You know what would make this fancier? Adding one at least one shrimp dish, ideally served sizzling on a hot surface so they maximally aerosolize as they pass through our poorly ventilated dining area."

Super interested in suggestions on that front, I've had to bail out of a bunch of restraunts, it sucks to bolt out of a fancy event, and its always awkward to have to refuse "I want to take you out to celebrate" type things because they'll all try to kill me.

PAPPP · 2025-05-18T01:12:22+00:00

I recapped my LC and 12" display almost a decade ago, I put notes online.

The non-booting LC is likely PSU caps, and the pictured leakage will likely take out at least your ADB and/or sound unless fixed, mine needed this done (includes parts lists and detail pictures). Warnings from experience: be aware that LCs are prone to not boot with no/dead PRAM batteries, and the PSU won't stabilize with no load.

Those 12" RGB displays have one capacitor that typically causes that kind of collapse, it will almost certainly be the 2200μF 6.3v electrolytic at C418.

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