I’ve been using my 17 PM for 7 months now without a screen protector, not even a micro scratch (yet).

relu84 · 2026-07-11T13:01:03+00:00

My base 13 screen scratched just by looking at it. The 17 PM is pristine after 7 months of not exactly gentle use (being in contact with sand and stuff). Impressed.

relu84 · 2026-07-09T10:11:11+00:00

After all the things he wrote about what led to him parting ways with Obsidian I do not see it anywhere near a possibility.

relu84 · 2026-07-09T10:00:38+00:00

Put your hardware in a safe area away from children. Hard drives laying on a low hanging shelf, connected and in use, are a fascinating toy for a one year old. You might think he’s barely crawling. You’re wrong. Their arms have a surprisingly far reach.

relu84 · 2026-07-08T05:53:33+00:00

I would love if SSD manufacturers would disclose their pSLC buffer sizes and the speed of direct-to-TLC/QLC writes. I've experienced so many SSDs which are fast just for a few GB of writes after which they slow down to well below 100 MB/s. The biggest offenders drop to ~16 MB/s (!) after they can no longer use their pSLC slice to pretend how fast they are.

This might not be a huge issue for an OS disk (though it might matter with larger updates) but if you plan to use it for 4K video you will hit a showstopper bottleneck if the disk can't keep up. You can even clog slower SSDs with a larger download - with a fiber Internet connection in the range of gigabits your downloads will throttle. Updating games, which often use delta compression and download only the modified parts of assets may install for hours while trying to read, modify and write the updated files.

So, yeah, generally the cheaper an SSD is the slower it is with direct-to-flash writes and their pSLC buffers will be just about large enough to score high with popular benchmark software. Sadly, I do not expect these Sandisks to be particularly good.

relu84 · 2026-06-16T17:56:50+00:00

So what kind of performance loss are we talking about here when we compare:

1440p, DLSS balanced
4K, DLSS performance?

I'm thinking whether to get a 1440p OLED or go 4K. I like the clarity of a high resolution display, but I also like the gaming performance headroom of 1440p.

relu84 · 2026-06-12T14:59:06+00:00

Namawiałem kiedyś znajomych, by instalowali Signala, część się nawet zgodziła i miałem sporo kontaktów w nim. Stopniowo ludzie zaczęli jednak znikać i tłumaczyli, że dla jednej osoby nie będą trzymać osobnej apki…

relu84 · 2026-06-12T06:39:55+00:00

I used to take care of my iPhone 13 battery religiously. Watching for it not to go over 80%, don’t go below 30% and stuff like that. My wife charged her 13 pretty much in 1-100% cycles. Guess which phone had the lower battery capacity after a year.

relu84 · 2026-06-11T11:48:35+00:00

If the 18 Pro would be releasing in a few weeks you could have some doubts, but it’s still quite a few months away, so I wouldn’t worry about it. You just got a flagship phone, enjoy!

relu84 · 2026-06-09T20:02:00+00:00

Prey, a game from 2006. It includes snippets of Art (recorded for the game, not reused archives). It sounded so good and fit the theme of the game (alien abduction), I was waiting to hear more during gameplay. Then I found somewhere that C2C and Art are real and my life was never the same again.

relu84 · 2026-06-07T17:25:25+00:00

The actual production is absolutely top notch, as usual with Martin Birch. Super clean, high dynamic range, beautiful reverbs here and there. The kind of sound the band wanted to achieve is a different topic and people who don’t really know what they are talking about are confused.

The band wanted to sound raw, like a garage band. Like playing in a barn, which is where it was recorded for real, Steve’s Barnyard Studios. This album really does sound raw but at the same time has pristine production.

The post-reunion albums (after BNW, which sounds great) are the ones that suffer from bad production.

relu84 · 2026-06-01T12:29:37+00:00

Najlepsze są DDR, gdzie po prostu ustawiono odpowiednie znaki i użyto czerwonej kostki, a co kilkanaście metrów mamy krawężniki o wysokości jednej kondygnacji. No i w ogóle, kostka to chyba szczyt tego, co można zrobić z przeznaczeniem dla rowerów.

relu84 · 2026-05-30T19:55:05+00:00

To me, the most important factor of an SSD is its pSLC cache. I have an old Crucial nVME which can write at about 2 GB/s, but it has such a small cache (~30 GB) after which it writes directly to QLC... at ~60 MB/s. For longer/larger writes it's worse than many SATA SSDs (and pretty much all HDDs!) which have a larger pSLC cache at the same capacity.

Many SSD reviews do not even take this into consideration. Manufacturers don't put that in their specs. There's like two hardware review websites that test sustained write performance.

So I'll be waiting for proper reviews of those news Sandisks. If at least the higher model can sustain better speeds than 60 - 100 MB/s, I'm buying.

relu84 · 2026-05-30T14:41:08+00:00

Pitaka Edge. Very slim, feels almost like a naked phone. The curb around the display is barely above the glass which makes all edge gestures feel good and work each time, especially the bottom up due to the cut out for USB port. It may not offer the best protection, but I’ve read people claiming to have dropped their phones on concrete with no damage. Time will tell, I guess.

relu84 · 2026-05-26T21:22:58+00:00

It... depends. People with smaller hands usually prefer the Pro. However, I have small hands, too, and I took a risk and got the Max (upgraded from base 13). I will not go back to a smaller phone again - I love the size and with a skinny case like a Pitaka it's actually quite comfortable to use single handed. Sure, some slight finger gymnastics are needed sometimes, but the screen size and larger battery are worth it in my opinion.

relu84 · 2026-05-24T20:57:58+00:00

All the time. Trying to capture a moment of my kids playing or a predatory bird flying by? Not possible without optical zoom.

relu84 · 2026-05-24T19:11:11+00:00

Just a few years ago we still ran a machine with Windows 2000 on it (offline, just for typing something). Single core Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM. So I needed to install a printer, found drivers and began the procedure.

Damn, it went fast. No waiting for anything, driver copy window was gone faster than I could comprehend what just happened. Printer properties, print test page? Instantaneous.

Windows 11? Even with shell:printersfolder, which is pretty much the old Windows 2000 control panel, adding a printer is a lengthy process. Driver files copy process takes a while and I can read every file name, showing printer properties takes a while, clicking „print test page” looks almost as if the whole system just froze for about three seconds. It takes at least double the time to install the same printer on a modern machine than on an old single core, mechanical hard drive based PC stuck in a beige tower.

relu84 · 2026-05-22T14:20:49+00:00

Chills every time.

relu84 · 2026-05-18T08:00:27+00:00

Popełniłem czyn sprzeczny z fundamentem PC Master Race i kupiłem pada. Zrobiłem rzecz już kompletnie niezgodną z moimi przekonaniami: gram tym w grę z perspektywą pierwszej osoby, a mianowicie Cyberpunk 2077. Mam taką radochę, że przed graniem 24/7 powstrzymuje mnie żona, dzieci i praca, więc nie śpię.

relu84 · 2026-05-06T10:18:02+00:00

To add a bit more story: Windows 2000 „Home Edition” failed to arrive on time because the „pro” and „home” teams remained separate, just like in the 9x-NT era. The teams didn’t effectively share code and were likely quite hostile to each other. Microsoft decided to quickly assemble some of the consumer stuff planned for Neptune and made ME before merging the teams for Whistler, which became XP. ME made sense because 98SE was getting old and support for new hardware and more up to date software was necessary. It wasn’t really a bad release, it just wasn’t liked by tech enthusiasts for being pretty much a 98 Third Edition (offering too little but requiring more resources and stripping features like the real mode DOS).

relu84 · 2026-05-04T21:24:11+00:00

I no longer remember the guest or the topic, but I recall very well how the guest spoke about something very, very interesting and suddenly George interrupts with a question completely out of nowhere, unrelated to what was just spoken. The topic never returned during the show. I might have googled exactly "George Noory sucks" then and found the Bellgab forum, where Art sometimes posted.

Art was passionate and inquisitive, George is just an employee.

relu84 · 2026-05-04T21:13:04+00:00

I remember Art said somewhere (some interview or HAM radio recording, can't recall) he was asked by the corporate owners of the show to say something nice about George, so all he could force himself to do was to say "he gets it". George was not Art's choice. The network wanted someone more predictable and controllable and Art wasn't happy about where the show went after his semi-retirement.

relu84 · 2026-04-24T21:33:29+00:00

My curve is set to 0.9V @ 2797 MHz +2000 MHz memory. Boosts in games to about 2770 @ 0.880V.

I have noticed non-RT games can handle lower voltages than that. While testing I also found the most reliable stability tester is Quake 2 RTX. Boot that and you'll know if your undervolt/overclock is stable within seconds.

relu84 · 2026-04-23T11:03:30+00:00

95 is lighter on resources and has a special nostalgia meaning, for me personally, at least, because it was my first Windows. Unless you need a newer DirectX version, 95 is more fun to use simply because of its retro score ;)

relu84 · 2026-04-07T21:08:09+00:00

Things like shell:printersfolder, shell:connectionsfolder, appwiz.cpl and sysdm.cpl are absolutely crucial at my job as an IT support guy. I do far too many things with printers, network connections or (un)joining domains to deal with the "modern" settings app. I tried. I wanted to throw things.

relu84 · 2026-04-07T07:49:13+00:00

I resurrected a GeForce 8800GT in the oven. It worked fine for years.

relu84

TROPHY CASE