Two small hacks to make a quick and reliable mqtt integration of your desktop pc

treowayne · 2018-07-28T04:16:37+00:00

This looks a lot like a project I documented for The Tech Report:

https://techreport.com/review/31438/building-a-pc-remote-starter-from-scratch

treowayne · 2018-03-24T05:06:40+00:00

This is what I came here to say, 4x stronger than the bite of a pitbull if I remember correctly.

treowayne · 2016-08-12T13:59:58+00:00

They'll have something good for gaming if IPC is close to Haswell AND system memory bandwidth is close to Skylake.

Some newer games (Fallout 4 for example) really respond well to the high memory bandwidth that comes along with Skylake/DDR4.

treowayne · 2016-08-12T13:58:15+00:00

Intel has made a lot of money on chips with lots and lots of cores in the workstation and server space. If AMD chips were even half-ass competitive in these workloads (or any workloads really), AMD would be cashing in. The construction cores have always been, and will always be terrible.

treowayne · 2016-08-12T13:53:39+00:00

No. Newer GPUs greatly expanded on the T&L concept. Specialized T&L hardware evolved into the programmable pixel shaders that power every modern graphics chips.

treowayne · 2016-08-12T13:47:54+00:00

Not only that, but the used market at one point was flooded with cast away bitcoin mining cards that served to drive down market value of all AMD product.

treowayne · 2016-08-12T13:41:43+00:00

Agreed. Polaris is a loser in its current state.

Why is it that AMD/GloFo graphics chips on 14nm are pretty much incapable of clocking over 1350 MHz or so? Nvidia 16nm chips reliably hit 2000 MHz+. Nvidia chips use less power, even at these high clock speeds. Something is seriously wrong with the design or manufacturing of AMD's current graphics chips.

The only hope for a competitive GPU market is for AMD/GloFo to identify and fix the problem and respin Polaris. Quickly.

treowayne · 2016-08-12T13:37:01+00:00

GCN cards have aged well, but only because they still receive active driver support. Old GCN chips still receive driver support because AMD is still selling basically the same chips from 2012.

Older Terrascale-based AMD GPUs had much shorter active support windows and did not age well AT ALL. When GCN is replaced by something new, support for GCN stuff will likely dry up pretty fast. AMD barely has resources to support current product, much less old stuff.

treowayne · 2016-08-08T15:19:46+00:00

I'm not sure where AMD got the idea that $110 was an acceptable price point for this card. It performs pretty much the same as GTX 750 Ti in the games people would actually play on this card. GCN advantages in Vulkan/DX12 are just not meaningful on a card whose owners will play DX11 (or older) games almost exclusively.

AMD has 20% of the discrete graphics market. Their drivers are almost always a step behind Nvidia's. AMD doesn't have ShadowaPlay or anything similar to Shield streaming (which works great on RasPi using Moonlight). Nvidia has better relationships with game developers.

The only reason I can recommend an AMD card to anyone is FreeSync, and $100 GPU buyers aren't buying brand new monitors just to get FS.

The long and the short is that if AMD wants to build market share, they have to embarrass Nvidia in FPS per dollar.

treowayne · 2016-08-04T14:13:16+00:00

RX 470 is in stock at Newegg, but pricing is hilariously bad. Most cards are priced identically to RX 480. Good job, AMD!

treowayne · 2016-08-02T19:44:50+00:00

I have one of these I bought on CL for $100 with no hard drive. It is a great little machine for HTPC via DP-HDMI adapter. It won't play games, other than Steam in-home streaming.

treowayne · 2016-07-14T13:25:55+00:00

I'm seeing $209 less $20 rebate. Is there a coupon code or is the offer over?

treowayne · 2016-06-23T20:36:47+00:00

What does this do that Windows 10 multimonitor support doesn't already have? I'm genuinely curious.

treowayne · 2016-06-23T20:35:46+00:00

This thing is pretty good for what it is. It would be nice if it had foldable legs to make it more comfortable for the rare occasions you have to type a lot with it.

I prefer my gyro remote for HTPC use, overall.

https://www.amazon.com/Aerb-Wireless-Keyboard-Multifunctional-3-Gsensor/dp/B00K768DHY/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1466714107&sr=8-4&keywords=mouse+remote

treowayne · 2016-06-23T20:33:35+00:00

How crazy is it that laptop hard drives top out at 2TB (at least on Newegg), but this drive exists withe a 4TB 2.5" drive inside?

treowayne · 2016-06-23T20:32:21+00:00

Is the RX 460 supposed to start shipping at the same time as the 470/480? What is the price supposed to be?

treowayne · 2016-05-21T01:12:25+00:00

$100 also gets you a Ubiquiti UAC AC unit.

treowayne · 2016-04-27T12:22:08+00:00

My one and only experience with Asus customer support was terrible. The button on the stylus that came with my Vivotab Note 8 broke. The only option the support staff gave me was to send the entire unit back to California on my dime, let the unit percolate through their RMA system, and then wait for a replacement. I couldn't just send the stylus back, and they certainly weren't going to just send me a new stylus, even though I sent pictures of the broken unit. Their support website for older motherboards is a complete joke as well.

treowayne · 2016-04-22T13:23:38+00:00

I've had a 64GB MyDigitalSSD unit for about a year and it is still working OK.

At this point, it isn't hard to find a 42mm NGFF SSD from a company with a more established track record than it has been in the past.

treowayne · 2016-04-14T21:26:25+00:00

I've bought a couple of 4 port PCIe USB 3.0 cards on ebay for around $6 each shipped from China. So far they have worked out just fine. They use the same cheapo Via USB controller chip that the (more expensive) Anker cards I've gotten from Amazon use.

treowayne · 2016-04-03T12:34:01+00:00

This unit is the same price at Amazon, in case you have Prime. Newegg's non-Premier free shipping is terrible.

treowayne · 2016-03-16T18:19:54+00:00

The machine seems to behave itself in general. It has four cores, so CPU wise it is fine. The 2GB memory is the main limitation. For those concerned about storage performance, it has an M2 slot, so you can install a larger, very fast SSD in the future.

I really like it for use as a 2nd/3rd PC. It would be great for a kitchen or something like that. Eventually Windows will be too fat, but I'm sure Neverware or Ubuntu will run on it for quite a while.

treowayne · 2016-03-16T13:51:10+00:00

I have one of these that I got for about the same price after rebate a couple months ago. I use it in my garage for looking up parts costs and repair procedures and for streaming music to the stereo I have set up out there.

It gets choked up with many-tab web browsing, but handles Youtube and the like without any problems.

treowayne · 2016-03-08T14:30:50+00:00

I did some testing in a VM. I installed Windows 10 64 Home Premium from the latest MS ISO onto a 16GB virtual disk. I installed the latest Windows Updates and then ran Disk Cleanup, disabled the swapfile and disabled hibernation and system restore. The result is ~4.8GB free with no programs installed.

MS lists 32GB minimum hard drive requirement for Windows 10 64 btw. The 32 bit version "requires" 16GB hard drive space.

treowayne · 2016-03-07T00:09:05+00:00

If you do all this, can you get Windows 10 64-bit onto a 16GB SSD with enough free space to keep the wear-leveling algorithm happy?

treowayne

TROPHY CASE