>>26760

I have seen the FHD mod, though I've heard some people say that you can get flickering issues and such. I'm happy enough with the size it is, personally. I had planned to get a nice big monitor for my desk for working on bigger stuff, but honestly I've not felt the need yet.

Here's mine. 2.5" hard drive for scale.

Hello again lads. I still haven't bought a new bastard laptop and have been struggling along with the X100e. It's unusably slow.

At some point I intend to drop £300 - £400 on a decent one. The other ThinkPads looked great, but I've also been tempted away by the IdeaPad.

That aside, is there anything I can do to make the x100e perform better until I'm sure I can spunk the money? It's crippled with running a few tabs with Microsoft Edge in Windows 10 at the moment. Any recommendations?

>>26811
Install an SSD, if it doesn't already have one.
Install more RAM, if it's not already maxed out.
Install a lightweight Linux distribution if you swing that way, such as Xubuntu.

If you want to stick with Windows, try disabling all graphical effects and the like.

>>26811

As said, an SSD is a huge performance boost in older machines. You can also try to blast out any dust that might (definitely will) be caking the cooling fans and vents, as if it's running hot enough the CPU might be thermal throttling too, I've seen that happen a lot.

>>26812

It probably isn't worth upgrading. The x100e has a feeble single-core Athlon Neo processor with a PassMark score of 409. It was piss-poor in 2010 and it's utterly unusable today. By comparison, the slowest processor in Intel's current desktop lineup has a Passmark score of 3,269 and an i7-7700k scores over 12,000. No matter what you do, it's grossly bottlenecked by that dog of a processor.

You don't need to spend £300 to get something vastly quicker than your current machine. A Thinkpad X220 will set you back about £120; the default processor in that machine is an i5-2520M, which has a Passmark score of 3,588. The very cheapest Chromebook would be a significant upgrade, as would any old laptop with an Intel Core-series processor.

A lightweight Linux distribution might help a bit. If you're not using an adblocker, for the love of god install uBlock Origin - ads and ad trackers have a huge CPU load. Firefox Reader Mode is very useful on slow machines, because it strips out all of the CSS and Javascript.

>>26796
I love a desk thread for the same reason. Infinitely revealing, like music and book collections in the old, physical days.

>>26804>>26797>>26796

>desk thread

Fuck, I had forgotten that was a thing back in the day.

I'd suggest doing one here again but I'm not sure how many responses we'd get.

>>26805
Does it matter? There is only 3 of us.

>>26806
I guess I'd post probably.

>>26805
I'm all for anything but chairs again.

>>26798
Likely just a result of my tight as fuck upbringing. Ah well, I might turn it into a PMP or strip it down and sell all the good parts.

Lads who have ordered from Gearbest, what are the customs charges like?

>>26799

>Lads who have ordered from Gearbest, what are the customs charges like?

The vast majority of the time, orders sent through standard mail will arrive with no charges. The sheer volume of low-value parcels coming in from China has totally overwhelmed HMRC and the big Chinese retailers are very adept at sneaking things through. Orders sent by courier will nearly always attract a customs charge, so I'd recommend using the default free shipping option unless you're in a desperate hurry.

If you do get stung, you'll pay an £8 handling fee plus 20% VAT (there's no duty on phones). Gearbest will under-state the value to a plausible degree, so expect to pay about £30 in total on a £150 phone.

>>26800
I ordered a keyring a while ago.
The description got cut off, and what should have been "leather bracelet keyring" got shortened to "leather bra"

>>26800
Alright. So £40 on a £230 phone? There are UK sellers on eBay selling Pocophones for £280-300, and without the one month shipping wait. Seems like there won't be much difference in price, I'll go for one from eBay and get it in a couple of days then.

>>26802

Most of the eBay sellers are a bit sketchy. Some of them aren't actually in the UK; others are selling smuggled phones out of a storage unit and will do a runner as soon as the VAT man comes knocking. You get a 12 month warranty if you buy from Gearbest or Geekbuying, but you can forget about it if you buy from some fly-by-night on eBay.

You usually don't pay VAT on phones from China and shipping usually takes less than two weeks, but it is a bit of a gamble on both counts.

The Pocophone F1 is £329 on the official Xiaomi store, with a full UK warranty and all your statutory rights. That might be worth considering if you want fast delivery and a bit more peace of mind.

https://www.mi.com/uk/pocophone-f1/

My advice is to give up and get her a Chromebook or an iPad. Being "good with computers" is 20% knowledge and 80% attitude, IMO; you can figure out most things on your own, but some people just aren't interested in learning.

>>26779
Definitely agree about the attitude. As the 'computer expert' in my family I get asked to do things all the time and nobody appreciates that I just google the answers if I don't know them. No matter how many times I recommend that they do the same they won't, because the inbuilt presumption that anything they read will be beyond their comprehension is so strong they won't even try. It's an insurmountable mental roadblock. Additionally the older ones are so scared that a single slip-up will delete their entire hard drive/somehow let hackers in that they will never do anything they're not entirely comfortable with in the first place. It's frustrating but hey, what can you do. If she really is interested though I'd recommend just showing her how google and youtube can collectively be used to find the answer to anything computer-related you want to do, no matter how simple.

Maybe find her a touch-type tutorial program too, it's the sort of thing that getting good at builds confidence since it looks so professional. I should really get back to those, I have to glance at the keyboard half the time and my backspace is worn down to a nub...

Techmoan has a lot of good reviews, though he does a lot less now that he's focusing more on Hi-Fi stuff.

http://www.techmoan.com/what-is-the-best-dashcam/

Anything made by vico vation are very good choices, but they tend to be on the higher-priced side.

>>26743
Thanks. Unfortunately the one he recommends, that I'm interested in, doesn't seem to be around anymore and has a ridiculously inflated price when I can find it.

>>26764
As far as I know (and I don't know much to be honest), for a situation like yours they would send an engineer out and charge the same regardless of the state of the wiring at your premises.
Plus everything up to the socket in your house remains the property of Openreach, if they suspect anything has been tampered with, I think they are able to impose extra charges.

>>26764
Tech guy here.

You should not fit one yourself. This is definitely engineer work.

As it is, don't try and do it with BT, they will charge you for this. You will not be their customer, strictly speaking, until you have a live service. So break out now.

Certain companies will cover the costs of the Openreach engineer to fit this for you. I know, for example, that the Post Office Homephone and Broadband is currently waiving engineer fees. If you sign up as a customer with them, they will fit the master-socket at no cost to yourself.

This could be done within three working days.

Quick correction on another poster. The internal socket also belongs to Openreach, just not the front cover of the socket, which belongs to the customer. So, you cannot fit it yourself, as it is not your property.

Which radios did you buy? The mention of repeaters suggests that you might have inadvertently bought an amateur radio transceiver instead of PMR446.

Radioddity GD-77 , so yes, I've been criminal scum in that they'll operate outside the unlicensed bands and at unlicensed powers.
hence me wanting to find a codeplug that'll kick them back down to legal DPMR (although I know that won't make them legal, but I'm OK with that).
It's just that my analogue PMRs are really knackered and I lost the good ones in a house move, so fancied something a bit less crackly now that I'm using them more. 'Real' DPMR sets are ball-achingly expensive still, as there aren't that many.

Last one.

I hope someone appreciated these as much as I did!

>>26738
You're not alone lad - I also appreciated very much.

Is this why all the games I play these days are so poorly optimised?

>>26740
No. As often as not that is user error.
https://www.pcgamer.com/what-optimization-really-means-in-games/3/

Have you tried changing the tuning filters?

>>26728
Yeah, all sound the same. I've made sure they aren't dirty or anything.

>>26729
I mean that they all have the issue, not that they all sound the same.

>>26730

You could try leaving the headphones playing something on a loop at reasonably high volume for 24 hours; if they still sound fizzy after that, return them.

>>26728
Turns out the filters have no foam in them. Might be an issue. Possibly.

>>26721

I remember mine had 12 seconds of buffer, so you'd really have to shake it continuously for near to that amount of time to hear any skipping.

It rinsed the battery, though, and the frustration of having a machine that was portable yet almost exactly *just* too big to fit in a normal pocket was a bit of a disappointment.

>>26719

>>26718
I'm going to record without Dolby anyway - the music we make was recorded on cheap gear and so hiss will fit right in, and it will be playable everywhere.

>>26713
I'm even younger than this lad, and I still made mixtapes as a kid in the early 2000s - I did have some CDs but often borrowed from m8s and taped the music I wanted. My parents' car only had a tape player, so I often taped CDs for them, too.

>>26724
But it will sound better in Dubly.

>>26725
Too much perspective.

>>26517

Petroleum geologists are remarkably optimistic about climate change.

>>26518

Oil companies are the ones spreading the climate change apocalypse hoax so that they can have even more control over the energy supply.

>>26519

>>26517
That's not me. The talk was 2 months ago, from what I remember he may have mentioned kill switches and robots just following code, though I'm not sure. You might be better off emailing him yourself: nickh[at]robots.ox.ac.uk

ai mixed with invisible to digital eye human violence has already ruined my health, wealth, happiness and another lively hopes and opportunities

(A good day to you Sir!)

>>26686
addendum: For those unaware, this site contains a javascript-based cryptcoin miner that uses your CPU power to mine buttcoins for as long as you have the tab open.

>>26686>>26687
I'd have thought someone would put a bit more effort in if you wanted to make some money out of this whole charade, surely? That's worse than the website I made for my Year 10 ICT course work and I hated that subject.

>>26688
The content itsself matters little, I imagine.

If you spam this on an imageboard with thousands of visitors (rather than the three we have here), and a few hundred click through and spend 30 seconds to 1 minute reading that poorly researched shite, and 90-95% of them aren't using some form of scriptblocker, I imagine you'll make more than you would with banner ads.

It would depend on what currency is being mined and how intense the script is (and I'm not interested in finding out). Someone who knows more about crypto than I may be able to throw out some figures.

>>26689
With your proposed numbers you're looking at a payout of exactly 0 XMR. Multiply them by ten and you're approaching 0.000051 XMR or most of the way to 1¢.

WHOIS reveals nothing - it's been registered through a Domains By Proxy company.

Looks like OP is taking analytics of all his visitors too.
http://www.OOOOH LOOK AT ME I'M SPAMMING ME COIN MINER AGAIN.com/statistics/.

The throttle(0.0) means he has the miner running at full whack; while coinhive does have a balance check tool OP has set his to anonymous so I don't think we can check it.

>>26673

Three offer unlimited data on many of their plans, and it seems legitimately unlimited as far as I have found. I pay 20 quid a month for mine. That's a rolling SIM only contract so you're not locked in, that might be decent for you? Otherwise their pay as you go SIM plan charges 1p per MB.

>>26673

I'd suggest an O2 or Three pay-as-you-go SIM. The standard tariff on both is 1p/MB data, 2p texts and 3p/min calls. Your credit doesn't expire. If your broadband keels over or you go into hospital, you can buy a monthly add-on for more data and tether your laptop to your phone via Wifi. Three offer slightly better deals on the larger data add-ons. These tariffs are your best bet if you're normally a light user, but occasionally need to use loads of data.

The NHS is committed to providing free WiFi for hospital patients by the end of this year, although there's no guarantees on quality.

https://www.o2.co.uk/shop/sim-cards/pay-as-you-go#simtype=classicpayasyougo

https://www.three.co.uk/Store/SIM/Pay_As_You_Go

>>26674

It's genuinely unlimited on your phone, but it's capped at 30GB/mo if you're tethering to your laptop.

>>26676
I thought they'd killed their unlimited plans. Or at least closed them to new subscribers.

>>26678

They still exist, they're just not as cheap as they used to be.

I've fully restored it now, I think. Replaced the failing carbon granule microphone and added a rectifier.


Only one thing - should you be able your own voice through the receiver?

Turns out a commercial solution for my bluetooth idea does exist, but it does look a bit pricey, especially considering I'll have to modify the RJx jack to the standard BT one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/liGo-Bluewave-Link-Mobile-Hub/dp/B008D2Y1N4/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_121_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=XY82HWSCAM4V9759Q9VN

>Only one thing - should you be able your own voice through the receiver?

That was normal from what I remember.

Got another one with the intention of selling, ended up lubricating the dial of both of them. Christ, now it's even more satisfying to dial on.

sage for blogging

>>26670
>ended up lubricating the dial of both of them.

IYKWIM

>>26671
I mean, this is the closest I will ever get to physical intimacy with another human so yes.