I mean, this is not like a waste of time. You will get savings. Particular in terms of the heat and cooling costs. Being able to warm or cool your place only when you are there, should be a significant savings. Taking control of your alarm system means less money being spent to secure the same level of service.

Not to mention, automation and logistics used for it are not really things taught at all, but are super important for tech and manufacturing. If you are selling tech, knowing the ins and outs of the innovations being made to it right now, you can make better pitches.

It is funny though, I tried to pitch as 21st century learning skills algorithms, logistics, logic (for gates) and supply chains. Feel utterly on deaf ears, as I was pitching content areas and not like learning skills. But this shit is only taught in tiny bits in k-12 to programming people. But generally you need to do college for these skills. But even in college we limit these to tech schools or programming classes again since formal logic is no longer taught.

It is doubly ironic as we have to crash students in things like logistic nodes, algorithms and boolean logic so they can learn statistics in graduate school, which then takes away the actual statistics we can teach them. Since the advanced stat classes do not require each other, we have to do this at the start of every stat class basically.

While you have the benefit of triggering these events one by one, when using stat methods or building theory using nodes, students need to know how to optimize the system and automate triggering of things when the conditions of the priors are filled. Like you can turn on the lights, turn off the alarm and open the door one by one. In a stat model or theory though these will all have to be triggered by a singular action or the system / model becomes inefficient at best. At worst it creates weird casual loops.


Def not the worst way to spend your time to learn all this stuff.  Learning all this here, also opens the door for learning traditional programming, as really, this is basically what we do with programming anyway.  One you know the logic of programming, all that varies between programs is syntax.

Yes, this is all relatively simple programming-wise.. I am more used to a little more challenging applications, like this:

I am literally dumb when it comes to hardware. I do everything on the programming level and that is the limit to my knowledge right now. When we turn the stuff from paper to the real world I am utterly useless. Can really tell I was not allowed to play with electronics as a kid...

...I bought a smart light bulb yesterday. It can change colors.

May 4, 2021 15:17:21 GMT Gyro LC said:

...I bought a smart light bulb yesterday. It can change colors.

Oh yeah I got a few of these for Christmas! I find them particularly useful in lamps so you don't have to go searching for the switch.

May 4, 2021 23:40:53 GMT @admin said:

May 4, 2021 15:17:21 GMT Gyro LC said:

...I bought a smart light bulb yesterday. It can change colors.

Oh yeah I got a few of these for Christmas! I find them particularly useful in lamps so you don't have to go searching for the switch.

For lamps I like the smart plus where you can plug anything into them.
They're very useful.
I have one at home on the possum deterrent on our back deck so it only runs after we have gone to bed... Noise drives me crazy. [/Australian problems]

Nothing says bedtime now like turning off the plugs in the bedroom.

I still haven't settled on a Desktop replacement, but last week I ordered a new laptop:

ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 5

Intel i7-12800H 12th Gen
NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX™ 3070 Ti 8GB
1 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4
16 GB DDR5-4800MHz (SODIMM)



Soon as I get it I am going to stick in a second 16 GB stick and a second 2 TB HDD.
I decided against the i9 in a laptop as it will just thermally throttle and it is why I picked the 3070 Ti over the 3080 Ti

Will be quite a change
I am currently rocking a Intel Core Core i7-8850H 2.6GU with a GTX 1050Ti

I will also get some photos of my new desk setup, I retired my dual 27" monitors and went a curved 34" monitor and kept a 27" for a vertical monitor, it is a very nice setup, I feel way more productive.... At least until the dopamine wears off.

It is always weird seeing people get super high end Laptops when they can only run the stuff at like half power due to the thermal throttle. I got a PC in parts I am slowly putting together when I have good days that will be a major upgrade for me. But still need a graphics card, and the 2000x are still out of my price range and basically cost as much as the rest of the PC.

Jun 28, 2022 12:51:19 GMT c said:

It is always weird seeing people get super high end Laptops when they can only run the stuff at like half power due to the thermal throttle. I got a PC in parts I am slowly putting together when I have good days that will be a major upgrade for me. But still need a graphics card, and the 2000x are still out of my price range and basically cost as much as the rest of the PC.

The crash in BTC will likely bring a heap of secondhand GFX cards onto the market, I think you could hold out for a decent priced 3050/3060
The 2000x seem almost less worth it at the moment.

But yeah, there was a good video on YT today about snaffling a Server and turning into a decent gaming PC.




It helps when you get the Graphics card for free, but I thought it was a decent build for the price.

I cannot wait for that crash to hit. I need at least a 2000x for ray-tracing. Know the 3000x will be the better upgrade, but right now on an old ass 1000x and mostly play lower end games anyway.

Jun 28, 2022 12:44:02 GMT iNCY said:

I will also get some photos of my new desk setup, I retired my dual 27" monitors and went a curved 34" monitor and kept a 27" for a vertical monitor, it is a very nice setup, I feel way more productive.... At least until the dopamine wears off.

Let me know how that works for you. I've been considering switching to that as well.

I'm still using a GTX 970. Works well enough.

Unless you do modern AAA games or video editing do not need a better video card really. And often the cost of that video card is worth more than a console that the games are optimized for.

I read a tweet somewhere that PC gamers are like the vegans of gaming. Now I'm just picturing a bunch of incels waxing CPU superiority while downing wheatgrass and still seething about the success of Super Meat Boy.

PC Master Race people are assholes. Most of us just want to play games at a decent framerate. And most of us love to see our favorite indy company's blow up. Hell, Meat Boy is a great example, Edmund to this day mails his early fans weird ass shit like shirts of statues he makes. Cannot wait for his new, Mewgenics looks fucking amazing. Roguelike take on Final Fantasy Tactics. But with cats.

Wow, looks like PCI 5.0 SSD drives will need their own cooling system in a tower now. Kind of glad I opted against waiting for these. They are insanely fast, but also insanely hot and will require active cooling.

Jul 5, 2022 15:48:58 GMT c said:

Wow, looks like PCI 5.0 SSD drives will need their own cooling system in a tower now. Kind of glad I opted against waiting for these. They are insanely fast, but also insanely hot and will require active cooling.

This is going to be the biggest leap in PC gaming in a long time.
The talk I have been reading is that SSD's will be fast enough that the Graphics card can read straight from the SSD without passing the data through the CPU, which will make loading screens a thing of the past, which is very cool technology.

I finally got my new Laptop set up after having it sit on my desk for two weeks.


Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 5
Intel Core i7-12800H - 14 cores 4.80 GHz
64GB DDR5 Ram
4TB PCIE4 NVMe Drive
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti

Initially I bought it with a 1TB drive and 16gb of Ram but decided to upgrade, I was planning to add a second SSD, but this model only has the one slot because of the Graphics Card.
I was tempted to go the i( and the 3080 but in a laptop they would be thermally throttled all the time.


I run VMWARE and this handles a couple of Virtual machines running at the same time no sweat.
My only issue was whether I should have gone reference cards for my Autocad usage, but in 2D it seems completely fine.

Mother of all bumps, I finally bit the bullet and arranged my new PC.
Even though I really enjoy building PC's I went for a site that let me customise my machine and get it delivered, I just don't have the time at the moment.
I wanted to do a full workstation build with either a Xeon or a Threadripper, but I just couldn't justify it.

• Fractal Design Meshify 2 Light TG - Black
• Asus ProArt X670E Creator AX Motherboard
• AMD Ryzen 9 7950X | 5.7 GHz | 16 Cores 32 Threads
• Nvidia RTX 2000 ADA - 16GB GDDR6
• 128GB Crucial 4800MHz (4x32GB)
• DeepCool LE720 360mm Radiator 
• 1TB Gen4 Silicon Power US75 M.2. NVME (R
  
• 1TB SABRENT Rocket NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280
• 4TB Seagate Ironwolf 5400RPM 3.5
• 850W Inwin P85II 80+ Gold

I do some pretty heavy work with my PC, running multiple Virtual Machines at the same time and some pretty big 2D Autocad files and so far it has handled everything I have thrown at it.
Now I wish I had done this years ago and just bought a low power laptop and remoted into my Desktop.
I know it might be time to think about a Server with bare metal virtualization, but I don't have the time to set that up at the moment.

It is always a question of where do you stop, I don't need the high speed RAM for my applications so I decided on more RAM and lower clock speeds and I can always change later if I am so inclined.
I was more interested in the 7950X because of the 16 cores... It is crazy, Intel is in serious trouble.
And because I am GenX I bought the thing with as little RGB as possible and have disabled the RGB on the Water block.

Sweet Jesus...

Tell me you're just gunna play Fortnite on it.

Jul 12, 2024 3:42:46 GMT NATH45 said:

Sweet Jesus...

Tell me you're just gunna play Fortnite on it.

I probably won't ever play a game on it 😅

Run Doom on it, and that's it.

I imagine there's 3 x 32 inch curved monitors running off it, am I right?

Jul 12, 2024 3:45:55 GMT NATH45 said:

Run Doom on it, and that's it.

I imagine there's 3 x 32 inch curved monitors running off it, am I right?

Not quite....




1 x 34" Main Display
1 x 24" Vertical (Highly Recommend)
1 x 18" Pen Input Monitor

Since I retired my laptop out of this setup, I am down a screen, so i might add another monitor primarily for screen sharing.

And here I was thinking my new laptop was fancy.

Sweet rig. I've had the Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core for a couple years and it smokes everything I do. I can't imagine how a 16 core would be. Is your vertical monitor purpose-built for vertical? I converted an old 27" and it's pretty nice, but it doesn't work at all viewing angles so I have to be a little careful.

Jul 12, 2024 5:09:35 GMT Gyro LC said:

Sweet rig. I've had the Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core for a couple years and it smokes everything I do. I can't imagine how a 16 core would be. Is your vertical monitor purpose-built for vertical? I converted an old 27" and it's pretty nice, but it doesn't work at all viewing angles so I have to be a little careful.

No, mine like yours is a repurposed Dell 24" 1080P but the viewing angles are good, it probably should go in my productivity thread, but the vertical monitor is where I have my Calendar and Todo list open all day, I find it fantastic to have it open all the time, it keeps me focused.

When I am preparing documents it is nice to be able to see the whole A4 page at the same time.


The PC though is overkill but this is my attitude for PC's and laptops buy the top end now, it will just be longer until you have to replace it.
I also stretched for an AM5 Motherboard that has PCI Gen 5 and DDR5 memory because I hope the AM5 socket will be around for a while.
There are some great deals out there now on AM4 and DDR4 but there's not much of an upgrade path.

My laptop was also around 5k: www.lenovo.com/au/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/thinkpad-p14s-gen-3-(14-inch-amd)/len101t0048
But I really don't like it... The whole high end laptop is a bit of a joke, doesn't matter the processor, if you only have a 135w power supply, it isn't going to run fast and it will thermal throttle before the power chokes it.
From now on I think I am permanently in the thin and light camp, I have a Lenovo X1 Carbon at home and I love it.

I am doing more and more Teams and Zoom meetings these days, so I bought one of these a month ago to help me with my White boarding in meetings:




Honestly speaking, I haven't really come to grips with it yet.
Not sure if I will persevere with the Microsoft Whiteboarding App or try something else.

Now the phone iNCY?

I'd imagine your phone is a 12" duel sim'ed product of the Chinese space race with a small thermo fan and supercar coolant to keep it from burning a hole through your trousers.

Jul 13, 2024 7:03:06 GMT NATH45 said:

Now the phone iNCY?

I'd imagine your phone is a 12" duel sim'ed product of the Chinese space race with a small thermo fan and supercar coolant to keep it from burning a hole through your trousers.

I'm usually somewhere between bleeding edge and cutting edge with my phone. I spend half my day on my phone so it's one of the main tools of my trade. Right now I have the Z Fold 5 which I have a mixed relationship with. When it's open I love it, but it's too small a main screen when closed for texts and emails and annoying to open and close.

I got my extra monitor... And yes the next phase is going to be one of cable management, because it is a shambles.
My PC needs to go under the desk, as my monitors don't quite fit.

I want to get one of the supports that mounts to the desk suspending your PC beneath as my desk is a sit/stand desk and while I don't stand a lot... I don't want to rip out all the cables when I do.

This is my office at work for those following along at home.