Rubenerd

Overheard this morning at one of our local coffee shops:

“When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

“Nah mate, every problem can be resolved with a hammer.”

My post about graphics cards generated bunch of comments. I’ve summarised below, but thanks to all of you who sent them in.

I didn’t think you were much of a gamer?

I didn’t think so either. I don’t play AAA titles, but I love flight and train simulators, and world-builders like Minecraft. I think there’s this expectation that you have to like shooting people under pulsing RGB lights to be considered a “gamer”. It’s not true.

Let me rephrase, I didn’t think you were a modern gamer

Fair! I spend more time on retrocomputing stuff than modern stuff. But while Sim City for DOS and Flight Simulator 98 are still so much fun, Cities Skylines and X-Plane can look spectacular.

Are you concerned about cooling?

Definitely, especially for these space heater GPUs. I think I can fit a 140 mm fan in the back if I cut a panel out, and I can use the gap where the original IO panel went in the front bezel to discreetly add ventilation. That still might not be enough though, I’ll need to run thermal tests.

Why the RTX 3060 Ti or the 3070?

These and the 6700 XT (more on that below) are the best you can get in a dual-fan card. My silly sleeper PC case is oddly short, meaning I can only fit 260mm or smaller cards by the time I mount my beloved Noctua fans inside. The 3050 would still have given me a nice bump over my 970, but these other cards are a huge leap.

Did you decide on the 3060 Ti or the 3070?

Not sure yet. The 3060 Ti hits that price/performance sweet spot. But I figure I’ll buy the best this system can support if I’m burning money in a dumpster fire anyway. I know that for 10-15% better performance (based on reviews), this is ridiculous.

Wouldn’t the extra 3070 money be better spent upgrading the motherboard and CPU of the computer you’re putting it into?

Almost certainly! But where’s the fun in rationality?

Why not an AMD?

I’ve been so impressed with the 5500M in my MacBook Pro, and considered a dual-fan MSI 6700 XT. Unfortunately Nvidia’s binary drivers have always been easier and more consistent for me in FreeBSD, and Linux with Steam and Proton. I’d reconsider if this were a Windows machine.

Did you hear Intel is finally releasing discrete GPUs again?

I saw their announcements, we’ll have to see what eventuates. At the very least I hope it adds some competition and supply to the market, both of which might help alleviate price pressures. But I doubt anything will change any time soon.

Last year I wrote about defensive blogging. I lamented the attitude of always reading things in bad faith, and the urge to jump on people and wear them down with rudeness and pedantic criticism.

Rami Ismail:

Twitter defensiveness is wanting to tweet “it’s nice weather today” and tweeting “While I understand the implications of climate catastrophe & global warming, to me personally right here at the time of posting I personally feel the weather is quite good altho I recognize..

I didn’t realise how much I’d internalised that too. Unless you’re willing to only ever post bland observations, opinions, or ideas, you’ll run into people who want to call you out. It’s exhausting.

Frank Nora of The Overnightscape used to talk about spentgags, or knee-jerk jokes that everyone knows. I even think this applies to observations. Mention Seagate, and you’ll get thousands of links to a Backblaze study.

I’ve learned the only “solution” here is to ignore, mute, and block. If you’re able to do this effectively, let me know how!

I’ve changed my theme to use Nimbus Sans instead of Liberation Sans. I’ve fallen back to the latter for years, but the former looks better to me on my FreeBSD and Linux desktops.

If you’re on a BSD, Linux, illumos etc, let me know if this breaks things horribly for you. People use wildly different display and subpixel settings, so I want to make sure it’s as legible as possible.

I may have even switched KDE Plasma to use Nimbus Sans over Robo Sans.

From his most recent episode where he spawns natural disasters:

There’s only so many snowballs you can throw before a bear eats you.

Picture (or I guess feel?) the scene. You’re sitting there, or walking around, or otherwise existing in a state where you’re not checking your phone, only to have it vibrate in your pocket. You reach in to check it, only to discover its not there. What you felt was a phantom; a vibration you’ve trained yourself to feel after years of having these devices close to your body.

Anxiety aside, it’s also another reason why I’ve avoided smartwatches that want to shove notifications onto your wrist. I don’t need more of these!

These phantom vibrations happen to me on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times a day. It’s strong enough that I’d swear something is there, poking me to check my notifications. And it always happens on my right side, because that’s where the phones go.

I had a friend in Singapore who was an amputee, and among her biggest frustrations was feeling the need to scratch an itch on her limb that no longer existed. That’s obviously infinitely worse, but I wonder if there’s a similar physiological cause? Clearly there’s a miscommunication going on.

I did a quick search, and there are already studies in the medical literature exploring this phenomena. Amrita Deb in Asian Pac Psychiatry even draws a connection to the potential mental health effects:

The last decade has witnessed considerable interest in pathological conditions stemming from misuse or overuse of technology, a condition commonly referred to as technopathology. Of the several complaints reported, phantom vibration or phantom ringing is one that has not yet been widely explored. … According to findings obtained, phantom vibration or phantom ringing was commonly experienced by mobile phone users; however, few found it bothersome and hence took no steps to eliminate it.

I feel like I’m starting to cross that threshold now into it being a nuisance, but I’m wondering what can be done about it.

I’m going to make a conscious effort to put it in the other pocket for a month, and see if it either results in phantoms on that side, and/or if it reduces them on my right. I’ll report back in a month!

My graphics card post yesterday was part of a broader project to rebuild my desktop into this silly Compaq case. I decided while I was thinking about it, I’d do a clean install of Debian with the newest version. I’m lucky that Debian with Steam and Proton run almost all the non-native Linux games I care about. We owe these developers a huge debt of gratitude!

Back on the Debian front, the installer ran glacially slow. FreeBSD 13 installed in less than fifteen minutes on my other boot drive, and I remembered Windows 10 had previously installed quickly as well. Something was a bit weird.

I opted for the text-based interface, but it still took upwards of half an hour to progress beyond each step. After two hours I decided to reboot and check what dmesg(8) showed.

During boot I saw a flash of text that mentioned “sda”, so I unplugged the FreeBSD SSD and the slim Blu Ray burner drive from the SATA bus. Same issue. I unplugged the target SSD, and same issue.

I then realised my decision to build this into a 90s-era Compaq case was fateful one. I wanted to keep as much of the case stock as possible, including the original optical and floppy drives. To make them work on the new motherboard, I bought a FDD to USB header, and employed an old IDE to SATA converter for the CD-ROM. Both worked great on my FreeBSD install.

I unplugged the IDE to SATA converter, and Debian booted as fast as I’d expect.

Having this optical drive disconnected isn’t the end of the world; it would have been fun, but I have an alternative drive underneath for all my multimedia CD-ROM sillyness. I might do a bit more digging to see what that IDE to SATA converter uses. The fact FreeBSD boots fine with it suggests there’s a Linux driver issue somewhere.

I’ve been looking to buy a new graphics card for the last year or so. Already you can probably tell where this is going.

My Asus GTX 970 OC edition has served me well over the years playing Minecraft with shaders, and games like X-Plane and Train Simulator. The Nvidia binary blob drivers work great on FreeBSD, and Debian for Steam games. Alas, it doesn’t fit in my smaller sleeper PC case rebuild, so I’ve sold it and am using the integrated Intel silicon while I decide what to do.

(My MacBook Pro ended up filling the void here with its 8 GiB AMD 5500M. I was surprised that it gave comparable performance to that much older 970, though it does struggle a bit on my new monitor with anything greater than medium settings. Even with an active cooling pad, the laptop also sounds like its roasting itself, which can’t be good for the battery).

In the words of Gough Whitlam, it’s time. Unfortunately, I’m learning about the dreaded trifecta that digital designers and gamers have been throwing their hands up in despair over for years now:

• crypto-“currency” miners,
• silicon shortages, and
• the effects of the pandemic

These have driven prices to eye-watering heights. GPU manufacturers have paid lip service to discouraging mining, and have set up elaborate systems to allow people to bid on the cards they want, but the situation is still grim. Cards now cost as much, if not more, than game consoles or all the remaining components of a PC build combined.

But wait, there’s more! Top-end cards were always halo devices, but the price for what is considered mid-range or even low-end (that’s a lot of hyphens) have all shifted up a few notches. A bit of a Train Simulator pun there. The Asus 3060 Ti Dual Mini or Zotac 3070 Twin Edge I’m looking at would fit perfectly in my target sleeper PC tower, but both breach four figures in Australia despite being decidedly mid-range. That’s a lot of coffee.

I’ve had money saved for more than a year waiting for prices to become even a tad more reasonable, but as they say, the market can remain irrational longer our patience can last.

Anjou Stiles nailed it:

“Relief that your software just got out of my way and did the thing” is the highest possible aspiration.

I initially read that as respiration. I suppose I’d breathe easier knowing the software I used worked.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of each number? I thought of this tech over my morning coffee:

1. One-time password
2. Two’s compliment
3. Triple DES
4. Commodore Plus/4
5. Windows 95
6. MOS 6502
7. 7zip
8. 8-bit Zilog Z80
9. Mac OS 9, the last of the classics
10. 2₁₀!
11. DEC PDP-11
12. The age OrionVM turned yesterday… wow.
13. FreeBSD 13, my favourite release in years, especially for desktop
14. Raspberry Pi (3.14… is that a stretch?)
15. 15-inch MacBook Pro, my first Intel Mac from back in the day
16. Commodore 16 and 116