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Crunchy on my chair today
Took this with a halogen light on:
Like always, thanks for viewing.
Is this the best 65W CPU you can buy today?
I think that if today I had to build a new machine, I’d probably take this CPU for it, on a B650 mainboard. Twelve cores and twenty-four threads should be plenty for about everything, and since platform costs are high for the new AM5 series systems anyway, it doesn’t make too much sense to save on the CPU itself. I’d probably take a good after-market cooler still, even if the provided one is adequate already. Oh, and I’d only add a graphics card if that was my main use case, like rendering graphics or so – for all others, the built-in graphics should be fine, like they are with Intel as well. Add 32 or even 64GB of RAM in case you’ll plan to use big sample libraries for music or so, and that would be a wonderful machine.
As are ours, both Mitchie’s and my machines have the AMD 5700G “APU” which are 8-core/16-thread CPUs with built-in 8-core graphics, so the graphics are a bit better than in the newer ones, otherwise a new 6-core would beat ours. These are 65W processors as well.
Oh, and Zuleikha is mostly using Mitchie’s birthday present from 2019 now, so we’re all set… and notebooks are the ultimate in power saving 🙂
Like always, thanks for reading.
LibreArts – 2023 in preview
Free and open source software, short: FOSS has come a long way. For artists, 2022 has been very good in particular. Read the article 2023 in preview on LibreArts on what’s next for the coming year.
Also, the artwork for that article is about the nicest version of “2023” I’ve seen so far:
Like always, thanks for your interest.
No comment…
Matti Sulanto in KL
This one is for the gear heads, or for those who want to see some photos from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Matti Sulanto is a photographer from Finland and as it seems he’s currently on a trip to Malaysia where he lent a camera and lens from Robin Wong, another photographer who lives in KL. So he’s talking about the gear mostly, but you can see some photos of the area – I think in one traffic directions sign I saw “Jalan Bukit Bintang” or so? Enjoy, if that is of any interest for you:
Oh, and about that lens – it’s really a lovely one, I have it as well. Like always, thanks for reading and/or viewing. Found these videos via 43rumors.
Self portrait
Haven’t done a “selfie” since a while. But today I reinstalled one of the studio strobes into a corner of our dining area, attached a gridded beauty dish to it, set the camera to share its display and settings via WiFi, and used my phone as a remote controller. Then, with a black background attached to the kitchen door, I took a photo of myself. Looks like this:
I set the white balance to 4800k and cropped the photo into a 4×5 format, otherwise it’s unaltered and like “out of the camera”.
Getting grey, am I not? Well I guess for an almost retiree that’s quite normal perhaps? Thanks for viewing.
One of my favourites
Olivia (OKO) posted this on Soundcloud a while ago, just found it there. We have so many good bass players on Wikiloops, so I feel quite honoured that she chose the version with me on my upright bass:
Thanks Olivia and friends, what a pleasure to jam with you all 🙂 <3
“Let’s just hibernate for a minute…”
Crunchy, as my family calls him:
Like always, thanks for viewing. Pssst…
Android 13 on the Google Nexus 5
When both my wife and daughter got newer devices one day, one of the first mobile phones I kind of “inherited” from them was the Google Nexus 5 – a truly wonderful device in my opinion, with a just right 4.95 inch screen size. When it came out it had Android 4.4 codenamed “KitKat”, and Google officially supported it until their version 6.0.1 “Marshmallow”.
LineageOS prolonged its life until Android 7.1 (LineageOS 14.1), and sometime last year or so I’ve found inofficial images on the XDA developers’ site for versions of LineageOS 18 (equals Android 11). So up until a few minutes ago, my device looked like this:
Today I changed it to the newer and of course also unofficial version 20 of LineageOS which equals Android 13, so its operating system is now newer and more recent than even that of the Google Pixel 3a which we gave to my brother (tho an image of LOS20 for that exists as well, it’s also still not an official one). Here’s how mine looked after the first reboot, with a check on the version number:
The standard and unaltered start screen of the “Trebuchet” launcher of LineageOS20 looks like this:
This time I haven’t installed any of the more or less free Google services, so no push notifications, no location or “Play Store” services, and so on – I can do without. This device hasn’t even a SIM card, and I use it over WLAN and for development/testing purposes only.
Anyhow, this is also a proof of concept that you don’t really have to throw or give away older hardware even if you want to or have to stay current because of security considerations. All you need is a computer and a bit of time to restore your devices to newer and still updated versions of a truly free (as in freedom) operating system. Only works with Android or Linux tho, Apple users sadly can’t do this.
My Pixel 4a will officially be supported until August of this year, after that I can decide about the right time to upgrade it to a free version of Android 14 or whatever is to come.
Like always, thanks for reading.
Update: like always, first things first – I installed F-Droid and after that (and from it) also the Aurora “store” (which is only a proxy to the Google Play Store, you need it for apps like Firefox et al), and then the Zapp app (also in F-Droid) which lets you view German live and “Mediathek” (streamed) TV from our public (“Öffentlich-rechtlich“) TV stations. Plus I copied over some music from my computer to which the device is still connected. So the list of apps now looks like this:
while the screen in the integrated Music app looks like this now:
That’s hardly different from what my Pixel 4a has – which shows that this is truly a usable device still. I can listen to music both on- and offline, watch TV, I could also send email if I wanted to, so that was my point…
Again, thanks for reading.