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Retro Gaming November 2025 (0 Comments) (link)
 Saturday, 1-November-2025  15:16:37 (GMT +10) - by MUTMAN

This month's "Retro Let's Play" for November is Simon the Sorcerer from 1993
Simon the Sorcerer is a comedy point and click and shamelessly so, it blends stupid puzzles (which will require a guide of course) with jokes that's just the formula and from all reports is unapologetically British which should make for plenty of laughs. To top it all off it's one of the original talkies that added a dimension to these games that could not be matched especially if you had a strong cast and they did with Chris Barrie of Red Dwarf (Rimmer) fame doing the duties.


click for the thread!




Retro Misc Pics (37 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 31-October-2025  12:18:07 (GMT +10) - by MUTMAN

Friday again !

1st March 2013:






8th March 2013:






15th March 2013:






22nd March 2013:






29th March 2013:







Misc Newsy Stuff (3 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 31-October-2025  12:14:32 (GMT +10) - by MUTMAN

Matt B sent word on this delightful nugget of news on the next update to Win 11 - unavoidable AI assistance in the settings page. Since you're interacting with an AI model, you can use plain, natural language to explain what's wrong or what you're trying to do, and the feature should understand your intent and surface the relevant setting or automate the necessary steps to apply the changes.

callan gives a laptop a run for its money. But, the CPU is ARM based. I really hope this machine (and ones like it) will finally help bring about processor agnostic computing again. I think RISC V has a ways to go (but I'm still rooting for it), but this machine shows that ARM, outside of the embedded/mobile market has finally come of age, and is a credible alternative to the AMD64 instruction set market. The packaging strikes me as an all-out effort.

TSMC gives an ultra-rare video look inside its fabs. The opening sequence shows the so-called 'silver highway,' TSMC's automated material handling system (AMHS), consisting of overhead tracks transporting front-opening unified pods (FOUPs) carrying 300mm wafers. Hundreds of FOUPs are shown in motion to demonstrate meticulous logistics of wafers around the fab, something that is critical for maintaining cycle times in a high-volume manufacturing (HVM) environment. Central to the video are ASML's EUV scanners (likely the Twiscan NXE:3600D), depicted 'printing' patterns on wafers in a Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer-style video.

Backblaze disk drive failure stats suggest the “bathtub curve” effect may be imaginary. The idea is that disk drives fail either early on in their life or after many years, and a plot of failure rate over time shows a U-shaped curve with higher rates at the start and end of working life and few or no failures between these points. However, a Backblaze blog shows that the bathtub curve effect is absent as the company builds up more lifetime failure data.

This story is a bit concerning, BitLocker reportedly auto-locks users' backup drives. The best part is that this isn't even the extent of BitLocker's overreach. We found out that BitLocker is surprisingly resource-intensive as well. In our testing, it slowed down random read/write speeds of the affected SSDs by up to 45% because it forces your CPU to encrypt and decrypt every single thing. This can genuinely slow down performance and make your PC feel sluggish.



Thirsty Thursday News (0 Comments) (link)
 Thursday, 30-October-2025  23:00:57 (GMT +10) - by MUTMAN

Microsoft in court for allegedly misleading millions of Australians over Microsoft 365 subscriptions. The ACCC has commenced proceedings in the Federal Court against Microsoft Australia and its parent company Microsoft Corporation for allegedly misleading approximately 2.7 million Australian customers when communicating subscription options and price increases, after it integrated its AI assistant, Copilot, into Microsoft 365 plans.

You wouldnt be a fly on the wall with this. No, you'd need to be a fly near a power outlet. Using the unique liquid cooling solution that can run the handheld at a 120W TDP, the results seem truly impressive, although actually using this handheld with liquid cooling is certainly stretching the definition of "handheld gaming", since the device will need to be attached to a liquid cooling base with sizable coolant tubes.

Qualcomm buys Arduino, and the open-source community is sceptical to say the least. The announcement came out of nowhere. Arduino wasn’t known to be courting a buyer, and no hint or rumor of the deal leaked beforehand—a rarity for any tech acquisition brokered in 2025. It left fans of Arduino and open-source hardware concerned about what it means for Arduino’s future. “It was a great surprise,” “To have them be bought out by a huge tech company like Qualcomm just floored me. I don’t think anyone saw that coming.”

Does your workplace use Microsoft Teams? Be wary, because the House of Windows is testing a new Teams feature that can automatically update your work location based on the Wi-Fi network you're connected to. Oh M$, wont you ever learn ? Microsoft frames the feature as a way to "reduce confusion at the workplace," helping colleagues identify who's on-site or remote—though the privacy implications speak for themselves.
With that said, the feature will apparently be off by default, and tenant admins will have the privilege of deciding whether to enable location reporting and also whether to require end-user opt-in. Of course, given how these things usually go, it wouldn't be shocking if most corporations quietly made it mandatory for everyone.

Aftahours wanted to let you know DDR5 has just surpassed 13,020 MT/s for the first time. That's a lot of 0's and 1's. Overclocker Salty Croissant has become the first to break DDR5 memory overclocking at 6510 MHz. This translates to 13020 MT/s, the highest frequency achieved so far.

Blinky sent word he only uses 508GB a month and would be happy on dial up. As of June 2025, the average Australian household pulls down 508 gigabytes of data per month through the National Broadband Network.

And finally, this Windows trackpad caught my eye. Why you wouldn't just buy the Apple track pad and run this beautiful open source driver by imbushuo is beyond me.



Wednesday Reviews (4 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 29-October-2025  18:31:14 (GMT +10) - by MUTMAN

Keyboard, Hub:
HYTE Powered USB Hub @ ThinkComputers
Razer BlackWidow V4 Low-Profile HyperSpeed Gaming Keyboard @ Madshrimps

Cases:
Montech King 45 Pro @ TechPowerUp
Lian Li O11 Dynamic Mini V2 Flow Case @ ThinkComputers
Gigabyte C500 Panoramic Stealth Mid-Tower Chassis @ FunkyKit
Corsair Air 5400 LX-R RGB iCUE LINK Mid-Tower Chassis @ TweakTown

Storage:
Corsair MP700 Micro 4TB SSD @ TweakTown
Corsair MP700 PRO XT 2TB SSD @ guru3D
Biwin Black Opal X570 2TB SSD @ TweakTown
KIOXIA Exceria Plus G2 2TB USB 3.2 Gen 2 Portable SSD @ NikKTech
SSSTC PJ1 3.84TB M.2 22110 SSD @ TweakTown

Motherboard:
Colorful iGame Shadow II DDR5-6000 32GB @ FunkyKit
SAPPHIRE NITRO+ B850A WIFI 7 AMD @ guru3D
ASUS ProArt Z890-Creator WiFi @ TweakTown

Video Card:
MSI GeForce RTX 5050 Shadow 2X @ HotHardware
Gigabyte X870I Aorus Pro Ice @ TechPowerUp

Software, Benchmark:
The Outer Worlds 2 Handheld Performance @ TechPowerUp
Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 Handheld Performance @ TechPowerUp

Misc:
Project SD Gundam STEALTH @ FunkyKit
DXRacer Martian Gaming Chair @ TechPowerUp




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