Photos Latest Purchases Thread: v2.0

It would be wrong not to scoot about to see how far you can travel.

 

Pair of Adidas Montréal 76 in the End sale:

 

Anti-static carbon fibre record brush

 

For your Gram-o-phone Granddad?

 

Aaaaah! And the first thing you did with it was look me up!

 

I'm sure that he was just keeping an eye on you, can't be too careful these days... ;-)

 

I do need supervision, it's true.

 

I’ll be brutal, it was this very thread rather than spying on people directly or indirectly.

Y’know, unless that’s your thing

 

That's a bit like one of those "You can come back to mine if you want, or not, it's totally up to you and I'm fine with whatever" lines.

Oddly, they seem to work more than not.

 

A tiny wee e-reader that attaches to magsafe cases. Intended to stop me scrolling and do some reading instead whenever I'm tempted to whip out my phone and waste some time.

 

My other half mentioned this recently as she’s been seeing it pop up all over the place.

From what I gather you’ll want to mod the software, because the one that ships is a bit rubbish. And apparently the “XTC” ebook format, which I’d never heard of, is the most optimal for these devices.

My OH was interested for exactly the same reasons you are: read a book instead when you pick up your phone. But I steered her away, as there would just be too many points of friction for it to be practical. She’s deeply embedded within Amazon when it comes to e-books: all her existing books would need to be ripped from the Kindle, have the DRM stripped, and the format converted; I’d need to come up with a way of getting content on it that has a very strong “wife acceptance factor”; and using the Kindle “Lending Library” thing she pays for would land somewhere between “an absolute ballache” and “fugeddaboutit”.

I am still quite tempted, as it would be a neat little toy and they’re quite cheap. Most of the stuff I just mentioned is not an impossible hurdle… but I already don’t have enough time to play with all the other neat little toys I have .

 

2x 2tb HDDs and an old AppleTV from mrplow

 

And there’s the key part, I guess

Like I said earlier, it’s not impossible to rip books from a Kindle and strip the DRM, I’ve done it before. But the bigger reason I steered her clear was the extra friction it would introduce.

All she’s got to do now is: get kindle, search for book, download or buy book. Whereas with the XTEINK XT4 - or any other e-reader - it’s more like: buy book, download book (and get me to rip out DRM if necessary), upload book to calibre-web or copy to network for ingest, (presumably) connect e-reader to computer, load book to reader.

I’d be happy enough to do all that - it really isn’t that complicated for me and a lot of it can be easily automated. But I know I would very quickly be asked “why is this so much harder than using my kindle”, and the only honest answer isn’t very practical: that Amazon is one of the worst companies in existence and that DRM has caused a staggering amount of harm to your property, your devices, and your rights…

She’s starting to get it, especially in recent years: rapidly increasing pace of enshittification, “AI” “features” no one wants being stuffed down your throat at every possible opportunity, all the stuff that’s recently come out about browser extensions like Honey… But it’s been a 17 year long slog to even get this far, whereas nerds like me and anyone else still using this forum were sounding off about the implications of cookies, data collection, intrusive advertising, etc, at least 20 years ago :hehe

 

This has been de-purchased. Despite HP's attestations to the contrary, the laptop will not output on USB-C/DP using the dGPU, even in dGPU-only mode. Whilst I don't have an absolute requirement to do so, the option at some point seems like it would be useful - so it has gone back.

I was about to replace it with an Alienware 16x with similar specs (275HX, 32GB, 5070)... had it in my basket yesterday but didn't check out because I got distracted by something or other, but that has gone up by £400 overnight apparently. It was still in my basket at the expected price this morning when I went to check out and then was updated halfway through the checkout process. So Dell can entirely swivel.

Back to the drawing board.

 

My laptop is the same, it just means that it goes through the iGPU so you loose a few % over something with Optimus or a dedicated port.

A lot of laptops will do iGPU on one USBC port and dGPU on the other, did you check both or have advanced Optimus mux switch.

Perhaps the dGPU is to HDMI?

 

I understand that there are issues beyond just a few % when either using G-Sync or VR headsets when routing through the iGPU though (?)

This just had the one USB-C onboard - there's a setting in the BIOS for GPU configuration and it had no effect on the output of this port. HP support gave conflicting information across two different sessions, and no configuration seemed to work. Either this one was duff in isolation or it's just not a supported configuration, but given it was still in the easy-peasy return window figured that was safest rather than continuing to dabble.

The Alienware I was about to buy clearly identifies one USB-C as dGPU and the other as iGPU... but that's superfluous information now with the unexpected price hike.

 

That may be the case, I don't know about VR headset and the requirements, for Gsync side certainly issues on my laptop, I cannot get G-sync on USBC only on HDMI but don't know if that is a cable issue my end or a hardware issue as I use a TB dock that is quite old.

Laptops are such a PITA to buy, so many pitfalls from GPU power port issues etc.

You would expect a direct connection to dGPU on a gaming laptop like an Omen, my laptop is not a gaming laptop so I gave it a pass but really, these things shouldn't be so difficult

 

QFT - the GPU power situation in particular is nuts! I was completely oblivious to this until I started shopping and wondering why there seems to be two tiers of 5060/70 laptops with wildly different price points.

This is the main reason I had been shopping Omen, Alienware, Legion etc (that and workstation laptops with fully juiced GPUs are stupid money), but even then there's a lot of legwork in confirming what their power budgets are.

EDIT: Holy moly just noticed on the Dell site the spec that was £1600 yesterday has gone up again - £2200 now!