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smokey982

Last reply May 8, 2020 · posted in Computers and Gadgets

MacBook Pro or iPad Pro for college?

My daughter will be starting college this fall as a freshman. For her high school graduation present she has asked for a new laptop. We are an Apple family so she was leaning toward the MacBook Pro. But after reading about the new iPad pro she's not so sure now. I know the new iPads can do many things. But is there anything she wouldn't be able to do on the iPad as a student that she could do with a MacBook? Any pros or cons either way?

Sent from my iPad using SatelliteGuys

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EarDemon

May 8, 2020

Locally accessible NAS all the way!

If someone else has your data (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox), is it really your data? You upload your files to these companies, and they'll mine your data free of charge. Hell, if you go above the 'free' (nothing in life is free) threshold, you'll pay them a monthly or yearly recurring payment for the privilege to spy on you. It's win-win-win for them.

I have an 8TB 4 bay Western Digital NAS (PR4100), after RAID is taken into consideration, there's 5.5 TB of usable space and three home computers in the mix.

Weekly Back Ups - Sunday nights starting at 6PM, spaced 2 hours a part I have Veritas set to do system backups of all three PCs to the NAS. I have an 8 week retention policy, One full backup followed by three incrementals, followed by another full and three more incrementals. If a file needs to be restored it's just a matter of opening up the Veritas Recovery Browser, finding the recovery point, entering in my password, and finding the file(s) I want to restore. Easy peasy.

Monthly File Copies - The First of every month a batch file gets executed on each PC that copies the entire contents of the My Documents and My Pictures folders to the NAS, overwriting the previous months. I have a folder in the root of the NAS called 'Data Backups' with subfolders for each one of my computers. Taking this one step further, these folders then get copied by executing another batch file to a private area of our File Server at work over a VPN tunnel. I don't keep many pictures locally (see below), so the file size for all of this is not as large as one would think. I take this extra step incase of corruption to the Veritas backup set.

Camera/Phone Backup - With my real camera, after an event, I'll pop the SD card into the computer, make a subfolder on the NAS with the Date and copy all of the pictures taken that day over manually If I am on a road trip, when I get back to the hotel, as long as I have a decent cell signal, I'll connect to my home VPN and copy the pictures over that night. I'm not too concerned about the pictures on my phone. Unless I have something I really don't want to lose I'll copy it over to the NAS right away. I typically perform two factory resets on my phone a year, once in the Spring and once after a new release of Android comes out. Prior to doing the resets, I'll copy all of the pictures to the NAS and delete the previous version of that folder. That way my Pictures are up to date and when the phone restore is complete, I just have to copy the DCIM folder back over. It is usually at this time, I copy all of the photos that originated from my camera and phone to a portable SSD (used to use a portable HDD). The SSD is encrypted with BitLocker and kept it in a locked drawer at work. All photos are in their full resolution 6000 x 3376 resolution.

From Work to Home - In the middle of the night, our small servers at work back up to my NAS at home for off site backups. For our larger servers, I physically take a hard drive and tape home with me every week and rotate them. For the smaller servers, it goes over the VPN tunnel. I'm a bad boy and don't utilize my Home Folder at work, so I do the same thing as I do at home. I have a batch file that copies the content of the My Docs and My Pics folder on my work laptop to my NAS.

In addition to personal files, I keep installers for ancient applications that I may or may never need again on the NAS. I play around a lot in VMWare, so that installer for Internet Explorer 7.0 for Windows XP does come in handy from time to time as does that ISO of NT 4.0 and the installer for SP4a. I don't care about my VMs enough to make any additional backups of them besides what Veritas backups up weekly. All my music is stored on my NAS, I have none of it on my local computers. I do copy my music over to my offsite SSD that I keep at work when I copy my pictures over twice a year, and I also have a somewhat updated version on the flash drive in my cars infotainment system.

All of the extra steps I take are precautionary in case something happens to the NAS. Since it's RAID 5, I can have one hard drive failure, but only one can fail at a time before it rebuilds. I keep a brand new spare 2 TB WD Red in my desk drawer for just the occasion. Never had it happen yet. In all honesty, if my house burns to the ground, the last thing on my mind would be worrying about my pictures of the Blue Ridge Mountains or mist filled pictures of Niagara Falls.

For security, I have firewall access rules set up to restrict access to my NAS.

The only thing that can potentially get in my way in a cable (extremely rare) or power (more likely than it should be) outage. Having a secondary ISP to failover to is great if you're home, but when you are away, that VPN capability is broken, and if your secondary ISP uses CG-NAT, you are SOL. If there's a cable outage the router will failover to HughesNet on WAN2. If there's a power outage, the generator will kick on, and since cable will be out because Charter doesn't back up the nodes, the router will failover in this scenario as well. Problem is HughesNet, besides being barley usable sometimes, is the carrier grade NAT. If I absolutely need to access my NAS in the event of a cable or power outage when offsite, I could always contact my neighbor and walk them through setting up TeamViewer on my desktop PC and muddle through while on satellite. This is why we need IPv6. and why under no circumstance is '5G' an acceptable form of internet access to be used in the home as a primary method of getting online

If you skipped any of this long winded post, which I expect you did, bottom line, this is my data, I am in complete control. Not Google, not Microsoft, not Apple. I will never be subservient to those pigs.

Reactions: cp2k

cp2k

May 8, 2020

EarDemon said:
Locally accessible NAS all the way!

This post deserves it's own thread by itself. I'd love to be able to do the off site mirroring you do, but unfortunately Spectrum in our area doesn't have the speeds to support it. If fiber ever makes it here it might be a different story. On a good day I only get 11 megs up. You did bring up a lot of ideas I need to consider though to improve my own setup.

EarDemon

May 8, 2020

cpalmer2k said:
This post deserves it's own thread by itself. I'd love to be able to do the off site mirroring you do, but unfortunately Spectrum in our area doesn't have the speeds to support it. If fiber ever makes it here it might be a different story. On a good day I only get 11 megs up. You did bring up a lot of ideas I need to consider though to improve my own setup.

For my file transfers back and forth from work to home and vice versa over the tunnel, I'm actually limited by my speeds at work. We have 25 Mb symmetrical DIA fiber from Spectrum Enterprise. Nothing I can do to convince the powers to be to upgrade to 50 Mb for $200/month more. At home with Spectrum Gig, I'm at 940 x 40, so work is the weak link in the chain for me. That's why I have all of this scheduled in the middle of the night.

Another thing I considered was enabling RAID on my new laptop, it supports RAID 1 using two NVMe SSDs. Between causing the write performance to take a hit and having to spend $800 on two 2TB NVMe SSDs, I couldn't justify it. And then ultimately, I'd convince myself to get another drive to keep in storage collecting dust to act as a hot spare, so add another $400 to that cost. Right now I've got two 1TB drives in there, but don't want to go down to 1TB of usable space.

harshness

May 8, 2020

EarDemon said:
Another thing I considered was enabling RAID on my new laptop, it supports RAID 1 using two NVMe SSDs. Between causing the write performance to take a hit and having to spend $800 on two 2TB NVMe SSDs, I couldn't justify it. And then ultimately, I'd convince myself to get another drive to keep in storage collecting dust to act as a hot spare, so add another $400 to that cost.

This is way beyond the needs of someone looking to back up a few years worth of pictures, videos and music files.

Right now I've got two 1TB drives in there, but don't want to go down to 1TB of usable space.

You probably don't want to go above 75% of capacity with an SSD. I'd go so far as to say that anything that you dont use fairly frequently probably shouldn't be on an SSD given that the price per gigabyte is still 30 times that of a conventional hard drive.

It is always good to maintain perspective.

EarDemon

May 8, 2020

The current pricing may be beyond what people are willing to pay, but the concept is exactly what people need. Hardly anyone backups up their data, those that do, don't do it on a regular basis. So why not throw in an extra M.2 slot, stick an SSD in there, put in a RAID controller with RAID enabled by default? Even using the mainstream 2280 size these things don't take up that much space especially compared to the traditional 2.5" form factor and they weigh nothing. And even if you make regular backups, there's the example above. If Cpalmer had RAID on his computer, never would have an issue with potentially losing a 20 page report after leaving the computer alone for 10 -15 minutes.

Besides cost, this concept will never take off because of having the practices of non-serviceable hardware and soldering the drive to the board. Afterall you would need easy access to the M.2 slots to replace a failed drive. This is why I am done with consumer grade hardware. The ability to do the most simplest of tasks such as adding memory or replacing a drive is slowly being taken away.

The price difference between mechanical drives and solid state drives isn't worth the aggravation. Hard drives don't need to exist anymore for typical desktop/laptop end user use. They should be relegated for high capacity Server/NAS/SAN datacenter, NVRs and home media server use . The only mechanical drives I have anywhere in my house are the ones in my NAS and the ones in my DVRs. My two desktops, the older one dates back to 2007, the new laptop, the old laptop, the beater laptop I bought for cheap on eBay and my work laptop all have SSDs with at least a capacity of 500 GB. I have not purchased a computer for work with a mechanical hard drive in two years, and all WIN 7 -> WIN 10 upgrades involved me pulling the HDD, and putting in a 512GB WD Blue SSD that cost $70. I don't even own portable hard drives anymore.

The performance of filling up of a solid state drive and to what threshold is a debate that's been going on forever. I might have been worried about it 10 years ago, but these days, I don't see it as a huge issue. I don't have a lot of data, I don't plan to fill them up to capacity. That's my I have multiples. My main desktop has 3 500 GB SATA SSDs. C: for Windows, applications and data, D: for Virtual Machines, E: for audio/video/photo files as I experiment with Adobe CC. Same goes for my laptop, but with 2 1TB NVMe SSDs with the option to add a third 2.5" SATA. C: for Windows, applications and data, D: for VMs and A/V files for play back and editing.

I put Intel 730 Series SATA SSDs in my main desktop, work laptop and old personal laptop the day Window 10 came out, so nearly 5 years ago. These machines have been in use nearly every day since and in the case of two of the computers, they hardly every get shut down. There has been no noticeable performance degradation.

harshness

May 8, 2020

EarDemon said:
The current pricing may be beyond what people are willing to pay, but the concept is exactly what people need.

SSD is needed for speed and weight savings, not for gobs of storage. Storage inside a computer is hardly safe from the typical accidents that befall data.

So why not throw in an extra M.2 slot, stick an SSD in there, put in a RAID controller with RAID enabled by default?

Because there are cheaper and much more secure ways to back up a computer?

If Cpalmer had RAID on his computer, never would have an issue with potentially losing a 20 page report after leaving the computer alone for 10 -15 minutes.

In that particular case, yes, but if the problem had been ransomeware rewriting all the directories (much more likely than a hard drive failure), it would have taken out both drives.

The price difference between mechanical drives and solid state drives isn't worth the aggravation.

How much is an 8TB SSD (hint: its on the shady side of $900)? You can get an 8TB winchester USB drive for under $140.

While the piddly drives (128GB, 240GB and 512GB) drives are getting affordable, drives those sizes are arguably a waste of real estate outside the realm of a truly personal computer.

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EarDemon

May 8, 2020

Of course RAID won't help you in the case of lost or damaged files. It's just another layer in a multilayered approach for data integrity to cover for different scenarios to protect against data loss. Just because other ways exist doesn't make it any less valid to use. Why not go all the way and take it to the extreme and say why should there be RAID on servers? After all, if cryptolocker spreads through network shares, drive redundancy isn't going to make the aftermath any better. Servers just sit there in datacenters, they don't get moved around and banged like laptops. That's another compelling argument for having no redundancy on them, correct?

I gave examples of where large capacity hard drives are still needed, but as time goes by, prices will still continue to drop, while technology gets better. Here are my major SSD purchases from the past 5 years. Twice the capacity for the same cost and faster interface.

July 2015: Intel 730 SATA @ 480 GB - $240
July 2017: HP S700 Pro SATA @ 512 GB - $215
Dec 2019: WD Black NVMe @ 1 TB - $230
Dec 2019: Intel 760P NVMe @ 1 TB - $220

I personally wouldn't want an 8 TB SSD unless it was a part of an array. I don't like the idea of putting all that data in one spot even with backups. There is a reason I went with two 1 TB drives, instead of one 2 TB drive. And in regard to laptops, last I knew there wasn't a 2.5" mechanical drive on the market larger than 4TB. The 14TB WD Gold is under $500 on Amazon. If you need that kind of storage a mechanical drive is the only way to go. But very few people benefit from that amount of potential storage. Now stick in a couple 512 GB or 1 TB SSDs, configure for RAID 1, and it has the potential to benefit a lot more people for roughly the same cost.

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TWiT Tech Podcast Network

8 minutes ago · posted in TWiT Tech Podcast Network

8 U.S. States Sue OpenAI Over Safety Concerns With Younger Users

Time for another AWESOME video from the TWIT Network!

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87N42NxLPC0

Direct YouTube Link - 8 U.S. States Sue OpenAI Over Safety Concerns With Younger Users
TWIT's Website
TWIT Live Feed

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Ramy

Supporting Founder

Last reply 33 minutes ago · posted in The Sports Section

2026-27 NCAA College Football

Really excited for this season with Kentucky having a new coach and some really exciting recruits. Probably won't last long, but here's hoping this season is great.

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Yespage

Today at 4:57 PM

24 team playoff seems to be real close.

Are we really that far from a 64-team tournament?

The benefit of the 24 team playoff:

All the cartel teams that cartels want in playoff are in playoff
- Independent of record too! Bonus.
MONEY!!!!! for the cartels.
I'm out of ideas.

Cons

Regular season really doesn't matter now other than the rivalry games
- Top cartel teams can lose three games and still make the playoff
Going to start resting players?
- The playoff is going to be *checks notes* several games!
- Resting players could make games dumb.
- Maybe even restrict NIL players from games played.
How much are streaming sub costs going up a month to pay for this?!

AZ.

Today at 5:30 PM

Yespage said:
24 team playoff seems to be real close.

Are we really that far from a 64-team tournament?

The benefit of the 24 team playoff:

All the cartel teams that cartels want in playoff are in playoff

Independent of record too! Bonus.

MONEY!!!!! for the cartels.

I'm out of ideas.

Cons

Regular season really doesn't matter now other than the rivalry games

Top cartel teams can lose three games and still make the playoff

Going to start resting players?

The playoff is going to be *checks notes* several games!

Resting players could make games dumb.

Maybe even restrict NIL players from games played.

How much are streaming sub costs going up a month to pay for this?!

One of the pro's I see is in a year with so many undefeated teams they have a good chance of an opening. Few years back you had lower divisions that didnt get a shot. I love collage football and I have no problem with that addition.

We are in what week 5 now? Been two real good ranked games to watch.....Other than that top 25 teams are playing nothing.

Jimbo

Today at 5:45 PM

Yespage said:
24 team playoff seems to be real close.

Are we really that far from a 64-team tournament?

The benefit of the 24 team playoff:

All the cartel teams that cartels want in playoff are in playoff

Independent of record too! Bonus.

MONEY!!!!! for the cartels.

I'm out of ideas.

Cons

Regular season really doesn't matter now other than the rivalry games

Top cartel teams can lose three games and still make the playoff

Going to start resting players?

The playoff is going to be *checks notes* several games!

Resting players could make games dumb.

Maybe even restrict NIL players from games played.

How much are streaming sub costs going up a month to pay for this?!

This will be a SAD DAY when this passes ....

They complained the last year that we had a bunch of Blow Outs in the Playoffs ... heres an idea, lets Double the amount of teams and hope for Closer games ... ya right.

This never should have went past 8 teams, 10 at the most.

Now, I have heard that play in games are being talked about, such as #13 plays #24 and so forth, to cut the field down (why cut it down, just don't expand it.)
I'm not sure exactly how thats going to work out or if it was just someone talking.

They were also talking about starting the Season earlier ...

I really don't like the National Championship game being the end of January ... if the Semi Finals are over New Years, thats fine with the Championship game the next week.

Jimbo

Today at 5:47 PM

AZ. said:
One of the pro's I see is in a year with so many undefeated teams they have a good chance of an opening. Few years back you had lower divisions that didnt get a shot. I love collage football and I have no problem with that addition.

We are in what week 5 now? Been two real good ranked games to watch.....Other than that top 25 teams are playing nothing.

There are 68 Power 4 teams, so eventually they will get there I wouldn't imagine ...

AZ.

48 minutes ago

Jimbo said:
There are 68 Power 4 teams, so eventually they will get there I wouldn't imagine ...

Far from it but you know that....You dont like the larger playoff.....Its ok.....

Jimbo

37 minutes ago

AZ. said:
Far from it but you know that....You dont like the larger playoff.....Its ok.....

Oh, I Hate the idea ...

It would be different if it was a game that you could play 2 or games each week, but when you only play 1 game a week, the larger playoff is Not a good thing ...

The season has how many games now, is it 14 ... then you want to play another 5 (with more to come) against Top 12 (eventually 24 teams) ... remember, the 5 games in the playoffs will be the hardest games all year and back to back.

For example, IF Ohio State should win it all this year ... they play 5 teams in the Top 25, plus they would play 5 more to win it all, depending on how the ranking shake out and if Bye weeks are given.

Thats 10 Ranked teams ... in one year ...
I don't see that happening very often ...
Edit, Bama plays 4, Georgia plays 3, But Ole Miss plays 5 (didn't expect to see that)

That said, I don't see the Buckeyes winning it all this year.

Reactions: AZ.

AZ.

33 minutes ago

Jimbo said:
Oh, I Hate the idea ...

It would be different if it was a game that you could play 2 or games each week, but when you only play 1 game a week, the larger playoff is Not a good thing ...

The season has how many games now, is it 14 ... then you want to play another 5 (with more to come) against Top 12 (eventually 24 teams) ... remember, the 5 games in the playoffs will be the hardest games all year and back to back.

For example, IF Ohio State should win it all this year ... they play 5 teams in the Top 25, plus they would play 5 more to win it all, depending on how the ranking shake out and if Bye weeks are given.

Thats 10 Ranked teams ... in one year ...
I don't see that happening very often ...

That said, I don't see the Buckeyes winning it all this year.

Yes anyone here knows you 100%....Astros failed no posting...Ohio state loses we hear it.....Its ok....Its called an opinion....I have one so do you.....Problem is?

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ppappas

Pub Member / Supporter

Last reply 33 minutes ago · posted in DISH Network Support Forum

Newest NCIS recording doesn't allow auto skip

On Tuesday, I recorded the first episodes of the new season's NCIS shows on CBS (Dish provided, not OTA). The new New York series and Origins will both do Auto Skip, but the original, now season 24 does not. What's stranger, when I do a search for NCIS, Origins and New York show the current recording and the next episode it will record, but the original show only shows the current recording and some other channel showing the very first episode of season one. It makes no sense. When I set up the timers, I was able to use search for Origins and New York, but for the original, I had to scroll ahead in the guide until last Tuesday when the show was airing. Then set the timer from there. You can see its timer type is DVR where the other two are Seek. What am I missing?
Thanks!

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Nebugeater

Today at 9:12 AM

It is obviose some people do not know the diffornece between auto skip and FF

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Jimbo

Today at 9:45 AM

Nebugeater said:
It is obviose some people do not know the diffornece between auto skip and FF

IF you were referring to my post ...
Thats why I do all my Streaming Commercial FREE.

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Bobby

Today at 11:22 AM

Nebugeater said:
It is obviose some people do not know the diffornece between auto skip and FF

And there is a difference between fast forward and skip forwad....

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tanman

Today at 11:25 AM

With both CBS and Fox autohop (as we know) is not enabled for a week..But after 24 hours if you mash the FF button until the red kangaroo shows up in the bottom right you wont overshoot the program. No need to try to figure how long the break is.

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Cold Irons

Today at 12:03 PM

tanman said:
With both CBS and Fox autohop (as we know) is not enabled for a week..But after 24 hours if you mash the FF button until the red kangaroo shows up in the bottom right you wont overshoot the program. No need to try to figure how long the break is.

Yep. We do this all the time, but we use the 30-sec skip forward button until the red kangaroo shows up. Love this feature.

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Jim5506

33 minutes ago

I'm a bit confused about the recording methods.
Do you havePrime Time Anytime enabled, by doing that you don't have to set recordings for Prime time programs on ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox stations, it's done daily, 7 days a week.
And only 2 weeks recordings are saved, no deletions either.

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"MysteryMan"

Pub Member / Supporter Cutting Edge

Last reply 51 minutes ago · posted in Computers and Gadgets

Windows 10/11 Download

I created this thread on the original Edgecutter Cutting Edge Forums site. It's simply a place for those to review the latest software available for those using Windows 10 and Windows 11. To date it has received 112,559 views. I have been asked by staff to continue this thread here.

520 Replies · 47145 views

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EarDemon

Tuesday at 9:43 PM

If it wasn't for what I want, I wouldn't need any of this.

Do I need a collection of handheld radios, scanners and speed enforcement countermeasures? Nope, but I want them. Very little, if any of the software used to interface with these devices is available on Linux.

WhiteBeard

Tuesday at 9:59 PM

EarDemon said:
If it wasn't for what I want, I wouldn't need any of this.

Do I need a collection of handheld radios, scanners and speed enforcement countermeasures? Nope, but I want them. Very little, if any of the software used to interface with these devices is available on Linux.

To each there own but I've found that Windows can't do much more than Linux can. Can't have everything.

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EarDemon

Yesterday at 10:12 PM

WhiteBeard said:
To each there own but I've found that Windows can't do much more than Linux can. Can't have everything.

For niche use cases, yes I agree. Kali for ethical hacking and security testing, and running a Cacti server for network monitoring are the two things I have experience in. Plus thousands and thousands of other things, but for every day use I just can't see it. The owner of the GMRS repeater that I pay to access is changing the Tx DPL tones tomorrow, while Chirp is available on Linux, the software to program my MXT500 is not.

I run Fedora and Ubuntu in VMWare, honestly I don't care much for the UI of either of them and I don't feel like spending days/weeks to customize the UI to make it look Windows-like when I could just use Windows. The cartoonish dock at the bottom of the screen reminds me of Apple products.

EarDemon

Today at 10:07 AM

I have no OEM bloat, on CTO devices where I can access the drive, I order it with the smallest allowed drive and crack the device open throw the factory drive in the garbage and put in my own WD Black and install Windows from bootable media. For Windows bloat, I install Windows using the English - World option which limits preinstalled MS bloat.

Windows and Office features I wish to block, like CoPilot and Cortana, macro enabled Office files and others are blocked with GPOs.

Between keeping all software up to date, doing firmware updates, putting IoT devices on a separate VLAN, running Symantec Endpoint (say what you want about it, it's been good to me) and practicing safe hex, I'm vigilant but not paranoid about security.

With NVMe SSDs, my cold boot up time on all devices is under 30 secs as well. Fast boot disabled, BitLocker drive encryption enabled.

I have nothing against Linux, been paying with it on and off since 2004ish, it's just not the right solution for me.

HipKat

Today at 10:32 AM

EarDemon said:
it's just not the right solution for me.

As I said above, and, FWIW, I run Win11 Pro and Arch on separate 250 GB NVME drives, using F8 to select which I boot to, with a 1TB SSD for storage, accessible to both OSs and a third formatted Nvme I want to use to learn Kali. It was much faster to setup Arch than it was to strip down Windows. Windows still takes much longer to boot.

harshness

Today at 11:18 AM

EarDemon said:
I don't care much for the UI of either of them and I don't feel like spending days/weeks to customize the UI to make it look Windows-like when I could just use Windows.

What is so fantabulous about the Windows UI? By many accounts, it has been going downhill since Windows 7.

There are Linux desktops that offer Windows or Mac UIs, yet you don't hear much chatter about them outside of questions about when the creators might get sued.

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EarDemon

Today at 8:55 PM

harshness said:
What is so fantabulous about the Windows UI?

Because it's what I prefer. I know I've said this a few times, I use Open Shell to give me the cascading start menu a la WIN 95 and NT4.0. The only reason I went from Windows Vista to 7 back in the day was because of Classic Shell. I cannot stand anything other than the OG start menu from 30+ years ago. I'm using ExplorerPatcher to give me Windows 10 UI elements of the taskbar and right click context menus.

If you could take a look at how I set up Windows 95, you'd find many similarities to how I use 11.

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EarDemon

51 minutes ago

I could probably use that as a starting point, but I don't like the full size icons. If you have to click on each folder that's also a no-go for me, it has to be cascading.

I used to have Peppermint Linux in a VM, that was about as close as I could get to recreating a Windows NT4.0 style of menu structure, but I could never get it to scale properly in VMWare on a 4K display and eventually gave up.

Whatever the boot up time it's fine with me. The longest part of my bootup is the HP SureStart BIOS integrity check. Once that is done, it's only a few more seconds. I haven't done this reg tweak yet since the reformat, but I switched the bootup animation to the Windows 10 style spinning circle of dots, and it's two and a half rotations. I can live with that.

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dfergie

Staff member HERE TO HELP YOU!

Last reply Today at 9:00 PM · posted in TV Shows

NCIS: Origins

Hard getting used to the new younger Gibbs, Mark Harmons son had the right look but I understand he didn't want the role.
Still I'm enjoying, pretty good job with Franks.

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dfergie

Today at 4:38 PM

Really good one with OG Gibbs bookending it...

reubenray

Today at 4:48 PM

dfergie said:
Really good one with OG Gibbs bookending it...

Will the OG Gibbs be on NCIS or will Tony be on NCIS Origins?

dfergie

Today at 6:06 PM

Tony was there at the end of the episode with Gibbs.

reubenray

Today at 7:23 PM

dfergie said:
Tony was there at the end of the episode with Gibbs.

I saw Gibbs walk into the door, but I did not see Tony.

Jimbo

Today at 8:41 PM

dfergie said:
Tony was there at the end of the episode with Gibbs.

Tony was Not in this episode ... you may remember Gibbs walking into the office and those around Welcomed him home, Voices only.

If you also watch the Mothership, Tony has been in that one ...

dfergie

Today at 9:00 PM

Jimbo said:
Tony was Not in this episode ... you may remember Gibbs walking into the office and those around Welcomed him home, Voices only.

If you also watch the Mothership, Tony has been in that one ...

I must have seen that in previews
.

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osu1991

Pub Member / Supporter

Today at 8:54 PM · posted in TV Shows

Frisco King - Paramount Plus

View: https://youtu.be/RHYQYYm5jLM?is=cwxm9t1efsWNl6yy

December 18, 2026 Paramount plus

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Scott Greczkowski

Staff member HERE TO HELP YOU! Cutting Edge

Last reply Today at 8:45 PM · posted in The Chit Chat Club

Song Name Game Part 3!

Sometimes a thread gets so many posts in it that is can cause issues for the server so that why today we introduce The Song Name Game Part 3!

So let the game continue!

The last song was added by Bobby who posted...

One Meat Ball - Andrews Sisters

CONTINUE ON AND HAVE FUN! WELCOME HOME TO SATELLITEGUYS.US!

Here are the original rules for the game as posted by WebbyDude back in 2006. http://www.satelliteguys.us/threads/68645-Song-Name-Game

Just name a song title and the band who performed it. The next person does the same thing, but needs to list a song title or band name which includes a word from the previous entry. Pick songs from any genre.

Example:

Long Live Rock and Roll -- Rainbow

Rainbow in the Dark -- Dio

Another example:

Ride the Lightning -- Metallica

Lightning Strikes -- Ozzy Osbourne

Get it?

An additional note: we all know that song titles, sometimes, use profane words. Because this is a family friendly website it is advised that you clean up that title up a bit. This is accomplished by using something like sh!t instead of the real word. Thanks....

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Bobby

Today at 11:19 AM

Kiss - The Art Of Noise

long_time_Dish

Today at 4:45 PM

Beautiful Noise - Neil Diamond

sdfntx

Today at 5:39 PM

White Noise - Jessie Baylin

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dishstaller

Today at 6:13 PM

White Rabbit - Jefferson Airplane

long_time_Dish

Today at 8:45 PM

White Sun - The Doobie Brothers

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dishstaller

Pub Member / Supporter Lifetime Supporter

Last reply Today at 8:25 PM · posted in Internet Television (IPTV) Discussion Forum

Hughesnet cancelling email addresses

Wasn't exactly sure where to post this. Just had a customer come in inquiring about internet. He has HughesNet and had heard good things about mine. He asked if we provided email addresses and it kinda caught me off guard. I said he should be able to keep whatever email he had been using....my sister in law is still using a BellSouth email addy and they haven't been around here for many years. He said he had gotten a letter from HughesNet stating that they had until Nov 16th to save, move, forward, whatever, their Hughesnet emails because they would lose them after that date.

I have never heard of a company simply mass-deleting email accounts (the customer still has his HughesNet service). From what I understand, in the past, the company who was ditching their email service simply sold the customer base to a company like Google.

Anyone else getting this letter. He said he would show it to me tomorrow when I go out there and set up his internet.

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Foxbat

Today at 2:37 PM

Doing a Google of the HughesNet Email notice, it seems that HughesNet has been trying to eliminate hosting emails since 2019. And with HughesNet filing Chapter 11 back in August, it would be a smart move to switch to a more stable Email provider. Even AT&T farmed out their Email to Yahoo! years ago.

SpaceX's Starlink and the Cellular 5G Home Internet solutions have pretty much relegated HughesNet and its high latency, low bandwidth Internet service to History. If Earth had shorter days, maybe a Geostationary Internet Solution might have stood a fighting chance…

navychop

Today at 3:16 PM

Foxbat said:
If Earth had shorter days,

Wouldn't we then die of old age sooner?

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Foxbat

Today at 3:30 PM

navychop said:
Wouldn't we then die of old age sooner?

Still the same number of years, just more Sunsets…

klang

Today at 4:21 PM

Foxbat said:
Even AT&T farmed out their Email to Yahoo! years ago.

I still have one of those although I've been trying to wean myself off it.

JSheridan

Today at 4:51 PM

Among my many email accounts I still have a .netscape.net which AOL assimilated a while back.

Reactions: dishstaller and Foxbat

EarDemon

Today at 8:25 PM

Yep, I got the notification a few days ago. I'm not totally surprised.

Never used the address for anything, so no big loss to me.

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meStevo

Lifetime Supporter

Last reply Today at 8:24 PM · posted in TV Shows

The Diplomat (Netflix)

Starting a thread klang !

After an amazing first 2 seasons and an 8 episode 3rd season still coming this year, season 4 has now been greenlit.

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klang

Oct 16, 2025

Probably starting season 3 tonight.

meStevo

Oct 16, 2025

Finished it this evening. General impressions with no story spoilers, but will spoil it anyways as it just came out today.

Not quite as impactful of a finale as past seasons I thought, we'll see how far down the rabbit hole things go as the latest plot twists and turns unravel. Thought this season had a full episode or two too much rom-com style disagreements, but it was more or less paid off later. Ultimately didn't enjoy that being more of a throughline in the stories this season compared to what I remember of the priors.

My least favorite of the 3 seasons, but still very good. Really wonder how far they'll go with things, hard to see a nuclear attack or something ever actually happening. They just had a better story to tell and more meaningful beats in the prior season.

KAB

Oct 17, 2025

Not in a hurry to watch it this time.

klang

Oct 21, 2025

Finished season 3 last night. Still one of my favorite shows.

Anyone else wonder if there might be something else going on with Callum? Seems to me he has too much access to Russian intelligence.

meStevo

Today at 8:24 PM

One episode into season 4 that dropped today...

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Bobby

Supporting Founder Lifetime Supporter

Last reply Today at 8:01 PM · posted in DISH Network Support Forum

4K Events Discussion Thread

This thread is a place to discuss the 4K events that appear on channel 540. We are getting, at this point, one college football game a week. Let's hope there is more coming.

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jsmit86

Oct 7, 2026

Regarding the no sound bug when watching 4K HDR events or DVR recordings with Dolby set to ON:
I got rolled back to H708 last night after getting an email from the support team. It fixed the bug.

The email indicated that they believed they found the issue, and if the fix works, they would roll it out via an update in the coming weeks.

So... we should see that bug exterminated in the near future.

Reactions: mphca, long_time_Dish, Foxbat and 3 others

long_time_Dish

Saturday at 6:31 PM

148-04 says the NASCAR race on at noon on Sunday. Be interesting to see if it is.

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Bobby

Tuesday at 8:48 PM

MLB, Brewers at Dodgers, Thursday 10-15, 6PM PDT, Channel 148-02.

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Foxbat

Today at 6:24 PM

Bobby said:
MLB, Brewers at Dodgers, Thursday 10-15, 6PM PDT, Channel 148-02.

Bobby said:
CFB, Notre Dame at BYU, Saturday 10-27, 4:30PM PDT, Channel 148-03.

Bobby said:
CFB, Ohio State at Indiana, Saturday 10-17, 9AM PDT, Channel 148-01.
CFB, Arizona State at Texas Tech, Saturday 10-17, 12:30PM PDT, Channel 148-01.

Hmmm, I'm not seeing anything like those events in our Hopper 3 guide for tonight or Saturday.

I went into the Tools menu and requested a Guide Update. I'll try looking at it after the update completes.

edit — I now have the 148-01 4KFox events for Saturday, but not anything for 148-02 or 148-03 which don't even show as available channels. I do have 148-04 4KUSA.

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Bobby

Today at 7:31 PM

Foxbat said:
Hmmm, I'm not seeing anything like those events in our Hopper 3 guide for tonight or Saturday.

I went into the Tools menu and requested a Guide Update. I'll try looking at it after the update completes.

edit — I now have the 148-01 4KFox events for Saturday, but not anything for 148-02 or 148-03 which don't even show as available channels. I do have 148-04 4KUSA.

As I recall you have the Flex package. Do you sub to multisport? -02 is FS1 and -03 is ESPN. -01 is Fox so you would get that if you sub to locals.

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Bobby

Today at 8:01 PM

Bobby said:
As I recall you have the Flex package. Do you sub to multisport? -02 is FS1 and -03 is ESPN. -01 is Fox so you would get that if you sub to locals.

As an edit, you need to sub to the National Action Pack at $12 a month to receive those channels.

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