[Dave Rice]

It’s a shame they keep changing the socket and the fittings with it. AMD’s bundled coolers are much better but they’ve abandoned us 🙁

[Dave Rice]

“I was hoping someone knew of a silent (for sure) one.”

Anything by BeQuiet, they aren’t cheap (but not too expensive). For a low profile one you’ll need to check carefully on the clearance to things like ram.

I’ve also used many of the cheap and cheerful Arctic Alpine range and not found them noisy. The ARCTIC Alpine 12 is less than a tenner and not hard to find. It’s rated at 0.3 Sone which is 22db, that’s louder than leaves rustling but a lot quieter than a whisper. That would do me. It’s the same form factor as the Intel fan so it’s going to fit.

[Dave Rice]

Look for Be Quiet fans. They do low profile too.

[Dave Rice]

As Ed says, caution! You will be copying them to the server so can leave everything on the PC until you’re sure.

Backups: the easiest way is via an external USB drive, I use the Toshiba Canvios almost exclusively as I’ve found them to be very reliable in this role. Plug them in, go to External Devices and format it EXT4.

Open up Hyperbackup and click the + to create a new Data Backup task. Destination is Local & USB then in Backup Destination click the drop down and change it to usbshare1. Change the Directory name to something more meaningful if you want.

In Data Backup, tick the folders you wan to backup, then in Application Backup I’d select the lot (it backs up settings rather than the apps). In Backup Settings change the Task Name to something meaningful, keep Compression on and then choose your Schedule and Integrity check times.

In Rotation Settings you get to decide how long to keep your backups, I usually go for 31 days and From the Earliest Versions. Smart Recycle is only really useful if you do multiple backups a day, which I have done on certain folders when working on big quotes.

You can also do all of this to the Synology data centre in Frankfurt via the C2 service.  It costs €34.99 a year for 500GB or €99.99 for 2TB. I use it for important files, multimedia I backup to a USB drive.

[Dave Rice]

DSM will find duplicate files for you via a Storage Analyzer Report. You have to set these up but it’s all pretty obvious with sensible defaults. You can run them on demand, which is probably what you’ll want to do whilst you’re sorting things out, but they can also be run to a schedule and even emailed to you.

You can also find the largest files, most recently modified and least recently accessed. The reports are interactive when viewed on the Synology itself, and you can delete duplicates from the interface. So I would just dump it all on there and use the reports.

 

[Dave Rice]

It’s dead easy to fit the drives, but yeah, I let BB do it. It was more the software setup I was thinking of.

1. Take the default settings and offer of what software to install, even if you think you won’t use it.
2. For the moment leave it on DHCP and have the router reserve an address if you want.
3. Create a Synology Account, this is required for lots of useful features.
4. Enable QuickConnect and use quickconnect:to/myservername to access it. You’ll find you really don’t need a fixed IP.
5. Set up DDNS using Synology’s service, this will let you easily create a Lets Encrypt security certificate (but note this will only work on external access, i.e. from outside your LAN).
6. Run the Security Advisor and resolve any issues – it will tell you what you need to do.

Backups is a subject in itself for another day. Rather than map a drive I use Synology Drive for a Dropbox like experience, but again for another day.

Drop me an email if you need any help.

[Dave Rice]

That gives me a clue over how they are obtaining their keys as I’ve not had that happen to me. I suspect they are bought in batches, so if they underestimate demand before extending the current one or buying a new lot… They probably have several on the go. As I’ve mentioned before, MS licencing is a real convoluted beast with so many routes in, I probably only know a fraction of them.

I let my daughter have my R5 over the holidays, so it’s been the 6th Gen i5 laptop with 12GB ram and an SSD. Yeah, OK, #firstworldproblems but there is a lot of difference.

The Torpedo & Mortar mobos are very good. I’ve used a few this year. As for NVMe I let my daughter have the R5 with a spare SATA M2 and whilst it’s still very quick, you can tell – especially at boot up.

If you need help setting up the Synology just shout. I would accept the default apps even if you think that you won’t use them. They take up little space and are easily removed, plus I’ll bet after a while you will be interested in them.

[Dave Rice]

I have a 55″ Panasonic OLED which I believe is an LG panel, and that’s stunning for things like the Green Planet on iPlayer in 4K. Of course the highly optimised fully saturated demos in John Lewis are even more so.

But so much of what I watch is still in SD, so what is the point? Since lockdown I have been watching more “4K” (a movable feast it seems) thanks to Netflix etc. and a fantastic picture doesn’t save a crap production. I’ve not continued to watch something with a terrible plot and bad acting just because it was very pretty.

Conversely I’ve been thoroughly entertained by The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. Have I noticed they are 4K? Are they? I think they may be. Do I care? No. Just as I was quite happy with Star Wars on VHS.

It’s just to sell people new TVs by convincing them their old ones are crap, like PCs, phone and all iThings marketing. Fine if you like to spend your time watching the highly optimised fully saturated demos in John Lewis. I’d rather that money was spent in the talent behind the things we watch on them.

[Dave Rice]

As he’s a huge dick, he probably won’t notice.

[Dave Rice]

It’s hardly started, wait until the paperwork gets more and more onerous, especially when it comes to personal travel.

[Dave Rice]

The exFat default is 128kb, which is bad enough.

[Dave Rice]

That’s right. Virtualisation is great for creating / destroying test machines, much quicker than blowing gold builds onto physical boxes.

[Dave Rice]

What happens after Omega? Switch to Latin?

[Dave Rice]

Mythbusters did this a while ago now with a “secure” door lock. Biometrics were not trusted in the parts of the Defence industry I worked in. In fact I can’t think of Corporate I’ve worked in where they were.

The most effective place I’ve seen them used was a Youth Housing trust where the “guests” had a habit of losing expensive metal keys. Even cheap door fobs are a a pain when you’re continually issuing replacements and they couldn’t remember pin numbers for toffee. One thing they couldn’t lose or forget was their finger, they also couldn’t lend it to a mate.

[Dave Rice]

I used Aclab myself again the other day, always reliable.

[Dave Rice]

Out of interest I’ve been running a stress test all day on the Ryzen 3 PN50, maxing out the CPU, GPU and constantly writing to the drive.

The max temp of 91 was reached with 2 minutes but it then quickly dropped back to 77 where it stayed (105 is the operational limit). This was run remotely and I couldn’t find any software that could read the fan speeds, so it’s supposition but seems obvious the BIOS stepped in and upped the fans. I am guessing it maxed out, but whatever happened it did the job.

Syspectr kept an eye on the SSD temp and this didn’t move from 43 in the first hour, after which I stopped looking at any stats. After 9 hours I got an email warning that the SSD had hit 70, which is the top end of it’s operational limit. An hour later it was still at 70.

After turning off the stress tests things were back to the low 40’s in two or three minutes but the HDD is staying stubbornly at 70. Syspectr has raised another alert so it’s being monitored.

So it seems on this model at least, Asus has done it’s homework and even if you thrash it the CPU isn’t going to over heat. The constant writing to the HDD is very artificial, but a cheap heat sink would keep things under 70.

In the real world, for an general purpose machine you’re not going to have any issues and it can even handle being maxed out for long periods. What would cause that I can’t guess as if you had such a regular heavy workload you’d be looking at R5 or R7.

[Dave Rice]

Just looked at the HDD temperatures, they all have the same Kingston A2000 drives and the same 8GB SODIMM. All are on 24 / 7 and all are currently idling. All are mounted in the same way.

The Asus are all at 42 / 43, the i3’s are at 26 – 32. That’s quite a difference.

[Dave Rice]

I’ve not noticed any over heating and I install Syspectr on all my systems. However decoding can be hard on CPUs / GPUs.

[Dave Rice]

That’s very much the case at the moment. AMD’s are silly prices and hard to get hold of, the Ryzen 5 5600G is a very good chip but at £260?

I’m using the Asus PN50 mini PC more and more, at £315 it’s a bargain in the current light https://amz.run/52K2 16GB DDR4 3200 £64 https://amz.run/52K4 Western Digital 500GB WD Blue SN550 NVMe £44

So for the total £425 you also get Wi-Fi 6, BT4, microphone, IR receiver, 4 display support and room for an additional 2.5″ drive. The R5 4200U is 6 core and of course decent graphics. With a spare SODIMM slot and that 2.5″ drive bay, you have expansion potential too. There is a Ryzen 7 4700u 8C for £395 still available at Scan  https://bityl.co/9TNu which is probably the one I’d go for, purely down to the CCTV CAD app I use.

If I didn’t need a PC I can add bits to (for testing) I would have one myself. Some of my customers have them on the desk between the monitors, one has them on a gas arm with the help of a £10 bracket https://amz.run/52K5 which is what I would do. They have small desks so it saves loads of space, plus they may want to show patients x-rays or scans (it’s a physio clinic) and the gas arm makes a huge difference.

The clinic has 10th Gen i3 NUCs as well which are 2C / 4T plus the same bells & whistles, and a little bit cheaper. In general use they are very similar but Intel make a dogs dinner of the driver installation, you’ll find yourself doing a lot manually. For an office scenario it’s a coin toss, but they aren’t available.

 

[Dave Rice]

Jeff Bezos remaking Flash Gordon

[Author]

Posts