A timely delivery

[mtbc]

This morning, the movers came with the goods and effects that I had shipped from Eastern Tennessee so, as usual, the transatlantic shipment took a little over three months. At a glance, everything seems present and correct. It feels good to see my stuff once more, it comforts me to have it to hand, my possessions feel part of my desired identity. Perhaps hoarders have such feelings but rather more strongly than I, given that I now own far less than I once did.

Yesterday, my work laptop developed an issue that made pointing device input most troublesome. The trackpads, both built-in and external, became very insensitive, one to movements, the other to clicks. This coincided with a reboot, I wonder if some previous Linux update is the culprit. Anyhow, among my newly delivered stuff, I found keyboard and trackball that I much like, plugged them in, and became satisfactorily productive again. What a difference it makes to have one's interface to the computer become rather more ergonomically smooth.

Comments

[mtbc]

I'm glad you got that behind you, at least. (-: I hadn't realized that good video might make much difference, honestly my personal laptops tend to be at the low end there.

[thewayne]

Windows has so much graphics going on that by having a decent video card it takes away graphics processing from the CPU and frees up a lot of cycles.  Doesn't have to be a lot of money on the card, and good video cards have been hard to come by of late, but that should be changing with the crypto crash - hopefully people will stop making mining rigs and video card inventory will improve.  With just slogging out code in a text editor, you're normally not going to notice much.  And our IT girl just came by and upgraded my permissions!  I think I may be local admin now on my box!

[mtbc]

Very handy being a local admin. Last time I had to get that approved somewhere, I had to take a largely irrelevant course first.

Hadn't thought about how the crypto crash might affect GPU availability, good point.

[thewayne]

Yeah, the miners were snatching up cards and basically fully populating boxes with them to grind transaction chains.  The market is going to be flooded with them, but they're going to be questionable to use as video cards because they've been used so hard 24/7.  The video card makers have tried making their card BIOS resistant to the calculations used by miners, but the miners have some extremely good codes on their side who basically wrote patches to the BIOS to get around them or rewrote the BIOS entirely.