fashoom

Without going into too much detail, I find myself CTO at a small company that just isn't able to get real traction--the software is very solid, but the market for what we're trying to do turns out to be pretty rotten. My work's taken things from pre-revenue through Series A but things are just beyond stagnant now. I've got a small team and still do a ton of hands-on development, mostly Scala/Java/Kotlin, containers, Postgres, Redis, AWS, etc., have done heavy work in the Windows Server/C# world too. Personal prior background in app security/authn/authz, and I always dig challenges in messaging, multithreading/multiproc, etc. I might be a little bit of a workaholic.

So that said, wanting

So, I've got a MBPr that served well and unremarkably for years, until about one year ago, when it very randomly began blacking out the screen and going unresponsive, and sometimes also raising the fan speed to max while getting nice 'n toasty. Also, sometimes the fans and heat will max out during sleep. In both cases it takes a 3- or 6-second pressing of the power key to restart or power down. On restart, MacOS may notice it had an abnormal shutdown and asks about reopening apps--but just as often, it doesn't acknowledge that anything went wrong.

This happens unpredictably... it could be five minutes or five days between incidents. Running memory-intensive programs like an IDE seems to

So, I told my AC Pro access point to update from "BZ.v3.7.21" (as per the shell prompt) to BZ.qca956x.v3.7.49.6201.170315.1111.bin as downloaded from ubnt onto the device with wget. About one hour ago. The blue/white upgrade pattern is still flashing. Is this thing likely ever to return to service on its own? I'll give it a while longer, but this length of time maybe does not bode well.

I'm thinking of going with an S4 (my second Audi after a long interval--I had a new B5 1.8T back in the day) and rather like the S-Tronic transmission, despite being a manual snob most of the time. I don't think another 30 horsepower is really critical for a car like this and have not much interest in a torque converter automatic. So, what say you, get a late B8 S4 or... maybe an S3? Or could the updated looks and interior of the B9 somehow make up for the slushbox?

Considering a current-gen base STI as a practical, go-anywhere, snow-capable, haul-some-stuff second car... its garage-mate would be a flat-six turbo thing not suitable for carrying much or parking in questionable circumstances. Am I crazy? Will the noise and ride bum me out too bad on the occasional 300 mile road trip?

FWIW the alternative I'm considering is a Wrangler... I test-drove a manual Rubicon and was a little bit nauseated by the terrible gearbox and wandering road feel, but maybe it would be fun enough with an automatic and more streetable rubber.

So I've got this LaserJet 4P, one of the early 600dpi home laser printers, been in the family since, ohhh, 1993 or so. Mechanically it still works well, but the printed pages are covered in dark smears. I've run through a few test pages and given the toner a shake to no avail.

Is it maybe time to replace the fuser? Anything else to consider? I print only very rarely, so any new cheap laser printer would probably suffice, but it'd be a shame to throw this old battle axe on the scrap heap at this point.

Well, it looks like my Surface Pro 2 is effectively a brick now, as all it can do is show the UEFI secure boot menu (or, if booting from USB restore media, it can tell me that the system disk "can't be found" for reset with new partitions, or is "locked" otherwise). My impression is that this is a result of a post-Windows 10 Windows Update to the firmware, but of course it's tough to know for sure... could be a defective, and totally unserviceable, SSD.

I've exhausted my options with Surface Support. The verdict from my local Microsoft Store is "that sucks, we could give you a replacement device for $400... yeah, we know you don't want that." Much sad, very low hours on the SP2 too.

Is

So, I played through FO3 and the DLC quite a few times and enjoyed it a great deal, and after having my Xbox eat the save game on NV a while ago, just started on FO:NV on the PC a week ago...

I'm at level 12, 100 on guns, reasonably high on sneak, energy, and speech, playing mostly a sneak+crit style, and it feels like my character kinda sucks. I can either massacre fiends or get raped by deathclaws with not a lot in the middle. Mostly using Ratslayer or a regular unmodded Sniper Rifle... not nearly enough caps for AMR, Sleepytyme, or anything like that.

Is this just how FO:NV goes for a while? Should I have better gear at this point, or try using different tactics for a bit?