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The Umbrella Academy is comedy-drama (or maybe drama-comedy) about a group of young adults who are each imbued with a different power. As teenagers they were a famous crime fighting force. But something went wrong; the team broke up. There mentor, and his motive for bringing them together, is somewhat mysterious.

We enjoy watching it because it often doesn’t follow the usual TV show tropes (well, some of them). We see each character developed along the way, with an impending crisis looming in the near future. This, of course, is the usual plot device to build tension. A lot of what happens is funny, some of which may well be described as dark comedy.

It’s entertaining, diverting fare and worth a look. Check out Season 1and see if interests you.

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OscarCP

Thanks, guys. I was afraid your answers would be the ones you provided. I resigned myself a while back to viewing and bulk deleting the Junk mailbox two or three times a day. And, I just hate giving up my oldtime email address.

Main reason for posting the issue is that I was helping a friend who receives tons of junk mail each day at their iCloud.com address. In that case the junk mail is mostly unwanted daily newsletters and updates from legitimate sites which my somewhat naïve friend allowed to “update you with the latest etc., etc.”

iCloud email has a simple click-on-this-arrow-here to send an email to the Junk folder and all future emails from that source automatically go to Junk. Advantage: no need to return to all those websites and unsubscribe. Some newesletters have an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page. My experience over many years is that such an option works about two-thirds of the time. So, we just went down the Inbox list for one day’s worth and, voila!, most of the unwanted stuff is gone never to return.

Of course, that doesn’t prevent my friend from letting it happen at other websites, haha.

again, thanks for your replies. Cheers!

Then they will need an extra gadget such as Yubikey which they may have difficulty using, who knows? We can keep raising possible obstacles to participation, and there will always be some cases we just can’t fix.

A blind person goes to a restaurant. The menu isn’t printed in Braille, but the customer can ask the waiter to read him the menu. What if he’s deaf, too? Then he’d better have someone to assist him. This is a far-fetched circumstance, of course, and I don’t want to debate it’s particulars or its merits. The point is that you can’t make all technology convenient for all users, but said users might find a way to adapt to the situation if they truly desire to use the technology.

Personally, I’m still trying to adapt my skill to get past Level 3 on Far Cry, lol.

In that case the simplest way is probably to place your cellphone on the desk or table where your laptop or computer keyboard is. If you can get into the habit of doing this it will definitely make the annoying authentication thing a bit less annoying! No extra gadgets required, just place the phone near your keyboard. Sometimes when I’m writing an email I stop and think – hey, it would be easier just to call the other person since my phone is right here!

And, regarding those small, hard to see words on your cellphone screen I’m happy to let you know that all these phones have a setting where you can enlarge the text to make it bigger and easier to read all the time. That same setting also lets you make the text bold if desired.  Please ask a friend, or customer service, or the store where you bought the phone and they will show you how to do that. In fact, if you can tell us the exact brand and model of your cellphone we can probably find step-by-step instructions for adjusting the text size and post it here for you. Cheers!

Most people use INTERNET based email? Yes, and we love it. Been using Microsoft’s internet email since 1999. Never once had to troubleshoot a problem. Even after cleaning out old emails that are no longer relevant  I still have many, many messages going back over the years to autumn ’99. They never lost a single message. Can have as many folders as desired. Can limit Inbox to only people/entities on my contact list; all else goes automatically to Junk folder which I briefly scan in case a new, wanted communication source makes contact. Even though Microsoft has changed the name of their internet-based email several times my original email address remains the same; continuity is a good thing. I can have messages forwarded automatically from other email accounts such as Gmail, etc. very conveniently. Regarding privacy in general, once anything has been uploaded to a server or website there is no privacy. For truly sensitive messages or data it is, of course, sensible to use encryption, yet most of us never have the need for that. Other web-based email accounts which i may use for registering at various forums or online shopping, etc. have also proven totally reliable over at least 10 or 12 years of use. The only times I had to manually move any messages were when leaving Netscape (remember them?) and Excite. In both cases I simply did “Select All” and forwarded the whole lot to my (now) Outlook.live account. I should point out that this is all personal stuff, not sensitive business accounts. BUT, from the convenience and reliability standpoint it’s what many millions of us experience all the time.

Just out of interest what sort of email problems have you needed to troubleshoot?

Regarding the Nvidia 1050Ti (or Geforce GTX-1050Ti as they are wont to call it), we have the benefit of their designed power limit of 75 watts. Supposedly, this comes from the fact that in a PC you plug your 1050Ti into a PCIe X16 slot on the motherboard. By design, no additional cable from the power supply is necessary (and there’s no socket on the card for an extra cable); thus, the power limit is the maximum wattage that the PCIe socket can deliver on its own which is 75 watts. Various tech site reviews have confirmed this, and the 1050Ti remains an outstandingly capable non-power-hungry choice even now. One can only surmise that a 1050Ti in a laptop would have the same maximum designed power, or possibly a little less since mobile graphics often run at lower power than their PC counterpart.

cyberSAR wrote:

I’ve got an older ASUS laptop in here that draws more amperage than my refrigerator!

Ah, yes, but can your laptop make ice cubes or keep the beer cold?

For those who are unable to obtain a readout of maximum power draw (usually in Watts) there’s a simple way to get a close approximation. Look at the printing on the laptop’s charger/power brick.

Failing that, check the maker’s website accessory store or Amazon.com.

One of our laptops is an ACER E5-575G. (It comes with Intel HD Graphics 520, and Nvidia Geforce 950M. It auto-switches between the two.) HWInfo doesn’t show any maximum power rating or spec for either graphics chip. The power brick only shows volts & amps – not watts!

The ACER store and Amazon both offer a 65-watt suitable for our model.

We also have a Lenovo gaming laptop which has a massive 180-watt power brick, presumably to support its dual Nvidia G-chips!

Let’s not forget Quick Assist, the easy remote desktop included with Windows 10.

Click on Start and type:  quick assist

At the top of the search results click on: Quick Assist

Choose either Get Assistance or Give Assistence (click on : Assist Another Person)

Follow the directions to obtain a number code to type in and begin the session.

The person giving assistance must sign in to a Microsoft account (usually your Outlook.com/Windows Mail/Hotmail account).

There are a couple of other options as you go along such View Screen or (more likely) Take Control. (The person you’re helping can see what you’re doing and they also have control).

As i recall, the person you’re helping doesn’t need to sign in to a Microsoft account in order for you to connect and help them.

I don’t have Windows 11 so don’t know if it includes the Quick Assist app. Pretty sure Windows 8.1 does not include it.

 

Feel free to arrange these in order according to taste:

Fringe

The Expanse

Star Trek – The Next Generation

Dark Matter

Star Trek – Deep Space Nine

12 Monkeys

Babylon 5

Doctor Who

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OscarCP

Unfortunately, WD has been in trouble for downgrading their SN550 SSD and their RED HDDs.

The SN550 originally had a respectable 800+ MB/s sequential Write speed after the SLC cache was exhausted. The newer version is still called SN550, but with different NAND and controller its post-SLC cache Write speed is now less than 400MB/s.

The WD Red series originally used CMR (conventional magnetic recording). The newer version substituted SMR (shingle magnetic recording). Although SMR might be OK in a simple NAS home server for data, using it in a RAID setup is a bad idea. WD was exposed for this. Eventually, they changed so that WD Red is SMR only, and they released the Red Plus which is CMR.

It’s the deception that makes one no longer trust a maker who does that. Also guilty of similar deception is Crucial (their P2 SSD), ADATA (their SX8200 Pro), and Kingston (I forget the model number bit it was several years ago). At home, we have two WD SSDs which work ok, but I probably won’t buy any more ….

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SupremeLaW

You mentioned: ” It would help a LOT if Microsoft would make it easier to map logical drive letters to physical drives, perhaps by adding a “description” column to a spreadsheet that is easily maintained by system administrators. ”

Great idea! However, the best I’ve come up with at home is when offered to name the New Volume (usually after initializing the drive) I’ll name it SeagateDATA3TB, or WDBackups4TB, or TVRecordings3TB, etc.

Our main PC is a HTPC/Gaming/Home server rig with a 960GB SSD boot drive, 3 x HDDs, and an 8TB external HDD that causes the PC to take an extra 15 – 20 seconds to post before booting into Windows (annoying).

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SupremeLaW

Looks like a good method. Two things:

1. Print a list of the drives, Boot Drive priority, restore queue, etc. for all involved persons involved so nobody has an excuse to screw it up.

2. On the end of each drive that is exposed/visible when the PC side panel is removed place a label designating which partitions are on that drive; again, so nobody involved can screw it up. Peel & stick label with Scotch tape over it might stay stuck on for a few years, LOL.

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SupremeLaW

You mentioned: “1,212 MB/second is slightly more than DOUBLE the SATA-III ceiling of 600 MB/second (6G / 10).”

Yes, and that bandwidth allows for simultaneous Read/Write speeds of 500MB/s or more; not that I expect any SATA SSD to achieve mixed R/W performance that high, but it’s nice to see there’s enough headroom for it.

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SupremeLaW

It’s worth noting that USB 3.0 maximum theoretical bandwidth is 5Gbps, whereas the newer USB 3.2 standard has max. 10Gbps bandwidth. This permits a SATA III (6GB/s) SSD to achieve full performance compared to the limitations shown in the video you referenced.

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SupremeLaW