Another monoprice monitor, even if it isn't the best $160 is a great price.

THG review:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/monoprice-dark-matter-27-inch-monitor-review

No backorders or preorders, 4200 in stock as of this post. Note that no heatsink comes with this CPU.

I'm not ready to upgrade yet but I'm just wondering how bad the 3090 memory issues are, and what can reasonably be done about it. I asked once before and the response was basically "there aren't really any good options to deal with it", but I have a hard time believing that some heatsinks wouldn't take care of the issue. So I guess, what are my options? Is the 3090 so bad that I should just avoid it?

Pretty awesome deal, see these go for more than that used and the hardwareswap discord folks usually ask 120-130 obo. Please be aware that no heatsink or retail box is included.

I deliberately warm up my soda if it is cold.

Seems like a good price for mITX case. MIR sucks but eh...

So I am working on upgrading my pc and looking at power supplies. I see that some of them support PCIE 5 power and some do not. So my question is, if I get a PSU that is on the old standard and I later buy a GPU that only has PCIE 5 power, is using an adapter to fit the old power supply to the new GPU a bad idea? Or is this generally something that would be OK assuming quality components?

I'm in US-GA and I cannot find denatured alcohol locally. WTF happened? I need something 100% alcohol for cleaning electronics.

Sooo... I'm wanting to give vrchat a shot, but I haven't upgraded my PC in a long time since I haven't needed to. And I mean, I guess if it can't be done then it can't be done.

So here's what I have now: ryzen 1700x w/16gb of ram and a b450 mb. I can go to 32gb if needed, it has 4 ram slots. The GPU is a rx 570 4gb. PSU: uh... I'll have to look. it was ok at the time, it's like a 550w psu.

So clearly that isn't going to give a very good PC VR experience. I mean I'm sure it would run vrchat on desktop just fine but that isn't what I want.

So here's what I WAS thinking:

``` 5700/xt - $150 ish used - unfortunately the power consumption on this is kinda high and makes me think a new psu would be in order. but throwing it out there anyway. 5600/x - 130 ish used extra 16gb of ram if I need it - $30-40 Oculus quest 2 - preowned(I'm fine with preowned for everything). $150-$200 AX router or usb adapter in ad-hoc dedicated to airlink - $30-60(adapter -> basic router)

```

So that comes out to be about $550 ish usd. Really, not terrible.

But after more research I can already see some issues with this. For one, I've heard about lots of issues with pc VR and amd cards. 1. HEVC encoding performance. 2. driver issues. Secondly, just simply issues with VR chat and amd cards. 3. vram issues. I've been reading that 12gb is the bare bare minimum for an ok-ish vrchat experience. And I guess it isn't such a big deal but it seems like the ordering for performance and CPUs goes - 1. AMD x3d cpu 2. intel 12th gen or better 3. AMD non-x3d cpus well behind

So... making adjustments for all that.

``` the lowest cost alternatives 12gb GTX 2060 - $160-200 or 12gb 3060 - $280 Titan X pascal 12gb - $170-200 The soon to come 5600 x3d - $230

``` So the main issue with the titan x pascal is that it uses 250w+ and will likely require a better psu. Also, it is very old at this point and But to be fair so would the 5700, although I could go with a vanilla 5700 instead of the xt.

I guess what is disappointing in all of this is that for about $250 used I could get a 6700xt 12gb and that would blow all of that stuff out of the water in most games. Yeah, I would need a better psu but at least I'd be getting something out of it.

so what is the budget? I mean, the truth is I could technically afford to spend up to$1000 upgrading my pc, but personally I don't think that is worth it just for vrchat. So I'm trying to walk this tightrope of get stuff as cheaply as I can without being too cheap.

And here's the thing. Let's say I get the 3060, the 5600 x3d and 16gb of ram. Now we're looking at nearly $800 and the resulting pc upgrade is rather paltry. Like, a 12gb 3060 is just a terrible value. But hey, I can be reasonably assured that it will work.

If I managed to find a good deal on a 2060 12gb - and just went with the 5600 then not much changes for the price, I just lose a bit of the performance, but I'm not sure the 2060 12gb is going to cut the mustard either? Also, if things have changed and an amd card will work well then I might as well do that.

Anyway this has gotten rather long winded, not to mention I might also want to spend a bit on a better harness, some facepads, etc things like that which I haven't even gotten into. and virtual desktop is $20, not sure how needed that is anymore.

title says it.

So I guess this is half frugal and half just wanting a guilty pleasure with as little effort as possible, but I used to eat some box noodles that I had to cut out because the price went way up on them. It's so ridiculous, used to be like $2 a box before the pandemic, now it is hard to find for less than $5. Anyway the product is taste of thai peanut noodles. I can link to it if needed. But here's why I liked it.

1. I'm on a limited diet, so no wheat, dairy, and a few other minorish things due to food allergies. This eliminates most box noodles and a lot of good options for portable meal things.

2. good # of calories. 600ish calories in a box. Not too much sodium, less than most box noodles. Not that I need to watch sodium but ya know. The amount most things like canned food and instant noodles have is just downright suffocating.

3. tasty and filling. What can I say? it's peanut noodles, way better than most box noodles. imo anyway.

4. very portable. I just need water and a microwave and I'm good to go. Presto! I have a cheap meal I can take with me when I'm on a small trip. Also no need to keep it cold or in the freezer.

So what I want is to basically mimic this in a "build it yourself" sort of way. I mean it doesn't have to be exact, and really I'm also open to other suggestions. And yeah I know I could just cook it on the stove but that is not so easy to just take with me.

Before folks suggest sandwiches: Yeah, but I don't regularly buy GF bread because it is pricey. So that means I have to specifically go out and buy a loaf just to prepare to take a meal somewhere. Then I have to eat the rest later or it will go bad. Whereas the box noodles... I can buy a dozen of them and they can sit in the cupboard all year long.

So, somehow I got lost in the internet woods and came across birdsiteLIVE - which is basically a bot that makes twitter accounts viewable on the fediverse with activitypub(it's one way unfortunately, so twitter accounts won't see any replies or anything like that).

So I did some digging to give it a try, and after some time I arrived at the conclusion that mastodon.social, the instance I have an account on and the largest instance, doesn't seem to have any active or useful birdsitelive servers federated. But this is based on searching for mirrored twitter accounts - I haven't yet figured out how to see which servers mastodon.social has federated. So if someone could point me in the right way there that would be helpful.

I know there was the big API price hike(just like reddit) in february and maybe that killed off many of the birdsitelive instances. But it seems like some are also still running? It looks like the official beta instance is dead https://mastodon.social/@BirdsiteLIVE@fosstodon.org/109299139482179395

The last release on github was on march 16th.

I guess... what's the deal? how are the servers that are running, running despite the API switch? I guess I do not want to suggest birdsitelive to people unless there's some expectation it can keep working in reasonable capacity I suppose. It seems like a highly useful tool.

I've noticed while using lemmy that stuff will just "pop up" so to speak. Is this because of some kind of automatic refreshing or something? Anyway, I know copying reddit shouldn't be the goal but tbh having stuff constantly pop up is kind of annoying. I noticed this also with the federated feed on mastodon, it is impossible to read because there's a constant stream of new stuff getting added.

Just letting y'all know cause I know some would prefer it.