I love the Dark Rock Pro. Used it in two builds so far, and it’s amazingly quiet. I opted not to go with the NVidia 50x0 series because I expect demand to be outrageous and prices to be high by then because of tariffs. At least I can get my hands on a 4080 Super these days. I literally just upgraded my parts list to include the X870 for exactly the reasons you stated. I’m thinking of going with the 7800X3D to save some money now, and maybe upgrade to the 9000X3D in a couple years if I ever notice performance issues. I primarily use it for gaming, and word on the street is that the 9000 series just doesn’t add enough to gaming performance.

I’m not going to re-use the Define R4 case. I would probably get something like the Torrent (not the compact). My plan is to build the new box from the ground up and repurpose the current machine into a hand-me-down for the family.

You probably only need the iPad. The iPad is great for giving you access to most stuff until you get home and can do the more serious work. If you absolutely must do your work away from home, get the Macbook Pro, because iPads are great, but as you mentioned, they don’t have a desktop OS, and that’s a limiting factor.

clamxav

ClamAV has a maximum size for files that it will scan, which I believe is 20MB. I can’t tell if clamxav has the same size limit baked in, but it might! So it may not be the best solution if you have large files in your system.

Fantastic!

Denise Crosby has great talent as a villain. Just look at how she jumped off the screen as Sela. After seeing where the writers went with Ro Laren, I feel confident that Yar would have filled that role. She would have been a friendly foil, either as a member of the Maquis to set up Deep Space Nine, or as an onboard intelligence officer like Malcolm Reed in Enterprise.

In the early seasons — while Roddenberry’s edict that the crew not have conflict was in effect — I think she would have befriended Data and Geordi, and would have been in many scenes with them.

Here’s a tip for people who do own the Apple Vision Pro: although the Vision Pro doesn’t support side-by-side video playback out of the box yet, you can use this Archive app to view it. The app has a video player included that will handle various modes of stereoscopic file playback. I haven’t tried it yet, but this is a welcome workaround.

However there is already at least one third party app that plays SBS video just fine.

Which app?

You can also convert SBS video to MV-HEVC, which is arguably a better 3D format, and use the built-in player.

I investigated this and couldn’t find a tool to do this. Which tools have you seen that do this?

Readers will be available for $99

Has anyone here used a different VR headeset who also needs reading glasses? I use readers (I had laser eye surgery, which made me need reading glasses much earlier than usual). I tried the Meta Quest 3 over the holidays and was surprised to discover that I didn’t need reading glasses to see things “up close.”

Don’t forget spatial video. A minute of spatial video is approximately 130MB. 256 GB is going to fill up fast.

Using the search bar in iPad OS to solve equations does not require access to the internet.

If you have a keyboard, press command-space. You can then enter an equation that you want to solve in the search bar. If the syntax is correct, it will give you the solution. Try this equation as an example:

(2+pi)/(3^3)

It will display this result: 0.1904293575

If you press enter and you do have internet access, then it will send the equation to Safari and execute a search in your default search engine. I’m not sure why it odes that; that doesn’t seem too useful.

Some other operations you can do in the search bar:

sqrt(n), cos(n), sin(n), tan(n), log(n), ln(n), etc.

Some other functions that I’ve used in Excel also work in the search bar, such as min(12,2)

My guess is that it supports many or all of the functions that are supported in Numbers.

With this, you should be able to quickly solve just about anything you would type into a calculator app.

I’ve used this button before. I swear it does something slightly different than saying “details” did. Like it doesn’t preserve North-up map orientation or something. Without having the old voice command, I can’t check to verify. Thank you for taking the time to highlight the button, though!

What bothers me is that Apple doesn’t document its features very completely. Here’s an example:

In CarPlay, I do a lot of navigating using Apple Maps. I discovered years ago that I could say “Details” to Siri to get the map to zoom in to allow me to see upcoming turns. I could say “overview” to get it to zoom out to show me the whole trip on the map. Very useful! I had to discover this feature by accident, though. As far as I know, there’s no button in the interface to do this, and there certainly isn’t a list of commands that Siri users can use, CarPlay or otherwise.

Even more infuriating is that this feature was removed about six months ago. Does it exist under some other spoken command? Who knows? Apple doesn’t document anything!

The same thing happened to me. I spent years changing the setting to traditional scrolling. Then, one day, my brain just flipped, and now I make registry edits to Windows to enable natural scrolling there, too. I suddenly can’t live without it.

How advanced of a calculator do you need? You can do a lot with the search bar.

Is this a PC port of the 1971 Star Trek game?

I give them three months before the new society collapses due to arguments over age of consent.

Don’t forget Marina Sirtis and Denise Crosby in XCom 2! It was quite the TNG reunion.

It’s scaring me how similar your situation is to mine! I also just finished scanning in a bunch of photos that my grandmother took. I chose to host the photos in the Photos app, and considered for a long time whether I would let that sync up to iCloud. Sure, the photos would exist on Apple’s cloud. But if I die, they can only be accessed from my Apple devices. If someone can’t get into them for any reason, they’re as good as gone, because Apple – as good a company as it is when it comes to customer service – can’t be counted on to let anyone else into my account to retrieve data.

So I stored them in Photos, and will store copies of them on my NAS, in hopes that having them in multiple locations will increase the chances that someone else can access them. Same thing goes with my data – I ignore iCloud, but I store that data on my Macbook Pro, inside of its periodic backup, on my NAS, on the backup of the NAS, and potentially in the future, on a thumb drive. More locations means more chances of being able to get at the files in the event of a catastrophe.

It probably was. The activity sharing part of the Fitness app sometimes won’t work if some users have a different version of iOS than you do. It will now warn you about this when sharing your data for the first time.