The laptop that Magic bought

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Card sale update

I sent out a big batch of The Dark cards to Card Kingdom Tuesday, which they promise to pay $1,500 for, assuming their graders agree that my near-mint cards are actually near-mint. They’ve already sent a confirmation email that the cards have arrived, so depending on their turnaround, I could find out as soon as Monday.

Inspired by this possibility, I dug out more of the stuff I’d been about to throw away, and was surprised to find good-sized stacks of Legends, Antiquities, and Arabian Nights. The estimated value is, um, impressive, with several cards over $250 and a few over $1,000.

Yesterday morning, I opened up a box full of miscellaneous Illuminati: New World Order cards and found a near-mint Unlimited Mox Ruby and Gauntlet of Might. Now I have to go through everything, even the Jyhad and Mythos boxes!

It may take a while to sell everything off, just because I don’t want to risk them all in one UPS shipment.

🎶 “Mammaries light the corner of my eye…” 🎶

Still watching Kicked Out Of The Hero’s Party So I’m Shacking Up With A Busty Blonde Princess, and in episode 2, Our Retired Hero Guide is reunited with The Tsun Who Loved Him, and pretty much the entire episode is flashbacks documenting her quick and extremely thorough transformation into Very-Very-Dere, accompanied by frequent mutual blushing. I’d say “get a room”, but she’s already taken care of that by bullying him into letting her move in.

Since the point of this show is the clumsy romance between these two, having the first two episodes be their introductions works. I don’t know if they’re going to try to cover all of the first four novels, but that would be the obvious stopping place, resolving the fate of the entire Hero Party while getting these two to finally boink.

Given the genre conventions, it’s important to note that Our Couple first met five years ago, and both were already adults. They’re probably both 25-30, although Rit’s Amazing Rack is no more than 18.

(this is the only recognizable image I’ve seen for this series on Pixiv so far, and the text at the bottom suggests it’s official art, not fan-made, although perhaps the NSFW images in the set are not canon…)

(update: no, the descriptions for the set say it’s definitely fan-art)

HP Aero 13.3 with Windows 11

So, what’s the out-of-box experience on a brand-new laptop that shipped with Windows 11?

Pros:

  • Minimal packaging. Slit seal, pull out laptop and power supply, break down box and toss into recycling bin. Thirty seconds, tops. There were three pieces of paper in the box: warranty, basic setup and trackpad gestures, and a “hey, Win11’s gonna auto-update during setup” card.

  • Nice-feeling matte plastic case, with just enough texture to be easily gripped, and little silicone strips to stabilize it on the table. (I went with the “Ceramic White” color, which is quite attractive, and includes a matching backlit keyboard)

  • Microsoft’s privacy options are clearly explained on setup, and easy to customize. Ditto for HP’s separate communications screen. They’re both opt-out, but it’s just a few seconds to read through them and turn that shit off.

  • The optional thoroughly-recycled laptop sleeve has a nice look and feel. Minimal bulk, nicely grippy, and I even like the color. It’s a very tight fit the first time, but loosens up a little once you’ve finished snickering at the obvious innuendo.

  • Terrific screen. Yes, I went with the “WQXGA” 2560x1600, and it’s worth it. The default UI/font scaling is set to 200%, giving you an effective 1280x800, but the full resolution is there for things like Photoshop, and all modern apps handle whatever you scale it to. (update: I’d forgotten how nice matte screens are; Apple went to full-time-shiny years ago, and switching back and forth between the two really highlights what a bad idea that was)

  • Excellent sound. Whether it was on the table or on my lap, movies and music videos sounded great through the speakers. I watched about 15 minutes of a BluRay rip of Deadpool 2 off of my NAS, and it was appropriately cinematic.

  • Cool and quiet. I haven’t done anything to really stress the system, but I’ve gotten the fans to spin up to full a few times, and they’re unobstrusive. The case has gotten at most mildly warm, nothing that would put tender parts at risk. Part of that is that the hinge is designed to lift up the body a little when open, improving both the keyboard angle and the ventilation.

  • WSL2 is trivial to install (wsl --install -d Ubuntu)… from a CMD window that’s been opened with administrator access. You can’t do that from Terminal, for some reason.

  • MS Terminal has improved significantly since I last really used it, with most options available from a proper UI, not just by editing the JSON config files (which you can, and should, still do for a few things).

Cons:

  • Compact USB3 ports; they just couldn’t fit them on the sides without using pop-outs.

  • The lower right corner of the trackpad is a right-click area; everywhere else is a left click. There is no visual indication of this or on-screen feedback, and I’m used to Mac-style two-finger right-click (which this also supports, according to the handy setup sheet), so at first I wondered if it just wasn’t responding to some of my clicks. This can be turned off once all the setup and updating is finished.

  • Decades of usability testing clearly shows that your most-used buttons should be in fixed positions on the screen, for rapid, accurate navigation of the interface. Having the Start button be at the left-most edge of a dynamically-sized centered strip of buttons is fucking stupid, but fortunately easy to change with the “Taskbar alignment” setting.

  • About a dozen crapwares/craplinks pre-installed. One of them, McAfee, gets your Microsoft account information during setup, and uses it to add you to their mailing list. plonk

  • I can’t figure out how to adjust the backlight timing for the keyboard. It comes on when you hit a key, then shuts off after a little while. Effectively, in a dark room you can only read the keys after you start typing. Also, on the “Ceramic White” model, the keys are white, and in a bright room, the backlighting actually reduces contrast. I basically need to turn it on and off with the action key as the light changes.

  • Speaking of action keys (volume, backlight, etc), their default behavior requires you to use the Fn key to turn them into function keys F1-F12. Reversing this (required for many games) requires changing a BIOS setting. Reboot and spam the Esc key until you get into the boot menus, then find the Action Keys option and disable it.

  • By default, the taskbar and window title bars are partially translucent and adjusted to match the current theme. This has always been a bad idea. Apple does it too, and I’m not actually sure who committed it first, but I’m sure the designer was 23 years old with perfect vision.

  • Related, the HPAudioSwitch tray icon is white with a transparent background, making it nearly invisible if your taskbar is a light color or the translucency is turned on.

  • I used Edge to install 1Password. Pretty sure the first link Bing offered me was malware. It sure as hell didn’t go to their site, but fortunately it was blocked by my Pi-hole.

  • I haven’t decided what my default browser should be. On the Mac, I do most things with Safari, and use a heavily-nailed-down Edge autolaunched in private mode for disposable stuff, mostly because the Cookie app does a good job of managing the few things I don’t want wiped every time I quit Safari.

  • AMD performance hit. Fixes promised by the end of next week. (Ryzen 7 5800U, by the way, and I haven’t tried anything yet that would reflect this slowdown)

  • The WSL2 Ubuntu install was locking up after closing the active Terminal window. Downloading the latest version of the AMD Radeon Software app and having it update all the firmware and drivers seems to have fixed that. Could have been caused by applying all of the available Ubuntu updates.

(Umi Miura (site NSFW! Javascript off!) throws away an Apple, which is definitely related)

TODO

  • font-management software; I’m going to try out FontBase.

  • backup software; Acronis is still highly recommended, but looking at the feature list, they’ve really crufted things up with clouds and blockchains and anti-ransomware and real-time scanning and website-blocking and antivirus and videoconferencing protection and more, to the point that TrueImage is now called (and I’m not making this up) Cyber Protect Home Office. And, yes, it’s a recurring subscription model, ranging from $50/year to $125/year per computer.

  • copy over my Rocky Linux 8.4 distro; not a big fan of Ubuntu, but I wanted something to try right away.

  • try out Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom. Installed, just not tested yet.

  • install some of my Steam games and see how they run; I don’t have a lot of recent high-end stuff, so most things should run at least tolerably well.

  • set up Docker, VMware, OpenSCAD, and Cura.

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