My Synology DiskStation DS212j has gotten slower over the years ever since I bought in 2012. DSM operating system security and software upgrades introduced feature bloat that required more memory and caused memory to page to disk. Wikipedia gives an amazing overview of why paging is bad and why zRAM...
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Nils in Whistler
Some small jumps and blooper highlights at Whistler last weekend!
Crazy Pow at Mt Bachelor in Oregon
We decided to hit up Oregon and were lucky enough have it dump. Amazing times!
Gaming with XDMA CrossFire Passthrough on Ubuntu 17.04
I have used Windows as my primary OS ever since I was a teenager because I am a gamer. Ironically, my gaming hobby also introduced me to my programming/Linux hobby (and now career) which are always at odds with one another. I can either game, which has an unfortunate requirement...
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Intel Smart Response Technology vs Windows 10 Tiered Storage Spaces
I have used Intel’s SRT (Smart Response Technology) as a way to boost the performance of my slow spinner hard drives ever since they introduced the SSD caching technology alongside the Z68 chipset for Sandybridge in 2011. SRT works by caching heavily used data onto the speedy SSD with a...
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LEDE and Debian on the NETGEAR Centria N900
I authored a post on liberating a WNDR4700 router more than two years ago which garnered some interest in the community on developing a proper OpenWRT image. I’m happy to report that it finally happened! The LEDE (Linux Embedded Development Environment) team is fully supporting the apm821xx system-on-chip and are...
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Modded R9 390X BIOS for the PowerColor PCS+ R9 290/290X
IntroductionI am a PC enthusiast and enjoy putting together computers, modding them, and subsequently writing about it. I am also the tinkering owner of two PowerColor PCS+ R9 290 video cards that I have used now for over a year. This is the story of how I worked to break...
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Yvonne in Lake Luise
The drop in oil prices lead to a cheap Canadian dollar which in turn led to a an amazingly frugal Canadian vacation! We enjoyed our trip and would highly recommend our fellow skiers and snowboarders to check out the Big 3 in Banff.Click to view the above video in glorious...
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mojave national preserve and capitol reef national
Migrating from QGLWidget to QOpenGLWidget
A year ago I migrated an old Qt4 project to Qt5. The migration was relatively painless and a huge success with the exception of the QGLWidget powered OpenGL canvas. In Qt5, this widget has been deprecated and currently mangles text rendering on Mac OS X retina displays as shown below:The...
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