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***UPDATED – Windows 10 April Update Benchmark

Samsung NVMe Driver v3.0
“This driver supports Samsung NVMe SSD 970 PRO, 970 EVO, 960 PRO, 960 EVO and 950 PRO.”
Download | Alternative download at MajorGeeks

O&O Shutup10
Version 1.6.1396 – released May 2, 2018
-Adapted for the Windows 10 Spring Creators Update 1804 (Build 17134)
-Fixed issue with finding High Contrast mode on user-defined schemes
-User interface adapted
-Bug Fixes: Various small bug fixes
-Available in English, German, French, Italian and Russian
Download

Win10 April Update Freezing Chrome
Source: Neowin. It happened to me too.

Tuesday Random Stuff…

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Win10 Benchmark Continued
I’m no nearer figuring out why my benchmark scores are lower. I thought maybe my NVMe SSD had an even bigger performance hit but my AS SSD Benchmark and CrystalDiskMark scores are similar to the results I had before.

Features removed or planned for replacement starting with Windows 10, version 1803
Thanks JO!

7-Zip 18.05
Download | Release Announcment

Linux Releases
Kali Linux 2018.2
“This Kali release is the first to include the Linux 4.15 kernel, which includes the x86 and x64 fixes for the much-hyped Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. It also includes much better support for AMD GPUs”
Download | Release Announcment
Fedora 28
“For the first time, we’re making it easy for users to enable certain third-party software sources, including proprietary Nvidia drivers.”
Has kernel 4.16.
Download | Release Announcement
Meanwhile at openSUSE…
At the end of May they will release openSUSE Leap 15 which follows version 42.3. Yes you read that right. Oh, and it will use kernel 4.12 that was released last July.

Monday Random Stuff…

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AMD Radeon Adrenalin Edition 18.4.1 Optional Drivers
“Initial support for Windows®10 April 2018 Update” plus a few bugfixes.
Download | Release Notes

Firefox 59.0.3
“Fix for compatibility with Windows 10 April 2018 update”
Download | Release Notes
Related: How to Stop Mozilla From Sticking Ads in Your Firefox Browser

Off Topic
Stuff I bookmarked today:

Google boss warns over evil ‘sci-fi style’ robots that could ‘manipulate people’ and steal your job
Danger! Danger Will Robinson!

China is now monitoring employees’ brainwaves and emotions
“The Orwellian-as-all-get-out practice”

Everything coming to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO Now in May
Not real excited about the list.

AP Explains: A look at DNA-sharing services and privacy
No. No way. Uh uh. Not gonna do it.

Multiple fire crews battle blaze at Amazon center
That is my local center…

Monday Morning Random Stuff…

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Win10 Update Stuff
Review: Windows 10 April 2018 Update shows promise, but ultimately disappoints

https://changewindows.org/build/redstone4/17134/pc

Most folks will be watching here for the download: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO
We will know today if that is the only way to get it for now. If so, you DO NOT need to make a disc or usb image from the ISO. Download the image to somewhere other than your OS (C:) drive, extract the image using 7-zip, and then click on setup.exe. That’s it.

Off Topic

Digital and analog audio’s curious coexistence
Related: Myths (Vinyl)

GMO Corn
An article on my local paper’s website said GMO corn is OK. Nobody seems to source their information anymore so I Googled “gmo corn” and found another article that lead to the study:
Impact of genetically engineered maize on agronomic, environmental and toxicological traits: a meta-analysis of 21 years of field data
So yeah, the study pretty much says that.

Tu Quoque
Recent political events had one sides defenders saying, “Well, your guy does/did it too.”
This is a Logical Fallacy also known as Appeal to Hypocrisy.
By making this counter-argument people hope to discredit the initial argument:
A – She ate too much.
CA – Well he ate too much last week.
The fact that “He” ate too much does not excuse someone else eating too much.
I think of it like this: Pointing out my bad behavior does not excuse yours.
When you use a logical fallacy I just tune you out.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

Ride The Wild Surf
World record: 80 foot wave!

Ride The Wild Surf – Jan and Dean

Weekend Random Stuff…

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The Week Ahead
The Win10 WhatEverItsCalled update is “available for download” tomorrow. AFAIK that means what it says and you can download it but it will not be on Windows Update until Patch Tuesday which is May, 8th. If you want to delay this update my guide is here.
Star Wars Day (May The 4th be with you) is Wednesday. Rumor has it that Solo: A Star Wars Story advanced tickets will go on sale then. I always do the first showing of Star Wars and Star Trek so I’m watching out for an announcement. BTW, there is a new Solo trailer and I’ve embedded it at the bottom of this post.

Off Topic

Interesting Links
Stuff I’ve bookmarked in the last few days.
Took an ancestry DNA test? You might be a ‘genetic informant’ unleashing secrets about your relatives
I trust those tests and the companies that do them about as far as I can throw an elephant.

New Star Map Could Change Everything We Know About the Milky Way
Very Interesting.

‘Dare to Be Different’: See New Doc on Radio Station That Broke U2, Cure in U.S.
I watched this. Good stuff.

Kiss frontman Paul Stanley reveals plans for ‘major’ tour to start next year

Solo: A Star Wars Story | Becoming Solo Featurette

Friday Random Stuff…

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AMD Combat Crate
The rumors are true,
“The AMD Combat Crate comes stocked with the essential hardware you need to push your game to the next level and lay waste to the competition. With a lightning fast Ryzen processor, powerful Radeon RX graphics backed by revolutionary Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition and a future-ready MSI motherboard – the AMD Combat Crate is the ultimate arsenal for gamers.”
AMD Combat Crate Bundle with Ryzen 5 1600 CPU,
MSI Gaming AMD Radeon RX 580 graphics card,
and MSI B350 Tomahawk AM4 Motherboard
Currently $549.00

Win10 1803/RS4/SCU/Next/April/1804/Whatever Update
Source: Windows Blog
Official name: Windows 10 April 2018 Update
Official release date: “will be available as a free download beginning Monday, April 30”

Software Updates
Google Chrome 66.0.3359.139 (bugfixes and 3 security fixes)
VirtualBox 5.2.10 (maintenance release)

Off Topic

Subway Closing 500 Stores
Story. My Experience at Subway:
Me: “I would like a half Italian Hero on white.”
Subway Person: (starts making sub, I think she puts the right meat on it) Then looks up and stares at me… “What do you want on it?”
Me: I want that. (pointing at the picture above and behind her)
Subway Person: (Turns around, stares at pic, she is clearly confused. Asks the other girl, “What’s on the Italian?”
Other Subway Person: “I don’t know.”
Me: *sigh* “From the picture I’m going to guess it comes with cheese, lettuce and tomato. I’ll just have provolone and vinegar & oil.”
Firehouse Subs and even Arby’s is way better around here. We don’t have any good old-school deli’s. I would love a N.Y. style Reuben about right now.

S.O.S.
ABBA is gonna release a couple of new tunes for the first time in 3 and a half decades. They are also gonna, get this, tour “virtually”. Yeah, they want you to pay for a “concert” that they aren’t even at. If you buy tickets to this show, I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona I would love to sell you.

You Ain’t Worth The Whiskey
– Horse Soldier Bourbon’s New Bottle is Made from World Trade Center Steel
– Jameson Bow Street 18 Years

Wednesday Random Stuff…

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Software Updates
Macrium Reflect 7.1.3169
Wireshark 2.6.0

Nvidia GeForce Game Ready Driver 397.31 WHQL
“Provides the optimal gaming experience for BattleTech and FrostPunk”
Download | Release Notes

Over It
That Win10 update that never got released? The one “they” say will be called “”April Update”? Now “they” say it will be released in May. Oh, and it might also be 1804 instead of 1803. I think we are all over it at this point.

Samsung 970 Pro and EVO NVMe SSDs
Seems the 960s were just released. Press Release here.
Anandtech ran some benchies.
“Since faster storage brings diminishing returns to overall real-world application performance, many consumers will can find drives cheaper than the 970 EVO that are still fast enough, and drives like the 970 PRO are impossible to justify on the basis of performance alone.”

Explained – 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen™ Processors: XFR 2 and Precision Boost 2

Off Topic

Best Headline Ever?
Uranus Smells Terrible. There, We Said it
“The finding comes courtesy of a study in Nature Astronomy, revealing that the cloud tops of Uranus are made principally of hydrogen sulfide, the gas that is principally responsible for the foul smell of rotten eggs and, yes, human flatulence.”

Fleetwood Mac Detail New Tour and Talk Life After Lindsey Buckingham

Pair of 1926 Macallan whiskies sold for record $1.2m

Tuesday Morning News

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AMD Chipset Drivers
Version 18.10.0418 is out.
Download

Win10 Updates
Will 1803/RS4/SCU/Next/April/Whatever update be released today?
Dunno, but 1709 has got an update:
KB4093105 – April 23, 2018—KB4093105 (OS Build 16299.402)

CCleaner
Couple of IE/Edge fixes and… wait… the release announcement says, “Where appropriate, CCleaner Free may recommend improvements to your system’s antivirus protection“.
Hmmm… Pure speculation on my part but, is this gonna be ads for Avast? Has anyone seen one?
Download

Friday Random Stuff…

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Pretty uneventful week IMHO.

Avast: The CCleaner Hack Was TeamViewer’s Fault
“To initiate the CCleaner attack, the threat actors first accessed Piriform’s network on March 11, 2017, four months before Avast acquired the company, using TeamViewer on a developer workstation to infiltrate. They successfully gained access with a single sign-in, which means they knew the login credentials.”

Ryzen Gen 2 Benchmarks
Anandtech did the right thing and applied all the Meltdown and Spectre patches before benchmarking. Keep that in mind when you read other reviews.
“In our benchmarks, we compared the new AMD chips to the more recent Intel chips, but with the Spectre and Meltdown patches applied. It is clear that the patches have had an effect on some of our Intel scores more than the AMD results: combine that with AMD’s generational improvements and for a lot of tests, especially gaming, there is either a neck-and-neck result or AMD pulls a lead in multi-threaded scenarios. For anything that is hard on a single-threaded, such as our FCAT test or Cinebench 1T, Intel wins hands down, and winning the 1T tests is no easy feat, however overall AMD is pushing that performance-per-watt metric ever closer, and offering a competitive product for users that multitask.”

Ya Don’t Say
“Increasingly, it feels like people in our industry, the tech industry, are losing touch with reality.”
Y’all. Everyone else already knows that.

Off Topic

Disgusting
Saw this:
Equilar 100: CEO Pay at the Largest Companies by Revenue
Looked up this:
Forbes: The World’s Highest-Paid Athletes List
Vogue: The Highest-Paid Models Of 2017
I don’t blame the people who get it. I blame the people who pay it and the culture that allows it to happen.

National Record Store Day
Saturday, April 21, 2018 is National Record Store Day.
“Record Store Day was conceived in 2007 at a gathering of independent record store owners and employees as a way to celebrate and spread the word about the unique culture surrounding nearly 1400 independently owned record stores in the US and thousands of similar stores internationally. The first Record Store Day took place on April 19, 2008. Today there are Record Store Day participating stores on every continent except Antarctica.”
Many music artists have special releases for this day. In the past I’ve gotten a few albums and even a Metallica cassette.
This year I am shooting for the Def Leppard – Live at Abbey Road LP. I’ve got emails out but no responses yet…
*edit (April 21, 2018, 11:40(EDT)) – No luck 🙁
About | List of releases | Home

Have A Great Weekend!
Mine will involve one or more of the items below.

Wednesday Morning Random Stuff…

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Google Chrome
Updated to version 66
– 62 security fixes.
– Automatically disable video auto-play
Download | Release Info
Related: Microsoft now has Windows Defender Browser Protection extension for Chrome. Reckon they needed another way to see where you were surfing since nobody is using Edge and IE.

Clonezilla Updated
Version 2.5.5-38 released.
“Clonezilla is a partition and disk imaging/cloning program similar to True Image® or Norton Ghost®. It helps you to do system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery.”
Download | Release Notes
(I use the “Alternative Stable” version.)

Off Topic

RIP Barbara Bush
Wonderful woman.
Dana Perino: For Barbara Bush, loyalty — and love — went both ways
Barbara Bush, a First Lady Without Apologies