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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

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

Tuesday Random Stuff…

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Macrium Reflect Updated
Version 7.1.3147 of my preferred backup software has been release.
Download | Release Notes | Home Page

Russian Hackers Targeting Routers
“In a joint announcement Monday from the US Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the UK’s National Cyber Security Center, officials warned that Russian spies have been looking for vulnerabilities on millions of routers as a tool for future attacks.
The targets include routers in homes and offices, as well as firewalls and switches from internet service providers, critical infrastructure and major private companies”
US, UK warn of Russian hackers targeting millions of routers

Off Topic

Great Beer
Last week I had Uncle Jacob’s Stout from Avery Brewing for the first time. If you like barrel-aged beers like Founders KBS or New Holland Dragon’s Milk then you’ll love this. Highly recommended.

Wednesday Random Stuff…

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Win10 1803/RS4/SCU/Next/Whatever
“They” say:
– Nobody knows what the actual name of the update is.
– Nobody knows why the update was not released.
– Nobody knows when it will be released.
Reckon the “inside sources” failed them, and us.

Winaero Tweaker 0.10
“Winaero Tweaker 0.10 is out. It will allow you to disable Windows Update reliably in Windows 10, get rid of update notifications, ads in Settings, Timeline and My People. Also, it comes with new tools and tweaks, and it properly works under Windows 10 version 1803 “Spring Creators Update”
Download

Which of the following companies do you trust the least with your personal information?
Recode polled Americans,
“Respondents were asked to choose among Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Lyft, Microsoft, Netflix, Tesla, Twitter, Snap and Uber. Twenty percent selected none of the above.”

Patch Tuesday

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Updates available for all things Windows. I am still not updating my Windows 7 machines. The only Win10 machine I am updating is my main rig. I have switched that over to Windows Insider Fast Lane so I can get a head start on the Spring Creators Update that comes out next month. The things I do for you guys.

Full Windows Update info at the bottom of this post.
Win10 version 1709: March 13, 2018—KB4088776 (OS Build 16299.309)
“This update includes quality improvements. No new operating system features are being introduced in this update.”
Win10 version 1703: March 13, 2018—KB4088782 (OS Build 15063.966)
“This update includes quality improvements. No new operating system features are being introduced in this update.”

Firefox 59
Firefox 32-bit
Firefox 64-bit
All downloads
Release Notes. Be sure to check these out as there are a couple of new features you’ll want to know about.
Related: Tor Browser 7.5.1 released and Tails 3.6 too.

CCleaner 5.41
Release Announcement
Download (I use the portable version)
Thanks Arthur!

Adobe Flash Player 29.0.0.113
for Firefox, Opera
for Internet Explorer

[Read more…] about Patch Tuesday

Wednesday Random Stuff…

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BIOS Hell
BIOS updates are being recalled and replaced. Woody Leonhard has the scoop on several vendors.
My new rig had a second BIOS update 2 days ago. Previous BIOS version was F5i. It has disappeared and been replaced by F5m. Yesterday I reran PCMark10 on that rig. Performance drooped again. On PCMark10 I now have a performance loss of 6.4% overall, with a high of 9.9% in Essentials. Post updated here: Meltdown & Spectre Updates Benchmarked

Software Updates
EMDB 3.10
Mp3tag 2.86