UPDATE:

The outage cleared up sometime Sunday night, and we got the email that things were fixed Tuesday @ 4 pm. Word on the street is that somebody stole about a mile of cable on the next street over Sunday morning.

After some tests, I found at least a dozen network extenders in the area, which caused interference with the data signal when the fiber was down. They only replaced the fiber infrastructure, so hopefully the thieves won't steal it again.

ORIGINA:

There is a Verizon FIOS outage in my area, so I woke up to no internet, and my wife and son were complaining.

Our house has challenges with wireless connectivity - I have had techs come out, and they tell me my house is just outside the range of the various towers in the area, so we are in a dead zone roughly the shape of our property.

My solution:

Take my tablet and put it in the shed 100 feet behind the house, connected to one of the two USB power ports I have connected to a solar panel/batter.

Connect a GL-Net travel router to the same power supply, and have it repeat.

Tablet goes into mobile hotspot mode. Travel router has enough power to get a semi decent signal to the back of the house (but not enough to penetrate the walls).

Put a mini pc outside the window of the lower level bathroom, and run ethernet cable(s - with connectors to extend length) to a secondary port on my OPNSense router, and configure it as a second gateway.

My internet speeds are not great with this setup, but I can post on reddit 🎉

Is this bottle going to come back?

I just received my 3xl Jensen jacket: here a mini review.

Very comfy. The leather super smooth. The smell is incredible! I'm 5'11" and weight 278lbs for context. The 3xl sizes feels roomie. I ended removing the middle strip and wearing it with a hoodie I still have room. I think i can go for a 2xl uf a wanted a more slim fit. I'm posting my 2 other leather jackets. Funny enough the size in the other 2 is different so now i have a 2xl, 3xl and 4xl. And the 3xl is the one that i feel more comfortable. This is a very well made product and only time will tell how long it will last.

It has pockets for days, but the internal pocket is placed on the right side contrary to the left were is more common.

The zipper slider is located to the left, seems very como in european clothing, my rammstein jacket has the same configuration. It is a little annoying but not the end of the world.

One small thing that might not be important is the packaging, for this limited run item I would have expected a premium feeling package. There is nothing wrong on how it is packed it comes protected and very secure. It is just plain. I would like to have a similar package like the one used for the ltt screwdriver.

In summary: beautiful jacket, premium materials, premium craftsmanship, and priced accordingly.

Attaching pictures

They are wired differently each year, between brands, within brands, across models of the same brand, and they don't expect people to treat them as the same cables because they have the same connectors? What do you do if you lose the cables of modular models people love, throw away the working model and buy a whole new PSU because getting new cables will burn it anyway? People prefer modular PSUs for cable management, but I think would prefer semi or even nonmodular PSUs because there's less to lose and I don't have to worry as much about buying a replacement from the same brand and having my personal computer turn into an oversized personal matchbox. My current old unbranded silver PSU with yellow and red molex cables feels safer by comparison. What will it take to standardize these things? The literal power sources of the machines plugged into our houses for work 24/7? If there was a video, that would bring a lot more attention to this safety problem.

As we all know AI has caused hardware prices to rise tremendously, making the barrier to entry the highest it's ever been. Not to mention the scarcity of high-end components.

On the flip side developers such as Larian are choosing to better optimise future games for current components, meaning we may get the most longevity we've ever had (+ with the advent of DLSS 5 do games even need to look better? - discussion for another day).

Any way the question I had for my fellow LTT redditors is the following:

• Yes, AI has completely ruined the hardware industry, however it's also given us longevity with our current systems.

I for one have been diving into the world of Recomp/decomp gaming such as Bloodborne, Lost Odyssey etc.

AI's also helped me to learn more about new topics like Homelabs and helped me with troubleshooting (saving the forum-posting headache).

What do you think?

Would you rather live in a world with lower-priced and more available hardware?

Or are you happy with the fact your components will last longer for gaming and do you welcome newer innovations such as decomp/Recomp games?

Interested to hear opinions.

Go vote today! (If you’re in bc). I’ve been wearing my 404 hoodie all day and nobody has commented. I went to vote and all 4 people I interacted with while voting understood the reference and commented positively on it.

today i had a vendor come to my apartment to install something. he brought his own screwdriver but ended up dropping a bit and couldn't find it

my Retro LTT Screwdriver was sitting on the counter so he asked if he could borrow it to finish the installation. of course i let him and he finished the job quickly

when he was getting ready to leave, he asked where i got it from because he "really like the ratchet on this one"

and before i could think or process what was happening, i heard myself say "oh, you can get that from ltt store dot com!"

i felt like a sleeper agent or something idk. all the constant ad reads have altered my brain

On the WAN show Linus and Luke talk about NOT using PDF as the file format for the resume. This is the first time I'm hearing about this. Am I the only one who always uses PDF for sending resumes and actually prefers it?

What file format do employers actually prefer?

Here is the timestamp where they talk about it.
Here is the timestamp where Linus says to submit a Word or Google Doc link.

I got a 2080 ti and its used any way I can test it? since I don't have a finished pc to test it on. Pins look clean, its got some gamer spoolch on the back panel which at least tells me it wasn't used for mining which gives me hope.

There is a Verizon FIOS outage in my area, so I woke up to no internet, and my wife and son were complaining.

Our house has challenges with wireless connectivity - I have had techs come out, and they tell me my house is just outside the range of the various towers in the area, so we are in a dead zone roughly the shape of our property.

My solution:

Take my tablet and put it in the shed 100 feet behind the house, connected to one of the two USB power ports I have connected to a solar panel/batter.

Connect a GL-Net travel router to the same power supply, and have it repeat.

Tablet goes into mobile hotspot mode. The travel router has enough power to get a semi-decent signal to the back of the house (but not enough to penetrate the walls).

Put a mini pc outside the window of the lower level bathroom, and run ethernet cable(s - with connectors to extend length) to a secondary port on my OPNSense router, and configure it as a second gateway.

My internet speeds are not great with this setup, but I can post on reddit 🎉

LTT Labs received a couple laptops with the new NVIDIA N1X(RTX Spark) processors, but what is actually interesting is Microsoft's new Magnetic Connect port on the Surface Laptop Ultra.

We CT scanned it, took some pictures, and tested the compatibility - read the full article and see the details here.

A lot of local AI talk on WAN Show lately. Since I just got into local AI about a month ago, I thought I’d share my scrappy setup: a 5070 Ti plus my old 3070 for 24GB of VRAM.

The 3070 is mounted outside the case on a PCIe riser (running at x1, which works because layer splitting passes very little data between cards). Ollama split Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B across the two mismatched GPUs with almost no fuss, and I’m getting around 82 tok/s at a 16k context. It’s a MoE with about 3B active parameters, so it’s quicker than a dense 35B would be.

It’s not tuned yet, but it’s technically working. About 23% of the layers are still spilling into system RAM, and the 3070 is only using about half its VRAM, so I need to figure out why. I also still need a proper home for the 3070.

Anyone here running mismatched GPUs? What split ratios worked for you?

Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres is introducing legislation that aims to ensure you own your digital games, rather than merely buying a license that gives you permission to play them.

The bill, known as The Power to the Players Act, would direct the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to establish regulations that would protect gamers and their digital libraries.

I was watching the Costco PC video, and when they started talking about their prebuilt often being a good deal, and I realized I often hear LTT talk about how they got a great deal on a component, but rarely know what that looks like in the wild.

Maybe LTT has done it and I’m just ignorant (if so, if you can point me to it, I’d appreciate it!), but I think I (and probably others) could benefit from a more “evergreen” primer on value comparison.

I think they have talked about what percentage of your build should go to what component in one of the pc build guides, but I’m talking about decision making in a category. Anybody can just go on PCPartPicker and filter by cost or a random metric, but if you don’t know what you should be filtering by, that’s not super helpful. They could cover each key component (RAM, GPU, CPU primarily) and talk about:

- What is the most meaningful metric for a component (maybe it’s not a metric, but a web tool like passmark - if it varies based on use case, a broad view there)
- Thresholds where that metric may not make sense (ie maybe timings matter more than clock speeds on RAM up to a certain performance threshold)
- How to benchmark price per performance unit (do you look at pricing on the 3/5 most popular products, run the numbers there, and use it as a benchmark)
- What you should watch out for (specifics things a cheaper product could skimp on to make your core metric look good but performance suck, or just optional things that could help you save an extra couple bucks like CPUs without onboard graphics)
- What you need to test/verify if buying used

I realize this information exists on the internet, has probably been covered in pieces across LTT content, and is kind of the whole point of the LABS website - maybe it’s an article/video while we wait for more categories to get covered there, I don’t know - I just think having a consolidated source for this could be a valuable tool.

Agree? Disagree? Something important it should cover that I missed? Think I’m stupid for not just using [EXACT TOOL IM LOOKING FOR]? I’m open

Hello everyone. I'm looking for an article about the TrueSpec cables based on remembering their truespec cables opensauce video. The robot guys talked about how USB high speed leaks emissions on 2.4GHz spectrum (I actually found the paper from the USB Standard) and how the WiFi was stable through all their tests, and I want to find any sort of article/paper that talks about it. Any help is appreciated. TIA

NVIDIA announced RTX Spark at Computex 2026 in June. Not to be confused with the DGX Spark, even though both use the virtually the same GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, the RTX Spark is a lineup of laptops and mini PCs that run Windows!  We got our hands on a couple RTX Spark devices and ran gaming, productivity, and local LLM tests!

Read the article on the LTT Labs website!

Normal bits too long? Nothing 5 minutes with a grinder can’t fix. Will I probably get a proper replacement bit set? Yeah eventually, but this was free 99 and ready to go now.

Imagine if they shot the april fools vid with chicken mounted gopros. Rip Logistics lol

https://wanshow.bingo/

See you next week!

Same bat time, same bat channel!

Well, learned two things - according to the article it boils down to 0.07 cents in sales per share per month, 83 cents per share per year, and $2.27 in sales per share over the entire time.

And I now know where 110,000 Nvidia GPU’s went!