It’s been historically hot here the past few weeks, most days easily topping ninety, and it’s miserable. I have a skin allergy that worsens in sustained direct sun, so as you might imagine I have been doing my best to ignore the weather, impossible though that is.

In mid-June I bought a new PCIe video card naively assuming that it, as a PCIe card, would work with the PCIe systems I have in house, and since then I have been engaged in a delightful (well, no, that’s more or less the opposite) self-education odyssey.

The upshot is that *probably* if I roughly double the potential power output of my actual-built-that-way PC I might be able to get the card to boot, or maybe, *maybe*, I can get it to work under Bootcamp Windows on a Mac Pro. Today, after being quite directly informed by the manufacturer that the card is unsupported on a Bootcamp Mac Pro, I was able to bring it up on that system.

This is probably good news as it likely means I can dump the actual built-that-way PC. I still have a few days of tinkering to satisfy my curiosity but that does appear to be the resolution.

As I was going through this research process I was constantly running into end-of-life support issues directly tied to my determined insistence on doubling the active service life of my hardware. With luck, every unit in the house will see at least ten years of use and I don’t anticipate a main-unit refresh on any single device for another four years, cell phones possibly excepted.

One aspect of the rollover to shorter-life hardware in the industry is the shift away from flat-fee software to subscription-fee software. I’m just not gonna do that. Even seeing the pricing model makes me kind of angry at the business offering the terms. I suppose that one could make a case for per-use pricing but this in essence is nothing more than the traditional variable-pricing model, a model that actually actively locks out certain classes of buyer including the profoundly parsimonious and the low-information low-income buyer. It’s classist and exclusivist and I hate it with a bitter rage.

I suppose in the long run this shifts me completely off computer use. Not by any means a negative outcome.