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 60 fps!

Mojave National Preserve and Capitol Reef National ParkWe recently bought a Subaru Forester and we decided to take it out on a crazy winter road trip to view our national treasures: our National Parks and Preserves!

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 only way to fix the mangled text is to migrate to the QOpenGLWidget that was introduced in Qt 5.4.0. Overall, this widget is pretty similar to QGLWidget and Qt has done a decent job describing the differences as well as providing an example of working code.With that information in hand, I decided to try my luck migrating it over the weekend where I ran into some trouble. Here are some of the more annoying differences that I discovered:qglColor(), qglColorClear(), bindTexture(), and renderText() are not available.QPixmaps aren’t supported anymore and you need to substitute QOpenGLTexture.updateGL() has been renamed to update()Blending seems...
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The ASUS MG279Q was released with much fanfare because it was the first 144 Hz IPS panel that supported FreeSync. If you looked beyond the MG279Q quality control issues (and subsequently won the panel lottery) the only problem with this display was a limited FreeSync range of 35-90 Hz.A lot of people questioned why buy a 144 Hz IPS monitor if they would be effectively limited gaming to 90 fps (frames per second) but no other solutions existed. Luckily, a German hacker discovered that you could extend the range of FreeSync by modifying the EDID portion of the monitor driver. The total FreeSync range could now be extended beyond 35-90 Hz to 31-110 Hz or 54-144 Hz!FreeSync excelled at providing smooth gaming at low frame rates so a lot of gamers usually picked the 31-100 Hz option. Gamers were overjoyed with the November release of the Crimson drivers made that old...
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I am a PC gamer and I love building frugal, quiet enthusiast PCs with a focus on maximizing performance per dollar. This is the tale of how I was at odds with myself and ended up blowing my budget by going all-in on a custom water cooling loop.
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