Oldie-but-goodie K-Mart commercial. I still chuckle when little Billy runs up and tells his dad he can't wait to shi* his pants.

https://youtu.be/_8enIDEKrzA

And here's another classic:
https://youtu.be/F0-nMrdEt9Y

You're quite lucky. He doesn't miss very often.

What happened to your external drive? Often when they simply and suddenly fail, the problem is not the drive itself and is an easy fix. Without knowing the details of your "crash," I cannot say for sure, but there is a good chance you can repair the drive yourself -- because the problem might be with the enclosure, connector, or power supply.

Try a YouTube search for your specific brand/type of drive and what it's doing (or not doing). You might be pleasantly surprised.

I took a peek this morning at Puget's info on graphic cards. In part, here's what I found:

Adobe has been increasing support for GPU acceleration in Photoshop over the last few years, but currently there are only a handful of effects that can utilize the video card. Adobe maintains a list of effects that are GPU accelerated in their GPU FAQ: Photoshop GPU card FAQ

Although Adobe is constantly expanding GPU acceleration support to Photoshop, the current demand on the video card is actually relatively light. Even an entry video card will be able to provide a huge boost in performance for GPU-accelerated effects but there is a sharp drop in performance benefit by using anything more than a mid-range video card. A few tasks may be able to see a performance benefit to using a high-end card like the GeForce RTX 3090, but an RTX 3070 Ti is going to get you within a few percent of the best performance possible.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/photo-editing-workstations/adobe-photoshop/hardware-recommendations/#:~:text=Adobe%20has%20been%20increasing

That's the all-important gist, or nutshell. There's more, including a small benchmark. I might note that Puget's Photoshop-specific benchmarks differ significantly from other benchmarks geared toward gaming.

Amazon's Prime Day event is just around the corner, this Tuesday and Wednesday. Newegg, Best Buy, and others take advantage of this and offer competitive sales, so you might find a bargain then.

Thread hijacking with irrelevant, asinine, worthless comments doesn't help much either. But since we're already there...

I haven't noticed much change over the years. Admin has made at least some effort to control nonsense, such as starting the attic and assigning section mods. Oh, but you wouldn't know it because that happened before you joined. Might be nice if you knew the good ol' days before disparaging the site.

At that link is a link to a Best Buy sale on the card for $279.99, probably what TriX was talking about (because that card is usually mid-$300). The card has only 8GB of RAM though, so that's something to keep in mind although it probably won't affect Ps and Lr. For futureproofing and other apps, I would (did) look for a card with 12GB.

I also noticed today's Newegg Shell Shocker deals have my card, the MSI-branded RX 6750xt, for $329.99 -- which is also a very good price. The 6750xt outperforms the 3060ti only slightly overall, but the 6750 does have 12GB of RAM that would be noticeable in certain apps.

I'll add a link you might find useful, a link by the PC Builder YouTube channel. Seems he gets his data from Tom's Hardware benchmarks and probably elsewhere too. There is plenty of performance, pricing, performance/pricing, etc., data to be had there, all relative to an RX 570, a card he sees as minimum for gaming. You can click a column header and sort the data by whichever parameter suits you.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y-XKBPTL8RyAuw_Kkcye1FIjFGlnb7dacdN3EEybWGs/edit#gid=0

I'm no expert on this topic, but I'll share what I think I know.

I've read that you don't need the latest and greatest GPU to effectively run Ps or Lr, that just having a minimum-requirements card is as good as having a gazillion-dollar card. I think it was on Puget Systems website where I read that, and you may know that Puget Systems info regarding hardware for running Adobe apps is like gospel. You might take a gander and see if Puget has a recent article or benchmark on GPUs.

The minimum requirements, if memory serves, are a card no older than seven years and that supports DirectX 12. Oh, and whether a GPU will even help depends on what you're doing in the Adobe apps.

Once you decide on a card, you might keep an eye on Newegg's "Shell Shocker" daily deals. You can find a link (called "today's best deals") in the upper left corner of Newegg's home page. That's how I got my last two cards, an RX 6650xt (now in my son's PC) and my current RX 6750xt. I don't know how much difference this upgrade made, if any, for Adobe apps, but the 12GB of DRAM on the newer card (older one had 8GB) seems to help with video encoding and especially, with using multiple displays.

Radeon (AMD) cards are significantly cheaper than Nvidia cards with similar performance, but I seem to recall reading that Nvidia cards are better suited to Adobe apps (just as Intel CPUs are better than AMD CPUs for Ps and Lr). So why did I go with Radeon, if that's the case? Again, after meeting minimum requirements, there is no gain in performance. I shouldn't expect any additional Ps performance with a $1,600 Nvidia GTX 4090 than I get with my $340 MSI 6750xt.

I'll add another vote for Handbrake. I've been using it for years to rip DVDs to smaller files suitable for mobile devices and my video jukebox (a drive with hundreds of DVD-quality movies averaging around 650MB each). I also use Handbrake occasionally to convert a file type or to re-encode a damaged video file.

Handbrake is user-friendly and intuitive, but for anything you might not understand, there is plenty of help online from Handbrake and from third parties.

I'm curious though, about your issue. H.264 is a codec, and MP4 is a container, as bsprague said. Personally, I use the newer H.265 codec in a Matroska container (.mkv extension) in order to include toggleable subtitles. Some (all?) other containers (including Handbrake's default, MP4) won't allow subtitles.

You're a brave man person for coming out so late in life, Jerry. 🤣

I've wondered about my kids, all kids, whether they'll have to worry about shingles now that they've been vaccinated against chicken pox and will never contract that disease.

Nice shot! I've only caught a few bolts the old-fashioned way of a long exposure. Caught a few nice ones.

~Sigh.~ Jerry, your answer lies in your question. It's an iCloud DVR. Focus on the word cloud.

You won't get a physical device. Spectrum will simply charge you a monthly fee to keep track of your favorites (the stuff it already has on its servers) while telling you that you are recording it.

You can't beat the night-quality of a Wyze cam v3. It's an inexpensive but good IP camera, but Wyze also offers cloud storage and lots of other cams and devices.

Oh, the irony!

I once thought similarly when starting out in digital. I compared images from my Sony a77ii to a friend's images taken with a Canon 7Dii. We often got nearly identical shots - same scene and composition - while on Scout outings, but his photos were much better than mine. I asked him, and it turned out he shot RAW and processed his in Lightroom, while I naively accepted the lower-quality camera jpegs. That's what got me to shooting RAW and post processing, and I haven't looked back.

Good examples of many situations where a tripod is useful. But I can see the other side too, and I agree that a tripod can be a nuisance. That's why I own several.

I keep my main, relatively lightweight tripod in my pickup under the rear seat, so I always have it when I go out. I keep a similar one in the house.

I have a couple of old rock-solid Husky tripods from the '70s or '80s that weigh more than I do, but they're great for astro, pixel-shift, or any other work where a steady camera is a must.

And for times when I really don't want to lug around a big tripod, I still have two options: a small tabletop (rock-top, fence-top) tripod that fits in my extra lens pouch alongside an extra lens; and my favorite item for many situations, a trekking pole with a ball head.