[X] My Assistant

It's time to consider a PC upgrade. 8 years or so with my current setup is a pretty good run. Maybe once I do my taxes I'll start parts shopping...

Tumblr. Can't embed images from that site anymore and also the "unsupported browser" BS. Time to abandon Tumblr. If it weren't for Yahoo changing Flickr, I wouldn't have gone to Tumblr in the first place.

I thought tumblr was already dead and burried.

I thought tumblr was already dead and burried.

As long as they still have users, it will live on. As a zombie.

Modern iOS versions are pretty fucking annoying to re-jailbreak every time I accidentally let one run out of battery. I miss untethered so I could just leave them turned off, but now I'm at Apple's mercy for code signature so I can use Phoenix on one of them, and the other one takes an average of six tries (10 minutes or more) for the webkit exploit I use to not crash and reboot the phone or hang the system and force me to reboot it.

And if you don't have a mac that's new enough to run the latest OS X and xcode, you're pretty screwed. USB pass-through doesn't seem to work with lightning-based iDevices with KVM/QEMU OS X. My 30-pin devices do, though. Note that I only have one lightning device, which I was given as a toy by someone who upgraded to a newer phone. I refuse to give apple money.

TL;DR fuck Apple. I don't even know why I bother maintaining an iOS version of that app anymore, since it's not on the app store anyway.

Tumblr. Can't embed images from that site anymore and also the "unsupported browser" BS. Time to abandon Tumblr. If it weren't for Yahoo changing Flickr, I wouldn't have gone to Tumblr in the first place.

And here I thought we abandoned tumblr over a year ago now.

It's never been a good image host either, to be honest, with its downsampling.

I consider MySpace dead, even though people apparently still use it (I never did).

Github pages / gitlab hosting is probably the best way to blog nowadays, I guess, if you don't want to actually maintain a server or anything. Even moreso because you can't have web 2.0 server-sided stuff like guestbooks/comments.

It's time to consider a PC upgrade. 8 years or so with my current setup is a pretty good run. Maybe once I do my taxes I'll start parts shopping...

Mine's about that old and I have no plans to upgrade any part of it unless something smells like ozone (likely a venting capacitor) or I hear a screeching sound from my hard drive bay. It's not broken and it performs nicely by my standards so I'm not going to throw it out.

As of this moment it's been running 24/7 for the last seven weeks and two days (before then, I had to reboot it to install my SCSI controller card and make a backup of an old HDD).

Actually, if I do an upgrade it'll probably be a SATA controller card so I can have more disks than I do SATA ports on my motherboard. I do have them all filled currently (and I don't really want to get rid of my optical drive since I burn PSX games on it).

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Apr 4 2020, 10:42

Double-posting because time has passed.
I think Blue Penguin(?) drew my attention to the existance of [github.com] pHash a while back; it's just a library (no executable program I can build included, I think), so I wrote a hella shitty C program which really is just a backend for a couple shell scripts to test it out (Feed it an image, it prints out a numerical hash I can do things with.)
It's actually doing a pretty nice job so far!

I think I can make it work even better if I narrow down the list of match candidates based on aspect ratio, since that rules out simple resizes, and maybe also by basing it on some summary of the chromatic content (a histogram? Some low-resolution sample of the average 'hue(s)' of the image? I'll need to think on it).

The shell scripts are pretty rough looking, so I'm probably going to try to make them a little more efficient (they do a few things that are kind of redundant but simpler to code), but then I think I'll upload them all. GPL3 probably (due to pHash's license), at least for the C portions. I don't know if the shell scripts would be considered "encumbered", though they are certainly responsible for all of the sorting and narrowing down of the hashes made by the C program.

I don't actually mind GPLv3 personally, but I also kind of like the BSD and MIT type licenses (and WTFPL) so I'll probably think about it a little. Path of least resistance is all GPLv3, and I'd be fine with that.

Also I guess the fact that they're shell scripts makes the barrier to entry a little higher for Windows drones (Needs MSYS/Cygwin/"Bash for windows" (Bash won't work, it's actually a Kornshell 93 script)), but I don't know if I honestly care enough to rewrite them for better compatibility with an OS I hate more with every passing year now.

Also I modded my Amiga's monitor (VGA connector only, Commodore 1942) to accept composite sync signals, so now I can play my SNES/PSX/Mega Drive (Genesis) and stuff on it. I also fixed a color purity and convergence issue by moving some magnets that the manufacturer taped on the rear of the tube to new positions. Looks great now.

I think I still have a capacitor failing on the inside of the set, though, because that burning odor never _quite_ went away (though it is significantly better than before I replaced that big and obviously swollen capacitor I posted a while ago).

So to be frank, I'm still not feeling very bored with the whole virus thing happening. It's giving me time to do a lot of projects that I'd just been putting off forever.
[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/od8ndNHg.jpg)

I'm using a Game Genie PCB so I don't have to take the shell off the Super Famicom or the cartridge. I plan to make a simpler pass-through adapter (which also passes the expansion pins on the sides of the connector unlike the game genie), but that's a project for another day.

The fan next to all that stuff is how I degaussed the mask in the tube when I was done adjusting things inside and I put it back upright, btw.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Apr 5 2020, 06:51

Any cons should I change from the default Legacy Only to UEFI Only?

(IMG:[live.staticflickr.com] https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49736828563_08c5dc2668_d.jpg)

Any cons should I change from the default Legacy Only to UEFI Only?

(IMG:[live.staticflickr.com] https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49736828563_08c5dc2668_d.jpg)

You won't be able to boot DOS or 32-bit Windows up through 7 (32-bit 8 will likely work, as will 10).
64-bit Win7 will work, if installed in UEFI/GPT mode. I think vista does, too, but am not sure on that one. XP will not, even in the 64-bit one that's based on Server 2003.

The big pro is that you can use larger HDD's. I'm about maxed out on my MBR-only thinkpad.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Apr 5 2020, 10:10

(IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/od8ndNHg.jpg)

That mismatched cartridge is heretic and...is the controller not original either?

And nice, breath of fire.

I think you needed to switch to the angel bish to fly over the canyon on the world map.

You won't be able to boot DOS or 32-bit Windows up through 7 (32-bit 8 will likely work, as will 10).
64-bit Win7 will work, if installed in UEFI/GPT mode. I think vista does, too, but am not sure on that one. XP will not, even in the 64-bit one that's based on Server 2003.

The big pro is that you can use larger HDD's. I'm about maxed out on my MBR-only thinkpad.

So it's to accommodate user of older operating systems that the Legacy Mode was set as the Default.

No wonder my 4TB HDD can only be formatted up to 2TB. Then there's this:

(IMG:[live.staticflickr.com] https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49738866451_799bc36bde_b_d.jpg)

That mismatched cartridge is heretic and...is the controller not original either?

And nice, breath of fire.

I think you needed to switch to the angel bish to fly over the canyon on the world map.

the controller's an american snes controller because mine didn't come with a JP pad. It was $7 so I can't complain; a SFC/euro SNES pad would cost me more than the console. I did swap the colored buttons from a knockoff pad into it, though, to try to atone.

I agree on the mismatch. I hate it too.
I'm not quite that far in the game yet on this playthrough.
BoF is criminally overlooked these days.

So it's to accommodate user of older operating systems that the Legacy Mode was set as the Default.

No wonder my 4TB HDD can only be formatted up to 2TB. Then there's this:

(pic)

You need to re-initialize the disk with a GPT style partition table instead of MBR.
I only know how to do it from linux/BSD's but I'm sure there's a way in Windows as well.
BTW another bonus of that is that you aren't limited to four "primary" partitions on a disk anymore with GPT.
And that's correct, it is the reason you can't use more than 2TB of that disk.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Apr 5 2020, 20:08

I don't use uefi on any of my systems, but I also have exactly zero need for windows post 7.

I don't use uefi on any of my systems, but I also have exactly zero need for windows post 7.

I use UEFI on my desktop, but only because I was forced to get intimately familiar with it on a 32-bit Atom SoC to boot Linux.
Had to build my own kernel and my own EFI loader - the built in EFI stub you can bake into the kernel only supported amd64 at the time. It was hell. But now I understand how it works decently.

I use MBR on all my other stuff though because it doesn't matter that much to me and my laptop's not UEFI anyway.

Managed to clean out (contact clean) an old style KVM switch and put it back together correctly on the first try. Feels good.

Previously it wasn't able to reliably carry all three signals (R,G,B, ground) without lots of coaxing.
It's still a little bit noisy, though. My guess is that's just gonna be something I live with if I ever use it for anything.
[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/YEW807Pg.jpg)

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Apr 6 2020, 02:17

Phew, reinstalling the graphic card driver in clean install (maybe I could/should have tried without that) fixed my issues.
Now the fonts are displayed properly (I see the U in My Uploads on the main site among other things), and I no longer have a vertical area near the right border of the screen that weirdly reflect some colors of the rest of the screen.
I wonder if they will ever make graphic driver installation system that would make obsolete advice about clean install, 3d party software to remove drivers, and other stuff like that.

Phew, reinstalling the graphic card driver in clean install (maybe I could/should have tried without that) fixed my issues.
Now the fonts are displayed properly (I see the U in My Uploads on the main site among other things), and I no longer have a vertical area near the right border of the screen that weirdly reflect some colors of the rest of the screen.
I wonder if they will ever make graphic driver installation system that would make obsolete advice about clean install, 3d party software to remove drivers, and other stuff like that.

Use Display Driver Uninstaller.

I must have done something to please the Windows 10 gods, updates lately are fixing the various broken features on my install automatically.

Oh damn, now that is a legit switch. I hot a dual monitor KVM switch, but also jad to het 4x edid data spoofers, as it did not pass those lines through. Windows xp was dumb and would output anything, but X refused to do much with no id signal.

Didn't realize memory speed was reset back to 2666mhz after I applied the third iteration of F50 Bios (didn't happen with the two previous F50). My PC wouldn't boot after applying XMP & it's always stuck at error code 48. Don't know what it stands for as the code is not listed in the manual. Have tried Asus, ECS & MSI motherboard before (throughout 10 years span) and each had its own problem. Now it's Gigabyte's turn.

(IMG:[live.staticflickr.com] https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49745317888_509bbed5d0_d.jpg)

Oh damn, now that is a legit switch. I hot a dual monitor KVM switch, but also jad to het 4x edid data spoofers, as it did not pass those lines through. Windows xp was dumb and would output anything, but X refused to do much with no id signal.

Problem is it has no mouse connector; just a 5-pin DIN for AT keyboards.
I still love the design itself because (despite not being actually great for signal integrity or anything) it's just pretty damn cool (especially since I repaired a lot of old equipment that used rotary switches like this and it was a happy surprise to find one in here) and it can be repurposed for things other than VGA if needed without issue because they connected every line of every connector. I basically have 15(vga)+5(DIN)=20 pins for whatever I want, plus the 'sleeve' or whatever you call it on the connectors which I could use as the only ground in a pinch for low frequency stuff.


I guess I might be able to pass a low-speed USB device over the DIN, though. Say a USB 1.x hub with a keyboard and mouse attached. Same number of pins as DIN.

Didn't realize memory speed was reset back to 2666mhz after I applied the third iteration of F50 Bios (didn't happen with the two previous F50). My PC wouldn't boot after applying XMP & it's always stuck at error code 48. Don't know what it stands for as the code is not listed in the manual. Have tried Asus, ECS & MSI motherboard before (throughout 10 years span) and each had its own problem. Now it's Gigabyte's turn.

(IMG:[live.staticflickr.com] https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49745317888_509bbed5d0_d.jpg)

Can't speak for post-ivy bridge, but my ASRock board's been nothing but decent to me. Save for one problem I had running a conventional (parallel 32-bit) PCI SCSI card (kernel panic during boot), but it worked in the other slot. ASRock didn't make the PCI bridge chip, so I gave them a pass on that.

Never been one for LED's, though. I don't trust the priorities of products with bells and whistles like that which are purely aesthetic.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Apr 7 2020, 16:29

I didn't have high hopes when I received a reply from Gigabyte's support this morning. To my surprise, they actually issued a beta Bios for me to try out. Unfortunately, that didn't resolve anything.

(IMG:[live.staticflickr.com] https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49749897497_0c14951c3d_z_d.jpg)

My RAM isn't defective after all.

(IMG:[live.staticflickr.com] https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49749897467_08754b1a7c_z_d.jpg)