[X] My Assistant

I found out they added an 'open new tab next to current' parameter in Firefox, maybe recently. Thank God.

Nice.
Now if only I could toggle it in software post-FF57. New style addons can't change most about:config preferences.

I have an (old-style) XUL overlay addon I wrote that just toggles opening new tabs in the foreground/background, for instance. It runs as a taskbar button so I don't have to open about:config or a preferences page manually all the time.
I open in a tab next to current by ctrl-tabbing one to the left and ctrl-shift-tabbing one to the right (to return) before opening the new tab. So a preference for this would be an improvement.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 5 2020, 23:17

Just did an apt-get dist-upgrade that I'd put off for several weeks (okay, months). It didn't scrozzle anything that I've noticed so far. Feels good.

What version and distro you on now? I need to give 20.04lts of xubuntu a whirl now. I think I have an empty partition or two to try it from a clean install.

New mice are here, grabbed the boxes on my out the door. Will advise how the Lenovo compares to a non-worn out Logitech. There was a slip with the logitech talking about their unifying software that doesn't work in wine, so hopefully it's dongle is already paired.
The Lenovo feels quite nice in my hand, good weight to it, and I like the soft finish. The hinged battery door with latch, and LED visible from both sides are nice touches.

What version and distro you on now? I need to give 20.04lts of xubuntu a whirl now. I think I have an empty partition or two to try it from a clean install.

Still on Debian sid, same as I have been for years.
I haven't run a non-rolling-release distro in a long time; I just need to do dist-upgrade whenever there are packages that necessitate the removal of other ones or kernel updates.
My desktop's been running the same installation since 2014. It's getting a little "fragmented" in that I've run out of room on several partitions and had to move things to new ones/mount new drive partitions for my videos directory, but it still runs as well as always.

I really need to just wipe off my Windows partitions (I have at least three because I scrounged hard drives from old donor PC's) and try to consolidate my data a little bit so I hopefully have a disk or two left over I can write backups to. My PC's booting off a 2005-vintage HDD still (no SMART errors).

I hate Ubuntu, and haven't liked it since the days of 10.04. Now that it's embraced the Snap (or docker or flatpak, they're all interchangeable to me) memes, I like it even less.

New mice are here, grabbed the boxes on my out the door. Will advise how the Lenovo compares to a non-worn out Logitech. There was a slip with the logitech talking about their unifying software that doesn't work in wine, so hopefully it's dongle is already paired.

I had a Logitech K800 keyboard I was given that I used for a little while when I needed to be quiet; I was able to program its unifying receiver with third-party code. I bet it is already paired, but I used mine with a mouse and a keyboard together.

My older logitech wireless devices don't even have a unifying receiver. Most of those date to around 2006. I think a K800 and an M505 are the two devices I have that use a unifying receiver, if I remember correctly.

If I remember correctly, [github.com] this is the program I used. This memory is from around 2013, though. I still have the K800 but I think a key on the keypad broke off in storage and needs a new scissor mechanism. I honestly don't care about it as much as my IBM boards and my Apple Extended Keyboard (from the late 80s) so I'm not too motivated to fix it. I can touch-type, so I don't really need the backlight.

Anyway, [packages.debian.org] it's also in Debian's repositories, and since Ubuntu derives from Debian, presumably Ubuntu's as well if you for some reason still like it. I'm running a cutting-edge version of Debian ('unstable'), so it might be a little less up-to-date in Debian stable or Ubuntu. apt-get install solaar. Should let you manage pairing devices.

The Lenovo feels quite nice in my hand, good weight to it, and I like the soft finish. The hinged battery door with latch, and LED visible from both sides are nice touches.

I liked that about it, too. Hope it's working well.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 6 2020, 08:54

I thought about where to get money sitting in quarantine

I thought about where to get money sitting in quarantine

…And what did you decide?

Might consider 2 X 16GB 3600mhz in the future. At the moment, I'm seeing significant price hikes for both RAMs & SSDs.

Might consider 2 X 16GB 3600mhz in the future. At the moment, I'm seeing significant price hikes for both RAMs & SSDs.

I don't think 3600MHz ram actually… exists for consumer hardware quite yet outside very special situations.
DDR4 has a clock rate of 800-1600MHz, and since most CPU instructions take more than one CPU clock cycle anyway (and the RAM isn't being accessed on each cycle necessarily), it seems pointless to have the RAM clocked as fast as a mid- to high- range CPU.
I suppose due to multiple core CPU's that's likely to change soon-ish. Though with all the other problems regarding synchronizing multiple execution cores I think that's a bit overrated, too. DDR5 (whenever it actually starts being a real thing) probably will hit 3600MHz. But for now it's essentially nonexistant.


BTW, still camping out with the DDR3-1600 2x8GB ram I got in 2013 or 2014 (~200MHz). Completely unadorned by heatsinks and other useless shit. Still perfectly acceptable for everything I throw at it. I honestly think the need to upgrade constantly is overstated and overhyped because my machine feels as responsive as ever. I do run a linux distro, though, with FVWM as my window manager and no proper DE, so i've probably got significantly less bloat running than many. I have done RAM frequency upgrades in laptops and a few desktops before and I rarely notice much of any difference.

(IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/lFK64iXg.jpg)
DDR3-1600, 2x8GB, Crucial CT102464BA160B. I've never ended up actually using more than around 12GB of it, it seems, even running VM's/games/video encoders/compilers/what-have-you. So I've never had any reason to upgrade further. 12GB is itself an extreme rarity not even encountered with HD video or editing huge images. Basically only happens if running a virtual machine while also linking a firefox libxul binary with debug symbols.

Laptop's running 2x4GB DDR3-1600. Maxed out. Still can't remember ever running out of RAM on it, although the X201 tablet is significantly slower than my desktop probably due to a variety of other reasons, ranging from the intel GPU using some of that RAM for itself to the slower CPU clock speeds and the low voltage design (i7-640LM, 2.13GHz, runs on ~1.3V vs. the ~3.1V of my desktop, half the core count, older CPU design).

I might enjoy SSD speeds, but as a data hoarder and someone who's seen terrible experiences with other peoples' SSD's failing in such a way that they don't even get detected on a SATA bus, they aren't cost-effective for high density storage yet and they quite probably aren't as dependable (you have to be more thoughtful about how much you write to them; I've been writing to a few of my hard disks for over a decade.)

If I did more HD video capture, an SSD would definitely be worthwhile just for that. But my HDD's are satisfactory for standard definition (480i/240p) sources, which I capture far more often, and that's probably one of the most I/O intensive things I regularly will do.

Anyway, over the last decade it seems like CPU-based PC performance has risen by only around 50% or so (1.5x). GPU's? Sure, those are better now. But other than that it seems like the primary take-away from newer hardware is possible power savings. Not worth creating more e-waste for me.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 7 2020, 08:46

I could use a laptop upgrade from my Insipron 5765. It's the full AMD/highest spec one of them, but trying to play games I can tell it's lacking. The three main things I play that tax it- Minecraft, Euro Truck Simulator 2, and My Summer Car, it's acceptable for. But just barely with lower settings than I'd really like.

How much 17" laptop does USD $800-1K buy these days?

On the lenovo mouse, it took me till just now to realize side scroll is broken system wide. Been so long since I had a mouse that actually supported it, never realized. Either way, it feels much nicer to use and fits my hand better than the cheap logitech. Thanks again.

This post has been edited by Wayward_Vagabond: May 7 2020, 22:58

I did spot 3600mhz DDR4 kits at few manufacturers' website - Essencore (Klevv), Geil and Kingston (HyperX). That probably won't matter after all since Zen 3 won't be compatible with my motherboard.

In Visual Studio, I wonder if there's a regular expression that would allow me to find what I'm looking for, I found it once manually, but more would be hard, here's the one I found:

program.exe+117CF3- 00 50 34
program.exe+117CF6- 42
program.exe+117CF7- 00 05 00050052

I tried some hieroglyphic syntax

CODE

50(.|\r?\n)*34(.|\r?\n)*42(.|\r?\n)*00

to try to get around that .* could not over line ends, but it didn't work.
I wish there was an user friendly way to create an advanced search, or a regular expression when that could work (not sure it can in my case), but what I saw (for free) on Internet seemed to not make things any less complicated (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/wacko.gif)

On the lenovo mouse, it took me till just now to realize side scroll is broken system wide. Been so long since I had a mouse that actually supported it, never realized. Either way, it feels much nicer to use and fits my hand better than the cheap logitech. Thanks again.

NP. Glad it's doing what you want it to. May it serve you well for many years.

In Visual Studio, I wonder if there's a regular expression

Ha. That's a good one. Visual Studio. Regexes. What a great match for each other.

I wish there was an user friendly way to create an advanced search, or a regular expression when that could work (not sure it can in my case)

A regex typically will operate per-line, so it's unlikely unless you do additional filtering. I could probably do it reading from standard input in a shell script though.
Also: the more you use regexes, the more "user friendly" they become. That's in quotes for a reason, but it really does get a lot simpler over time.

I did spot 3600mhz DDR4 kits at few manufacturers' website - Essencore (Klevv), Geil and Kingston (HyperX). That probably won't matter after all since Zen 3 won't be compatible with my motherboard.

Never mind that, will those DDR4 _chipsets_ be compatible with that RAM?
It might be meant for servers or mainframes; IDK. Don't really care to look, and anyway it sounds strange that they'd be advertising something as complying with DDR4 specifications when it operates well over twice the maximum specified rate I've seen for DDR4. Maybe the chips refresh twice per cycle via a clock multiplier or some stupid shit like that for marketing purposes. If it does it that way it won't actually improve throughput.

I'm installing FVWM3 to try out. Hopefully, everything will be a smooth transition and I'll never have to use FVWM2 again. It has some nice things like XRandR support, so I don't have to use the Xinerama backend and reload FVWM whenever I change monitor configuration.

Update: Yep, FVWM3's working pretty well.
Only problem so far is that some old submodules have been temporarily removed, but thankfully I made minimal use of those and primarily wrote gtk (and a couple TCL) applets to extend FVWM instead of just using FvwmForms. I don't even feel like I need to replace the remaining functions, since one of them isn't necessary anymore (I don't need to reload FVWM constantly, like when I rotate my screen, because FVWM3 supports RandR) and the other thing is just a 'run dialogue' that used an FvwmForm which I basically have whenever I open a terminal anyway.

So, all in all, quite pleased.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 10 2020, 03:14

Never mind that, will those DDR4 _chipsets_ be compatible with that RAM?
It might be meant for servers or mainframes; IDK. Don't really care to look, and anyway it sounds strange that they'd be advertising something as complying with DDR4 specifications when it operates well over twice the maximum specified rate I've seen for DDR4. Maybe the chips refresh twice per cycle via a clock multiplier or some stupid shit like that for marketing purposes. If it does it that way it won't actually improve throughput.

120% sure. Klevv Bolt X, Kingston HyperX & Geil Evo Spear are geared towards consumers. Or as their marketing says it, for gamers. Corsair Vengeance & Patriot Viper memories have reached 4000Mhz.

120% sure. Klevv Bolt X, Kingston HyperX & Geil Evo Spear are geared towards consumers. Or as their marketing says it, for gamers. Corsair Vengeance & Patriot Viper memories have reached 4000Mhz.

Please give a datasheet for that or I don't really trust they're measuring 4GHz the way I am.
It makes no sense to have RAM that refreshes as fast as a CPU core since most opcodes take multiple clocks.

Please give a datasheet for that or I don't really trust they're measuring 4GHz the way I am.
It makes no sense to have RAM that refreshes as fast as a CPU core since most opcodes take multiple clocks.

[assets.website-files.com] Patriot Viper Steel

[www.corsair.com] Corsair Vengeance LPX

[assets.website-files.com] Patriot Viper Steel

[www.corsair.com] Corsair Vengeance LPX

That's not a datasheet. That's a specs list.
They're different things.
I meant like a datasheet for the chips they are populating on their sticks, so you know the actual read speed in nanoseconds or whatever. The ones that engineers use when they design the ram sticks around the chips.

Point is, pretty sure it's snake oil.

Thanks for the links to the items though.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 10 2020, 08:36

I just encountered hCaptcha. I wish all website would employ it since the Google-owned reCaptcha is super annoying to users of non-Chrome based browsers. Several times I had got it right, but reCaptcha still failed me on purpose.

I meant like a datasheet for the chips they are populating on their sticks, so you know the actual read speed in nanoseconds or whatever. The ones that engineers use when they design the ram sticks around the chips.

None.

This post has been edited by loli-hujan86: May 10 2020, 16:03

Managed to lock up my pc in forever.

Was deleting about 5 gigs of shit and then opened a movie to watch but everything froze and cltr+alt+delete made it worse cos it locked my cursor and i had to do a hard reset and foobar being the piece of shit that it is lost a small chuck of my newly added albums/songs to my playlist because it doesn't have good error handling or native backup.

I'm so pissed i installed foo jesus again.

This post has been edited by Pillowgirl: May 11 2020, 10:39

I just encountered hCaptcha. I wish all website would employ it[...]

Be careful with those wishes.
Many (most?all?) captchas have different versions, and sometimes you see the best at first (like recaptcha only requiring a click and nothing more (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif) ), but later you find some hellish implementation.

Managed to lock up my pc in forever.

Was deleting about 5 gigs of shit and then opened a movie to watch but everything froze and cltr+alt+delete made it worse cos it locked my cursor and i had to do a hard reset and foobar being the piece of shit that it is lost a small chuck of my newly added albums/songs to my playlist because it doesn't have good error handling or native backup.

I'm so pissed i installed foo jesus again.

First mistake:
Win32
Second mistake:
Foobar2000

No, but really, I feel bad for you, but I don't have a clue why it happened or if it'll happen again. Did you run out of RAM due to some insidious background process?

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 11 2020, 12:06

Laptop ram size seems to have leveled off at 16gb. I did see one 24gb and a some 32gb machines. The cheapest 17" dell with 32gb was a $2200 one, system76 was closer to $2600. MSI has some cheaper, but won't ist prices and configurations on their own website- so it's kinda hard to browse. The $1400 MSI looked to have unimpressive specs elsewhere, but I don't claim to know which chipsets are good.

It's mainly GPU perfromance I'm falling behind on, but CPU and RAM could do better.
Current specs to the best of my knowledge [why won't people give GFX memory size for laptops?]:
Inspiron 5765, out of warranty since December of 2017
AMD FX-9800P CPU, quad core 2.7GHz
16GB DDR4 RAM, 1866MHz
AMD Radeon R7 M445DX, 4GB?? GDDR5
Crucial MX500 2TB, 6GBPs
1920x1080 60Hz 17.3" screen
DVD +/- RW burner
SD card slot
2x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0

This post has been edited by Wayward_Vagabond: May 11 2020, 16:58