[X] My Assistant

Need to replace my laptop, seeing it stay at 0% available battery for more than 1 hour, was just another symptom of that poor 12 years old gramps needing a permanent rest.
But right now, things are much more costly than what I'm willing to put on it (less than before, doesn't help).
I guess I will have to wait for special circumstances.

Need to replace my laptop, seeing it stay at 0% available battery for more than 1 hour, was just another symptom of that poor 12 years old gramps needing a permanent rest.
But right now, things are much more costly than what I'm willing to put on it (less than before, doesn't help).
I guess I will have to wait for special circumstances.

you could always pick up a replacement battery from ebay/alie that'll roughly last a year for ~20 bux. if its at all still worth it.

depending on your device it might be a better idea to blow it out in one piece, I've slightly ruined the look of more things than I want to remember taking them appart and breaking little 'one time snap-in' plastic clips holding cases together.

…Almost every Famicom cartridge ever. I hate this, too. I've come to like using rubber cement brushed around the inside edges of carts to hold them back together afterwards; It makes them easy to pry open again but it holds well enough that it won't open up accidentally in normal use.

My iPod Classic, however, is probably never going to look right again after I opened it up a few times (metal clips on metallic body pieces that bent). I fucking hate trying to fix Apple stuff.

Whenever the bottom RAM slot finally decides to stop enumerating I'll probably stop bothering with this Powerbook; it's a bit easier to open than an iPod Classic, but it still has a couple metal tabs and a small bent area that'll never flatten out above the DVD drive lip.

I'm compiling Netsurf from source code for PowerPC Linux again. It's a newer version this time, though.

For something that pretty much doesn't work (especially since dynamically redrawing the page is pretty much not going to happen in the current engine), the Javascript backend stuff in Netsurf sure does take a long time to compile. Beats compiling a Mozilla product, though, which usually fails inexplicably with some cryptic Rust error I'm too stupid to understand which never appears on x86 machines.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 1 2020, 07:14

"are the accounts across the e-hentai verse linked or separate?'' lol mine used to be ie e-hentai worked but now im not sure as I cant really ever tell if im logged in to e-hentai, tbh! lol still love the work (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

given the autocorrection im guessin that is no more, im just slow on the uptake lol

This post has been edited by TabooAnalAddict: Sep 1 2020, 07:28

Need to replace my laptop because a modular part of it that can be removed and replaced isn't working

Typical consumers…

I got a new battery for my Powerbook about two years ago, which I'm typing this on. From back when apple made laptops with user-replaceable battery packs. I guess this is 16 years old now, but it doesn't actually feel like it with the exceptions of when I try to decode h.265 or play games on it.

It actually has a very nice keyboard compared to most modern machines; at least on par with my 2010-ish thinkpad (although '90s thinkpads do have better keyboard feel).

Also, I built netsurf successfully for it; they moved the tab bar above the URL bar. Ugh. It's really stupid how everyone's done that, but I guess I'll live. When I use FF I have some CSS to force it to its holy configuration.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 1 2020, 08:27

Typical consumers…

Typical idiots that don't read the whole thing, notably the "12 years old part" and "just another symptom", meaning there have been plenty of things wrong until now (though it doesn't imply the laptop went into repairs for it, but that doesn't save it).

"are the accounts across the e-hentai verse linked or separate?'' lol mine used to be ie e-hentai worked but now im not sure as I cant really ever tell if im logged in to e-hentai, tbh! lol still love the work (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

given the autocorrection im guessin that is no more, im just slow on the uptake lol

more something for the helpdesk forum but everything is technology I guess, yes its just the forum account thats used on e-hentai

My iPod Classic, however, is probably never going to look right again after I opened it up a few times (metal clips on metallic body pieces that bent). I fucking hate trying to fix Apple stuff.

Whenever the bottom RAM slot finally decides to stop enumerating I'll probably stop bothering with this Powerbook; it's a bit easier to open than an iPod Classic, but it still has a couple metal tabs and a small bent area that'll never flatten out above the DVD drive lip.

not sure what's worse, metal clips that bent or plastic ones that snap off.
but these days even those start to look like a luxery compared to things just BEING GLUED and having to replace the adhesive to get it back together. or in some cases, it never going back together (thanks sonically welded china plastic cases).

Beats compiling a Mozilla product, though, which usually fails inexplicably with some cryptic Rust error I'm too stupid to understand which never appears on x86 machines.

it gets worse each time as well, as they move more random parts to rust. and it doesnt help their build system is awful. so a random rust compiler error can take 4 layers to unpeal to get down to it just being some dependency missing.

not sure what's worse, metal clips that bent or plastic ones that snap off.
but these days even those start to look like a luxery compared to things just BEING GLUED and having to replace the adhesive to get it back together. or in some cases, it never going back together (thanks sonically welded china plastic cases).

Yeah, I'll have to take apart my Pixel 2 XL at some point if I ever want to use its USB-C connector for data transfers or audio ever again. Not looking forward to trying to get it back in one piece. But at least I don't have to replace the LCD itself, which would be a complete disaster to adhere back in place. The USB-C is on a daughterboard, thankfully.

it gets worse each time as well, as they move more random parts to rust. and it doesnt help their build system is awful. so a random rust compiler error can take 4 layers to unpeal to get down to it just being some dependency missing.

You might be the only other person I've talked to who actually builds Mozilla stuff from sources. Any reason you do it?
I mainly got into it because of Seamonkey, which isn't an official Debian package anymore, but I build FF too because of a few reasons (apart from security stuff, I also compile it with Alsa support). Most of the stuff, like addon signing enforcement, can actually be neutralized by unpacking and editing some files in 'omni.ja' without a fresh build, though.

And yeah; I remember not so long ago I didn't need Rust _at all_ to build Mozilla products. And then when i tried to build something (FF 58 maybe?), Debian Sid (unstable) didn't have a recent enough version of rust in the package manager so I had to "build the world" (compile my own Rust, which IIRC required an already working version of rust as a bootstrap).

For this most recent FF build I had to install some random Cargo helper program or something, which itself had around 400 other dependencies. I really hate this trend of pip, npm, cargo, etc. of every language having a repository.

Also, once I finally had ironed out all the problems, and made a couple patches backported from their mercurial head to the release so that it would actually build successfully, a FF 80 build took my computer an hour and fifteen minutes. This same machine could compile FF 52 (I think; it might have actually been a bit older than that) in around 30-45 minutes from nothing just a couple years ago.

I ran out of hard disk space twice, too.

And this is off-topic, but I miss XULRunner.
In other news, EHG doesn't work properly in Netsurf (navigation bar is messed up, thumbnails are too), but the forum works fine.

Just modified an ancient bare-bones .PSF (playstation 1 chiptune) player to have an ncurses frontend and interactive controls (like volume adjustments). It's so old that it's still using OSS (I'm wrapping it through aoss), and it won't compile in GCC 10 without '-fcommon' being passed; I don't know if I'm really up to the task of fixing that particular issue; it'd be a massive restructuring and I'm sure I'd make the code a lot uglier. I also would like to maybe try to update the ancient XMMS 1.x library for modern XMMS, but I don't actually use XMMS so I don't know if I really will follow through on that.
I'm gonna go to sleep to some calmer chiptunes now though.


This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 2 2020, 11:06

but I miss XULRunner.

No one can genuinely say that XULRunner was good, come one. The majority of build "adaptations" (to be euphemic on the word) that mozilla had was due to XULRunner. And these are still in there making the build a complete pain.

I like rust but I do see that mozilla is slowly fucking it up. There are good languages out there that have been devastated by small - extremely stupid - decisions in their package management and build systems. e.g. I really like clojure and find scala quite acceptable (if compared to java) but would not touch a reasonably sized system written in those with a 10 foot pole. Their use of maven and sometimes even ant in all builds of clojure and scala makes you write java code to fix scala code the majority of your time. i.e. in the end you are writing more java than clojure or scala - or worse you are doing more XML file manipulation than coding.

I'm afraid for a similar fate for rust. You may know rust alright but to build anything in rust you need to *really* know the mozilla build chain garbage - for any rust project not only mozilla projects.

You might be the only other person I've talked to who actually builds Mozilla stuff from sources. Any reason you do it?
I mainly got into it because of Seamonkey, which isn't an official Debian package anymore, but I build FF too because of a few reasons (apart from security stuff, I also compile it with Alsa support). Most of the stuff, like addon signing enforcement, can actually be neutralized by unpacking and editing some files in 'omni.ja' without a fresh build, though.

And yeah; I remember not so long ago I didn't need Rust _at all_ to build Mozilla products. And then when i tried to build something (FF 58 maybe?), Debian Sid (unstable) didn't have a recent enough version of rust in the package manager so I had to "build the world" (compile my own Rust, which IIRC required an already working version of rust as a bootstrap).

there were some times before when there was a bug I was trying to get rid of. there's still a particular one that causes firefox to hang when typing from multiple keyboards(see the long complaint here: [bugzilla.mozilla.org] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1640535). It's usually some bug breaking something in a new version, someone finds a way to patch it, and I build firefox from source for a while with that patch until fixed (unfortunatualy for that bug there still isnt anything I could work out besides the workaround).

before I also used icecat built from source for a while. lots of times a new release would just introduce more issues building it for no apparent reason. but that was when firefox based anything would only take ~30 minutes for me to build, I think the last time I clocked it at well over 1 hour 30 minutes. so even though the prebuild package leaves a lot to be desired (note a lot of telemetry disabling flags missing: [github.com] https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packa...runk/PKGBUILD.), it beats building it from source for me currently.

that said I do know a couple people that are still massochistic enough to maintain their own firefox build for their oddball distro, which keep me up to date on the build system still being as awful as ever to deal with through version changes and increased rust usage.

For this most recent FF build I had to install some random Cargo helper program or something, which itself had around 400 other dependencies. I really hate this trend of pip, npm, cargo, etc. of every language having a repository.

to make matters worse with the increased use of the rust toolchain memory usage for building is also going up, some people already unable to build it now just because of that.

That reminds me, I was completely unable to build FF for PowerPC this time around. It wasn't due to RAM shortages; I was using a chroot on a machine with 16GB of RAM.

There are several patches I made for older versions to make them run stably on it, but I guess I can't do that anymore due to cryptic Rust errors.

No one can genuinely say that XULRunner was good, come one. The majority of build "adaptations" (to be euphemic on the word) that mozilla had was due to XULRunner. And these are still in there making the build a complete pain.

I like rust but I do see that mozilla is slowly fucking it up. There are good languages out there that have been devastated by small - extremely stupid - decisions in their package management and build systems. e.g. I really like clojure and find scala quite acceptable (if compared to java) but would not touch a reasonably sized system written in those with a 10 foot pole. Their use of maven and sometimes even ant in all builds of clojure and scala makes you write java code to fix scala code the majority of your time. i.e. in the end you are writing more java than clojure or scala - or worse you are doing more XML file manipulation than coding.

I'm afraid for a similar fate for rust. You may know rust alright but to build anything in rust you need to *really* know the mozilla build chain garbage - for any rust project not only mozilla projects.

IDK, I liked XULRunner for making GUI's. I know it was awful under the surface.

I am a fan of Common Lisp myself and had thought of trying Clojure; it's a shame if that's the way it's going.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 2 2020, 19:16

I soldered tabs onto a watch battery (CR2025) today, by first sanding down the surfaces of the battery and then fluxing & soldering.

I used an ice cube wrapped in tinfoil to keep the battery cool between applications of the iron. Seems to be working alright so far in my copy of Pokémon Red.

At the very least I probably still diminished the life of the battery some, but I don't actually know my chemistry well enough to guarantee that. Just a guess.

Trading a couple Pokémon into my copy of Red really is making this run a lot faster; especially helpful was having something that knew cut so I could bypass a huge chunk of battles north of Cerulean City and get a bike earlier. As a side-effect of that I'll also be able to see the mythical truck, as pointless as that is.

I went up above Cerulean once I had a bike, though, to catch an Abra and also to do the "mew glitch" a few times. Will probably fight more of the trainers there just to train Abra a bit.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 3 2020, 10:46

I soldered tabs onto a watch battery (CR2025) today, by first sanding down the surfaces of the battery and then fluxing & soldering.

I used an ice cube wrapped in tinfoil to keep the battery cool between applications of the iron. Seems to be working alright so far in my copy of Pokémon Red.

batteries are okay with a surprising amount of heat, as long as you dont let it soak into the entire battery. I usually get a big tip on iron and do it as quickly as possible. did it a while ago to make some random battery pack cells usable as regular batteries(missed the top point).

they're quite nice as they're slightly closer to the voltage of non rechargable AAs, which work a treat in old electronics that dislike the lower voltage rechargables.

that said though was probably very close to shorting these, but hey it keeps the task interesting.

My 750ti just died, it overheated playing a shitty coded game and crashed hard(you know shit is going wrong when the fans start maxing out for particle effects).

Now it has gross artifacts and lines and won't display over 740x480 and it's in washed out 8 bit color, i cleaned it to try and revive it but nah.

Tried all the ports on it and it won't display without going into safe mode, normal boot hardlocks the system when it tries to display 1080p.

Sucks man, debating whether to bake it.

This post has been edited by Pillowgirl: Sep 3 2020, 18:27

My 750ti just died, it overheated playing a shitty coded game and crashed hard(you know shit is going wrong when the fans start maxing out for particle effects).

That's weird, because the on-card firmware should limit power usage to 38 watts (judging by nvidia-smi on my 750ti).

considering baking it.

Eh, might as well, but first I'd try pushing down on individual non-BGA parts/areas of the card while booting and see if you can find exactly what part or area of the board is failing.

I suspect the parts labeled "U6" and "U7" on the reference card design, but admittedly I have no idea what those parts actually are; they're just the only non-RAM secondary IC's I see on the card.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 3 2020, 22:51

Sucks man, debating whether to bake it.

Isn't the usual thing to remove the card, examine all connectors for deformity, verify all parts don't smell burnt with the sniff test, clean the connector fingers and socket, then reseat the board?

That's weird, because the on-card firmware should limit power usage to 38 watts (judging by nvidia-smi on my 750ti).

Hahaha vrm design issues were common for a couple of generations where nvidia physx could cause excessive power draw.

Crysis 3 was a RMA meme for a while because there was a part of a game with a rope that used an excessive amount of physx to troll nvidia and it could cause some cards to fail. Hahah lol that was the 700 series.

Crysis 1 was and still is used for benchmarks for AMD and Nvidia.

Crysis 2 was sponsored by Nvidia and they put in an excessive amount of tessellation (eg 1000x required) which murdered the performance of AMD cards.

Crysis 3 was sponsored by AMD and they got revenge by coding certain elements throughout the game with excessive physx. Sweet revenge. lol. Grass murdered nvidia cards because there was so much but single ropes in some stages hit the hardest.

Isn't the usual thing to remove the card, examine all connectors for deformity, verify all parts don't smell burnt with the sniff test, clean the connector fingers and socket, then reseat the board?

I think you can assume that's been done already.

batteries are okay with a surprising amount of heat, as long as you dont let it soak into the entire battery. I usually get a big tip on iron and do it as quickly as possible. did it a while ago to make some random battery pack cells usable as regular batteries(missed the top point).

they're quite nice as they're slightly closer to the voltage of non rechargable AAs, which work a treat in old electronics that dislike the lower voltage rechargables.

That looks pretty good.

And yeah, I was using the ice cube to try to prevent the heat from sinking inwards.
Got the idea from Bill Herd's [c128.com] Commodore 128 story, wherein one of the CP/M programming guys from Digital Research had taken to cooling his prototype machine's prototype MOS 8563 (VDC, video display controller) chip by using an ice cube in a hot-air popcorn popper's butter tray sitting on top.

…the only problem was that no one told the guy (Von Ertwine) who was developing CP/M at home (consultant). Von had wisely chosen not to try to follow all of the current Revs of the 8563, instead he latched onto a somewhat working Rev4 and kept it for software development. Later we would find out that Von, to make the 8563 work properly, was taking the little metal cup that came with his hot air popcorn popper (it was a buttercup to be exact) and would put an Ice cube in it and set it on the 8563. He got about 1/2 hour of operation per cube. On our side there was talk of rigging cans of cold spray with foot switches for the CES
show, "sparkle??? I don't <pissshhh> see any sparkle <pissshhh>". Anyways, no-one told Von.... but don't worry, he would find out the day before CES during setup in 'Vegas.

He didn't have a compiler to fix the changes for the new VDC revisions the day before the Vegas show, so he patched it in the binaries in a disk editor, recalculating checksums by hand. Bloody legend.

Speaking of legends, this guy

Typical idiots that don't read the whole thing, notably the "12 years old part" and "just another symptom", meaning there have been plenty of things wrong until now (though it doesn't imply the laptop went into repairs for it, but that doesn't save it).

You use windows, and aren't buying a new battery and would rather contribute another laptop to e-waste. Therefore you are a typical consumer.
Whatever else is wrong with it could use stating because otherwise I'm going to assume it just has a chipped corner of the plastic in the case or something else equally insubstantial. My newest laptop is 10 years old and its only problem is a small hairline fracture in the palmrest.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 4 2020, 10:22

Isn't the usual thing to remove the card, examine all connectors for deformity, verify all parts don't smell burnt with the sniff test, clean the connector fingers and socket, then reseat the board?

I already did all that, first thing i did.

I'm checking out replacement cards, rx 550, 750ti, 950, 1050ti, 1650.

Saw a 2080ti for 420$, i think that the upcoming 3070 for 500$(i think) will beat it easily, so no point in going balls to the wall now.

Also saw a 2070 for 300$


LATE EDIT : now i found a 1080ti for 170$, my wallet is itching

This post has been edited by Pillowgirl: Sep 4 2020, 20:28

Speaking of legends, this guy

I'm almost tempted to try this, it cant be super unsafe with an atx psu since they have a current cutoff and usually lock for a second after they go into overcurrent.

I already did all that, first thing i did.

I'm checking out replacement cards, rx 550, 750ti, 950, 1050ti, 1650.

Saw a 2080ti for 420$, i think that the upcoming 3070 for 500$(i think) will beat it easily, so no point in going balls to the wall now.

Also saw a 2070 for 300$

might as well bake it at this point it might work for a bit till you pull the trigger on replacements and you could sell it later