[X] My Assistant

my friend's friend burned out out my friend's speaker's voice coil.

Years ago I had a job replacing voice coils, foam, etc. in speakers. Kind of hoping I remember enough to do it again. It was a fun job. I'm not sure where my boss ordered voice coils from, though… I hope they're easily available for his speakers.

Also, I'm running up against the 2TB barrier in my old laptop. Since it has only one drive bay built in and no m.2 slot, I'm wondering if doing something like a hybrid MBR would let me sidestep the issue. Probably not but I'll have to look into the underlying cause of the barrier on BIOS systems.

It'd be neat if I could find a reputable maker of mini-PCIe (_NOT_ M2) SSD's; i.e. ones that act like a SATA controller as far as the PC is concerned. Then I could just shove one in my WAN card slot, since I removed the WAN card (and the BIOS card whitelist) ages ago. I know I couldn't boot from one of those, but I wouldn't be doing that anyway; just using it for additional storage capacity.

An ExpressCard/54mm SSD from a reputable maker would be cool, as well. Looks like someone's developing an M.2 ExpressCard adapter, but they aren't for sale yet.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 16 2020, 22:19

my friend's friend burned out out my friend's speaker's voice coil.

Years ago I had a job replacing voice coils, foam, etc. in speakers. Kind of hoping I remember enough to do it again. It was a fun job. I'm not sure where my boss ordered voice coils from, though… I hope they're easily available for his speakers.

Like 10 years ago where I am, there were only two local suppliers left.

Not even sure now.

I made a division algorithm (currently only for unsigned integers), but I now need tests to make sure it work properly.
I wonder where I could find division with big numbers (my thing should support 1 billion) and their result (otherwise I can't test efficiently (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/wink.gif).
For now I passed the small tests I did:

CODE

Divide 10000 by 100, expecting 100
100
Divide 10000 by 500, expecting 20
20
Divide 10000 by 9, expecting 1111
1111
Divide 111111111*0 by 12345679, expecting 9*0=0
0
Divide 111111111*1 by 12345679, expecting 9*1=9
9
Divide 111111111*2 by 12345679, expecting 9*2=18
18
Divide 111111111*3 by 12345679, expecting 9*3=27
27
Divide 111111111*4 by 12345679, expecting 9*4=36
36
Divide 111111111*5 by 12345679, expecting 9*5=45
45
Divide 111111111*6 by 12345679, expecting 9*6=54
54
Divide 111111111*7 by 12345679, expecting 9*7=63
63
Divide 111111111*8 by 12345679, expecting 9*8=72
72
Divide 111111111*9 by 12345679, expecting 9*9=81
81

Is this what you are after?

CODE

# python
>>> sum([100/75]*75)
99.99999999999991

Saw this and thought it looks cool and cute (small and pretty light weight only 900gram) for 32TB

Than I saw the price and said never mind lol (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/dry.gif) (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

(IMG:[i.redd.it] https://i.redd.it/8ish5pq6jt261.jpg)

My old NAS with traditional hard drives cost 4k back in the day for the total package. Still working.

That would be a pretty massive upgrade... but my old one is still working.

Years ago I had a job replacing voice coils, foam, etc. in speakers. Kind of hoping I remember enough to do it again. It was a fun job. I'm not sure where my boss ordered voice coils from, though… I hope they're easily available for his speakers.

Does standardization of speaker cones even exist anymore? When it's all custom, then only the manufacturer is able to replace their own special windings in order to preserve the dynamic range and soundstage since there are multiple windings in those better speakers. Below is documentation of a Virtual Voice Coil product for emulation of this part in speaker design It's not so far-fetched because it's very similar to electrical motor winding emulation which was already done in the 1980's on PCs. But the documentation is nice as it shows pictures of different types of speaker voice coil wire windings.

Examples speaker voice coil windings emulated by a Virtual Voice Coil device:
[www.speakerlab.it] https://www.speakerlab.it/resources/VVC_datasheet.pdf

Of course, the manufacturer probably wants to encourage you to buy another complete new speaker instead of repairing it. All too many manufacturers of electronics price the cost of parts about the same as the price of buying a new one. For example, it is possible to self-service some HP inkjet printers. I looked at the cost of buying just the print head and it's cost is roughly 80% the cost of just buying a whole new printer. Humbug, might as well buy a new one.

Hardware side channel research usually have the neatest tricks to show.

Latest is [arxiv.org] hitting the hardware bus to generate low power WiFi to exfiltrate data.

Adds to already growing list of methods:

Latest is [arxiv.org] hitting the hardware bus to generate low power WiFi to exfiltrate data.

Steve Gibson (of Spinrite GRC.COM fame), used to make a lot of interesting comments on USENET. You'd not see those comments anywhere on his website. One was about a contracted project for the gov't in order to listen in to very minute electromagnetic emissions in order to sift that elecctromagnetic noise to develop Data and then to process that data into Information.

Some places in Europe, like the United Kingdom, have annual usage taxes on each of your monitors able to receive TV signals. So there are those fabled TV detection vans that cruise around looking to see that each house they pass by has purchased the proper number of usage licenses for the number of signal emitters in their household. Is it illegal to make fake signal emitters? I can imagine someone putting up a bunch of Raspberry PI controllers to drive a bucket brigade device that then pumps a bunch of separately tuned auto-transformers to emit fake horizontal scan signals for old time TV monitors. Otherwise, it's impossible to hide a smart TV since they will always try to phone home.
[en.wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_li...tion_technology

Hardware side channel research usually have the neatest tricks to show.

Latest is [arxiv.org] hitting the hardware bus to generate low power WiFi to exfiltrate data.

Adds to already growing list of methods:

On conf calls with a camera I always keep my router behind me, and I point it all so that the LEDs are visible.

I often test the people on the call whether they can do a blinkenlights against my connection.

Spoiler text - Highlight to read...

They can't, video FPS is waaaaay too slow for it to be possible.

But that fact did not stop a bunch of "clever" people telling me that they indeed can blinkelight me and that I should not have the router there.

A very effective way of measuring attention to detail and ego.

Thermal and fans??

I had read papers on other methods but are those real? I thought that was a joke.

Fans makes sense as being possible but how do oyu use CPU temp?


Also atm getting stressed out by diagnostic lights on one malfunctioning device spazzing out.

Oh so its green so all good? Nope, needs to alternate green and yellow???

Oh its white? is that good, nope super fucked.

Red is bad? No that is good if it lights up first.


Wat??

On conf calls with a camera I always keep my router behind me, and I point it all so that the LEDs are visible.

I often test the people on the call whether they can do a blinkenlights against my connection.

I thought you could only use the LEDs to get data from the LEDs on the router if it was hacked to blink 1000x faster.

It would be easier to use the special data packet to get admin access.

This post has been edited by EsotericSatire: Dec 21 2020, 02:57

It's a real shame Adobe seems so determined to milk Flash dry; they look to have transferred rights relating to it (or AIR, at least) to Harman (basically Samsung) so it won't become open-source and they can keep someone profiting off late transitioners.
I thought, since in the past they donated Flex to Apache (Flex is a bunch of tools to author SWF's without using Adobe Flash; works as a bunch of command-line tools), that maybe we'd get lucky or something. But i guess they really want it stone-cold dead and don't care about preserving historic media authored in the format.

Gnash works really well for most pre-Actionscript-3 flashes, but has been abandoned and gets harder to build every year. It's also been removed from Debian, so I'm building it using the old (now removed) Debian patches plus a couple of my own. It's a shame that none of the AS3 flash implementation attempts ever just used Gnash's renderer as a base, since it appears to work way better than any other I've seen, and it seems that Flash doesn't use a very different rendering "architecture" for AS3 flashes versus older ones.

Lightspark's renderer appears to be pretty bad, and its AS3 implementation far from complete. It also has a nasty habit of segfaulting, and doesn't save session storage information (shared object "flash cookies"), even as an option for things like games that might save data.
I think Lightspark really should have used 'agg' as its rendering backend, like Gnash did.

Ruffle looks like another Rust meme, but I mainly say that because I can't get the damn thing to build and it has about three million dependencies. It also doesn't support AS3 much at all at the moment.
--

So I went and helped my friend with his busted speaker today.
Turned out the only issue was that the two tinsel leads (the braided wires) running between the voice coil and the connectors were touching each other and shorting out. Spread them apart and they worked again. Easy.

Figured it out before even removing the speakers from their housing by just poking at the terminals with an ohm meter.

Does standardization of speaker cones even exist anymore? When it's all custom, then only the manufacturer is able to replace their own special windings in order to preserve the dynamic range and soundstage since there are multiple windings in those better speakers. Below is documentation of a Virtual Voice Coil product for emulation of this part in speaker design It's not so far-fetched because it's very similar to electrical motor winding emulation which was already done in the 1980's on PCs. But the documentation is nice as it shows pictures of different types of speaker voice coil wire windings.

Usually, with newer speakers we didn't see generic cone sizing (easily replaceable). Especially with car audio. That meant the real trick was getting the surrounds off without damaging the original cones so that we could take out the cone and get to the coil. We usually would use with MEK (methyl ethyl ketone). You just have to let it sit for a while and then it scrapes right off usually. If your surrounds are foam, be prepared to replace them after doing this, though, since they'll likely crumble away.
But the cone and the voice coil can usually be replaced separately from each other. If you have multiple voice coils, then you might be in trouble, but the vast majority of loudspeakers, even good ones, still use a single coil per cone, and are pretty simple as a result. Car audio was the most annoying thing, since a lot of those don't even use standard impedances or diameters.

Of course, the manufacturer probably wants to encourage you to buy another complete new speaker instead of repairing it.

Yeah. I specifically remember Cerwin-Vega speakers being annoying in that they had special foam surrounds. My mid-70's Jensens did, too, and those were more annoying because the correct replacement pretty much doesn't exist anymore (Jensen has changed hands over 9,000 times since then). Ended up just getting a surround close enough and cutting it to fit.

All too many manufacturers of electronics price the cost of parts about the same as the price of buying a new one. For example, it is possible to self-service some HP inkjet printers. I looked at the cost of buying just the print head and it's cost is roughly 80% the cost of just buying a whole new printer. Humbug, might as well buy a new one.

I thought printer ink being a ripoff was common knowledge at this point.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 21 2020, 09:16

Got my money back from eBay scammer. He was, fortunately, too lazy to add a fake tracking number- so I didn't have to wait 3 days for him to not respond to case I had to wait 10 days to open. Lesson learned.

I am going to give a friend a copy of Monster Girl Quest without any documentation on how to set locales and stuff.

This might be interesting. He's a CS student but still refuses to use a good OS; I wonder how long it'll take him to figure it out.

As a side note, I'm currently trying to see if I can get it working properly in ONScripter (it works fine in Wine, but it'd be cool to not have to use Wine at all). So far I can't figure out why it isn't adding line breaks properly, but other than that it seems to be functional.

I am going to give a friend a copy of Monster Girl Quest without any documentation on how to set locales and stuff.

I think Win10 has made it a bit easier than originally when they screwed it over. On a fresh install adding locales was easy.

I thought printer ink being a ripoff was common knowledge at this point.

Not too terrible if you can get good quality third party ink that is compatible. Still not great but it can work out to 12.5% of the price of OEM ink.

I think Win10 has made it a bit easier than originally when they screwed it over. On a fresh install adding locales was easy.

What I meant is that I'm not even gonna tell him about what locales are in Windows and watch him squirm.

Not too terrible if you can get good quality third party ink that is compatible. Still not great but it can work out to 12.5% of the price of OEM ink.

I should have specified, but I really meant OEM inks/toners. And printers that "verify" that your ink/toner is both genuine and not "expired" before letting you print.

Meanwhile I'm getting closer and closer to getting the game working properly in ONScripter. It's got a handful of minor issues on my Intel machines, some of which I've already been able to work around, but on PowerPC (big-endian) there's a bug relating to how it processes Ogg audio (…it appears to actually be an SDL 1.x bug). Basically it is swapping the bytes at some point to little-endian, which results in white noise instead of the desired audio. MP3 and Wav files play fine, though, so for now I've converted all the audio to .wav's while I figure out the rest of the issues. This however means that they music is treated as sound effects, so I'll likely have to convert the SFX noises so they can play in a different channel (the BGM one). I had to resample some of the music in the game so it all uses the same constant sample rate already. And I was able to make a one-line edit to the original game script to make line breaks work properly.

And yeah, i really just can't be bothered to try to fix a bug in SDL itself. I did try to fix it from within ONScripter, but it really looks like it's an SDL bug rather than an ONScripter one and I hate building SDL on a slow machine like this.
Also I'd like to make the font smaller, but the version I'm using (the original Japanese ONScripter) doesn't make that easy so I'll likely have to recompile once I'm all done figuring out the handful of other changes that I need to make to get this thing to work properly.

Still, being able to actually use my Powerbook (running Debian) for something is always a nice feeling. Since Wine on big-endian is probably a far greater mess to even think about, I'm content with this for now.


This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 22 2020, 14:13

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is a fukken mess. Buggy as hell for something that's been out 4 months+ and costs $120 for the full game. It crashed every time I launched it on a computer that should've easily ran it. The closest thing I found to somebody having the same bug was something with the eula- but you need a second windows 10 computer to jar it into working if that's the case.
I'll try flight simulator X for now, at least steam didn't give any lip about refunding me.

Last MS flight sim I used was Combat Flight Simulator. Played it with an old MS Sidewinder force feedback pro joystick (used a DA-15 gameport).

anonymouse is sooo dead now that most sites are https, and using it for https is paywalled

What I meant is that I'm not even gonna tell him about what locales are in Windows and watch him squirm.I should have specified, but I really meant OEM inks/toners. And printers that "verify" that your ink/toner is both genuine and not "expired" before letting you print.

At least in my country they could not directly block the generic cartridges from working if they had compatible chips. However when you installed a replica ink cartridge in the last HP inkjet I had, it would come up with a pop up telling you how dangerous third party fake cartridges were, and that you may have been scammed by pirated products. Then it asked if it wasn't a genuine HP cartridge.

If you clicked no, saying it was third party, it would format the chip and brick the cartridge so you couldn't use it.

The inkjet was a total scam with OEM cartridges because it would do a quick jet clean on start up which wasted ink for no real reason.... and it would do that when waking from sleep.... So you could waste half the ink without even printing.