[X] My Assistant

[wiki.eth0.nl] ikea table

Excellent, I've been looking for something like that for aaaaages.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Aug 30 2021, 02:47

My drunken eBay buys tend to be radios and accessories, have yet to buy a computer that way.
Speaking of, why they hell are dell optiplex so expensive on ebay as of late? Everbody wants $150+ for a pentium 4 optiplex before shipping...

Old Optiplexes are good quality/serviceable corporate desktop towers in the same way that old Thinkpads are serviceable/good quality laptops. They're the most hyped option and priced accordingly unfortunately.

They are pretty good prebuilts, and they're well recognized. And they are relatively performant.

Oh yeah the other half of the equation is hardware shortages driving up demand for stuff like older CPU's/GPU's and motherboards.

also current thought: man these trays are expensive, just filling it up with proper trays(no drives or anything) would set me back another 40, and thats with the cheapest chinese garbage trays that exist.

By trays, do you mean HDD caddies?
Yeah I hate that shit. Have you considered just running scsi/sas or sata extension wires out of the rack unit?

I buy stuff online once a month at most, so even reaching for my credit card makes me apprehensive enough that I'm not sure I'd buy anything, even when drunk. I'm not sufficiently accustomed to online ordering for it to be second nature.
I have a digikey order that's been accumulating since before COVID began that I haven't pulled the trigger on yet.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Aug 30 2021, 02:56

The primary differences lie in:
a) Different phosphors, sometimes, and
(IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/cool.gif) Pro monitors often have better deflection circuitry/power regulation to prevent or reduce things like blooming.

If someone could figure out a new way to make some configurable "universal tube/deflection yoke driver" board, and could make new flyback transformers to power them, then suddenly a ton of those old random PC monitors would become fantastic retro gaming displays. I think the deflection yokes would not even need changing; just the circuitry to drive them.

The main blocker to using PC CRT's like that right now is that most of them aren't designed to scan that low, and probably need to be fitted with a different flyback and possibly other control electronics inside. But the tubes have so much potential.
I've even swapped some random old Magnavox/Philips PC monitor tube (by Chungwha Picture Tubes, CPT) into a pro broadcast set (using the deflection yoke from the broadcast monitor), and the resulting image was great. The broadcast set in question had already been using a Chungwha tube with a similar (but not identical) part number. My guess is the difference in the part number denoted the anti-glare finish on the screen face, and possibly also different phosphors. To get a really great image out of it I'd probably need a colorimeter or spectrometer to re-balance the red/blue/green guns for the new phosphors if they are different.Yeah, I get by quite comfortably with my old ones, as I've said before. Even with my inefficient crappy power supply I'm still using less energy than a lot of modern ones and I can still do the graphical stuff I want to do.

Yeah, another problem is a lot of old CRT monitors were abused with screen savers and left on 24/7. Offices often when with the cheapest monitors they could find as well.

I couldn't get the colour calibration right on most of the old monitors I used to deal with. Taking the tubes out and changing the circuitry is more hardcore than most people are willing to do. You could charge for that service.

There used to be a CRT service dude in my area but their store is long gone, went about 5 years after blockbuster died.

This post has been edited by EsotericSatire: Aug 30 2021, 03:32

Finding the proper trays, 8 of them at that, and backplane for my supermicro tower server case wasn't cheap. Neither was finding the proper set of 4 mid-chassis fan caddies.

Speaking of, why they hell are dell optiplex so expensive on ebay as of late? Everbody wants $150+ for a pentium 4 optiplex before shipping...

somehow they've gotten a surge in popularity in the past years, not sure how it started but I've heard people praise them for a while now.
think they're going the way of the thinkpad in terms of following.

By trays, do you mean HDD caddies?
Yeah I hate that shit. Have you considered just running scsi/sas or sata extension wires out of the rack unit?

yes, these overprised flimsy pieces of garbage (and this is the cheapest flimsiest one too),
at the very least it seems I was lucky as they start including chips and more garbage in these starting with g8

do really want them solely for the proper lightpipes and aeshetic, and it seems every seller is aware they can just keep the value up.
also partly ''''enterprise'''' I guess.
if I'm lucky theres some hiding at work, I have seen some old hp stuff in the racks there.

This post has been edited by cate_chan: Aug 30 2021, 19:50

I couldn't get the colour calibration right on most of the old monitors I used to deal with. Taking the tubes out and changing the circuitry is more hardcore than most people are willing to do. You could charge for that service.

Well, if you or anyone else wants me to do something feel free to ping. I could use money.
But I'd provide armchair advice free because I am just that kind of person with too much time and not enough business sense.
I've fixed some pretty horrid CRT's before. My commodore monitor was especially bad.

somehow they've gotten a surge in popularity in the past years, not sure how it started but I've heard people praise them for a while now.
think they're going the way of the thinkpad in terms of following.

Yeah, that's a better way of phrasing what I was trying to say above.

at the very least it seems I was lucky as they start including chips and more garbage in these starting with g8

What exactly do these chips do? Google-fu is failing me. Seems like HDD's might still be swappable but the fans might kick on hard or something? [old.reddit.com] https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/5...tion_from_wiki/

Thought: I have a few old IBM HDD caddies from an SCA-80 backplane machine; wonder what they're worth.

Also it's still annoying how I have to wait for the forum to purge old pictures before I can upload new avatars (if I've recently uploaded one already); I often want to make tiny tweaks to mine and have to wait ~24 hours for stuff to propagate sometimes, or reloading will randomly fetch the old or new image (even where not cached on my end).
Coming soon:

Or:

Or:

If you have an opinion on which looks better/best, lmk.
Whatever I do I can't have transparent regions to pad things out or it'll crop and stretch my image for some reason.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Aug 31 2021, 02:50

Doublepost killed. Worry not, you can always just hit the report button on it and we will be happy to sort it out.

On topic: FF really needs to stop copying chrome. FF 91 just started accessing the GPU from background threads just like chrome does. It is the most common reason for chrome crashes for fucks sake, why the hell did you folks copy that. With nvidia drivers it now becomes a nighmare - if you have both FF and chrome open and both have hardware acceleration enabled, and one is working under DRM (drm.modeset=1, i.e. direct rendering, not digital restrictions) - then your X may randomly crash because both browsers decided to re-render themselves at the same time.

This is a new level of browser wars. If you have both open and doing nothing they will still compete for which one crashes first by not checking each other's semaphores on the card's display memory.

Doublepost killed. Worry not, you can always just hit the report button on it and we will be happy to sort it out.

Thanks. I wasn't sure if I should report because I don't want to waste peoples' time/overuse it.

On topic: FF really needs to stop copying chrome.

Funny you should mention that; I just came back here to write about another Chrome/ium bug I stumbled onto.

It somehow manages to bizarrely half-use color corrections, but fails in some very arbitrary/unusual ways. It definitely does not correctly apply display profiles and 3D LUT's.
I think it might be applying corrections for embedded image colorspaces, but nothing else. But its failure mode is not any of the listed modes on displaycal's test page.
[displaycal.net] http://displaycal.net/icc-color-management-test/

Firefox handles it better (although it is still broken; in my profile picture for instance the darkest hair colour is overly purple instead of blue for instance, and saturation is generally too high as well.)

In my opinion though GIMP and other programs I've used LCMS with handle it best.

And I can't make heads or tails of the chromium bug tracker to know for sure if they're even aware of how they pretty much don't manage colors correctly. In the browser engine most of the world is using. Webkit (Apple) and Mozilla handle it a lot better.

FF 91 just started accessing the GPU from background threads just like chrome does. It is the most common reason for chrome crashes for fucks sake, why the hell did you folks copy that.

My theory is that it's because of two factors.

1. Management wants to clone Chrome, since IE cloning netscape worked for it in the 90's.
2. Development and management priorities are on another planet, and the brain drain at Mozilla is getting worse as they lay off or fire their more intelligent employees (i.e., the Rust team).

With nvidia drivers it now becomes a nighmare - if you have both FF and chrome open and both have hardware acceleration enabled, and one is working under DRM (drm.modeset=1, i.e. direct rendering, not digital restrictions) - then your X may randomly crash because both browsers decided to re-render themselves at the same time.

Ha.
Chromium actually runs slower with acceleration enabled on my machine; forcing it to use software rendering with '--disable-gpu' is the only way I can get full speed in RPG maker games (playing those by feeding a native version of nwjs the correct directory). So I only have hw accel enabled in Firefox. It seems that may be about to change, however.

This is a new level of browser wars. If you have both open and doing nothing they will still compete for which one crashes first by not checking each other's semaphores on the card's display memory.

Ah, so I'd imagine something like GPGPU would also cause crashes, then?

Update: OK, now firefox is correctly rendering my images, and I have no idea what I did.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Aug 31 2021, 01:02

Also it's still annoying how I have to wait for the forum to purge old pictures before I can upload new avatars (if I've recently uploaded one already); I often want to make tiny tweaks to mine and have to wait ~24 hours for stuff to propagate sometimes, or reloading will randomly fetch the old or new image (even where not cached on my end).

Can't you just switch profiles on HV to make it update sooner?

Can't you just switch profiles on HV to make it update sooner?

How does that flush a profile picture exactly?

Ah, so I'd imagine something like GPGPU would also cause crashes, then?

That's been around for a while. I can't use Chrome and run pytorch at the same time. Chrome always finds a way to kill the GPU in the middle of training.

I still need to test if the new FF does so now.

That's been around for a while. I can't use Chrome and run pytorch at the same time. Chrome always finds a way to kill the GPU in the middle of training.

I still need to test if the new FF does so now.

Let me know what you find; I also use Pytorch.

On topic: FF really needs to stop copying chrome. FF 91 just started accessing the GPU from background threads just like chrome does. It is the most common reason for chrome crashes for fucks sake, why the hell did you folks copy that. With nvidia drivers it now becomes a nighmare - if you have both FF and chrome open and both have hardware acceleration enabled, and one is working under DRM (drm.modeset=1, i.e. direct rendering, not digital restrictions) - then your X may randomly crash because both browsers decided to re-render themselves at the same time.

is this also happening with their webrender garbage disabled? it causes me great issues still on my nvidia system

Using chrome or chromium never once crossed my mind.

This FF addon has a byzantine configuration UI. [addons.mozilla.org] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ad...itcher-revived/

There was an addon called UAControl for classic mozilla that did it way better. I still use it in Seamonkey.
But it looks like this is the only current firefox addon that allows per-domain user agent string control. At least it works… with a couple annoying twists you need to account for.

Also, I just realized "byzantine" as a synonym for something ridiculously convoluted is such a weird phrase. I bet it's confusing for non-native english speakers.

Using chrome or chromium never once crossed my mind.

I thought about it before I knew better.
But it would just be limiting myself.

Thought: Mozilla has been copying Chrome/Chromium for like a decade now. I don't think they're going to stop (which makes me sad since it's slowly losing everything that made it good).

Also FF 2.x or 3.x was Mozilla's peak. 4.x was when they clearly started taking notes from Google's book, and also shot themselves in the foot with the rapid release approach.

It's almost like they don't want their browser to differentiate itself at all.

It's fine if they want the browser to be compatible with all pages that chrome/chromium are, since they need to do that or people will abandon firefox; I just wish they wouldn't copy all the "chrome" (the UI; netscape called the browser UI the chrome. Thus userChrome.css.)

I wonder how long we have until Mozilla removes userChrome.css functionality instead of just needing the about:config setting changed.

By the way you might want to enable telemetry just so they see that people are using the about:config pref for it. I would but it's compiled out of my build and I don't really want to rebuild it. I have the distinct feeling they made it a pref so they could gauge how many people were using it.

This way, they can remove it claiming their telemetry showed no one used it - all while ignoring the obvious skewed results because power users are the ones who know to turn telemetry reporting off. They've done exactly this before when they stopped baking in support for the ALSA audio backend and then acting surprised when they get backlash (but refusing to backpedal).

If telemetry were opt-in instead of opt-out, I think power users might be more likely to turn it on, since opt-in is a non-evil behaviour.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 1 2021, 03:48

How does that flush a profile picture exactly?

It used to also update the forum profile rather than waiting up to 24 hours.

Doesn't look like I can use an APNG as a profile picture. I think the backend software does something and discards the animation frames. Damn.

Doesn't look like I can use an APNG as a profile picture. I think the backend software does something and discards the animation frames. Damn.

theres always gif for both transparency and animation


This post has been edited by cate_chan: Sep 1 2021, 21:53

You can use gif for profile picture for a while now.

I've been wanting to switch to one but can't find the animated version of mine from ages ago.

theres always gif for both transparency and animation

Well yeah. But APNG is both smaller and better (supports alpha channel gradients). It'd be nice if it was supported here.
It was a thought for the "last thing you thought" thread. I'm waiting for the cache to flush to upload a gif I already prepped.
BTW my four frame GIF is smaller than the one you posted by 60 bytes or so, but the APNG is 300 bytes smaller.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 2 2021, 03:01