[X] My Assistant

I wonder what alternatives exist to earplugs you have to screw in your ears so they stay in place, but it can hurt in the morning?
Headphones at least would not work due to possibility of turning around... (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/unsure.gif)

You need to get a sampler pack of different types & brands of earplugs. The foam in some of them will stick to the lining of your ear canal and start to irritate the skin, and the foam in others will not. Also, it is possible to sleep all night while wearing earmuffs; I've done it many times. If I wake up & they're off, I put them back on.

When printing envelopes, it's necessary to set the paper type to envelope, not just paper size, or else they will smear. I thought my old envelopes weren't laser-printer compatible, bought new ones, they smeared too, found out that was the problem.

P.P.S.: star wars 4k77 looks pretty good. It's amazing they managed to obtain and scan a technicolor print. I wonder where they had access to a film scanner?
Also, I've heard it's hard to transfer technicolor films to video due to a contrast problem. IDK how prevalent it

It took international effort and former Lucas Arts staff to pull it all together. I currently have the despecialised editions.

I might try to download the newer 4k version. I like the feel of the original movies, the enhancements killed the soul of the film. Mainly because George Lucas is actually a terrible editor and is not great at writing dialogue. Its a shame he didn't bring back his original team for the prequels. The team effort was greater than the individual outputs.

the new trilogy was bleh, I predicted the ending based trying to guess the dumbest ending.



edit: bios update made mobo dumber. Now it has a cpu fan error (until I set to ignore) because the rad fans were on a low voltage connector. Previously it would detect everything fine. Previously with it detecting the pump it realised there was no issue.

This post has been edited by EsotericSatire: Nov 23 2021, 13:00

Every time it says "by default" you can ignore that because it means mplayer can be configured to do it.

It's fine if you want to use mpv, I prefer the performance of mplayer.

I do kinda want to prefer it, but I'm afraid I'm too used to mpv.
if mplayer was like a single package install with less deps than mpv I'd probably work around the few things I'm complaining about currently, but for the time being it seems like I gain very little in my current usecases.

good to keep in mind mplayer is mostly perfectly usable though, I recall some old machines that used to be fine playing full hd content on mpv but then when I tried it again sorta recently (years ago) they didnt enjoy keep up anymore. probably still fine with mplayer.

I do kinda want to prefer it, but I'm afraid I'm too used to mpv.
if mplayer was like a single package install with less deps than mpv I'd probably work around the few things I'm complaining about currently, but for the time being it seems like I gain very little in my current usecases.

good to keep in mind mplayer is mostly perfectly usable though, I recall some old machines that used to be fine playing full hd content on mpv but then when I tried it again sorta recently (years ago) they didnt enjoy keep up anymore. probably still fine with mplayer.

You can statically link mplayer. I've done it - on windows no less.

Not going to tell you it's easy though, because that would be lying.
And yeah I know calling Windows DLL's "dynamic" is a little bit of a stretch if comparing them to unix ones (no position independent code).

I noticed the same slowdown occurring on my pentium M machine (with videos that were already on the HDD and therefore I know were fine at some point) in MPV. But I think some of it is probably ffmpeg's fault, too, rather than entirely mpv or mplayer's faults.

mpv isn't absolute garbage or anything, it's just changed a lot of things I don't think needed or should have been changed. And it seems to have this "the user is an idiot" mentality in places (like where it claims that an argument from mplayer was "removed," but still continues to work with it regardless - albeit with annoying stderr printouts).

If I had to choose a non-mplayer video player in linux/unix, I'd either pick ffplay (for framebuffer support via SDL) or mpv. VLC feels like bug-ridden garbage to me and always has. It's fine for just playing video files, but if you try to do DVD playback or something you're going to have a lot of fun.

Just got ffmpeg (not even ffplay) working as a framebuffer output.
[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/jj8ZI66g.jpg)

I just learned about [datatracker.ietf.org] HTTP 451. I like it.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Nov 24 2021, 16:35

Wifi 6 is surprisingly good. Its probably the first time I'd not add Ethernet infrastructure to where I am living.

Performance on older devices is also a bit higher, but I bought a good router.

…Whatever 'wifi 6' means in terms of 802.11 types.

I have an 802.11n dual band card in my daily laptop because no firmware blobs. And a 802.11ac-capable router - which is only broadcasting 802.11n dual band because I only have one 802.11ac device and therefore don't benefit on LAN transfers to and from it because of bottlenecking.

I was using 802.11g exclusively until about a year ago.

Also, got that new laptop battery I think I may have mentioned. Took a while to do its initial charge (started off trickle charging, I think), but now I'm doing its first discharge to see how it's gonna work and also to calibrate the controller. So far looking promising.

Also the build quality of this pack feels really nice. It fits flush with the laptop, the latch actually works, and it fits in my docking station. It's got a different shell design than any other battery for this laptop I have seen, which means they probably redesigned the shell themselves for their packs.
I paid around $40-50 for this pack, too, which is less than I paid for my last chinesium one.
Also, the company is in Texas and claims to use only LG/Sanyo/Panasonic cells in its packs, So I'm hopeful. And its my first aftermarket battery for this machine to actually report a part number that actually fits in this laptop. My last few reported they were for thinkpad X60's.

I also replaced the RTC battery in the Thinkpad 310ED I got recently, it was a bitch to get to (had to take the motherboard out of the frame to access the battery), but now it's working. Just need either a floppy drive cable for it or a way to create a bootable HDD for it now (probably will get a USB -> 2.5" IDE interface of some sort). It claims to boot from CD's, but apparently it will only do so if the HDD has a valid boot sector for some reason.

Edit: oh shit, i just now remembered my Latitude D610 uses an IDE HDD (and it can boot USB or optical media with no issues). so I could just swap it into there, install FreeDOS or whatever on it, and swap it back and install OpenBSD.

Also that one has a passive matrix LCD, so I'm considering hunting down an active matrix panel for it sometime (some of them without optical drives were sold with active matrix panels, and they swap into the ones with optical drives just fine. Guess if you want an optical drive and active matrix LCD they wanted you to pay more for a 700 series thinkpad).

Wish I had a 700 series one. I had an opportunity to get a 760ELD at one point but it had roaches in it so that was a hard "nope" from me. And I absolutely refuse to pay ebay prices.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Nov 25 2021, 14:00

work

speaking of thinkpads, barrel jack on mine (t520) is making the crackling sound of bad connection, plus pushing the cable slightly to the side makes it disconnect.
didnt know the round yellow ones had any failure mode, still seems solid both cable and connector on its own, just when you put them together. not sure I can do much bending on the contacts or anything either as it just seems to be a solid block of yellow plastic with contacts stuck in

This post has been edited by cate_chan: Nov 25 2021, 22:00

speaking of thinkpads, barrel jack on mine (t520) is making the crackling sound of bad connection, plus pushing the cable slightly to the side makes it disconnect.
didnt know the round yellow ones had any failure mode, still seems solid both cable and connector on its own, just when you put them together. not sure I can do much bending on the contacts or anything either as it just seems to be a solid block of yellow plastic with contacts stuck in

The dock connector on my thinkpad does that. the main jack works fine.

Have you made sure the solder on the connector is not cracked? Sometimes that's all it is.

Also electrical contact cleaner might help if the conductive surfaces have built up a patina.

Since I always use my dock, i just broke the tab thing that prevents you from plugging into the DC jack on the laptop when docked. and ignore that the dock connector exists.

I need another round plug charger; I had to switch to my backup recently after the cable wore through (the strain relief thing on the plug broke).


Anyone know where i could get just the cable coming out of the adapter, or the connector jack itself, or nreak the jack apart to allpw resoldering?

…Whatever 'wifi 6' means in terms of 802.11 types.

I have an 802.11n dual band card in my daily laptop because no firmware blobs. And a 802.11ac-capable router - which is only broadcasting 802.11n dual band because I only have one 802.11ac device and therefore don't benefit on LAN transfers to and from it because of bottlenecking.

I was using 802.11g exclusively until about a year ago.

The oldest device I have tested are a pi3 and a 2012 iPad. I think both are 802.11n. Both got great reception BUT it could just be because its a good router with multiple antenna.

I think I upgraded my older laptops to 802.11n. The old thinkpad I had that was 802.11ac died. The other old laptop was broken as well.

The laptops I lent to other people died mysteriously fast even though they had been in good working condition for a long time.


If you have a big property and need to use two routers, then the dedicated back hall channel on some higher end wifi6 routers can be very useful. Like all things, Wifi 6 has a lot of marketing associated. Whilst high end routers may have all the candy, cheaper ones may have half the peak performance.

Looking at reviews, most don't recommend switching from a good hispeed 802.11ac router to 802.11ax.


The thing that did annoy me, was that most of my devices weren't compatible with the latest WPA3.

This post has been edited by EsotericSatire: Nov 26 2021, 01:02

For many months since I decided to use Opus audio & Constant Quality mode in my video encodings, I have made a flawed assumption. The "overall bit rate" info listed in MediaInfo includes bit rate for subtitles as well, which I did not take into account. Several of my movies actually ended up with an average video bit rate of around 3900kpbs instead of 4000kbps which I targeted as the absolute minimum (unless RF 18 achieved less than that).

E.g. 4564kbps (overall) - 510kbps (audio) = 4054kbps (assumed video bit rate)
Copying the video without the audio & subtitle revealed the actual video bit rate is 3927kbps.

Respective bit rates for video and audio were shown if the audio codec is Dolby Digital or AAC. But when Opus is used, only "overall bit rate" is listed.

This post has been edited by elda88: Nov 26 2021, 02:43

Once again, Internet fail me.
I thought it would be a piece of cake to find what I expected with the keywords "exit door ascii art", but noooo, no open door with "EXIT" written above it.
And here I expected my only issue may be that the spacing or some special characters would not work where I would have wanted to use the image, but I didn't even reach that step (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/faint.gif)

Also, it's been a long time since my (primary) laptop would last this long on a charge. Feels really nice.

I really would love to build my own battery for this thing some day; one that uses more 18650's and just sticks out more or something. That or a battery that sits below the machine like a dock.

My non-tablet X201 still lasted way longer - until the battery decided to stop charging one day - but it had a nine cell battery with nine 18650's in it. The eight cell tablet battery has four 18650's and four of what appear to be 103450-type prismatic batteries. The OEM tablet eight cell batteries were rated for 4700 mAh, compared to 7800 mAH for the regular X201 9 cell. The two do not share a battery form factor.

I just tried to trickle charge the dead battery using an AT PSU (+12V) and a current limiting resistor.
No response whatsoever, so I am assuming that the internal fuse is actually blown or the controller chip is fucking with me.

I somewhat doubt I'll be able to get this battery (OEM lenovo) opened at all cleanly.
And buying another battery is out of the question; I've done enough of that for a while.

About a year ago this battery was giving me nine hours of power in a (non-primary) laptop. Then I let it sit for too long. Worked for one or two cycles after turning it back on again, and then threw up its hands and refused to charge again.

---
I think I actually have an 802.11ax PCIe card that someone gave me. Not planning to use it though.

Once again, Internet fail me.
I thought it would be a piece of cake to find what I expected with the keywords "exit door ascii art", but noooo, no open door with "EXIT" written above it.
And here I expected my only issue may be that the spacing or some special characters would not work where I would have wanted to use the image, but I didn't even reach that step (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/faint.gif)

CODE

  .----.
  |EXIT|
  '----'
   ______
  |+|    |
  |+|    |
  |+|]   |
  |+|    |
  |/_____|

Hope the forum doesn't fuck up my formatting.
Also, if it's ascii, there are no special characters. If it's not ascii, it isn't ascii art.

For many months since I decided to use Opus audio & Constant Quality mode in my video encodings, I have made a flawed assumption. The "overall bit rate" info listed in MediaInfo includes bit rate for subtitles as well, which I did not take into account. Several of my movies actually ended up with an average video bit rate of around 3900kpbs instead of 4000kbps which I targeted as the absolute minimum (unless RF 18 achieved less than that).

E.g. 4564kbps (overall) - 510kbps (audio) = 4054kbps (assumed video bit rate)
Copying the video without the audio & subtitle revealed the actual video bit rate is 3927kbps.

Respective bit rates for video and audio were shown if the audio codec is Dolby Digital or AAC. But when Opus is used, only "overall bit rate" is listed.

That's because opus doesn't use a fixed bit rate, it uses a target rate. If it uses less than what you specify, that's likely a good thing.

Look up Variable Bit Rate (VBR) vs. Constant Bit Rate (CBR). CBR is the older method. Also might want to look up constant rate factor (CRF), while you're at it, even though it's tangential.

My attempt at explaining without writing yet another essay:
-----
What happens is that some frames don't have as much change as others do. By using a variable bit rate, you can say "I want about this much information in every second of video, on average."

In h.264 (and I think also in opus) in ffmpeg, the values of 'maxrate,' 'minrate,' and 'bufsize' also have an impact. Together, they basically determine how often ffmpeg will recalculate its current average bitrate. See also [trac.ffmpeg.org] https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/EncodingForStreamingSites .

If you really want to force a truly constant bit rate, you could try

CODE

-b 4000k -minrate 4000k -maxrate 4000k -bufsize 1835k

or something like that. 1835k is pulled from the ffmpeg man page; it's that because the ffmpeg man page says it is. Also because the recommendation is that 'maxrate ÷ bufsize' should be a value of around 1 or 2 (so ffmpeg recalculates its current rate every 1 or 2 seconds). 4000kbps ÷ 1835kb = about 2.18 seconds. This way, it will be able to handle sudden changes better with less blockiness.


If you want me to write more or clarify, let me know. I've had dealings with this before.

Anyone know where i could get just the cable coming out of the adapter, or the connector jack itself, or nreak the jack apart to allpw resoldering?

I just found some. They all ship from China, though, so I don't think I'll order one yet. Especially since I remembered I have one of those "universal laptop charger" things for an old machine and it has a tip for thinkpads. So if anything happens to my other OEM 90W charger before I actually follow through and purchase a new wire, I have a backup (which is also 90W apparently).

Apparently the thinkpads just detect the charger wattage by if there's resistance between the "signal" pin and the shell. If there isn't, they assume 90 watts.
Much nicer than the old dells that had that 1wire EEPROM chip in the chargers that would kill themselves.

Update again:
Almost dawn, time for bed.
Todo: I need to solder on a new tactile switch for the left click button. It's hard to make it activate now and it feels wrong.
[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/QqWrpd7g.jpg)
Yeah that's a passive matrix LCD

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Nov 26 2021, 12:19

New day, new post.

Amazon must die.
[www.cnn.com] https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/ama...invs/index.html

New day, new post.

Amazon must die.
[www.cnn.com] https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/ama...invs/index.html

Yeah when the majority of the products stopped being American made and started to be supplied by mostly China, and mainly the cheapest products, this was always going to happen.

Since the start of 2020 Amazon went from being 80% American products to 30%.

Also might want to look up constant rate factor (CRF), while you're at it, even though it's tangential.

Actually I currently use that method. Some referred CRF as Constant Quality mode so I stick with that term.

While I still target a bit rate/file size, I decided to abandon the 2-pass method because a 1hr30min movie typically took 16-18 hours to complete, meaning I have to let the encoding process run until the next afternoon (I usually start in the early evening or at night after work). Due to hot climate, air conditioning is a must in daytime. Unfortunately my neighborhood is always hazy in daytime because many residents here love to do open burning.

Others swore anything higher than RF=18 (many considered this is where the encoded video is "visually transparent") is a bust, whereas my rule is to be as close as possible to RF=18 until the video bit rate reaches the absolute minimum 4000kbps, whichever comes first. There is trial and error involved, but at 4000-4500+ kbps it's an acceptable trade-off in terms of quality and file size IMO. Using CRF method, it typically took 6-8 hours to complete for 1hr30min movie.

There is a solution that I found for reaching my established absolute minimum bit rate at a Rate Factor higher than 18: either lower the rate factor by 1 or if that resulted in a bloated size (bit rate > 4600kbps), then lower the rate factor by 1 and decrease RDOQ from 1 to 0. That's for live action or CG animations. For traditional animated content, I just lowered the AQ Strength from 1.0 to 0.9 in case the bit rate is bloated.

If I had known the actual video bit rate, I could just do a new encoding for those that did not reach the minimum bit rate, using the aforementioned solution. Unfortunately, after falsely thinking the encodings had passed, I've deleted all the previous remuxes to make room for new ones. So there's that. I'll just have to accept and move on the next encodings.

Actually I currently use that method. Some referred CRF as Constant Quality mode so I stick with that term.

While I still target a bit rate/file size, I decided to abandon the 2-pass method because a 1hr30min movie typically took 16-18 hours to complete, meaning I have to let the encoding process run until the next afternoon (I usually start in the early evening or at night after work). Due to hot climate, air conditioning is a must in daytime. Unfortunately my neighborhood is always hazy in daytime because many residents here love to do open burning.

Others swore anything higher than RF=18 (many considered this is where the encoded video is "visually transparent") is a bust, whereas my rule is to be as close as possible to RF=18 until the video bit rate reaches the absolute minimum 4000kbps, whichever comes first. There is trial and error involved, but at 4000-4500+ kbps it's an acceptable trade-off in terms of quality and file size IMO. Using CRF method, it typically took 6-8 hours to complete for 1hr30min movie.

There is a solution that I found for reaching my established absolute minimum bit rate at a Rate Factor higher than 18: either lower the rate factor by 1 or if that resulted in a bloated size (bit rate > 4600kbps), then lower the rate factor by 1 and decrease RDOQ from 1 to 0. That's for live action or CG animations. For traditional animated content, I just lowered the AQ Strength from 1.0 to 0.9 in case the bit rate is bloated.

If I had known the actual video bit rate, I could just do a new encoding for those that did not reach the minimum bit rate, using the aforementioned solution. Unfortunately, after falsely thinking the encodings had passed, I've deleted all the previous remuxes to make room for new ones. So there's that. I'll just have to accept and move on the next encodings.

Yeah, I almost never do two-pass encoding. Sure, it's better, but I don't have the time and I don't consider the tradeoff to be worthwhile.
I usually use crf 20 regardless of everything else, for what it's worth. 18 for archival stuff or sharing. 20 for personal stuff I don't care too much about, or re-encodes of something I have in better quality but can't decode in real time for playback (4K h.265, av1, etc.).

From what I can tell, crf depends on the encoder somewhat, too, though. In VP9 it appears to be dependent on the resolution of the picture, with higher resolutions working best with lower crf values.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Nov 27 2021, 05:15

Admittedly, final average bit rate of 3900kbps for video alone isn't really the end of the world. I just wanted to be consistent in complying my own rule.

On another note, encoding a movie with strong grains is extremely slow when uaing 2-pass ABR method, taking up to 24 hours or more, even for ones with 1hr30min runtime. Yikes.

This post has been edited by elda88: Nov 28 2021, 06:05

I don't know if it happened when I updated to Firefox 91.3.0 ESR, or when I updated Windows, but it finally happened:
🇫🇷 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 🏴‍☠️
I can see flags now (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif)

(IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif) (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif) (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif) *SHOCK* (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif) (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif) (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif)
It was from Firefox (or maybe Mozilla since I see them on thunderbird too) after all.
Notepad, Notepad++, Wordpad, Edge, LibreOffice Writer, none of them can display flags, they still display for a french flag a F and a R in some weird font.
I almost wrote to emojipedia.org to ask why there wasn't a news about something like Microsoft finally stopping to reject flags and any official statement on that...though now that I deleted the unfinished mail, I realize Mozilla finally finding a way to go around Microsoft restrictions to forcefully display flags could have been news-worthy too. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif)

(IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif) (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif) (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif) *SHOCK* (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif) (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif) (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif)
It was from Firefox (or maybe Mozilla since I see them on thunderbird too) after all.
Notepad, Notepad++, Wordpad, Edge, LibreOffice Writer, none of them can display flags, they still display for a french flag a F and a R in some weird font.
I almost wrote to emojipedia.org to ask why there wasn't a news about something like Microsoft finally stopping to reject flags and any official statement on that...though now that I deleted the unfinished mail, I realize Mozilla finally finding a way to go around Microsoft restrictions to forcefully display flags could have been news-worthy too. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif)

They either use a different font, or they bundle one in.