[X] My Assistant

Forgot to pack my good headphones, so I'm stuck using a shitty pair of USB headphones that I think probably came with a family member's copy of Rosetta Stone for the next few days.

After mucking around with the ALSA [github.com] equalizer plugin for a while, I got them sounding somewhat acceptable. If a bit quieter than I'd like.

To avoid clipping/distortion, I had to lower levels instead of raising them, unfortunately.

Still it's actually a surprise to me that I got them sounding as acceptable as I did. Considering they started as utter shite.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 25 2021, 07:43

Forgot to pack my good headphones, so I'm stuck using a shitty pair of USB headphones that I think probably came with a family member's copy of Rosetta Stone for the next few days.

After mucking around with the ALSA [github.com] equalizer plugin for a while, I got them sounding somewhat acceptable. If a bit quieter than I'd like.

To avoid clipping/distortion, I had to lower levels instead of raising them, unfortunately.

Still it's actually a surprise to me that I got them sounding as acceptable as I did. Considering they started as utter shite.

makes me wonder if I can make the horrible but very comfortable chinese earbuds sounding any decent, they're tiny yet only bass. it's like listening to stuff through a pillow

After moving around stuff a lot to experiment putting my screen in front of my bed, figuring it was too low and not easier on my neck, and disconnecting/making unusable so much of my hardware due to things disconnected/reconnected/put away in various ways, I dropped the whole attempt.

But having the screen closer made me wonder about something:
Old animes always tell you to watch from a good distance from the screen in a well-lit room.
What did VR and its helmet/googles do about that?
Is it raping your eyeballs until they pierce the back of your skull while trying to escape the torture?
Or did they actually find a solution for that (that somehow I haven't heard of, and haven't heard of it being implemented on ordinary screens) ?

This post has been edited by uareader: Dec 25 2021, 17:50

makes me wonder if I can make the horrible but very comfortable chinese earbuds sounding any decent, they're tiny yet only bass. it's like listening to stuff through a pillow

It can help a little, yeah. But it will also cause some distortion and is no substitute for actually having good speakers/headphones.
Makes things less blantantly awful, though, yeah.
If you want an alsa config let me know.

Old animes always tell you to watch from a good distance from the screen in a well-lit room.

It's anime. The plural of anime is anime, unless you call Pokémon in plural Pokémons.
And they told you that because of "[en.wikipedia.org] Pokémon Shock."

What did VR and its helmet/googles do about that?

Nothing. Tell you not to use it if you are prone to photosensitive epilepsy.

Is it raping your eyeballs until they pierce the back of your skull while trying to escape the torture?

Yep.

Or did they actually find a solution for that (that somehow I haven't heard of, and haven't heard of it being implemented on ordinary screens) ?

Not really any solution, no. They use the same basic idea as those viewmaster things where you just use a lens to make something really close to your face come into focus.

Maybe they'd do motion blurring or something. Or drop framerates? IDK.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 28 2021, 03:01

Maybe it was only the UV radiation from CRT and Plasma that was a problem for your eyes sitting too close to the screens.

Trying to pad out a potential digikey order. They don't have bloody 2N2222 transistors.

Trying to pad out a potential digikey order. They don't have bloody 2N2222 transistors.

I have some of those.
But what I don't have is TL074's/TL072's. And neither do they.
IIRC, for a lot of purposes the 4401 can substitute for a 2222.

Thought: I made a script today that reads out all of the shell processes running as a current user (minus itself) and enumerates a list of the working directories of each. I have it set up to only add the ones that are inside of my pr0n stash. It can also open new terminals for each directory in the list and open it in the correct working directory.

So basically it's like a browser tab session manager, except it's for terminal windows instead. It's useful for when I'm organizing stuff and then have to stop and come back to things later (I do most of my file management in a shell rather than a GUI).

It's highly linux-specific rather than my usual "POSIX only" approach, but that's good enough for now, and I think I know how I'd implement it on OpenBSD (and possibly FreeBSD). OpenBSD is very different in that it doesn't have a procfs, but I think I can figure out how to get the info I need via sysctl. And it also doesn't have pgrep, which I initially wasn't using at all but made things easier when it came to finding all running instances of a specific program.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 30 2021, 06:34

Would I look like an insufferable dickhead if I started a "technology problems" thread, where people post their problems and others answer?

Because I'm starting to think that might be a good idea. But I don't really want to look like I'm flexing or anything because I know I talk a lot as it is.

Also I just got a colorimeter of my own (a cheaper model, with intentionally crippled firmware compared to the "pro" version that limits it to lower brightness screens and also might not be good for operating on displays that "refresh" like CRT's or plasmas due to crippled polling rates) so I can finally give my friend theirs again.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 30 2021, 06:36

I will have to buy a new fan for my computer next year.

I will have to buy a new fan for my computer next year.

I don't know why but I have spare fans all over the place. Probably from past builds. Fans have gone way up in price fro some reason.

I should go put the leftovers in the fridge

I forgot to do that before leaving for holiday. Was fun to have to throw that out when I got back.

But more tech-related, I wish DisplayCal would get updated for Python 3 sometime soon.

For now I'm having to use the ArgyllCMS command line directly; it's a bit confusing figuring out what I'm supposed to do with it. Option overload. I'm about 99% of the way there but am having an issue where it bumps up the black level so that it isn't quite black. Might know what to do about that, but testing this stuff takes a while.

I think I might try to make a CLI frontend for the CLI tools (lol) by seeing what DisplayCal does when it calls the Argyll programs. Just something to automate the process somewhat and bypass some gotchas. That way I won't have to remember to feed each program I call the same correction data repeatedly, for instance.

Might also be easier than trying to figure out Argyll for other people who can't use DisplayCal anymore, too, while we wait for a better option. Thankfully I have displaycal log files to help me to reconstruct what it did. And also one machine that it still works on.

Also, this is basically what goes on in my head with any and all equipment that I get. And how I feel when I think about upgrading when something is still working. And sometimes even when it's actually broken already.
Even if motherboards don't look like cute anime girls.
[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/sFyFFX2g.jpg)
[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/O3o6k3zg.jpg)

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 30 2021, 20:30

Also, this is basically what goes on in my head with any and all equipment that I get. And how I feel when I think about upgrading when something is still working. And sometimes even when it's actually broken already.
Even if motherboards don't look like cute anime girls.

absolutely same when I look at the dusty boxes full of unused hardware, who knows maybe one day I'll need one of the 4 soundblaster pci cards

in other thoughts/news:
found a store that sells the actually dymo branded dymo labeling ribbon, it seems to stick better than the chinese version that came with the letter clamp.
hope I can finally get on with labeling stuff without labels peeling off now.

absolutely same when I look at the dusty boxes full of unused hardware, who knows maybe one day I'll need one of the 4 soundblaster pci cards

(glances to the left)
[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/q6bz8bDg.jpg)
I should have a Diamond Monster Sound MX400 (ESS Canyon3D) card here somewhere, too, but I can't seem to find it so maybe I did lose that.

The thing in the back right is a Google Cardboard. The ISA card poking out under the game boy is an EPROM programmer that I do not have the external device for. 3.3V AGP card is a 3DFX Voodoo3 2000 that I can't test because I don't have any motherboards with 3.3V AGP slots (yet).

Maybe I should go buy a labelmaker today.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 30 2021, 21:34

I have a brother p-touch PT-D210, and buy the cheap amazon refills. I don't know if the amazon stuff has the same weather or UV resistance, but for inside stuff it's the exact same.
(IMG:[service.pcconnection.com] https://service.pcconnection.com/images/inhouse/5C80E99E-BA73-4208-B491-2542FF16740A.jpg)

Ordered about $100 of semiconductors from digikey this morning. I only needed 2 op-amps...

This post has been edited by Wayward_Vagabond: Dec 31 2021, 18:25

like, shit, no one is online these times

I now have a microwave with grill function.

A sausage cooked in microwave mode should be pierced to not explode.
A sausage cooked in grill mode should not be pierced, for the skin to retain the heat and allow proper cooking.
In what state should be the Schrodinger's sausage, in microwave+grill mode?

Seriously, keywords to search how to use this kind of microwave constantly lead to unrelated stuff, I'm not sure how to reliably use the damn thing.

I made a shell script (that uses a program called xclip as a dependency but otherwise only depends on POSIX standard shell features) which you can feed imgur links as arguments and it will spit out forum embeds with smaller thumbnails that link to the original image automagically and puts the result on the clipboard.
I think it's handy for embedding images here.
For instance:

CODE

$ thumbify https://i.imgur.com/ShtegS1.png https://i.imgur.com/DhQCh2m.png https://i.imgur.com/C0QqLbr.png
[url=https://i.imgur.com/ShtegS1.png][img]https://i.imgur.com/ShtegS1g.png[/img][/url]
[url=https://i.imgur.com/DhQCh2m.png][img]https://i.imgur.com/DhQCh2mg.png[/img][/url]
[url=https://i.imgur.com/C0QqLbr.png][img]https://i.imgur.com/C0QqLbrg.png[/img][/url]

Code:

CODE

#! /bin/sh
# imgur link to forum post embed
while [ "$#" -gt 0 ]; do
  FILENAME="$(echo "$1"| sed 's!.*/!!g')"
  PREFIX="$(echo "$1"|sed 's/'"$FILENAME"'//')"
  FILEEXT='.'"$(echo "$FILENAME"|sed 's/.*\.//')"
  FILEBASE="$(echo "$FILENAME"|sed 's/\'"$FILEEXT"'//g')"
  RESULT="$RESULT"' ''[url='"$1"'][img]'"$PREFIX""$FILEBASE"'g'"$FILEEXT"'[/img][/url]'
  shift 1
  if [ "$#" -eq 0 ]; then # print results when finished
    echo "$RESULT"|sed 's/^ //'|tr ' ' '\n'
    printf "$RESULT"|sed 's/^ //'|tr ' ' '\n'|xclip -selection c
  fi
done

I now have a microwave with grill function.

A sausage cooked in microwave mode should be pierced to not explode.
A sausage cooked in grill mode should not be pierced, for the skin to retain the heat and allow proper cooking.
In what state should be the Schrodinger's sausage, in microwave+grill mode?

Seriously, keywords to search how to use this kind of microwave constantly lead to unrelated stuff, I'm not sure how to reliably use the damn thing.

Unless the microwave uses something other than microwave radiation to cook food in 'grill mode', you should pierce it.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 31 2021, 21:36

I now have a microwave with grill function.

A sausage cooked in microwave mode should be pierced to not explode.
A sausage cooked in grill mode should not be pierced, for the skin to retain the heat and allow proper cooking.
In what state should be the Schrodinger's sausage, in microwave+grill mode?

Seriously, keywords to search how to use this kind of microwave constantly lead to unrelated stuff, I'm not sure how to reliably use the damn thing.

So you know how RF is conductive on metals? That's what that grill rack is for, which is to conduct the microwaves that the oven itself puts out in order for the rack to heat up more easily than other stuff inside the oven and cook the thing that's on it. The grill rack is specifically tuned to whatever frequency range the microwave puts out in order to convert out whatever the designed amount of heat is.

Basically, it's a (purposely) badly attuned antenna for microwaves. An even more badly attuned one would be a metal fork, which is why it heats up enough to put out plasma if left in a running microwave.

This post has been edited by chriseras: Jan 1 2022, 01:35

I now have a microwave with grill function.

A sausage cooked in microwave mode should be pierced to not explode.
A sausage cooked in grill mode should not be pierced, for the skin to retain the heat and allow proper cooking.
In what state should be the Schrodinger's sausage, in microwave+grill mode?

Seriously, keywords to search how to use this kind of microwave constantly lead to unrelated stuff, I'm not sure how to reliably use the damn thing.

is it one of those that has metal parts like grills and skewers even though its also a microwave?

in other thoughts, finally sick of dealing with nvidias shit, got myself a radeon card. found a cheap deal on something with 4(yes four!) display ports and 2 dvi ports, a nice bricky radeon 6970 for a couple tenners.
sober me will decide how great of an idea this was somewhere in the coming week when it arives and I get to experience the full joy of amds linux driver (radeon not amdgpu as its too old), in the mean time wow ports very nice