[X] My Assistant

Edit/update:
Fixed a key on my laptop keyboard by dabbing a tiny blob of melted plastic onto one of the clips on the underside of the cap where it had chipped (with my soldering iron).

Long time ago I had to do that for a thinkpad, though the key felt a bit weird afterwards.

I was pissed as I paid a Repair dude to fix it but he gave up and still charged me for the time.

That dude was a bit of dick. He made his money from market buyouts of new parts.


He bought out all the intel 980x cpus in my state and tried to sell them at 2x the price. He was stuck with stock for ages though.

This post has been edited by EsotericSatire: Sep 29 2022, 03:20

Mine's a thinkpad; key feels fine. I was very careful to avoid squishing the clip at all.

I used donor plastic from one of my chipped palmrests.

edit:
Worth noting that this clip still mostly was working; the tab was marginally chipped so that if you pressed the key in a specific corner it would come loose at the top and start teeter-tottering front to back until popped back in. normally while typing it would not happen. I needed the tiniest amount of rework on the order of well under a millimeter of plastic to fill in. It was also one of the top clips, which on my keyboard are the ones that don't snap into place but rather let the scissor mechanism posts slide into place in it when pushing down to snap the bottom of the switch into place.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 29 2022, 21:17

My VPN provider makes it annoying to download OpenVPN config files for all their servers, and even more annoying to use them.

I wrote some scripts ages back that do post-processing on the files (which are mass-downloaded via someone else's script) so that they're ready to load with the OpenVPN command line. I'm really glad that I did it the way I did, because there are so many goddamn steps to the process that I have a hard time figuring out what all I had to do anymore. I remember that to get country codes for the files I had to do a lookup on their servers comparing to a JSON file, for instance. Rigged that using duktape.

Right now the install script (shell script) invokes at least python script someone else wrote and I modified, a javascript thing I wrote to parse JSON (using the duktape interpreter), a C program I wrote to do the actual insertion of new configuration lines into the config files, and several invocations of 'sed' and 'grep' probably.

I hated nord, but at least they had that going for them... a nice convenient zip file full of all of their openvpn config files, with informative file names.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 29 2022, 21:54

Updated to the 102 based ESR version of Firefox.
One curious difference is that when I'm on "View New Posts" and refresh before going to the next page (as things may have been pushed down), it no longer go through a temporary white screen before loading the refreshed page.
Maybe now it download it, compare the 2 versions, and only update the display for things that changed or something?
Though it seems that method could be punishing on older/weaker hardware... (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/unsure.gif)

Or it just waits to update the display until the new page is rendered, instead of moving from the old one to the white screen.

Been tooling around with CD-MQA again today. Found that by erasing that data stream (setting the least significant bit of the least significant byte of each sample to zero), I can cut my filesizes in half when recompressed to FLAC (compared to a FLAC encode of the MQA'd version).

MQA really is just shit.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Oct 1 2022, 21:32

I've never used MQA, was it just for copyright protection some crap.

I've never used MQA, was it just for copyright protection some crap.

Not really?
But in practice, perhaps somewhat.

It intentionally degrades the quality of audio slightly by stealing bits from the PCM stream to use for carrying data. Supposedly it's reversible, mostly, but it's also lossy, the decoder is proprietary and not available officially for PC's, and the decoder upsamples the output.

A lot of USB DAC's will read the MQA data stream and proceed to lie to users about the bit depth and sample rate of the music they are playing (claiming it's "24 bit 352.8KHz" or whatever, because that's what the master was captured at. But it's still a 16-bit (actually 15-bit because of MQA), 44.1KHz CD that's being resampled and effectively just doing what the brightness/black level histogram adjuster does for images in photoshop to stretch it across 24 bits.

The MQA stuff is supposedly mostly reversed by this proprietary decoder, but I think it's bullshit if they're only using one bit of the data stream to contain both sample information and data.

Finally, on supported DAC's, MQA turns on a little blue light telling the user that it has been "Master Quality Authenticated" and is what the engineer heard in the studio or whatever. Despite engineers not having anything to do with the decision to MQA encode in many cases.

So it bastardizes the CD audio signal in order to turn on a little blue light on expensive DAC's that paid the MQA licensing fees.

It remains playable on standard CD players, but the MQA stream introduces noise into the output in the bit(s) that it stole. So it is actually worse than a non-MQA CD for pretty much every use case, as it is lossy to encode and then if you don't have a decoder at playback-time it takes another hit from the data stream.

Of course, this is only the least significant bit, so it's not especially noticeable. But it is a solution to a problem no one had and it objectively does no favors to the output quality.

I wouldn't be mad if it was just used for 24-bit digital releases, where it uses the lowest 8 bits but by stripping those you get an un-bastardized 16-bit PCM track. But leave CD's well enough alone, for fuck's sake.

The original use case was to lie to users about the audio they were streaming via bluetooth or wifi or whatever being at extremely high sample rates/bit depths while cheaping out and only sending lower resolution audio and upsampling it in software. No idea why they decided to put it on CD's, too, unless it was just snake oil marketing or to actively fuck people over who don't buy $700 DAC's (like me). Plus, they get license fees from the encoder, the decoder, and the DAC manufacturers, since processing happens at encode time, decode time, and rendering time. And they only allow the third component in the chain (which is an additional upsampling) be done within a DAC itself. No external software solutions are allowed.

Someone appears to have written a perl script to strip MQA out of audio files, but it appears to be lost to time so I wrote a C program to do it for me. I am also borrowing code someone wrote to hijack a software MQA decoding library from the firmware of a linux-based DAC/wireless streamer program to attempt decodes, just so I have options.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Oct 3 2022, 04:37

Apple makes it as hard as humanly possible to sideload apps (necessary for a tethered jailbreak on an ipad I was given; I accidentally let the battery run dry so I had to re-do the jailbreak).

Even after making a Mac OS VM (in QEMU) with USB passthrough (necessary so xcode will send your developer signature/key thing to the idevice... just passing the single USB cable through doesn't work because the connection resets break the passthrough unless you pass through an entire hub or a PCIe USB controller), you also need to install xcode, and then install like 10 random certificate files that Apple has let expire and renewed so that code signing has even a snowball's chance in hell of working. And then you get to puzzle through why you still can't sign your code, only to realize Apple's locked your account for no reason and you have to dig out the recovery code you wrote down 8 years ago when you made the Apple ID. And then when it still doesn't work you realize it's because XCode has made two exactly identical certificates that differ only by five seconds on their timestamps with the same name so the code signing software doesn't know which one to use and fails silently.

All in all, it took me ~3.5 hours to sign and sideload a single IPA file that I had already signed and sideloaded in the past on account of their 'security' fetish.

Of course, if you pay apple a $100/year tithing, things "just work" and you don't have to update your signed app every single week anymore.

I had to do all of this to play back music file without using iTunes (I do not use Windows or Mac OS X normally). I have to use a media player app that is not on the app store.

I have two old idevices that I was fortunate to acquire before their previous owners had had a chance to update them to iOS versions that can't get an untethered jailbreak. I wish the ipad was one of them.

I might invest in an arduino USB host shield so I can do that bootloader exploit that got discovered relatively recently for most of the older iDevices ("checkm8").

TL;DR Apple is fucking evil and stupid and retarded and whatever people are responsible for their "security" fetish and gold-digging policies should kill themselves (if they aren't already dead like Jobs).

------------

inb4 "why don't you not use apple products, then?"

Because I was given them for free and I want to make them useful since Apple is determined that anything over ~five years old must be made unusable and incompatible with everything. Also I have a car that has a 30-pin ipod connector in it, and it's the only way to play music through its audio system besides the CD player.

Oh yeah, and that one won't charge anything Apple made after 2007, either, since it uses the firewire charging pins and Apple couldn't be arsed to put a voltage regulator in anything newer than the original iphone to preserve compatibility with all of their previous products and licensed accessories.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Oct 3 2022, 08:07

Not really?
But in practice, perhaps somewhat.

It intentionally degrades the quality of audio slightly by stealing bits from the PCM stream to use for carrying data. Supposedly it's reversible, mostly, but it's also lossy, the decoder is proprietary and not available officially for PC's, and the decoder upsamples the output.

A lot of USB DAC's will read the MQA data stream and proceed to lie to users about the bit depth and sample rate of the music they are playing (claiming it's "24 bit 352.8KHz" or whatever, because that's what the master was captured at. But it's still a 16-bit (actually 15-bit because of MQA), 44.1KHz CD that's being resampled and effectively just doing what the brightness/black level histogram adjuster does for images in photoshop to stretch it across 24 bits.

The MQA stuff is supposedly mostly reversed by this proprietary decoder, but I think it's bullshit if they're only using one bit of the data stream to contain both sample information and data.

Finally, on supported DAC's, MQA turns on a little blue light telling the user that it has been "Master Quality Authenticated" and is what the engineer heard in the studio or whatever. Despite engineers not having anything to do with the decision to MQA encode in many cases.

Oh I remember, I did a review for some MQA devices once when I was reviewing audio gear. It was marketed during the time period when streaming flac was considered 'ultra high' end and this was supposedly a way to stream a compatible audio format.

I think my review was something like streaming over bluetooth is shit, MQA adds needless complications.
I think the MQA + bluetooth streaming added loads of issues like too much latency causing playback issues or problems with the early apps they were using. One device was compliant but had trouble recognising the source when playing MQA audio. Theoretically it could help overcome the problems with bluetooth streaming for a while, but it added its own complications.

I think it only took a couple of years before streaming higher quality audio became cheaper. Downsampling and then up-sampling was still an issue but the difference between raw HD 24 /192hz audio and 16 / 44.1hz is only really noticeable on good HD masters and bad CD quality masters.

The problem when you go ultra clinical with audio and your audio chain is that you start hearing more of the problems with audio and it takes away from the enjoyment.

The original use case was to lie to users about the audio they were streaming via bluetooth or wifi or whatever being at extremely high sample rates/bit depths while cheaping out and only sending lower resolution audio and upsampling it in software.

No idea why they decided to put it on CD's, too

Super vaguely I remember it had to do with (marketing) a beetles collection special edition release. I don't think anyone could really tell the difference between the songs and older CDs but supposedly it was a way of guaranteeing that you were listening to 'authentic' sound as intended because of all the other CD releases, streaming sources (and pirated sources).

I thought it was a pretty shit idea at the time. Supposedly for people with the hardware to ensure the authenticity of the release, whereas there was a lot of confusion with other HD releases. Of course MQA guarantees fuck all now, as its slapped on anything they can get away with regardless of source or mastering.

I don't think I have ever purchased a MQA release with my own money ever.

The Bubblegum Crisis box set is only offered on MQA-CD.

So I'm stuck with it unless I want to pay $90/disc for pressings from thirty years ago.

And yeah, it steals one (single) bit from the depth of the music (on CD's... on 24-bit audio, it "only" steals 8 bits to make it a 16 bit track) to form a bitstream that basically just contains checksums for sections of the song, which are continually verified to make that blue light stay on, keep the upsampler active, and keep the equalization curve present on the DAC.

That's all it is.

It's possible that on 24-bit audio they could be doing some sort of lossy audio compression in addition to their cryptographically "authenticated" crap, but there's simply no way they're doing that effectively with a single bit per sample on CD's. There it just exists to degrade audio for people with non-MQA setups by introducing low-order noise.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Oct 4 2022, 14:40

The Bubblegum Crisis box set is only offered on MQA-CD.

So I'm stuck with it unless I want to pay $90/disc for pressings from thirty years ago.

Damn has the price gone up so much? Though I think I only bought the compilation CDs maybe a decade ago.

Damn has the price gone up so much? Though I think I only bought the compilation CDs maybe a decade ago.

The compilation CD with the vocal tracks only isn't that bad. And if you can get lucky I've seen some episodes' discs go for about $30-40. But if you want them now and don't want to wait, yeah.

I don't think the vocals compilation went out of print, or if it did it wasn't out of print for as long. But if you like the complete soundtrack of the series, you're in for it.

There are FLAC rips of it online already (from original CD's), but the rip of Episode 3 ("Blow Up")'s CD is damaged; it's missing a track and another is corrupted. So even if I hate the way the new discs sound, I'm not SOL for any but those two tracks. And one of them is a vocal so I can grab it off the vocals CD.

Like I said, I found a hacky way to decode the MQA crap, so I'll see if I prefer the decoded, upsampled version. At least I have options. And no shortage of disc drives to rip CD's.

Edit:

Just bought another drive, so now I should be able to rip the blu-rays and mux some subtitles to them as well. Got one that I can flash with a downgraded firmware to read UHD discs if I ever get those.

Edit: I just got the box set, ripped all the CD's already. Made raw backups and then MQA-stripped FLAC's. They sound fine. Haven't A/B'ed them yet. Obviously the 'depth' of the old release should be better, but I suppose depending on other factors (equalization curves and the analogue-to-digital process used, for instance) it is still possible the MQA-compromised version might sound better. I kind of doubt it, but we'll see.

Maybe I won't be able to notice a difference at all... or only notice something I could chalk up to placebo.

Anyway, now I just have to rip the BDMV's (drive is in the mail) and I'll have a decent archival copy of this series. I wonder how different (if any) this encode is from the one I've been using.

If it has (non-artificial) film grain, I'll be happy. Surprised, but happy.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Oct 6 2022, 08:14

My other laptop's keyboard got busted up. Replaced it with a spare, only to find some of the keys didn't work.

Superglued some cardboard onto the ribbon cable to stop it from folding in a specific spot and that's fixed it for now, but I have two more keyboards on order (one as a spare).

I hope they send the NMB-made variety rather than the Chicony one... the trackpoint feels better (more responsive) on the NMB's and the key feel overall is a bit different, too. Trackpoint is the major thing, though. I asked them in a message to the seller, but we'll see if they honor it or even read it. I gave them the part number I wanted and the one I'd rather avoid if possible.

I also have more spare keys/switches for the NMB variety in my laptop parts graveyard.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Oct 7 2022, 03:29

I'm synchronizing subtitles up to a blu ray rip I did; it makes me more grateful for the work that release groups do.

Paypal was going to add a $2500 dollar fine for saying anything on any social media that anyone considered a wrong think. It was also for each instance, so if someone reported you or your business for something they could take a lot of money based on past infractions. It was also ambiguous whether they could also take money from linked accounts, not just the paypal balance.

They only went back on it as business started to cancel paypal accounts due to the risk of having money stolen. Even the FCC said it was an insane policy but there was no legislation against such policies.....

If you were a business, and someone makes a fake claim about your business Paypal could freeze your account or worse. In the past few years, there have been too many instances where 'misinformation' proved to be factual correct just a few months later.

[www.techarp.com] https://www.techarp.com/business/paypal-retracts-2500-fine/

I just finished cutting the locking brakes off an ikea swivel chair's casters.

They hold the chair in place when no one's sitting in it. So if you want to pull the chair out to sit in it, it just scrapes on the floor.

What a retarded 'feature.'

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Oct 10 2022, 01:38

Are the automatic ones that are spring loaded rather than the ones that are moved to the on or off position? Weird choice for a chair.

Are the automatic ones that are spring loaded rather than the ones that are moved to the on or off position? Weird choice for a chair.

Spring-loaded, yes. You have to poke a knife into an opening in the caster and saw the brake off, or else manage to pop the wheels off.

Both ikea swivel chairs I have bought have had that stupid mechanism.

Edit:
It's annoying that Mega dropped their free tier size from 50GB to ~15-20GB a few years ago.
Had to make two additional accounts to upload what would previously fit in one with room to spare. I feel like I'd known about this already, but I luckily had made a few accounts in the 50GB time period so I filled up my last empty 50GB one yesterday. Lossless BD video rips ('lossless' as in unmodified video streams, FLAC-encoded PCM audio streams) take a lot of space.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Oct 11 2022, 19:13

I found a PHP library for processing word (97 and 2007), ODT, RTF, HTML, and PDF files (PHPWord).

Working on getting it working on my powerbook, since libreoffice crashes on it when I attempt to open a DOCX (reads RTF's fine, though). This way I can convert them to a format that doesn't break everything and then read that.

So far I think it's mostly working, and it runs waaayyy faster than trying to convert a file using libreoffice's command line on an intel machine.

Not quite as good at preserving formatting, but whatever.

It's strange that with all their sample code they didn't have one that just converted from 'format A' to 'format B.'

Also I had to fix a text encoding bug with the Word 2007 decoder where it would leave HTML/XML-escaped entities in the output.

Haven't written any PHP in a while. It's awkward, yeah, but I still don't think it's THAT bad (at least anymore).

Also, played the lottery with used thinkpad keyboards on ebay; got really lucky. This one feels barely used, shows no dirt on the underside, and is made by NMB (the better of the two manufacturers for this model, IMO, having used both).

Came out behind on the search for new batteries, though. Looks like the US manufacturer I bought from last time has since discontinued my battery pack. And most of the chinese ones online bulge out so I can't fit the laptop in my docking station.

I guess I could buy a chinese one, open the case, remove the four lowermost batteries (they're in parallel with the other four), chop out the bump, cover it in duct tape, and use it that way. But I'd rather not.

For now my current battery is holding on, so I have a little time. But this battery hunt just gets more annoying every time I do it.

I can tell at some point in the near future I'm going to have to learn all about tricking battery microcontrollers into working after swapping in new cells.

No; getting a different laptop is not an option. I adore mine and the only suitable recent replacement is a Panasonic Let's Note from Japan, which costs over $2,000 and has pretty much no parts availability outside of Japan.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Oct 11 2022, 23:20