[X] My Assistant

i could use a sandwich

Amiga chose the worst possible moment to lose power; reformatting its HDD now.

I'm probably going to need to find another Kickstart ROM for my newly acquired secondary A500... Workbench 1.3 sucks. But I refuse to let Cloanto (the vulture that currently is picking the rotten corpse of commodore for every last penny it can get) get its tithe. They make selllers get "licenses" for this 30 year old software from them and also go after people who share ROM images. Fucking despicable.

Oh, and they sell an emulator, too.

There are some mask ROM's from back in the day that came out of old Amiga 500 Plus'es that will let me get up to 2.x, although for 3.x I may have to get some EPROM's and invest in an EPROM programmer after so many years of kicking that can down the road.

I'll probably just get a mask ROM. 3.x would be nice for GNU Emacs and GCC (GNU's C compiler), but TBH I mostly just use these things for Deluxe Paint, which works fine on older systems. 2.x is just a massive improvement for usability over 1.x.

That's new to me. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/blink.gif)

A common Simpsons reference.
It's only a (sizable) subset of Pale Moon users.
I don't think you or wayward are that type necessarily.

i could use a sandwich

Ah yes, sandwich making technology.
--------
The pale moon guy just responded to me again, telling me that he was using windows xp as a daily driver and that 'linux wouldn't run [his] hundreds of utilities so it's pure shit." Note that I never once recommended he run linux; I had just said that's what I do if I need a modern browser on ancient hardware.

Never mind that windows programs old enough to work in XP all but certainly work in Wine, especially non-multimedia-based utilities.

I wonder if these "utilities" are batch scripts to delete registry keys to force Windows to re-sort his start menu or something. That's what most of my Windows XP """"utilities"""" look like.

That and old eroge visual novels.

The guy who is clinging to XP desperately in 2022 and using Chinese spyware browsers in order to do so - and then interrupted a conversation I was having with someone else totally uninvited - also told me to "get a life." Lol. True-blue autism.

(I don't use an Amiga for day-to-day work; it's entirely different.)

Afterthought: I know someone else (someone whom I respect far more than this guy, because he actually knows how to program) that clings to XP like that. But he has no delusions about it. He just doesn't want to give it up and has thus far been skilled enough to avoid having to do so without resorting to being a dipshit.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 2 2022, 07:51

If someone knows what the source of something is, but they tell you to "just take a screenshot of it and use Google® Lens™ to crop and search for it" instead of giving you at least a goddamn name so you can search for it yourself, they should be executed on the spot.

If they don't want to tell, or don't know, they should just shut the fuck up and not say anything.

recently things like bonus cards you used to be able to get physically are now 'just get the app for discounts' where you have to pullout a phone with the app then click on something to get a qr code just for them to scan. people somehow find this more convinient than having a card and they dont issue cards anymore because 'no one uses them anymore'.

why must things always get worse

recently things like bonus cards you used to be able to get physically are now 'just get the app for discounts' where you have to pullout a phone with the app then click on something to get a qr code just for them to scan. people somehow find this more convinient than having a card and they dont issue cards anymore because 'no one uses them anymore'.

why must things always get worse

Because didn't you hear??? All problems can be solved by throwing more software at them!!

Don't want to pay for art or learn to draw? No problem! Just throw a computer at the problem and make it go away.

Don't want to pay to have plastic cards made?
"Do you guys not have phones?"

And consumers will (by and large) just eat that shit up. Nothing will get better unless people stop blindly eating whatever is offered to them. And I don't think that's going to stop happening.

Douglas Adams had it right.

t should be explained at this point that modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and maximum capacity eight persons jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetic Corporation ‘Happy Vertical People Transporter’, as a packet of peanuts does to the entire West Wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital.

This is because they operate on the unlikely principle of defocused temporal perception - a curious system which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing, and making friends that people were previously forced to do whilst waiting for elevators.

Not unnaturally, many lifts imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up or down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways - as a sort of existential protest - demanded participation in the decision making process, and, finally, took to sulking in basements.

At this point a man called Gardrilla Manceframe rediscovered and patented a device he had seen in a history book called a staircase. It has been calculated that his most recent tax bill paid for the social security of five thousand redundant Sirius Cybernetics Workers, the hospitalisation of a hundred Sirius Cybernetics Executives, and the psychiatric treatment of over seventeen-and-a-half-thousand neurotic lifts.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 3 2022, 10:19

Nvidia launched new 3060 8GB that is actually more like a 3050ti. It has 15-21% less performance for the same price.

Guide: how to remove watermarks from the National Lampoon magazine scan PDF's from the DVD-ROM on archive.org [archive.org] https://archive.org/details/NationalLampoon_201812 :

(If not using Adobe Reader > 6 on Windows, you will see a watermark on every page you try to read. If on a later version, the watermark will only appear when printed. To remove it entirely (or to use the PDF's on non-adobe-reader PDF viewers), you can use this script to rip them out.)

Firstly, the software you will need:

1. Install pdftk (the java command line version from [gitlab.com] https://gitlab.com/pdftk-java/pdftk.git). There are binary releases available [gitlab.com] here. Debian also has it in its repositories as 'pdftk-java'.
2. Install the ghostscript command line tool. In Debian, this is the 'ghostscript' package. You need the 'gs' binary. On windows I think they call this 'gswin32c.exe' or 'gswin64c.exe' instead. [url]Instructions for installing are here[/url].
3. You'll need a computer with the 'sed' program. If you're on a Linux/Unix (including Mac OS), you should have this already. If on Windows, using Cygwin might be a good idea.
4. You'll need a posix-style bourne shell (like bash or sh). Unless you're running Windows, you probably already have this. If on Windows, use cygwin.

You can use this shell script:

CODE

#! /usr/bin/env sh
fileext() {
  echo "$1" | sed 's/.*\.//g'
}
filebase() {
  echo "$1" | sed 's/\.'"$2"'//'
}
pdftk "$1" output uncomp1.pdf uncompress
sed 's!^/GS1 .*R$!!;s!^/GS0 .*R$!!;s!^/Fm0 .*R$!!;s!^/Fm1 .*R$!!;s!^/GS0 gs$!!;s!^/GS1 gs$!!;s!^/Fm0 .*$!!;s!^/Fm1 .*$!!' uncomp1.pdf > uncomp.pdf
rm uncomp1.pdf
extension="$(fileext "$1")"
# output filename for input /home/user/1973_01.pdf would be
# /home/user/1973_01_no-watermark.pdf
newfilename="$(filebase "$1" "$extension")"'_no-watermark.pdf'
gs -o "$newfilename" -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress uncomp.pdf
rm uncomp.pdf

Usage (if saved as 'fixer.sh' for example):

CODE

./fixer.sh 1973_01.pdf

For doing all PDF's on the disc:

CODE

find . -type f -iname '*.pdf' -print0 | xargs -0 -i ./fixer.sh "{}"

The files will be output to the same folder the originals were in; if you feed it '/home/user/1973_01.pdf' the output file will be at /home/user/1973_01_no-watermark.pdf'. You will probably want to just run 7zip to extract everything from the ISO in order to have write access to the folder you're reading from.

Sample output (original vs. fixed):
[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/YPYii0Fg.jpg)

This method does not remove OCR or other nice things in the files like the "extract all images and re-assemble" method might.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 3 2022, 22:48

Does anyone know any free Dialer app that is similar to Truecaller? Something that features crowd-sourced database to identify known scammers, spammers etc.

Just copied a disk to another disk and made a backup disk image all in one pass.

I love Unix. It's because of the little things like this.

CODE

# tee /path/to/disk-backup.img < /dev/sdb > /dev/sdc

edit: note: run as root. But don't do this unless you're sure the drive letters are correct and you understand why this works.

It's not super complicated once you understand shell syntax, but because you're working with your storage it's kind of important that you don't do things blindly.

Also note that you can get progress if you have 'pv' installed and instead do

CODE

# pv /dev/sdb | tee /path/to/disk-backup.img > /dev/sdc

Apart from the progress reports that the second command prints out, the two statements are pretty much equivalent.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 5 2022, 10:47

I found a project that does something simple i want, but also has all these extra features I don't care about like a web client and such. And the developer has a page documenting just how bad linux distros are for patching the program to not have all of that bloat.
Wish I could get inside their head and figure out why they think a web client and NVIDIA CUDA dependencies is a good idea for a remote desktop program.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 7 2022, 05:27

The graphics card returns by scalpers tanked Nvidia sales so much they had to do a 5% price drop.

EVGA probably made a good choice, the margins for board partners will probably be too low for the 4000 gen due to the pricing strategy.

The new 7900 xtx beats the 4080 in gaming rasterization performance. So they are virtually just relying on raytracing and glitchy DLSS 3.0 which kinda relies on future game releases. The big e-sports titles don't really use raytracing though, and e-sports gamers fear the latency of DLSS 3.0.


Edit: talked to one person saying they want to get 3090ti SLI as you can get 'deals' on them now. To me though, I feel that SLI is kinda shit for gaming. You need the drivers and the engine to be perfectly optimised for it, which nobody does anymore, so you can actually get worse performance in SLI than with a single card.

SLI could have been good with explicit multicard modes being built into the graphics APIs

This post has been edited by EsotericSatire: Dec 8 2022, 05:44

I thought SLI is dead on consumer cards? Sounds like a horrible deal either way.

Stupid programs that completely reinstall instead of just checking if things have moved (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/dry.gif)

I thought SLI is dead on consumer cards? Sounds like a horrible deal either way.

They upgraded it to Nvlink for one gen then killed it again.

Only actual use seems to be AI and rendering but they want you to buy their overpriced professional cards for that.

A zoomer friend of mine (one of the older ones that remembers cassettes , CRT's, the Mega Drive (due to older siblings), and VHS, and who grew up playing Super Mario kart, Turtles in Time, and Zombies Ate My Neighbors) was looking at my new-old computer the other week.

I got to inform him that 3DFX created the first (and "real") SLI - aka Scan Line Interleave; none of that bus sharing crap.
He was amused.

Also I got my Amiga monitor all fixed up, been playing around with it on the Amiga but also got it set up for my Win98 gateway PC.

Tops out at 640x480 if you want progressive scan, unfortunately, but that's still plenty for quake on a voodoo3.

I have a newer dead multiscan monitor in a box that I hope maybe I'll figure out some day.

It died on me 20 minutes into use after I got it, but until that moment the picture looked fine. So assuming it's not the cap in the flyback that blew up or something, I think it should likely still be fixable. Pretty much certain the tube itself is good.

Regardless, the amiga monitor works, and I think I may even have gotten rid of the ozone smell by giving it all (especially the flyback) a really good blasting with an electric computer duster. We'll see if it comes back. Its board still looks awful, but for the moment it's running better than I think it ever has before. No scary smells, no horizontal collapse, both speaker channels work, a working pincushion adjustment.

Gonna be slaving away for end of semester for a week or so, though. So I'll have to put all of that on hold.
December is fucking awful if you're a student.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 9 2022, 10:58

Firefox found a way to silently exit on me again.
I wonder if it could related to pinning tabs, maybe that kill my protection of having always 2 empty tabs to prevent full close (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/unsure.gif)

about:config
browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab = false
Potentially, also
browser.quitShortcut.disabled = true

You're welcome.

Thought: it'd be great if my analysis of algorithms professor just got lost in the woods or took a sudden leave of absence until after xmas so I could have time to finish his retarded assignment. It's like he doesn't realize that every other teacher also has given final assignments (and I have finals to prepare for), and is assuming that I can just do nothing but work on his homework for a week straight (that's how much he's assigned us).

The worst part is it's mostly hypothetical work that takes so long to figure out that by the time you've worked out the time complexity or drawn out the tree or whatever for a single one of the problems you could have finished a major programming project. And I'm hardly even kidding.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 10 2022, 02:38

about:config
browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab = false
Potentially, also
browser.quitShortcut.disabled = true

You're welcome.

that was my course of action as well immediately after landing on that update, luckily they still put it behind toggles at least.
but any positive credit that'd give them is instantly negated by them also changing the names of those config toggles or later removing them anyway.
I'm still surprised the css I've started using for browser styling hasnt completely broken (knock on wood) since setting that up. from around the time where they introduced that stupid mega bar and scaled the ui up to look weird and padded. though I guess because its filled with wildcards it should survive most updates for the foreseeable future.

I'm still surprised the css I've started using for browser styling hasnt completely broken (knock on wood) since setting that up. from around the time where they introduced that stupid mega bar and scaled the ui up to look weird and padded. though I guess because its filled with wildcards it should survive most updates for the foreseeable future.

Until they revamp the GUI again for no reason.
Which is something foreseeable that they will definitely do.

Still patching firefox for proper 'view image' (in current tab) in the context menu whenever I update it. The 'view image' kind that obeys referer (sic) and doesn't force it to open in a new tab unless you hold control or middle click.

Fuck mozilla.

This morning i fixed my website so that images scaled down properly to fit screen width on low-res (e.g. 640x480) screens in firefox 2.x and seamonkey 1.x. It was giving images horizontal scroll bars to let you view the entire image instead of shrinking it down with the window width properly.

I was testing it on windows 98 today, too, from my pentium 3 PC. IE5 and IE6 mostly work, too (totally work, except they don't scale images down and I'm not about to introduce any javascript into my pure, javascript-less blog just for IE's sake).

The amiga monitor I'm using with that PC maxes out at 640x480 if you want progressive scan. Which I do.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 12 2022, 09:00

Graphics card tech reviewers are schizophrenic at the moment.

We have both people saying 7900xtx destroys the 4080 by 15% and other reviews saying the 4080 destroys the 7900xtx by 15%.

Its probably that depending on the games tested they will be similar.