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PianoPlayer88Key

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About PianoPlayer88Key

  • Birthday Apr 29, 1981

Contact Methods

  • Discord
    2 accounts, ran into server limit.
  • Steam
    http://steamcommunity.com/id/tfcwings/
  • Twitch.tv
    pianoplayer88key (not streaming yet)
  • Twitter
    pianoplayr88key
  • Website URL

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    San Diego county, CA, USA
  • Interests
    Computer hardware, software (games, media production & editing, some others, not so much into office type stuff though), playing piano, listening to a variety of music, photography & videography, other things
  • Occupation
    Currently volunteering at a computer refurbishing warehouse. (Idk if it's similar to FreeGeek.)

System

  • CPU
    Desktop: Intel Core i7-4790K | Laptop: Intel Core i7-6700K
  • Motherboard
    Desktop: ASRock Z97 Extreme6 | Laptop: Clevo P750DM-G
  • RAM
    Desktop: G.Skill Ares Red 32GB (2x 8x2GB) DDR3-1600 CL9 | Laptop: G.Skill Ripjaws 40GB (1x 8GB + 2x16GB) DDR4-2133 CL15 SO-DIMM
  • GPU
    Desktop: EVGA (Nvidia) GeForce GTX 1060 SC 3GB | Laptop: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M 6GB
  • Case
    Desktop: Rosewill Thor V2 Black | Laptop: Clevo P750DM-G
  • Storage
    Desktop (not all are in system): 80GB WD IDE (WD800BB - dying), 250GB WD IDE (WD2500JB), 2x 750GB WD Black (WD7500AAKS & WD7501AALS), 1TB WD Green (WD10EADS), 2x 1.5TB WD Green (WD15EADS), 2x 2TB WD Green (WD20EADS & WD20EZRX), 3x 4TB HGST NAS (0S03664), 3x 5TB HGST NAS (0S03835), 3x 8TB HGST NAS (0S04012), 256GB Crucial M550 2.5" SSD | Laptop: 250GB Crucial MX200 M.2 60mm, 1.05TB Crucial MX300 2.5", (removed) 2TB Samsung/Seagate Spinpoint M9T 2.5"
  • PSU
    Desktop: Corsair AX760 | Laptop: battery & 230W AC adapter
  • Display(s)
    Desktop: Dell U2414H | Laptop: built-in 1080p IPS G-Sync
  • Cooling
    Desktop: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO | Laptop: copper plates + heatpipes + fans
  • Keyboard
    Desktop: Logitech K200 | Laptop: built in
  • Mouse
    Desktop: Logitech G602 | Laptop: Logitech M510
  • Sound
    onboard on both. Laptop mentions Sound Blaster X-Fi on sticker, but there's a RealTek HD Audio Manager icon in my system tray I've noticed sound is cleaner in my laptop than desktop.
  • Operating System
    Both: Windows 10 Pro. Build 1703 as of August 2017.
  • PCPartPicker URL

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  1. It's on the way. I'll also want to get a case for it, I've generally been happy with my Case Logic case for my current 15.6" laptop, although it's kinda falling apart some. (Probably cause I pack too much into it.) Hopefully I can find something locally. Or maybe I should plan a trip to the Tustin Micro Center in the next week or two, as after that I'll be going to Utah (Orem / Provo / south Salt Lake area) and probably staying there several months or so. (Also I should get a couple pair of cargo pants, Big 5 locally has some Carhartt pants that have pretty big cargo pockets that I'm pretty sure would fit this laptop.)
  2. Okay why are the emojis becoming absolutely gigantic when I copy/paste from drafts to here Also another in-line image was supposed to be like 320x256 pixels. Does the forum software not remember every nuance from where I copied from, when I'm copying / pasting with formatting preserved? Yes I know, I'm thinking around $60-80/month would be fine, maybe even $100 on months that I have heavy usage. TBH I'm not sure how much data I'll need ... sometimes I'll just be running discord, web browsers, occasional light video, and sometimes I might be streaming 4k several hours a day. My current cell provider is T-Mobile, so if I could go with one of their plans that might be alright. I do see what looks like a hotspot plan from Verizon with 150GB/month for $100/month, as well as 100GB for $60 or 50GB for $40. AT&T looks like they have 100GB for $90/mo or 50GB for $55/mo, but all I see from T-Mobile is 30GB for $10/mo, or less. (There's a tablet plan with 20GB for $35/mo, but besides not being nearly enough, idk if that's the TYPE of plan I need.) Another option would be upgrading my phone plan from a 50GB/month prepaid unlimited (but I think without hotspot) plan to the $90/month Go5G Plus plan, but it only has 50GB/month hotspot, and it also has other things I don't need like netflix, and Apple TV, although the AAA membership would be nice, I already have that standalone. (It still won't allow me to do daily full backups (full backup to me meaning a bit-for-bit clone of everything on the physical media) and hourly / realtime incremental backups to Backblaze or similar, though.) I've already done that once, and i have four SSDs in it already. The current battery has gotten to the point where it dies as I'm getting to the Windows login screen, if I power it on unplugged after it's been plugged in. (It also sometimes takes upwards of 30-45 seconds to POST.) Yeah, but backpacks currently aren't allowed at some conventions I've recently gone to and sometime want to go to again (and when they were allowed in previous years and I had one, I found it was pretty awkward to carry around). Yeah, idk about a light refresh though I've already upgraded this laptop a few times along the way -- went i3-6100 to i7-6700K, 8GB to 40GB to 64GB RAM, started with a 2TB 5400rpm Samsung/Seagate Spinpoint M9T HDD and ended up with a total of 12TB SSDs (in 4 & 2 TB 2.5" SATA & M.2 NVME). I'd really like enough CPU to eventually run like 20+ VMs at once (for now I could get away with 5 or 6 or 8), and enough RAM to not have to use pagefile all the time, like this, But that doesn't exist, outside of systems that support ECC RDIMMs. I don't really need a portable powerful GPU - I'm not as much into gaming as I used to be, and most I play are older (mid 2000s or older) or casual games that run just fine on my old desktop's Intel Haswell iGPU. I believe the 780M in the 7840U is about 10X stronger than that. (Even a few older games I play could run "okay" on my dad's old Core 2 Duo laptop's iGPU.) Yeah I don't game much these days, so the iGPU would be just fine. Interesting thing, I got generally comparable performance when OC'ing both CPUs, if I remember, or within a few % of each other. I think the 6700K was slightly ahead, as I could manage to get I *think* close to 1000 in Cinebench R15, and touched 200 in single-core, but couldn't quite get that with the 4790K. I think I could reach 4.7 GHz on the 4790K with a 212 Evo, or 4.8 if I pushed the voltage to 1.35V. On the 6700K in the laptop, I could get up to about 4.6 GHz or so, maybe 4.7 if I very carefully finessed the balance between voltage, temperatures (including ambient), etc. I found that it was much better for me to undervolt the 6700K than overclock it, though - I've been running about -150mV offset, and the CPU power generally doesn't exceed 65-70W under load, as long as it's not Prime95 Small FFT. Yes you're right, it's a socket 1151 desktop 6700K. I remember the primary reason I got it at the time was not so much because of the desktop hardware and it being a gaming laptop, but it was one of the only / few laptops I could find at the time that supported installing two 2.5" hard drives, which I anticipated needing at the time due to doing a lot of 4K video and SSDs still being pretty expensive then. As long as I'm not doing too much, it does fine for video streaming - in fact I used it in December 2020 to stream to Twitch while simultaneously encoding locally in 4K for upload to youtube, and I don't think I had any dropped frames or blotchy quality. I was careful to not have much else running though. Normal use for me, though, involves a lot of multitasking (and I've seen it take a few MINUTES to alt+tab from one task to another sometimes). And it played GTA V, Witcher 3, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Ark: Survival Evolved, etc just fine. I actually jumped on my desktop from the 4790K to the Ryzen 9 5950X (with 128GB RAM, and I could do some of the at-home heavy lifting on that), but that wasn't as big of a jump as in past memory. I came to the 4790K from my dad's Core 2 Duo T7250 (which was an interim for a few years after the motherboard died in which was my Athlon 64 X2 4000+, also the 4790K was 2.2x faster in single-core than the T7250 was in multicore, and about 10X faster in multicore.) Also in my childhood / teens, my dad upgraded from an Intel 286-10 to an AMD 486 DX4-120 after about 6 years 9 months, for probably about 1/3 the price and about 75-80X faster if my estimations are anywhere close to the ballpark. (I'd like to see THAT level of a jump today.) In between the 486 DX4-120 and my Athlon 64 and his Core 2 Duo, he had a Pentium 166 MMX, and a Socket A Athlon 1.4 GHz, and his current laptop has an i7-8550U. Anyway, one thing I'd use the Win Max 2 for would be when I'm at conventions like TwitchCon (although I'm thinking of skipping this year for reasons outside the scope of this post), and keeping up with the discord servers / chats for the channels I follow, and I'd need to be able to have multiple discord accounts open simultaneously without having to log out and back in. (Also if I could tame my notifications to only ping me when someone directly pings ME and not including everyone and here in my pings, unless it's by the streamer themselves announcing when they're going live or where / when a meetup is, then I could turn notifs back on.) Also I'll be using it for general use when I'm away from the desktop, and oh btw, for several months I might not have my desktop PC with me, as I'll be going to another state to do an internship at a piano shop, and I want to pack light, not take much extra stuff with me. (I'd get the rest of my stuff once I settle into a place for a longer period of time.) Also I might want to stream piano music with it as well, and my current laptop is a bit bulky to put where I want it on my acoustic Baldwin upright piano, as you can see in the picture in the spoiler. (Also I think it'd be a bit big to rest on my Roland FP-60X if I use that when I don't have access to the Baldwin, but the WM2 might be fine.) I could get into a bit more but it's probably a bit much to expect for this laptop (For example, being able to instantly re-open / switch to literally ANYTHING I've EVER opened / accessed previously, or encoding uncompressed / lossless 4K faster than real time (my 4790K in one test took 4 days to transcode a 4 minute video to 4K H.265, encoding a dozen or more 1080p 4-8mbps videos in VMs, which themselves are running nested inside another VM, and so on.) My family generally does the same thing - keeping things until they die or no longer do what we want. My dad in the past used to fix things (like appliances and tools) when they'd break even when they were well beyond their service life, although he's getting up in years now and has the beginnings of Alzheimer's so I don't expect him to do much more of that. My brother recently told me he was upgrading his system from an i7-4770K and GTX 1080 Ti to an i7-14700K and RTX 4070 (or Super or Ti, I don't remember which.) I wish I had a place to keep older hardware around and experiment with it (A couple things I'd like to test would be multitasking capability on an older system vs a modern phone - not how fast it is, but whether you can do certain things at all, and also testing the total time to write / read an entire 20MB or 40MB MFM or IDE HDD, vs a modern 18TB HDD or 4TB SSD, and if I kept thinking about it I could keep going.)
  3. Spillover from edited title: It's closest I find to my need, in budget. Hi ... I'm looking at replacing a Clevo P750DM-G laptop (15.6" 1080p, 6700K, 64GB, 12TB, 970M 6GB) with a GPD Win Max 2 (7/8840U, 64GB, 2/4TB). The Clevo's battery dies in a few minutes, it's unwieldy to carry around, and pretty slow. Also I want to be able to have internet when away from WiFi (& not limited to 50-100GB/mo hotspot allotment), desktop apps, virtualization I can't do on my Pixel 6a and other things. (Gaming isn't important, I might play older/casual titles sometimes though.) I'm thinking of ordering the WM2 (when in stock, currently on backorder) from GPDstore.net or Droix Global, should I? I'd be keeping it until at least early-mid 2030s. (What I really need doesn't yet exist, and when it does my needs may be more, but that WM2 is the closest compromise I find.) Okay this lacks detail (want whole post to fit on my phone screen, otherwise my posts tend to be WAY too long, wish I could fit entire post just in title), so I put the rest in spoilers below. Next spoiler is from a previous (2½ months ago) short-but-not-short-enough draft: More details / form mentioned above in the 3rd spoiler:
  4. Hi all, TLDR: Having trouble accessing, from my PC, the data folder for a specific app on my Android 14 phone. Need to transfer data from an older device (Android 7), I was able to copy that data to my PC. Folder access does work on another Android 14 phone but not on mine, and tests on my phone (per instruction from app author) confirm the folder does exist. - - - - - - - - - - - - Please forgive the lack of formatting, as I’m posting this on a couple different forums (a PC / tech forum, and a piano forum) and don’t feel like bothering with any type of UBB or HTML code or whatever. (Also I hope cross-posting to different forums is okay.) Anyway, I have some piano tuning software (Tunelab) that I purchased for my phone (Google Pixel 6a), and would like to import some saved data from an older phone (Moto G4 Play) that I had also used the software on a few times. I should note that the older phone is running Android 7, and the newer phone is running Android 14. Somewhere in between, there was a change in how Android organizes user app data. On the old phone, the files were in a “tunelab” subdirectory under the root folder, but on the new phone, they’re supposed to be in Android\Data\com.realtimespecialties.tunelab or something like that. I was able to get the files from the old phone and save them to my PC (Windows 10 22H2), but, when I plug the new phone into the PC via USB, that com.realtimespecialties.tunelab folder does not show up, although quite a few other folders do show up from other apps. I contacted the creator of the program and he had me test a couple things (one of which was using an internal tool to copy from a backup and overwrite a file, then check to see if it did it properly), and that worked, telling us that the folder in question does exist on the phone. (Also trying to manually create the folder on the phone from the PC doesn’t work either.) I also temporarily installed the app on my dad’s Pixel 8 Pro (also running Android 14), and on that one I was able to see the folder from my desktop PC. Also I plugged my phone into my older laptop (WIndows 10 1909, update is broken, thinks not enough space to update even though it’s on a 4TB SSD), and the com.realtimespecialties.tunelab folder doesn’t show up there either. I also tried uninstalling an reinstalling the app on my Pixel 6a, and that didn’t work either. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get the data files from the older phone imported to the newer one? I really don’t want to go back to using the old phone for that software, also my (paid) license is tied to the new phone anyway (for now, that is, it is transferable if I get a new phone in the future but that’s not planned until after support / updates end for the Pixel 6a, or later). Also the creator of the app does have an option for dropbox integration, but I don’t have any dropbox account set up.
  5. Yeah, I figure some stuff isn't going to transfer. Hopefully we can transfer the important things, though. I went on Transfer data from an Android phone to a Pixel - Pixel Phone Help (google.com) and went over the list of data to transfer with my mom, to try to figure out what's important. A lot of the things on there, she had really no clue what they were, so I'd presume they're unimportant. There are a few things she definitely wants to keep, though: Music, photos and videos Contacts stored on the phone or SIM card (idk how much she uses the google account on her phone) Text messages (SMS and MMS) and their multimedia Call history Among other things... Ringtones would be nice (if I could figure out how to do it manually, it's in the "doesn't automatically copy" section of the above link), W-Fi credentials would be nice as well she doesn't use a lot of custom apps, although she does use weather but I think that's already included, or something like that. There might be a few phone settings we may want to duplicate as well, but idk what, probably not a lot though. (I did at some point in the past enable developer options on her phone.) Might be nice to transfer non-Google accounts, if possible, but idk what all she uses. (She does have Yahoo mail and Amazon Prime, but I'm not sure that she uses any special apps on her phone, just the browser. Also afaik she doesn't really use the built-in password manager, instead keeping her login info written in a paper-and-ink book.) Pretty much most if not all the other stuff doesn't really matter afaik. What I'm thinking of doing at this point is ... From her new phone, skip the automatic data transfer, then log into the same account that she uses on her old phone. (btw I'd have to check her phone, but when I was looking up the pixel 8 transfer info on her PC to discuss with her, there was a banner saying that her (yahoo) email address had no recovery email associated with it.) Use a USB cable to manually transfer local data like photos, documents (if she has any, but doubtful), music, videos. Maybe use the option to restore from cloud backup? (I checked the settings on her phone earlier and it is turned on, but idk what all is backed up. (Her phone has 8GB total storage capacity, Google Drive afaik has 15GB, so it could theoretically hold a full "dd if, of" type image of the phone, not that it would work that well moving to such a vastly newer phone though.) Her phone does have an SD card, I think most of the pictures from the camera are saved to that, afaik. There's a few things I'm still a bit concerned about if we'd be able to transfer them or not, like the call history, text messages, contacts that aren't in her Google account, ringtones, etc. I went into the accounts section of her phone settings, and there's a couple gmail accounts in there under Google, and with a logo that's an envelope with a red-background @ symbol on the flap. Then one that looks like a Gmail logo, labed as personal (IMAP) is linked to the yahoo account I mentioned earlier. I just want it to be as seamless as possible for her to get used to the new phone. We bought it around Black Friday from Best Buy, and have I think until January 13 to return it, at least that's what the website said when we ordered it, unless it was a typo and they meant January 31 like the other places like Amazon or Google Store. (It was out of stock everywhere else I think, at the time, in the color and capacity we wanted - my parents both got the 256GB version, mom got the blue one and dad got the black one.) She'll be 80 the beginning of next month and I hope that two things happen: support (at least bug fixes and security patches) lasts at least as long as she's still around (that's why I picked a Pixel 8 Pro cause of its 7 year support life, instead of some other phones, also she's approaching the possibility of outliving the 82 years that one of the oldest relatives on her side of the family lived to in recent memory), and SHE lasts long enough so that the phone's support lifecycle (if it was extended, however unlikely) would be comparable to how long the Linux kernel supported the 386 or 486 At her age, and with her being less technologically advanced, it would probably be hard to get her another new phone several years from now. Even when she was somewhat younger, big technological changes were not an easy adjustment for her, although she has gotten used to them after a while, in the past at least. (She did relatively okay jumping straight from Windows XP on her previous laptop to Windows 10 on her current one almost 6 years ago.)
  6. Hey, I'm having issues with the YouTube browser on edge - whenever I open a video or go to the home page, it freezes my entire browser for several minutes. Yes, I may have a couple thousand tabs open, but I don't have this problem with 2x as many tabs in Chrome or 5x as many in FireFox. Also I don't have the issue with the YouTube studio page itself (but opening a video from there does cause it), or in InPrivatr. (And I'm pretty sure it's not UBlock Origin, cause that's allowed in InPrivate windows.) Is there some way (if not now, in the future) I could have something running (debug type) that could see what specific scripts are hanging up, and where and why, so I can terminate them or whatever is necessary? (Also if something is "not responding" for other reasons I'd like to be told why, for example if it's having to fetch things from pagefile, although I doubt that in this particular case, I'm only using 55.1/128GB RAM, with 113/164GB committed.) I'd like to figure out what's going on with it, or other scripts that make sites stop responding. Also it's really annoying to be always asked if I'm a human every couple minutes or more frequently. I don't even consider myself that much of a power user - my Ryzen 5950X CPU is only sitting at 5% utilization right now, RAM at 45%, all my storage at 0%, and network mostly 0kbps at the moment except periodic 8-32kbps blips.Il It's slowing me way down, quite frustrating. I thought web servers were supposed to be able to serve sites even to people with, high-end PCs, which mine is definitely not. (Also the browser finally just responded after I came into the forum and typed all that so far on my phone, and I have autocorrect off (too many NSFW horror stories) and had to correct a lot of mistakes.) My only has one CPU (a basic consumer socket at that) and lacks registered ECC RAM, and the network and internet connection is slower than the sequential burst read speed on my SSD. Do websites expect me to be using a low end PC from like 1995, or a phone from like 2006? (I even get "are you human?" prompts on PCPartPicker on my Pixel 6a, so I can't blame it on sites expecting me to use a smartphone, which afaik is less capable of multitasking than a PC.)
  7. Sorry for the delay, have a lot going on. Well it would be nice to be able to transfer the apps / data for ones that are supported on the new device. (I'm not sure what all she uses though.) Of course, I'm sure she'd want her media (music, photos, videos) to be transferred, as well as any Google or other accounts she's signed into. Also she can't go without her contacts or her text / SMS/MMS messages, and the mutlimedia in those. Also I would prefer to not have to re-enter wi-fi credentials either. (BTW I'm reading off the list at Transfer data from an Android phone to a Pixel - Pixel Phone Help (google.com) ) And of course phone settings, although there might be a few things I'd change later. Wallpaper would be nice to have. Call history is also a must-have. Alarms, idk if she uses those, but probably. Passwords from Google Password Manager -- she typically doesn't use those, writes them in a paper-and-ink book she keeps. She doesn't use spotify or fitbit, but she does have amazon prime and other accounts. Hopefully signing into the google account on the new phone would bring some of that up. Her old phone is set to backup, although idk if everything is backed up or not. Then of course we'll want to transfer any non-Google accounts and their data. She doesn't use LINE or WhatsApp as far as I know. Then from the "what won't copy during setup" ... I'll want to make sure downloads get transfered. I don't think her phone supports locked folders, and i doubt she'd use it anyway, also I doubt she has any non-Play-store apps. I will want to transfer data from apps that don't use Android backup, if applicable. Also other accounts and their data, we will want that as well. Not sure what if anything she has synced to other services. Ringtones might be nice, but idk how much if any customization she's done, likewise with "certain phone settings". Anyway I briefly tried the auto transfer again a bit earlier this afternoon, cause I thought maybe I had forgotten an important step, like turning on bluetooh discoverability, or wifi or something on the source phone, but, that didn't help. I'm thinking ... if I can't do direct transfer from my mom's phone to the pixel, maybe I could... Sign into her Google account (same one as on the old phone) with the new phone Let it sync whatever data it has Plug the old phone into the new one via USB cable, use standard files utility or whatever to browse the files on the old phone and bring them over to the new one. Something I don't understand though ... A few years ago when my dad got his Pixel 4a, I was able to automatically do the transfer from his Galaxy Core Prime to the 4a, and pretty much everything worked mostly without a hitch (except having to restart the transfer process a couple times cause of user error on my part, and a couple apps he used not porting over, which is why he STILL uses the old phone for some things occasionally). But, transferring from my mom's Galaxy Core Prime to her Pixel 8, I can't get anything to work, at least not like my dad's phones did a few years ago. Both source phones are just as old, I thought it should work. I was looking at Can't transfer data to a new Pixel phone - Pixel Phone Help (google.com) , and it says it might be able to transfer from source phones as old as Android 5, which is what my mom's and dad's Galaxy Core Primes have. (As I said, transfer worked from my dad's GCP to his 4a, but not from my mom's GCP to her 8 Pro.) One thing I maybe thought of, was doing some kind of intermediate transfer, as in, transfer from the Galaxy Core Prime to something slightly newer, then from that phone to the Pixel 8 Pro. But, I don't really have a suitable phone that would work as an intermediary. My Pixel 6a is my daily driver, and I don't want to reset that one. I no longer have my Pixel 3a, traded it in when I got the 6a. My Moto G4 Play was a previous daily driver, still has things on it that I don't want to remove. And it's Android 7, which might still be a bit much of a gap between that and the Pixel 8 Pro. My LG G4 essentially is close to factory condition except for signing into my Google account. (I had sent it in for repair with the bootloop issue, but that was after I had another phone, and when I got it back I still kept using the other phone.) But, it runs Android 6, so probably too old. Maybe that's a reason to go to a T-Mobile store, or Best Buy ... or would they not be able to help with that? Too bad, after doing the transfer from my dad's Pixel 4a to his 8 Pro (although I wanted to do my mom's phone first), there's no way I could ... Plug dad's 4a into a PC, boot up Linux "dd if=pixel_4a of=backup_file_on_SSD" factory reset the 4a transfer from mom's Galaxy Core Prime to the 4a transfer from the 4a to mom's Pixel 8 Pro plug the 4a back into the PC "dd if=backup_file_on_SSD of=pixel_ra" and have them be ready to go on their new phones, with the 4a still available for my dad to use as he wishes. Also my dad uses wired headphones quite a bit, and while I was thinking of having him get a pair of pixel buds (either A series or Pro), I'm thinking, with his Alzheimers, there's probably a non-zero chance of him losing them. So, I'm thinking of getting an adapter that hopefully would allow simultaneous connection to 3.5mm wired earphones and usb-c charger / data transfer. Anything I need to look out for on those? I remember some site suggesting stick with known brands, like Anker, Belkin, or others, but I also vaguely remember quite a while ago some people mentioning issues with not being able to do both at the same time, but idk. Heh ... thought I'd clicked submit a few hours ago but I guess I didn't, have a ton of things going on lol.
  8. Hi all ... My mom recently bought a new phone (Pixel 8 Pro) to replace her old phone (Samsung Galaxy Core Prime), which is getting to be too slow for her to use, and has other issues as well. I was just trying to set up the new phone, intending to connect the old one and transfer data with the Pixel utility, but I can't seem to get anything working right. (I was trying a couple guides, including one on Google's support page, and a reddit post and a youtube video, but nothing worked.) When I started the setup process on the Pixel 8 Pro, somewhere during that, I got a popup on my Pixel 6a about set up new device. That's not the phone I want to set up, though, it's my mom's Galaxy Core Prime. On that phone, I wasn't getting any kind of popup, not even when I connected it to the Pixel 8 Pro using the quick-switch adapter and a micro USB cable. Also, while they're both connected to the same wifi network, I can't get them to talk to each other, and the GCP doesn't have any way to scan QR codes that I'm aware of. (The camera app just takes a picture when I try, and it doesn't seem to be compatible with the Google Lens app.) I'm aware of a portion of the setup where if you tap an image 5 times on the Pixel 8 Pro, you get the option to use a USB cable transfer instead of wireless, but, I can't even get TO that point. (And if I try to skip past the QR code screen, it just basically continues with setup as if she was a first-time Android user, not migrating from an older device.) My mom really needs to start using the new phone soon - as I said, it's not exactly new - counting back the same number of Windows versions vs Android versions, she's on the equivalent of Windows 3.1 with her phone. She does have until sometime in January to return the phone to Best Buy, due to extended holiday returns, if we can't get it working or the data transferred.) I could consider taking the two phones to T-Mobile (her carrier), and had originally thought of doing that anyway. Turns out, though, that her old SIM card would physically fit in the new phone, just without the adapter. (Taking them to Best Buy would also be an option, since she ordered it from there around Black Friday. When I set up my dad's Pixel 4a a few years ago, from the same model older phone (Samsung Galaxy Core Prime), I didn't have nearly the problems with that, that I'm having with my mom's phone. (I did have to redo it once cause of something not going quite right, but I was still able to get the phones to communicate. Also there were a couple apps that didn't transfer, and I think the open browser tabs and some other things didn't transfer either; I had that same issue when going from my Pixel 3a to my 6a, and on my PC, from my i7-6700K laptop to my Ryzen 9 5950X desktop.) We also at the same time (as my mom) got my dad a Pixel 8 Pro, to replace his 4a, although I want to make sure I get my mom's phone set up before I start on my dad's. I'm kind-of lost for what to do at this point. I really want them to be able to start using their new phones, since they're now unsupported, and my mom's phone is getting almost unusable, but ... they're getting up there in age (and dad has Alzheimer's), so if they have to re-learn anything at all or can't retain all their existing data, etc, it's a deal breaker, and we might have to just send the phones back (and the Otterbox Defenders) and have them continue using their old phones.
  9. Hi ... I will be in Las Vegas January 8-10 for an event (related to pianos), and I noticed that CES overlaps that time some. (CES is January 9-12; I'm not going to that though.) I was wondering if there might be any possible meetups planned with the tech community, youtubers, etc, during the time I'll be in Vegas? (For example LTT, GN, Paul & Kyle, Salazar, Josh (formerly FractalJosh), Tech Deals, UFD Tech, Ian, der8auer, or others.) I'll be toward the south end of Vegas, but I could go pretty much anywhere since I'll be driving up from San Diego area. I anticipate hopefully getting there by around 4pm or earlier on the 8th, and leaving after 3-4pm on the 10th. There's a black tie gala happening at my event in the evening on the 9th, I'm thinking of not going to that cause i'm not too much into formal type events. Part of my itinerary includes the Cirque de Soleil Show on the 8th in the evening. (Schedule has us heading over there around 6:30pm and returning around 11pm.) I do plan to go to that. I could maybe try to be there earlier on the 8th (although that might prove a bit more difficult), or stay a bit later on the 10th. But, I will only be staying the two nights (8th and 9th), no extras (not 7th or 10th for example).
  10. Several years ago I was using my parents' Dell D830 laptop. Was leaning with my elbow on it below the keyboard next to the trackpad. Heard this nasty screeching sound, and the computer froze up. (I don't remember if I had to force power it off from that, or if it blue screened.) Apparently I was leaning so heavily on it that I'm thinking I somehow managed to slow or stop the spindle motor on the hard drive (it didn't have an SSD at the time). Luckily I didn't cause a head crash, as it rebooted fine and the data was all fine. Also in the early 2000s or so, my name on Planet Fortress forums was [<0FPS]FriedVideoCard .... We had an ATI All-In-Wonder card that my brother had originally bought in 1997. I'd been doing a bit of experimenting with video capture from VHS and similar tapes. One time, I was hooking it up, and there was a pop and some smoke, and we no longer had a graphics card. Had to pop in an older low-end card, like a Trident 9685 or some other Super VGA card from the mid 1990s, so we'd have video out, but that ended my gaming for a while. Even with that ATI card, I don't think I ever got out of single-digit fps at 320x240, lowest settings, software mode in Half-Life 1 / Team Fortress Classic, even with my face embedded in a textureless wall on an empty server. That, combiend with the fact that we only had dial-up internet at the time, meant I pretty much exclusively played as an engineer building sentry guns. Then when I've seen "Can it run Crysis?" ... I imagine that when Crysis came out, its performance on the top-end GPU configs of the day (like 3-way SLI GeForce 8800 Ultra or 4-way Crossfire Radeon HD 2900 XT) would, at best, have maybe matched what my ATI AIW got in HL/TFC. That reminds me, several years ago I was wanting to back up my dad's laptop HDD (500GB) to one of my desktop HDDs (2TB). I didn't actually have a working desktop at the time, so had to use an external enclosure hooked up to the laptop. Anyway, I first shrunk the partition that was already on there to make room for cloning from the 500GB drive, as I was only using maybe about 1 to 1.2 TB of space. Then, I don't remember if I actually go so far as to copy the partition (I think I used GParted in Linux), but at some point, the drive ended up coming up RAW with the data inaccessible. I had to shelve the drive for a few years, as I didn't have a second or third drive to clone and atttempt recovery for a while. I knew enough to not use it at all, to increase my chances of possible recovery when I did have extra drives and a way to hook them up simultaneously, to attempt data recovery. (Also I held out hope that I could recover it because -- there was part of the process that I forget exactly what I told it to do, except that it was supposed to affect the entire hard drive, and it only took a few seconds to do, whereas writing the entire drive would take at least a few hours or so. Before, the data was fine, after, it was inaccessible.) And I'm still not sure, even 10+ years later, if I managed to get everything, some of it did come back, but some of it didn't remember any folder structure or filenames when doing the recovery. I was using TestDisk and PhotoRec, I think.
  11. haha yes, teleport cat poo to the bin I'm guessing you have a cat like ours, yes, she goes in the litter box sometimes, but quite often I'll see evidence of her having gone somewhere else. And who knows where she might have gone under some furniture or behind a pile of random stuff in the living room (which actually used to be a garage, but that was a long time ago, it was already converted before my parents moved here in 1978.) More times than I can count or remember, I've been sitting at my PC, looked over where her litter box is, and seen her squatting on the step literally ONE FOOT / 30 cm from the litter box, OUTSIDE the box, looking right at it!
  12. Hi... Does anyone know of a good way to screen record multiple browser windows simultaneously, keeping them isolated from each other, while having the resulting video files stored in a "less public" location (like in a VM, instead of on my host OS), and be able to minimize the windows while continuing to record? (I was going to try OBS inside VirtualBox on several VMs, then found out that VB itself has recording capability, but I doubt that'll work.) I'd like to set something up where I can screen record a bunch of browser windows simultaneously, with each recording's audio and video being isolated from each other. I had the idea of spinning up some VMs and running OBS Studio inside them to record the screen inside the VM, but apparently OBS needs GPU acceleration which isn't supported on VirtualBox. (And even if it was, I don't have like 30 or so GPUs to pass through.) I had been going to those browser sources on my phone and using the built-in screen recorder function, which works well enough -- but only for one at a time, and often I want to do like 10 or 20 or even 30 simultaneously, and for longer recordings than my phone supports. (I would go in later and trim / delete unwanted portions / videos later.) Also, due to privacy and other concerns, I don't want the recorded video files to appear on my host system, just only in the VM. (I'll move them around later as needed.) The system I'd be doing this on has a Ryzen 9 5950X, 128GB DDR4-3600, a GTX 1060 3GB, host OS (Windows 10 Pro) boots from a 1TB Silicon Power P34A80, and once I get things set up, I'd probably be putting the VMs (with the recorded videos) on one of my hard drives - most likely a 14TB 7200rpm drive. I would have thought a single thread on a 5950X would be sufficient for encoding 1080p 30fps ~4-6 Mbps (ultrafast preset most likely) x264 video, but I guess not? It's a 16 core, 32 thread CPU, and leaving a couple threads available for various other tasks, I was hoping I could have as many as like 30 simultaneous recordings going, or would I need to limit it to 14 or 15 and ignore the SMT threads? My original thought included trying nested virtualization, partly because I also want a one-button method to shut it all down at once without shutting down my main host OS. (I was thinking, I could just shut down the "host VM" (or at least suspend to disk / save its state) if I needed to, for whatever reason, shut it all off without having to go through and individually shut each VM down.) Then I would have had the sub-VMs each with a different source, with OBS running in each one to capture that window, or the entire VM. As for why I would be using VMs instead of just normal native software, besides the privacy issue mentioned earlier - For one thing, I'm not aware of a way to "sandbox" the audio from one browser tab in recording software. (If I was recording in my main host OS, it would pick up the audio from everything on my PC, not just the one browser tab.) Also, I want to be able to minimize the windows or switch to other desktops while continuing to record, and the only way I can think of doing that is by doing the recording from inside a VM, and minimizing the VM itself. I'd be running some flavor of Linux in the VMs. I've done a little experimenting with various distros the past day or two, and I might go with a light distro like Lubuntu, LXLE Linux, Q4OS or Alpine Linux or something like that. I also was trying AntiX and Tiny Core, but I still need to learn other ways of installing software when "sudo apt-get install appname" isn't supported on a particular distro. Anyway, I was looking up why OBS was hitting 100% CPU usage on idle, and various forum posts & sites were telling me that OBS needs a hardware GPU, and doesn't really work properly in a VM. Also a couple other apps like ShareX came up in my search, and I might consider something like that as well (except it won't run on Linux.) Another thing that came up in my search is the factor of VirtualBox itself having a built-in recording function. Problem is, the video files would be on the host machine (I don't want them there), and I'm not sure the quality is quite what I'd like it to be. For example if I do 1920x1080 at 30fps (I'd like to be able to do 60fps) at max quality, it maxes out at 2048 kbps, and I was looking at doing around 4 or 6 Mbps or so. Also I won't be doing this all the time, just now and then. I do use the computer for other things as well, the recording would be primarily done when I'm not doing much else on the PC. So if anyone has any ideas that would work on the hardware I already have, I'd like to know.
  13. A few major annoyances for me on websites (among many for tech in general):

     

    In-window popups that require me to use the mouse to click a button to close it, instead of letting me hit "Esc" on the keyboard.
    (Also, anything that pops up over content on the page, blocking me from viewing it.)

     

    Any auto-playing videos, ESPECIALLY ads!  The MAXIMUM bandwidth / resources for an ad should be no more than 0.1% of the resources for the plain text on the page or something like that.

     

    On ads on mobile, trying to tap it to close it or stop a video playing opens the link instead, whether it be to another website, to the youtube app, the play / app store, or whatever.

     

    Ads or other elements spawning after the page has started loading, pushing what you were about to click on down the page to make room for the ad, so you end up clicking on that instead.  (Once a page has STARTED loading, the FIRST thing it should load is the basic layout for where all the elements are, and that should remain fixed, other elements spawning should NOT be able to move things around "after the fact".)

     

    After having intentionally clicked or tapped a link (for example in search results or on mobile Chrome's home page with the suggested articles, some of which I do read now and then), a SINGLE click or tap of the back button SHOULD take you to where you had been before you clicked.  Instead, often it will take you back through the series of things you scrolled through (for example, on sites that continuing to scroll gets you to a new article), or if you were going through a photo gallery (this is one reason I don't look at those things on MSN because they require me to click / tap a link to see each picture instead of just letting me scroll or swipe), or even worse, going back to "Check these out before you go" type page.

     

    There's more, but that's just a few annoyances.

    Oh, and a big one too: Not having full ownership / control over my own content (at least not to my satisfaction), having to store it on remote servers operated by big tech instead of being able to host it myself, and not having the resources available from my ISP so that i COULD host it myself.  I have tens of TB of disk space which is way more than what I'd get through the likes of google one or other services, and buying that much storage from them would cost more than what I paid for my hard drives, especially if you also take into account keeping the drives through the entire 5-year warranty period.  I want to be able to host my OWN things, streams, etc, and if I want to allow other sites to mirror it, or make it more widely available, I could CHOOSE to do that.

    Also I'd like to see the day when the download AND upload speeds of ISPs in general at LEAST match the sequential read/write speeds of our local storage drives, including NVME Gen 4 or 5 SSDs in RAID or whatever is the fastest at the time.

  14. Hey... I'd like to figure out how to change some behavior in Chrome & Firefox on Android when I close tabs. A video demonstrating a few examples is at I'll paste text from the description here... A. In both Firefox and Chrome, when you use back button to close a tab, if the originating tab is still open it switches to that tab. B. In Firefox, if the originating tab was closed, it goes to the home / overview / new tab page, but the tab is still open in the background. C In Chrome, if the originating tab was closed, it goes to the next (previous) tab in the strip. D. However, if you close Chrome (or it crashes or device restarts), then tapping back button from an open tab exits from the app. E. In Firefox, closing and reopening the browser doesn't change the behavior. F. Basically what I want to set up is: have both browsers, regardless of whether they've been restarted, behave like Chrome does in C. Sorry for no timestamps (in the video), I'm posting this from my phone and there are things you just can't do on this (or are extremely inefficient) that you can do on a PC. (That irks me to no end, that a phone makes it hard to, or won't even let you, do things that can be easily done on a PC with less RAM, a slower CPU & GPU, and a lower resolution screen. That's a topic for another time / post though.) Also I had to pause posting this to drive for a bit, and now I can't remember if I'm posting in the correct (programs, apps, websites) subforum, and the mobile interface doesn't show me that info from the post screen.
  15. I'm probably the only one who would like to see direct-comparison benchmarks between the 3870 (I think that's the last AMD card Linus said he had) and the 7900 XTX, including some with the same games and also with the same settings. No, I don't expect the 3870 to even launch Flight Simulator or Cyberpunk at all, but I would guess the 7900 XTX would get a few tens of times more FPS at 1080p high/ultra in Crysis or CS:Source vs the 3870, for example.
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