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PianoPlayer88Key

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Everything posted by PianoPlayer88Key

  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.
  16. Hi... so I've not been able to do any updates on this laptop since 1909, other than the periodic monthly security patches and things like that. Basically, it keeps giving me an 0x80070002 error, and if I try the Windows 10 upgrade tool from MS's website, it says "We can't tell if your PC has enough space to continue installing WIndows 10." (Also I was just googling that error, and it was remind me that I'd like to find a way to filter out search results from sites trying to peddle their own product that targets that specific thing. A couple examples that came up when searching were drivereasy, easeus, partitionwizard, and I've seen a lot more when searching for similar things involving updating an OS, repartitioning a drive, etc. Maybe it's just me, but I am very wary of first-party recommendations in general, I want to see third-party reviews, among other things.) From what I can tell, this PC most definitely HAS enough space, and then some. \ The laptop is a Clevo P750DM-G, with an i7-6700K, 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4-2133 RAM, GTX 970M 6GB, and four SSDs - 2TB and 4TB 2.5" SATA and 2TB and 4TB M.2 NVMe. Windows is installed on the 4TB 2.5" SATA SSD. I wanted to migrate it to NVMe a few years ago when I got a 1TB NVMe SSD, but I couldn't figure out how to clone from SATA to NVMe without having major problems or having to reinstall, so I just stuck with SATA. This is the third SSD that I've run Windows from on this laptop. Before this 4TB SSD which I just recently got this past Black Friday, I was using a 1TB WD Blue 3D 2.5" SATA SSD for a few years, and before that I was using a 250GB Crucial MX200 M.2-2260 SATA SSD. The problem with being unable to update started around the time I got the 1TB SSD, maybe a little later, idk. I even moved some things off C: to free up a bit more space (even though I already had 3.6TB free), so I could get the used space down below about 160 GB, in case for some reason Windows was still thinking I was trying to update on the original 250GB SSD. (In that case, I think having about 90GB should have been plenty...) Any ideas what could be going on, or something I should change to get Windows to update properly? Is there some setting I need to change somewhere, or do I need to take a look at something involving the other partitions on the SSD that I think Windows put there when I originally installed in Q1 2016? Or will I just have to live with the laptop being stuck on 1909 for the next few years or so? I'm not about to reinstall Windows on this laptop, as everything I have set up would be way too much of a hassle to reconfigure. Even if I tried, I still would never be able to get it exactly the way I had it set up. And I've had that same inability to exactly clone my configuration pretty much ever since I've used PCs since the 1990s or so, which is a major factor in me trying to avoid OS reinstalls as much as possible - I pretty much ONLY do it if I'm getting entirely new hardware, like a new laptop, or a new motherboard that uses a totally different generation of RAM, CPU socket, etc. About a new laptop... I had thought of getting a GPD Win Max 2 a few months ago, since I'd like something a lot more compact (preferably something pocket sized, although I'd have to get cargo pants to pocket the GPD; with a full-desktop, multitasking, virtualization-capable x86/64-compatible OS which rules out tablets and phones), but I really didn't want to downgrade my RAM and storage capacity. (Also I wouldn't really need a GPU upgrade cause I don't game much except older games, but would have wanted a significant CPU threads upgrade since I would run a lot of VMs - minimum being the Ryzen 6800U in that GPD, but preferably as many or more threads as my desktop's Ryzen 5950X although I'd be okay with only matching the single-core performance of my current laptop probably; also would want much lower power consumption so I could run full-load all day without running out of battery. Also I kinda almost want to wait to buy a new laptop until we're on DDR6, as just upgrading from one generation to the next (DDR4 to DDR5) is too soon for me.) My desktop did successfully get updated to 22H2, although that one's having some other issues right now involving transferring data from 8TB and 10TB HDDs to a couple 18TB HDDs, and other things, but that's 1 - a topic for another post, and 2 - I don't think I'm ready to post about it yet, there's still some things I want to try on my end before I ask for much help on it. (I don't think it's an issue with the drives though, as sometimes several drives will become unresponsive at the same time, and when I'm on WIndows (although I was running Linux at the time of doing the file transfers due to Windows hiding some files even from admin accounts), other things will happen at the same time, like my ASRock B550 Taichi's wifi becoming unresponsive and not detecting any connections at all. Usually a reboot fixes it.... for a while.... I just hope it's not something wrong with the motherboard as I don't want to take the system apart until I'm upgrading to either DDR7 mainstream, or DDR6 HEDT/workstation.)
  17. Okay, this time I just decided to categorize the different reply sections, and reply to the categories here. I've numbered and labeled the sections (sequentially as they appear in the previous post), and I'll go ahead and put my previous very-long draft in a spoiler at the bottom of the post. If you want to find a particular section from its number (so you can see the previous "thread"), you can open the spoiler ("Reveal hidden contents") at the very bottom of the post, then search for "► ### - ", where ► is typed on WIndows with Alt+16 (numpad,not over alpha keys), and ### is a 3-digit number from 001 to 112. Those numbers are referenced in each section below. Some are not exactly used, although they do appear in the draft. Some of those are marked with → (Alt+26) instead of ►. Also it took me a good while to get this done, have had (and still do) a lot of other things going on as well. (I may have to put some of my data decluttering back on the back shelf, although I'll still be doing some general disk-to-disk migrations as that does need to be done.) Anyway, once I hit submit on this, next thing I plan to do is prepare my PC for shutdown, install the 18TB drives and start doing some data shuffling / migration, probably booting to the 250GB SSD that has Linux installed on it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ► Backup / Redundancy -- 044 ; 076 ; 099 Are you saying something about THREE disks for each one, or what? (Also are you referring to the 3-2-1 backup strategy, or something else?) For me, I don't really need live-online redundancy (as in immediate seamless failover to a spare disk), but some kind of backup I definitely should have. Elsewhere I mentioned having poor internet (10Mbps and 1TB/month cap) which makes doing online backups pretty much impossible for me. (I could back up text files and things like that, but that's nothing in the grand scheme of things.) If I was doing online backup though, I'd prefer something priced no higher than what it would cost me to buy that much space on a HDD over time, considering the warranty. (A 16TB WD Red Pro has a 5-year warranty, if it's purchased for $269.36, that's (26936/16/60) ~28.0583¢/TB/year, or if you double that (for 2 disks for redundancy) it's ~56.1167¢/TB/year, much cheaper than Amazon or Google's cloud storage, and probably cheaper than Backblaze too.) Backing up everything including connected devices was a hypothetical idea - at least for now, although it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to sometime figure out how to back up everything, INCLUDING the backups, and cloud backup, etc. Some time ago I heard of people talking about doing daily full backups and hourly incremental/differential backups, but with my mutliple 10s of TBs (actually now probably >100TB) capacity, that doesn't seem possible. Also I've thought of having a backup server be mostly for the occasional full backups, and for incremental backups, have another drive connected to the system that backup files get put on as I'm working on. Then when it gets full I'd either move it to the backup server and get another local backup drive, or connect it to the server and dump its contents, then resume use as a local backup. ► Cables -- 054 I may have a few broken cables laying around still, but I'll want to get rid of them once I've verified they're broken. Also maybe I should make an effort to not follow in the footsteps of my dad on some things... yesterday my mom was complaining that he pulled something out of the trash, cause he was probably going to try to fix it. He used to be really good at that when he was younger, and HIS dad was even better at fixing and even making things, but my dad's showing his age now, he's 76 and not as able to do things as he used to. ► Case -- 008 ; 081 ; 082 Most Chenbro cases I've seen were rackmount, I think. For the most part I don't like the RGB (although it has proven useful for "is it powered on or not" diagnostics), tempered glass, etc, I prefer something more similar to my Define R5. I did take the front door off, though, broke the door on a Xion XON-303 case I had about 10 or 14 years ago and didn't want to break this one. I probably could technically put it back on as the spot where my Blu-Ray burner would normally go is occupied by my 360mm AIO, and I don't have an extra SATA port for it anyway on this motherboard. Quite a few years ago I saw cases with drive bays taking the entire height, and some with even an extra partial stack or two behind the main stack. I can't find any cases like that sold new anymore. There's an Antec 900 that's on sale for $118 from Amazon (not 3rd-party, but only says 1 left in stock), which can be configured with 9x 5.25" bays, which in turn can probably house 3 each 5-in-3 drive cages (5x 3.5" in 3x 5.25") for a total of 15 drives, but I'm not planning to get one right now. Those ebay examples are from Germany, I'm in the USA; also the cheapest is ~25-35% more than my budget for the ENTIRE system not counting storage, if I was using those cases in a backup solution. ► data ; hoarding -- 037 ; 105 I probably delete less data than I should. Also for things like family / friends documents, photos, audio, video, etc, I'd like to find a good long term storage / backup solution that my great grandkids (I have no children yet) can access even after I'm gone, if they want to. As I mention in the "server" section, it would be nice to have a central location for everything, so no matter what device I'm using or where I am, I could access it. (I do still want to be safe though.) ► Disks -- 009 ; 043 ; 075 ; 076 If possible, I prefer replacing several smaller disks with a single disk equaling their combined capacity, for the price I paid for one of the smaller disks previously. (As with anything though, if I have to replace something because of infant mortality (dying before warranty runs out, or otherwise prematurely), I'll try to get what I need at the time.) "Refurbish HDD" - Yeah I don't think so, unless it's the manufacturer themselves doing it (or at least someone like DriveSavers or similar but I doubt they're in that business). Otherwise, I suppose someone could "call" it a "refurbish" when they DBAN the disk and, well idk for sure if it's possible to wipe / reset SMART data, but I guess so if you have the right tools? Seagate: Yeah, hearing of consistently high failures, and my brother not liking them, are a couple reasons why I'm wary of them. The only way I would consider using it if it was in a RAID1 array with another disk from a different brand entirely - for example a Seagate Exos combined with a Toshiba MG or WD Ultrastar. On the other hand, I've heard of people with really old Seagate drives that were still working 30 or even 35 or almost 40 years later. A couple examples on YouTube are here and here, of the ST-506 - the actual drive, not just some other drive that uses that interface, as well as an ST-412 video. Sometime I'd like to find out exactly how this 8.4GB PATA IBM DTTA-350840 bit the dust. I could maybe open it up myself (since I don't care about any data that may have been on it, but from the scraping sound the heads are making as they sweep across the platter I doubt it's there anymore anyway), but I wouldn't know what to look for to determine how it kicked the bucket. ► Duplicates -- 093 ; 094 ; 095 I don't want to keep "so many" duplicates, just the originals from the media (camera, audio recorder, etc), and a couple others either for editing, or final renders / versions. Some time ago I had a few extra duplicates laying around, where I was, for example, testing a lot of combinations of mp3 encoding. (I've wanted to also do a similar experiment with video encoding but still need to learn some of the ins and outs of that.) A few times I've recently come across some duplicate folder hierarchies in different places. (When I was moving stuff around on a few disks the other day to prepare them for copying to the 18TB (wanted to resolve any possible "folder with same name already exists" conflicts), I came across a few duplicate folders which I deleted.) Some folders may start off at diffeerent levels or different places, but when you drill down farther within the rabbit hole they have the same things in them. (I've also been learning that it would be nice to be able to look in .zip files or similar and find duplicates there.) ► hardware, consumer / workstation / server -- 074 ; 080 If I had the $ I would have liked to build an Epyc system, but I also generally prefer the aesthetics of some consumer grade stuff (simple designs like Fractal, etc, not RGB/TG/etc or the over the top designs like some other "gamer" cases I've seen in t he past.) For now I'm limited to consumer hardware for my platform. A while ago I thought about building an LGA771 or 1366 based NAS, or maybe even 2011, but was having trouble finding the type of non-rackmount case I wanted...and electricity here is not cheap - several years ago it was upwards of ~40-67¢/kWh or so, and I thought I heard talk of >$1/kWh. I also thought of LGA1151 v1, as I do still have the i3-6100 I pulled out of my laptop (Clevo P750DM-G) when I upgraded it to an i7-6700K. I was having trouble finding cases then as well, although I did see a couple motherboards that looked promising a few years ago, like an MSI C236A Workstation for around $90 or so, and a couple others, maybe an ASRock Z270 Taichi (but doesn't support ECC) or an ASUS P10S WS or whatever it's called, or maybe ASRock C236 WSI, IIRC. ► hot-plug, SAS / SATA -- 062 ; 067 Actually, SATA does include hot-plug ability in the spec, at least for internal SATA I think. (idk about eSATA though, when I had a board that supported it and an enclosure with that, I don't think I could do it.) On both my recent motherboards (current B550 Taichi and previous Z97 Extreme6), there's an option to enable or disable SATA hot plug in the BIOS/UEFI. On the B550 Taichi I think it's just one setting to enable it globally, while the Z97 Extreme6 has it selectable for each port. (When I was booting off a SATA SSD, I would set it so the port my boot drive had hot plug disabled, but the rest had it enabled.) I don't think the M.2 or PCIe slots support hot plug, although I remember a video Linus did a while ago where he was demonstrating a server motherboard that did support PCIe hot plug. On my B550 Taichi desktop, clicking the "safely remove hardware" menu pulls up several HDDs, as well as an M.2 SATA SSD (although I don't think that supports hotplug, idk why it's in the list). Also I would want to be careful to not eject a disk while it's being written or read. I try to make sure my system is set to disable write caching, as I don't want the dialog box to disappear (or a command / terminal to say it's done copying) until it's ACTUALLY done copying and has written everything to disk. (In the past, I've ejected disks or memory cards after it said it was done, then the system popped up and said oops some data got corrupted.) Interesting thing though, I've sometimes seen my RAM usage spike when doing a large copy (and an initial transfer rate of much faster than the capabilities of the disk I'm copying to), even though I thought I had write caching turned off. ► image / dd / clonezilla -- 057 ; 097 ; 100 I did compress the dd image in at least one test. Problem, though, was it would take forever to try to open it in 7Zip, and my RAM usage would ramp up then it would crash when I ran out of RAM. (I'm thinking it was trying to decompress the ENTIRE image to RAM, which on my smallest SSD would be 240GB, my largest current one would be 2TB, and I now have a 4TB WD SN850X and Samsung 870 Evo on the way, thanks, Black Friday.) I would REALLY like to find a way to compress the images so I can fit more backup images on a single disk, but in a way so I can easily open the image in something like 7-Zip and browse, or extract individual things as needed. For now, though, I'm thinking I might just dd the drives to image files on the 12TB Toshiba MG07 drive, and as for the two upcoming 4TB SSDs, I might back those up onto the 8TB Toshiba N300 that I already have, once I've dumped its contents onto one of the 18TB drives. (I won't be using "dd" for that though, just a file manager in Linux probably, since I'll be combining two HDDs into one - twice, basically.) Also, if I'm backing up an OS drive, I want it to be bootable. I think I've tried Clonezilla in the past, and I vaguely remember it worked once a long time ago, but I've tried it since then and it would fail to boot. Using dd, though, does work. (I should maybe test again, but I think a while ago I tested backing up a 240GB SSD to an image file on a HDD, then restoring that image to a 500GB or 1TB SSD that I have laying around as a spare, and the laptop I was using the 240GB SSD in was able to boot off the other SSD just fine I think.) DD is the only tool I know of that backs up every single sector (although idk if it also catches firmware, or overprovisioned area / spare sector area though, so maybe I'm not really getting complete backups with it.) You are correct though about dd not being the right tool ... for incremental or differential backups. (I have kinda learned what the difference is, but am forgetting for now so I should probably re-educate myself.) ► keyboard -- 073 For now I'm using a Logitech K270 on my desktop and K360 on my laptop. For some reason on the desktop, I periodically get some kind of lag spikes where I type or key something, and it doensn't appear on the screen until a second later, or sometimes several seconds. (Then it will bunch up and all appear at once.) Yes, both keyboards are wireless, and maybe wired might have better communication. (I do have the wireless USB dongles sitting near the keyboard for the desktop, via a USB extension cable.) I quit using wired for now when my cat chewed the cords, and I also like the convenience of being able to move around somewhat, although with all the clutter around right now I can't do a lot of moving around. ► laptop -- 102 ; 104 ; 105 I believe my laptop (Clevo P750DM-G) technically does support RAID0 and RAID1, not sure if it supports RAID5 or RAID10 though. It does have 4 storage slots - two M.2 slots which support both SATA and NVMe, and two 2.5" bays. I might be moving to Utah sometime (a possible training / job opportunity not involving tech / PC things), although for the first few months or so I might not have my desktop PC, just my laptop, and I won't have any kind of server setup at my parents' house to access data on my PC there, so I'll need to take some stuff with me on the laptop, and decide what I need to have access to while I don't have my main PC. Once I'm more settled in I'd make a trip back to CA to get my desktop PC, some furniture, a couple pianos I have, and other stuff. ► Linux -- 046 I have Linux on a secondary SSD in the desktop, and some VMs in my laptop, but I mostly boot Windows 10 Pro as my main OS on both. (I would consider switching to Linux though, especially if a Windows 12 continues in the direction 11 seems to go in things like wanting online accounts, etc, after 10's support ends. My brother, I believe is still running 7, although he did help my sister and her kids build a PC a weekend or two ago and that one has 11 on it.) I wonder if there's a Windows tool (maybe something built into powershell) that's similar to hdparm.... I do have CrystalDiskInfo, and I think GSmartControl is available for WIndows as well and I do have it installed. ► magazine ads, museum -- 025 I'd like to find a way to scan the entire magazines sometime (without having to do it page by page, just feed the entire magazine into some kind of scanner, or send it to someone), and archive them that way. I have a couple boxes of the magazines, and would like to get rid most of the physical copies and just keep digital versions. (A while ago I was doing something similar with several hundred CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, etc that I have, but that project is on hold cause of other things that keep coming up, such is life around here.) I'm missing quite a few of that ComputorEdge magazine though. If I remember a few years ago, the original publisher (Jack Dunning I think, he has auto hotkey stuff on his computoredge.com site last I remember) might still be around, although I haven't reached out to him to see if there's a chance hey may still have the original files from which the magazines were published - maybe there's a way to convert them to searchable PDF or something... Also I heard that an author of a few "For Dummies" books had spent time writing for ComputorEdge in the '90s or so. ► performance (or lack of) -- 048 ; 090 ; 091 ; 111 ; 112 I don't think too many disks is overwhelming my system, I think it may be something else causing the issues cause other things ar e happening too periodically, often simultaneously. (Some things are more common, like my WiFi dropping out and a few HDDs being inaccessible, while others have only happened once or twice like the keyboard/mouse not responding or the GPU going to black screen and 100% fan.) I too don't like inefficiency, but I do want a complete job done. (If I'm parsing through data on an entire HDD, I expect it to take at least as long to do that as it takes to sequentially read the entire drive's capacity.) My 5950X isn't THAT slow, but WinDirStat a week or two ago said I had upwards of 5.77 million items on this PC, and that's with not all the drives plugged in or mounted. I have a feeling that older disks were "faster" in terms of how long it takes to fill the entire disks. (I've seen a couple clips on youtube where the write speed in a benchmark was such that it would only take a few minutes to fill up an entire drive, for example I calculated ~99 seconds to fill a 40MB Seagate ST-251, and there was a Connor IDE 20MB drive that could do about 500 KB/s or so.) It took me about 11 minutes to fill another 8.4GB IBM hard drive that's still working (same model as one mentioned elsewhere that has the click of death, but a month older). Also there's a Tom's Hardware article on "15 Years Of Hard Drive History: Capacities Outran Performance" from November 2006 - the page I linked was "Time Required To Write A Full Platter". The largest drive they tested at the time was a 750GB SATA drive, and it took 52 minutes to read 200GB, or ~27% of the capacity. Compare that to the 37 seconds it took to read 26 MB of a 40 MB IDE drive, or 65% of the capacity. (Extrapolating, I'm guessing it would have taken about 3 hours 17 minutes to read the entire 750 GB drive, vs about 57 seconds for the entire 40 MB drive.) Re: the Micropolis SCSI drive - Ahh I think I've seen some kind of site similar to that with old drive benchmarks and things, I think stason.org or something like that. If that 1346MB drive transferred data at 2 MB/s, then the drive could theoretically fill in 11 minutes 13 seconds. I looked on that site for some smaller drives, and saw several interesting ones, including the 5MB Fujitsu M2231AS and Seagate ST406 (I didn't see the ST506 on the site), the 10MB IBM WD 12, Seagate ST412 and Tandon TM252, which have an internal transfer rate of 0.625 MB/s. Then there's the 21MB Seagate ST325A/X, rated for 1.5MB/s in AT mode and 1.75MB/s in XT mode, and the 42MB Quantum Prodrive ELS 42 AT at 2.5 MB/s. Even if their actual transfer rates are slower, like in your 2MB/s vs 2.916MB/s example, it looks like they would theoretically transfer the entire capacity in about half a minute or less Okay, the ST-506 may not reach 500 Kb/s in the real world, but I did see a few youtube videos (01, 02, 03, 04) that included benchmark results from some older MFM and IDE hard drives. Some of them might have only transferred data at like 300-500 KB/s, but with small capacities like 20 or 40 MB it would still transfer the entire capacity in about a minute or two. ► RAID -- 007 ; 009 ; 012 ; 014 ; 015 ; 034 ; 107 I've heard things about software raid being more preferred now vs hardware raid. (For example, about ZFS preferring RAID cards be in IT mode, not RAID mode) I've seen a few 9211-8i around $30-40, occasionally 9200-16e ~$25 or so, and rarely the HIghpoint Rocket 750 about as cheap per port (although still more for the card cause more ports) I've heard of a few RAID levels, and Raid-Z and Unraid, but don't know all the possible levels. I don't need higher performance than single-drive (if I do I'll use an SSD for those situations). If disks fail, I want to be able to replace them and rebuild from parity / mirror (I've heard stories of RAID rebuilds taking days or weeks on some drives, I hope to avoid that - hopefully it doesn't take much longer than the time to sequentially write the drive's entire capacity). If too many disks fail, I don't want to lose the entire array, just the extra disks that failed (like Unraid). I've heard Extenders limit you to single-port bandwidth, so I don't like to use them. With only a few HDDs they might still "fit" within the bandwidth of a single port, but with a lot of SSDs they'll be bottlenecked really quick. Also I prefer being able to access disks individually, although true, it can be nice to be able to group everything together sometimes. I think Linux might actually do a better job of doing that, at least logically or with the file / folder / mount structure. UNRAID - Yeah that could be an issue, being unable to read the data if I switch to something else. Also I've heard horror stories of RAID controllers going rogue and committing fornication with the hard drives, spewing Scheiße all over the place, which helps to further my preference of working with the drives individually, not spanning things across disks. (The only time I would do that is if I need to store a file that's larger than the capacity of a single disk, and it's been probably 10 or 15 years since I've done anything with floppies. We still have a few stacks of 5.25" floppies, would be nice to see if there's still some readable data on them, but I've heard they weren't known for longevity...) ► Server / Rack -- 031 ; 051 ;060 ; 078 ; 079 But where would I even PUT a rack cabinet or storage server or anything like that? My current PC setup is in the first pic. In the 3rd pic, you may just be able to make out a part of a PC monitor sitting on the piano's music desk - that's where I've previously had my PC setup. I have the stand for that Dell U2414H, sometime I should see if I have or lack any necessary other hardware to attach it. I've never mounted it on the stand, have always used it sitting on the piano like that. I don't have any experience with 19" racks, cases, etc. I do have an audio cabinet that I got from my grandpa when he passed away that happens to be 19" wide internally, but it's only about 15" deep or so, with the back end being open. There's no way to secure a 30" or so deep case in there. (Also right now the cabinet is inaccessible, as there is other furniture and stuff in front of it. It's not visible, but it's toward the back left of the 2nd pic.) Also if I ran a backup server, that's literally ALL it would do - no plex, no transcoding, probably even no zip/unzip/etc. JUST storing and transferring files. Although, it would be nice to be able to have some central place where I could store everything and access it from any device, both in the home and, if I could do it safely and if it weren't for only having 10Mbps upload and a 1TB/month cap, from outside as well. (Also another project I've wanted to do is converting a bunch of old audio and video tapes, vinyl records, reel-to-reel, photos, etc, and that might be easier done on a server / rack with multiple devices ingesting simultaneously, but for now that project is postponed for probably a few years or more, until I have a place I can set the stuff up, AND can afford the equipment, for example something like a Nakamichi Dragon cassette deck, among other things.) ► shopping ; online vs store -- 022 ; 023 ; 024 ; 030 I remember going to a store a few years ago and seeing this. That was Fry's in San Diego, in Q1 2016, I think right before things started really going downhill. One of the last times I was there before they shut down, a song came on over the P.A. that I thought was pretty appropriate: "Highway to Hell" by AC/DC. In San Diego there used to be a few dozen computer stores or more in the 1990s, but almost all are gone now (most were gone by the mid/late 2000s). I buy online a lot now (well okay, not a lot, sometimes my Amazon, Newegg or B&H order history has entire years where I don't place a single order), but some things I might buy in a store if it's available and not too inconvenient, or I'm saving enough $ to make it worth it. (I bought my 5950X at Micro Center, for example. it was pretty easy to park and walk in but it wasn't Black Friday or GPU launch day.) ► Storage -- 005 ; 006 ; 009 ; 017 ; 091 ; 092 ; 110 ; I got the drives a couple days later than I'd hoped, but they're here. Been busy with other things, so as of now I have yet to install them, although I've been forced to restart my PC a couple times.) I've never used fiber interface for storage, thought that was for network? I have a few Toshiba MG07s (12 and 14TB), and so far they've been fine. I heard that when WD got HGST, in the process Toshiba may have gotten some of the 3.5" equipment / technology, but I don't remember for sure. This is a short video of scrolling through a little of what WinDirStat found, just scratching the surface. (I expanded a couple levels of folders, but didn't drill down very far.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w82ux0xm3o I noticed quite a few folder structures that looked like they could be duplicate hierarchies while looking through that. WinDirStat says 5.14 million files. I've seen MFM / RLL drives listed on ebay sometimes, but don't have a system to put them in or the knowledge to work with them. I've seen posts on other forums geared more toward those things, but don't have accounts there (and have been experiencing "online account overload" anyway), although I have also seen some of them on some retro tech youtube channels. ► warranty -- 039 ; 040 ; 042 I'm aware of pitfalls of sending disks with data back, would be nice to not have to do that. (Also they don't preserve / backup the data, they send a blank disk back usually.) Also for now I generally don't use encryption to make it easier for me or trusted friends to read the data on other systems, although I do have a couple VMs encrypted. If something happened to me or to my next-in-line trusted friends/family, then if someone else needed to access the data, I want to be able to provide a way to do that, while still being safe. I just prefer to save $ on replacement disks if it happens within a warranty period. Yes, I'd need to spend the $640 to buy two 18TB hard drives up front (one for storing the data, one to back up the data), but if one of those fails after, say, 1 or 4 years (assuming a 5-year warranty), I don't want to have to pay another $320 or whatever to get a third replacement disk. (I'd restore from my backup.) A backup will let me have my data right away, and not have to wait for warranty replacement disk. (I think that would then become the new backup.) I thought buying from the wrong (or a not-authorized) seller would affect whether I even HAVE a warranty from the manufacturer? (Especially if buying a refurb product, but I've heard horror stories of the same thing when someone bought something they thought was new.) There's a seller on Newegg (EOL Tech I think, and others) I've seen selling hard drives produced like 10 or 15 or more years ago as new I think, I doubt they still have an active manufacturer's warranty. ► web browser, sites -- 070 ; 071 ; 072 ; 073 I remember a decade or two ago, sites would actually behave properly when loading, I think, for the most part. Also I wonder if there's a more sinister reason to move things around on the page after it's loading -- to try to get people to click on more ads. I've lost count of how many times I went to click or tap something I wanted to open, and the page moved, or an ad spawned right there and I clicked it instead of what I wanted. I grew up in the era when it would take a few minutes to boot up, and you could key in commands at the command prompt before it had finished booting, and queue up. I want faster internet, but it's not available here. Yeah I might be able to get 1 Gbps down, but would be limited to 35 Mbps up I think. (I don't think fiber is available here at least not yet; also I'd really prefer internet that's at least as fast as my SSDs or RAM, or better yet fast enough so everyone in the house, both family and visitors, could likewise have full-speed access that wouldn't bottleneck their RAM or SSDs, but instead would BE bottlenecked by their RAM or SSDs.) ► misc -- 001 ; 002 ; 003 ; 011 ; 013 ; 036 ; 083 ; 085 ; 092 ; 108 001, 003 - emacs/mail: Ahh, I haven't done mailing lists in a while but I remember the > for quotes. Also I was able, with much effort, to remove the code from the box and prepare it for a reply. (It involved spreadsheets, multiple drafts, etc.) 002 - spolers: They are the "Reveal Hidden Contents" boxes. I'm using them to try to shorten the visual length of the post. 011 - Backplanes: Most backplanes I've seen are crazy expensive, or in expensive server cases. (I've had the idea of "making" my own, by somehow attaching some right-angle SATA data & power cables to a board and putting that in place, but idk yet how I'd pull it off.) 013 - Tape Backup: In 1994, tape was MUCH cheaper, like a tiny fraction of the cost per MB compared to HDDs for the tape, and about half or 2/3 for the drive. Last I looked, tape was only moderately cheaper (maybe 20-30% but I don't remember), and the drives were several thousand bucks or more. 036 - "host managed": I'm not super sure how it works, but I think the OS / software / system has to be involved with working with where the SMR data is laid out, so is generally not for general consumer use. 055 - ZFS: I've heard ZFS can be made to work with Linux, but it's beyond my level of expertise. 083 - 9200-16e: The picture is blelow the caption. Also what would create a fire hazard? 085 - testing, stitching buttons to: WHICH cheeks, the ones on my face or.....? Also a while ago I was briefly testing this... 092 - mariadb on server: I'm not sure what that is (and I'm not running a server). 096 - USB stick, boot: I have a couple USB sticks, one with Windows 10 installer and another with several Linux ISOs. I've been thinking of updating the BIOS on my B550 Taichi (it's running P1.30 now). I considered buying another flash drive (but didn't like the high $/GB and slow speeds compared to higher capacity drives, and low enduirance or lack of specs), but my Windows 10 flash drive is FAT32, I suppose I could put the BIOS file on there. 108 - PATA / IDE and predecessor: IDE was renamed to PATA I believe. MFM / RLL, or ST-506 / ST-412 is what predates IDE. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A previous draft, with the sections numbered and labeled, is in the spoiler.
  18. Hi ... TL;DR: Undecided on whether to upgrade GPU from 1060 3GB. Don't play much newer games (other than considering MSFS, and having a 4K monitor, most I play would run mostly fine on an older iGPU). BUT, interested in video editing, for example hoping for a massive speedup in transcoding (compared to my 4790K taking 4 days to transcode a 4-minute 30fps 4K video to H.265, at least realtime or faster would be nice if possible.) Not planning to break bank, power supply / circuit breakers, or case compatibility / block motherboard ports if I do upgrade.) EDIT: Added a 2-part poll. First part is whether to get one a GPU now or later, second part, if now, is which one do you suggest. I've been running a GTX 1060 3GB for a while, and trying to decide if I should upgrade now (Black Friday weekend), soon (maybe wait for the RTX 4060/4070 or RX 7600/7700/7800), or wait a while (maybe another 2 or 3 generations). Hold up, before you holler and say "you should have upgraded half a decade ago!"... Most of the games I play aren't all that demanding, and a lot of them could probably run "good enough" (for me at least) on older (Haswell, i7-4790K) Intel Integrated graphics, at least at 1080p. (Here's my steam profile's games, sorted by playtime, for example, and my wishlist, sorted alphabetically, although nothing's been added in probably a couple years except MSFS which I just added.) My current system is AMD (5950X), not Intel, with 128GB RAM (running at DDR4-3466 CL18 cause 3533 isn't quite stable and 3600 won't boot), an ASRock B550 Taichi, Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360, booting Windows 10 Pro from a 1TB PCIe 3.0 (carried over from a previous system that didn't support 4.0) x4 NVMe SSD (Silicon Power P34A80), several 10s of TB of HDD capacity, Fractal Define R5 case (all 8 3.5" bays used so absolute max GPU length <310mm, prefer <~230mm to not block headers, SATA ports, etc), Corsair RM850 PSU, the aforementioned 1060 3GB GPU, and a 4K 60Hz monitor (Asus VG289Q). A few games I enjoyed playing back in the day when I was more into gaming included Fortress Forever (Source engine, but not nearly as demanding as TF2 or CS:GO - for example I'd get about 2x the FPS or so on Core 2 Duo era integrated graphics in FF vs TF2) Team Fortress Classic (GoldSrc / Half Life 1 engine), Total Annihilation, Descent, Castle of the Winds, Commander Keen, Captain Comic, Sopwith 2, Battlechess, Alleycat, Need For Speed (original and Hot Pursuit from the 90s or so), Test Drive 4, Whiplash (Fatal Racing in some other countries), and a bunch of others. I sometimes wonder if there are more modern games similar to those and others, with similar gameplay, storylines, etc, and updated graphics? I'm not much into the newer games, as I said. For example, I tried a little bit of Witcher 3, GTA V and Rise of the Tomb Raider, but didn't really get too much into them. (I wanted to do some free-map exploring and track races in GTA V, for example, but I couldn't figure out how to get to that section and avoid doing the story.) Also I have a copy of Overwatch (1, not 2), but have never even installed it, nevermind played it. Fortnite and a couple other games look interesting, but I don't think I'd have much time to learn to play them or get very involved. (I think a lot of modern games are very different, in their gameplay, controls, physics, etc, than the games I got used to playing in the late 1990s to early 2000s or so.) Interesting thing with GTA V... if I crank up the settings to the absolute max at 1920x1080 (including going to the advanced graphics menu and cranking up frame scaling to 2.5x, resulting in the game wanting ~9GB VRAM), my GTX 1060 3GB absolutely tanks in performance. Normally, with standard 1080p high/ultra settings (but without cranking up frame scaling), the 1060 3GB gets about 50-60 fps, my laptop's GTX 970M 6GB gets around 30 fps, and my older Intel HD 4600 got about 3 fps or so, in the built-in benchmark, at least near the beginning when you're flying in toward the houses. But, when cranking up everything including frame scaling, the 1060 3GB would get about 0.3 fps, the GTX 970M 6GB around 6 fps or so, and the HD 4600 about 1.8 fps. I wonder why the integrated Intel GPU would soundly beat the 1060 in that scenario.... yes, I know 1.8 fps is not remotely playable.... although another interesting thing, at 1080p ultra on Intel iGPU in Witcher 3, running at 3 fps, the actual time of the game slowed way down, and I actually had time to react to things happening. I haven't tried it on the 4K monitor yet though. (All I know is it would call for a bit over 25GB VRAM with everything maxed, idk why not 36GB but I'm guessing I may have hit a texture size limit or something, idk. Don't currently have it installed (or feel like installing) on the 5950X PC to check 1440p.) From what I see of Cyberpunk on streams or videos, I don't think I'd get into that game at all, so I wouldn't need to worry about whether my PC could run that one. Flight Simulator (2020) does look interesting, but idk if I'd have time to get much involved with it. (And I'm guessing it's very different in terms of controls, gameplay, than the versions of MSFS in the late '80s or early '90s or so, which I've long since forgotten how to play and didn't get very far in anyway.) So, I'm not much into the more demanding games these days, at least for now (unless something comes out that I might end up enjoying, but I'm not currently watching the rumor mill like a hawk lol)... But.... I would be interested in doing some video editing and transcoding, especially 4K. My current camera is a Panasonic FZ1000 which I've had since about 2015. Someday I'd like to upgrade to something with generally better image/video quality, dynamic range, high ISO, interchangeable lenses, but I'm not planning to do that yet. (If I had the $ and was upgrading now, the Sony A7s III or similar would be on my shortlist.) I'd stick with just 4K for the time being, as I feel if I went to 8K in the next few years my system wouldn't really be able to handle it well at all. (I was a bit early on adopting 4K, seeing as how my 4790K buckled when trying to work with it. And I would consider skipping over 8K completely anyway, it wouldn't be unheard of for me to skip things like that. My previous camera before the 4K FZ1000 maxed out at 480p, so I skipped over 720p and 1080p, not counting my cell phones.) As for software I'd be using, I'm not totally sure, other than probably Handbrake, maybe occasionally AviDemux but I've kinda outgrown that one, Davinci Resolve (the free version) which I need to learn more when I have time, and idk what else, maybe Blender, Shotcut, or some Linux / FOSS editors, idk. I don't plan on using anything by Adobe (like Creative Cloud), as I don't plan on buying time-based software licenses. Some time ago on my 4790K setup (but without the 1060) I did a couple tests with encoding, one each with video and audio. Both were generally at "max settings", like q=0, placebo, all keyframes, etc. In Handbrake, transcoding a 4-minute video from the camera (4K, H.264, 100Mbps, 30fps) to 4K HEVC (H.265), in one test it took about 4 days to transcode that 4-minute video, or about 1/1440th realtime. Using LAME to transcode some CD-quality wave files to 320kbps mp3 took about 2 minutes to transcode 2 hours, or 60X realtime. It would be nice to be able to to the video encoding as fast as the 4790K was doing the audio encoding, but I have a feeling even the RTX 4090 couldn't do that, and its MSRP is like 5X my budget and TDP is like 3X my preference anyway. I'm located in southern California, east of San Diego, about an hour and 45 minutes or so from Micro Center, and I'd of course consider buying online as well. I strongly prefer not buying a used card though, as I would want a warranty in case something goes wrong, and also power efficiency is important to me (want to try to avoid prev-gen cards) as electricity can be upwards of ~40-65¢/kWh, possibly more since that rate was a few years ago.
  19. Okay so this is super annoying ... I've been editing this (in the drafts section) and at least a few times now I've gotten most of the way through, then made a mistake and hit Ctrl+Z to undo ... and it didn't just undo that last little mistake I did, it undid almost EVERYTHING I'd been working on. Also some of my replies to various points were getting pretty long. I left them in spoilers in case you want to see more details, but I put some condensed comments outside the spoilers. (There may be a couple other things in spoilers that are pointed out, those were originally going to be in spoilers anyway even if I didn't put the other things in spoilers.) For now, re: the original post topic ... I think I'll get a couple 18TB WD Ultrastar HC550 (0F38459 / WUH721818ALE6L4) drives, they're available from B&H for $320 each. (I was also considering 20TB WD Ultrastar HC560 (0F38785 / WUH722020BLE6L4) for $380 each from Newegg, but that's a pretty big jump in price for just an extra 2 TB, so I think I'll go for the 18TB drives.) I just need to order soon, as they do Sabbath there (they're Jewish) and their checkout is closed from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset NYC time. Update: Ordered 2x 18TB 0F38459 from B&H earlier today (a few hours before sunset in NYC), hopefully they'll be here next Wednesday (16th). Ahh. (And I'm guessing real raid would be with a hardware card like an LSI 9211-8i or similar? I've thought in the past about getting one, or a 9200-16e or, if I found a good deal on one, a Highpoint Rocket 750 so I could add more drives, but then my problems would be not enough SATA connectors on my Corsair RM850 PSU or 3.5" bays in my Fractal Define R5 case.) Yeah... I plan to buy two disks of the same size, one will be for the data and the other will be for the backup. But, I'm a bit wary of "fake raid" so I guess I won't be running RAID1, which, among other things, eliminates Seagate drives from my shortlist. I'd want some kind of setup that is platform, OS, cotnroller, etc. agnostic, so no matter what I plug it into, I'd be able to read it, unless of course the specific drive itself had died. Ah, would redundancy be RAID1, or something else? (Also my system as-is only supports 8 3.5" drives, which I'd prefer to all be available for storage.) "HDDs aren't cheap"... true I remember when tape was a tiny fraction of the cost per capacity compared to HDDs, for example in 1994. I was wanting to see a backup solution today that has a similar price ratio. (See the spoiler for more details, but you would be able to get a 16TB tape for ~$21, or a 128TB tape for ~$63, and the tape drive would be about 1/2 to 2/3 the cost of a similar-size HDD.) Ahh. Well my local Fry's went out, and now pretty much all we have is Best Buy and WalMart. If I want an actual computer store I have to go to Micro Center about an hour and a half away, and I usually only go there if I'm planning to get multiple things, or if I'm going to be in the area for something else anyway. (At least it's on the side of Los Angeles area closer to me, so I don't have to deal with as much traffic as if I had to completely go through L.A.) I remember those times too, although in my case I think it was all the online ordering and things that eventually shut them down. But, there were times when my brother said you could stand on some street corners in the area where most of those stores were, start throwing stones, and probably hit like 8 or 10 computer stores. In the spoiler are some links to photo albums of old magazine ads from various stores we had in the San Diego, CA area, from 1990 to 2007. (I have quite a few more magazines still in my paper-and-ink collection, but am missing a few; I remember having some as old as 1987.) Ah. As I said / hinted earlier, I typically order online, but might go to a store in certain situations. (I used to only buy at stores though, cause I was afraid of damage in shipping, but I guess me driving home with the HDDs isn't that big of a difference or might even be worse considering i'm not exactly a slow driver.) I've thought about it, but right now I don't have any physical place to put a server, never mind any kind of rack cabinet or anything like that. (Also when I was considering building a NAS / backup server, one of my criteria was having the entire cost of the setup, not counting the storage, be less than the cost of a single HDD.) I thought I had to have never deleted anything, AND have more storage drives / capacity than a mere mortal's peasant dual-socket 11-PCIE-slot-filled-with-HBAs motherboard could support in order to be a "data hoarder" Ah, I do plan to buy two disks, but idk how I'd set up real-time redunancy if I won't be running somehting like RAID1. (What I've done so far is have one disk of each set of 2 be my data, then the 2nd has stuff manually copied to it then it's unplugged for a while until I need to update or restore, and I'm way behind on updating.) True ... but how else would I deal with a failed drive if I wanted to replace it without having to buy another one. Yes, there's the issue of the data on it, but that's what backups are for. (Backups, however, won't save you the cost of a new HDD when you need to replace one that died prematurely, afaik.) I'm pretty sure warranties don't apply buying used parts from private sellers. Also I've heard that they may not apply when buying refurb parts from non-authorised sellers (in those cases the sellers are supposed to provide the warranty, same if you bought a complete system with a drive inside it from a retailer). Ahh, one for data, one for backup basically. "Discs always come at least in pairs" ... maybe it translates to English a bit different han whatever your native language is, but to me, what I imagine is that it's not possible to buy one disk at a time. In reality though, at least here, you CAN buy one disk at a time if you want to, but it's much more advisable to buy two. Ahh... but ... Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.19044.2130] (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. C:\Windows\system32>hdparm 'hdparm' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. C:\Windows\system32> Apparently hdparm isn't on here, and idk if it's available. (Also I don't think the drives I'm running now, or ones I plan to get, are the "green" ones, afaik.) I wonder if other things could possible be causing issues. I just hope I don't have to rip my entire system apart, I really don't want to do that until I upgrade to a new socket / RAM generation and I might skip DDR5 entirely or at minimum go to something that supports RDIMMs and 128 PCIe lanes if/when I could afford it, which won't be for a while. I'm not sure about firmware updates. As for broken cables, I believe the ones I'm using are fine, although I also have some other SATA cables that have been slightly modified with the aid of my cat's teeth, one had its retention clip broken off, etc. I've never used ZFS. Had considered it for NAS/backup server, but would lean more toward UNRAID or similar. (I like how it lets you add drives one at a time, and if > parity fails you only lose the data on the extra failed drives, not the entire array. Single-drive performance is good enough, if I need more I'll use an SSD.) Also I'm not familiar with BTRFS or VDO either. Dedup/backup ... A while ago I was wanting to back up a bunch of SSDs to a 12TB HDD. If I didn't use compression I could just "dd" to a disk image and they'd still all fit for now, but... (see in the spoiler). Haha Not well A couple years ago or so I was DBANning probably 14 HDDs simultaneously, and ... the total bandwidth was 1 GB/s, and a couple drives that on their own were capable of >200 MB/s transfer were throttling to ~40-50MB/s transfer. (No SSDs were involved but I've heard DBAN isn't advised for them anyway.) Ahh, I guess the BT-PESAPA card I had (actually still do, but only use it rarely for PATA) was limited to tthat, it's from around 2005 or so I think so maybe 2TB drives didn't exist then. (I also for a while had a Rosewill external 3.5" enclosure that I learned when buying a 3TB drive that could only format ~700 MB that it had the same limit.) Also several years ago I wanted the ability to pull individual drives out of a system to use with a 3.5" dock somewhere else, but I'm pretty sure USB flash drives and external SSDs would be better for that now. Ah ... but I'm often (as in a few times a minute or more) getting lag spikes just using my PC even when I'm only using <10% CPU and ~50% RAM. (I could understand when they're maxed out, but not when resources are still availble...) Maybe. I thought the stuff I had was supposed to be at least fairly decent, at least if I remember right reading reviews on it, there weren't a lot of complaints about DOA, failures, etc that I could remember. I mentioned earlier I'm not considering Seagate HDDs - that's because of possible reliability issues I've heard from some people, including my brother and others. I wonder if the newer IronWolf Pro or Exos drives might be okay though, but I would only consider one if I was running it in a RAID1 array with a different brand drive, like a WD Ultrastar/Gold or a Toshiba MG-series drive. (As for that, see the comments earlier about "fake raid".) Ahh, I'm not at all familiar with perl, or pretty much any other scripting / programming language for that matter. (What little experience I had with basic, pascal, html, batch files, etc, 20-30 years ago or so has pretty much fallen by the wayside.) Ah. I actually used rsync recently, but for a different task. Hah, I talked about "not hoarding data" earlier ... "Stuffing more disks", I can't really do that, 8 is my max right now. ... Okay now I see the "compare no further than the first byte that differs"... that's a good idea probably. (It's possible that in some cases I might want to compare some of those further, but I'd probably deal with those situations if / when they arise.) ... Also, some media files might have been en-/trans-coded with different settings, but are ultimately the same thing. In some cases I might have a bunch of different bitrates / codecs of the same thing, and I need to pare some of those down and only keep the max quality / uncompressed one (a "master" so to speak), and maybe a couple lesser bitrate ones probably. Ahh, checksums of checksums... but in my case I also have a bunch of partially duplicate folders, some maybe only 2 or 3 levels deep, some well into the double digits. Also I'm maybe considering getting a couple 2TB or 4TB SSDs (one SATA 2.5", one NVMe M.2) for my laptop, to replace a couple 1TB SSDs so I have more space. (My other 2 bays are already occupied with 2 TB SSDs.) I'm just a bit hesitant to pay that much, for example, for a 4TB; I'd prefer it be closer to what I paid for the 1TB a few years ago but prices aren't coming down as quickly as I'd like. (I miss the days in the 1990s or so when HDD capacity would jump by >2x for the same price in about a year or less.) I've also wanted to compare the speed of some old HDDs vs current ones and SSDs -- but not in terms of MB/s transfer rates, I'm thinking more like "How long does it take to fill the entire disk if you're constantly writing to it". I wanted to buy a couple old <80MB PATA HDDs on ebay, but those are crazy expensive, so maybe someone has some laying around and I should make another thread asking if someone has a way to do that. (I'm thinking that some of the older/smaller drives, like 40MB or 20MB, or if anyone has 10MB or 5MB MFM drives laying around and a working system capable of interfacing with them, could fill the entire drive in maybe half a minute to a few minutes or so, not the day plus that a modern 20+TB HDD would take, or the half hour or hour or longer that I guess a DRAMless 8TB+ QLC SSD might take to fill...)
  20. I think they're not using the HGST name anymore, but they're using the Ultrastar name and a very similar model number pattern. I'm not sure that it would matter. No, I'm not running them in any kind of RAID. I had briefly considered RAID1 in case I bought a Seagate drive and another brand, but I would only be running motherboard or Windows RAID. I've heard concerns about the former having issues sometimes, and I'm not sure if the latter would be recognized on the occasions I boot Linux. Also, in that capacity range, I right now actually have a total of 6 drives - 3x 8TB HGST Deskstar NAS, 1 8TB Toshiba N300, and 2x 10TB HGST Deskstar NAS. I currently have them set up so that 2 of the 8TB HGST drives, and 1 of the 10TB is used for data storage for whatever I put on it. (Between an 8TB and 10TB, they house the vast majority of my older stuff.) The remaining drives (1 8TB HGST, the 8TB Toshiba & the other 10TB HGST) are cold-storage (normally unplugged) backups that admittedly are quite overdue for updating as I haven't done that in at least a year or more. (I had basically copied the entire contents of the main data drives to the backup drives, but going forward I need to find a better way to keep backups updated. I've thought of some details as to what I want to be able to do but don't want to clutter this post with that.) Ahh, EUR vs USD, yeah there would be a difference there. (I'm east of San Diego, CA, about an hour and 25 minutes from Micro Center in Tustin, but when I've been there they haven't always had the lowest prices on HDDs, or the models that I would want in stock. It briefly popped into my mind to maybe buy the drives now, but don't open them yet, and if prices drop for BF, see if they'll price match after the fact (some may, some may not), or if different models go on sale, return them and buy the others. (But, there might be a restocking fee to consider which would probably negate any potential savings, so that's probably not a good idea.) Also I'm not running any kind of server, it's just my home PC. While I do have quite a bit of stuff, I don't think I qualify for r/datahoarders yet. (I'm guessing you're referring to RAID or backups when you talk about no way to store data on a single disk so they come in pairs, or do you mean something else?) Also 16 TB here can be had for about $300, or considerably less if you're willing to risk not having a warranty because of buying form a 3rd-party seller, or would I have a warranty still and shouldn't be worried about that? If the $1000 on 16TB includes backups, I'd prefer if possible to spend a lot less on the backup media than on the main storage media. (That was possible in the early/mid 1990s - see the highlighted examples in the pic in the spoiler, comparing the cost of hard drives vs tape media and drives.) It's not due to waking up from saving energy, because 1 - I don't think those drives have that function (at least not like the green drives, and I don't have Windows power plan set to turn off the hard disks at all), and 2 - when that issue happens, it's still persisting several minutes later as I"m trying to go through other stuff preparing the PC to restart, and if I go away and come back later they're still stuck at 100% usage with the drives inaccessible to Windows. (In "This PC" where it shows the drives, the drive letter will be there but the bar showing free space, and the capacity, will not be there.) When I restart (which sometimes requires just using the reset button on the case especially when my software restart attempt hangs for several minutes), it's fine until it happens again. Also that issue seems to be only happening with the 8 & 10 TB HGST drives; my 12 & 14 TB Toshiba drives are fine, and my 8 TB Toshiba might be okay as well but I haven't verified that last one. The last 5400rpm "green" drive I bought was a WD WD20EZRX several years ago, and I no longer have that drive. Since about 2015, I've only bought 7200rpm drives that are rated for NAS or "enterprise" grade drives, and going forward I plan to only buy drives with at least a 5 year warranty and preferably a 300 or 550+ TB/year workload rating. (No, not because I would push them that hard, but I feel like they would be more reliable than basic consumer-grade desktop drives like WD Blue, Seagate Barracuda, Toshiba P300.) Ahh, yeah I wasn't sure that ZFS would make sense in my case when I might only have 8 disks. (I have had 10 or 12 or so plugged in at a time, but that was on a motherboard with 10 SATA ports (ASRock Z97 Extreme6), and I had another PCIe to SATA 2 / IDE card plugged in as well. Side note: learned the hard way to not plug drives larger than 2TB into that card. Was able to get some stuff back and clone to other disks, etc, but that's partly why I have a bunch of files with gibberish names that were identical to some other files I also had, if you saw the part earlier where I had to use TestDisk / PhotoRec to recover some stuff.) I've thought about building a NAS for backup purposes, but details are outside the scope of this post. (I had considered ZFS / TrueNAS for that, but have also been considering UnRAID so that I can add disks one at a time as necessary.) I could sometimes use more than 128GB RAM I've had my pagefile on my laptop with 64GB RAM reach upwards of 308GB (which with the 64GB RAM used adds up to 372GB committed), and right now my total committed on my desktop with 128GB RAM is about 131GB (interestingly it says only 68GB RAM is in use) and I've seen it quite a bit higher. (Also I forgot to mention earlier that sometimes only 2 of my 4 RAM sticks are detected, showing 64GB RAM instead of all 4 sticks at 128GB, which usually means I have to restart. There was one time I thought for sure it booted with all 128GB detected, but later came back to the PC and it was only showing 64GB, but I can't see how that would happen without the system crashing or blue screening, and I have it set to not automatically restart after a stop error.) I kinda want to get rid of the file system clutter, and not have 5 or 10 copies of the same thing scattered who knows where. Yes, 2 or 3 copies is good for backup purposes, but they of course shouldn't be on the same drive. (I'd need to find a good solution for off-site backup though... there's no possible way I could do the daily full backup (which to me means every sector of every disk, for example using the linux "dd" command to clone disks which is how i've done a few backups & it's the only reliable way I've gotten a cloned Windows install to boot) that some people advocate, when I'd be backing up multiple 10s of TB (and besides there's no way I could afford that storage), especially on a site like BackBlaze when my internet is limited to 10 Mbps upload and a 1TB/month cap. Actually my older data isn't taking up a ton of space, compared to some of the newer stuff. About 6 and a half years ago I bought a camera that records 4K at 100 Mbps, which basically ends up being about 4 GB for every 5 minutes 55 seconds of footage. I've recorded some stuff with that camera, but haven't recorded nearly as much as I want to. (Sometimes I've recorded services at church camps, and that works out to around half a TB or so for each 3 or 4 day weekend event; and even just recording 2 hours will chew up about 80 GB. Do that twice a week, and it adds up; even more so if I also record other things that I've wanted to record but have been holding off for various reasons.) I think you're talking about WinDirStat, and I've run that on this PC, it's given me a very general overview of things on here. Ahh, I hadn't thought of an sql database and the last time I did any coding was like 25 or 30 years ago as a kid, and that was really simple stuff in basic and pascal. I generally like the idea though, of querying files with same date, and same size, then when matches are found there, start comparing checksums, or first portions of files to see what's identical. (I would probably use a fair bit more than 512 bytes for the initial compare though, then if those match, compare the entire files. It's possible, for example, I might have audio files that are the same size, and the sound is identical except where I might have applied a fade to silence at the very end of a copy, and I'm guessing the duplicate detector would need to parse the entire file to find it.) Also I'm pretty sure there are programs out there that will find duplicate or near-duplicate files ... but what I was looking for is something that will find multiple duplicate folders. One bad habit I had gotten to, when copying stuff from an SD card either from my phone when I had one that used it, or from my camera or my audio recorder (Zoom H2/H2n or others), was just dumping the entire contents of the card onto the PC (cause I was too lazy to only choose the portions that I had recorded new things), then leaving stuff on the card cause I still wanted it accessible in-device, then again copying the entire thing another time later to another folder on the PC. (There were some occasions where I only copied the new stuff and deleted the old stuff off the card, but not always.) So, I've got a bunch of duplicate folders scattered all over the place. Also I have duplicates of older "My Documents" folders, maybe even a few old Windows installs, etc, although on the Windows installs, I'm thinking I should get rid of the ones for which I no longer have the hardware that it was being used on. Problem is, I can't just delete some of them, as back in the day (late 1990s into mid 2000s or so) there were sometimes user / data files that somehow got saved in the Windows folder, or in the program files folder, instead of in the user area (like users\username\(etc), or in my case on a different drive entirely). (Also as for the program files, sometimes I've wanted to be able to run some older programs again, but I'd either need to find installers or find some way to get them to work, and I'd at least want to know which ones they were, and preferably if possible preserve the settings that I had used in the past, but that's outside the scope of this post, and I have too many other things going on to really take any time to pursue that for now.)
  21. HGST, afaik, was bought by WD. (I heard some of their technology, maybe involving 3.5" disks, went to Toshiba.) The model numbers of the WD Ultrastar drives use very close to the same pattern as some HGST drives had used, and in fact Ultrastar was an HGST brand I believe. I had been maybe considering 16TB, but I'm planning to replace 10TB and 8TB drives, and last I checked, 10 + 8 > 16. Also what would you consider a really good offer? (For me, I'm thinking 22TB under $360, 20TB under $300 or 18TB under $250 or something like that.) I'd really like 26TB or larger since I want to replace 8+8+10, but those aren't really available yet. (There is one from WD, but it's host-managed SMR among other issues.) One issue I've been having with the 8 and 10TB drives (HGST Deskstar NAS), and therefore considering replacing them, is that once in a while they'll go to 100% access time in WIndows task manager, and be completely inaccessible. I'm not 100% sure it's the drives though, as often at the same time my motherboard's built-in wifi drops out (to the point where WIndows says no network connections detected or something like that). Sometimes my keyboard/mouse have also quit responding requiring me to use the reset button to restart the PC, and at least once when I'd come back to the PC, it was on a black screen with the GPU pinned at 100% fan speed. Restarting the PC usually cured those issues, until it cropped up again a few weeks or a month or so later. System is an AMD 5950X, ASRock B550 Taichi, Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360 (I'm aware that some have issues but haven't had trouble with mine yet and don't want to take it apart unless I absolutely have to and am making a significant platform upgrade, for example socket SP5 or DDR6/7 (although this one was a budget-constrained stop-gap incremental upgrade from a 4790K, went 5950X in case it would be more than several years before I could replace it)), Silicon Power 1TB P34A80 boot drive with Windows 10 Pro, 128GB Team Expert DDR4-3600 CL18 running at 3466, EVGA SC GTX 1060 3GB, Corsair RM850 PSU, Fractal Design Define R5 case, plus a 250GB Crucial CT250MX200SSD6 with a Linux install. Current HDDs are 2x 14TB Toshiba MG07ACA14TE, 12TB Toshiba MG07ACA12TE, 2x 10TB HGST HDN721010ALE604, 2x 8TB HGST HDN728080ALE604 and 8TB Toshiba HDWG180XZSTA. Monitor is an ASUS VG289Q, keyboard is Logitech K270, mouse is Logitech G604. As for deduplication ... I had thought about ZFS deduplication, but the suggestion on some sites for 5GB RAM per TB of raw storage gives me paranoia. Also I feel like dedup would basically just get rid of the actual duplicate data but still leave some kind of pointers / shortcuts intact in the file system where the actual duplicate files had been, but in my case, I want the actual duplicate files / folders gone. (Maybe I'm too much of a packrat, I still have some documents / spreadsheets on the PC dating from when my family first had a '286 PC in Q1'1989 when I was a kid, and some games from the late 80s / early 90s that if I could, I might want to play some of them again.) I'd like to find some utility that goes through my storage, visually lays them out for me then lets me decide what to keep / merge vs what to delete. Maybe something like WinMerge, but looks across the entire drive for patterns of similar files in the same folders, and also allows for files having different names and dates, but the same size and contents. (Bonus points if it could also find near-matches, for example the same audio, photo, video files encoded with different settings, for example 1.4Mbps wave vs 48kbps mp3, or 16 megapixel Raw / BMP vs 640x480 75% jpg, or 4K 100mbps H.264 vs 640x480 2mbps MJPEG or whatever.)
  22. Hey ... I'm considering buying a couple 18TB or 20TB hard drives, with which I plan to replace an 8TB and 10TB with each. (I'd like 26+TB drives so I can replace 8+8+10TB, but the only one that exists is host-managed SMR afaik.) The drives I'm considering: 18TB Toshiba MG09ACA18TE - $299.99 (Newegg 3rd party - Platium Micro) 18TB WD (Ultrastar DC H550 0F38459) WUH721818ALE6L4 - $319.99 (B&H, or Newegg 3rd party - Platinum Micro) 18TB WD (Red Pro) WD181KFGX) - $349.99 (Newegg) 20TB WD (Ultrastar DC H560 0F38785) WUH722020BLE6L4 - $379.99 (Newegg) 20TB WD (Ultrastar DC H560 0F38755) WUH722020ALE6L4 - $387.99 (Newegg) (No Seagates are under consideration, because I & family / friends have had reliability issues with them in the past, etc. I had considered an Exos or Ironwolf Pro but my brother, who's better with tech than me, said avoid Seagate HDDs, although I do have a 2TB Seagate SATA SSD in my laptop and it's been fine.) The best deal appears to be the 18TB Toshiba, but would I need to be worried about being denied warranty coverage if I buy from a 3rd-party seller, or getting a used / refurb drive? (Also what is Platinum Micro's reputation like?) Or, I might consider the 18TB or 20TB Ultrastar drives. The 18TB is a bit cheaper per TB ($19.15 vs $20.47 with 7.75% tax), but would it be worth it to go for the 20TB drives? (I don't run a datacenter but I still consider some value in using fewer drives for the same / more capacity.) Or should I wait until closer to Black Friday, or are the 18+TB drives with 5+ year warranties not likely to be discounted much more? (I did miss a sale in mid/late October where prices on some models were somewhat lower than they are now, for example a 20TB WD Red Pro was available for $359.99, or $284.99 for 18TB.) (I was going to ask in Discord, but thought I'd ask here instead. Even though replies will be a lot slower (hours or days vs seconds or minutes), there's a better chance that I will see them here.) Also I'm needing to do some decluttering, get rid of some duplicate files / folders (there's some things that are probably duplicated like 5 or 10 times and scattered across multiple hard drives, some things possibly being 8 or 12 folders deep, some files having different names but same contents, etc, so idk if WinMerge would help much) ... I'm guessing the Programs, Apps and Websites subforum is a better place to ask about that? (I was able to free up about a TB and a half or so just by finding some duplicate video files, comparing them by playing in VLC then deleting the ones with obscure names cause TestDisk / PhotoRec didn't preserve their normal names, but that was the easy part.) Also how long do you think until SSDs overtake HDDs in TB/$ and TB/drive, assuming the same level in the product stack? (As in, high-end (TLC/DRAM/NVMe) SSD vs high-end (enterprise/CMR/etc) HDD, and the SSDs being able to handle 24/7 writes without dying better than the HDDs, among other things)
  23. Hey Google / YouTube, please! I'd like to discover some SMALLER creators, okay?

     

    I've been looking through my youtube homepage feed now and then recently, and quite often I see videos suggested that already have like hundreds of thousands or even millions of views even though they were only uploaded in the last couple months, or sometimes as recently as several days ago.  That, or they're from channels that already have silver or even gold play buttons.

     

    Yeah, some of the videos are kind-of interesting, once I weed past the clickbait titles and thumbnails, but ....

     

    I personally like to be able to find smaller channels more often than occasionally.

    For example, I would appreciate it if the YT feed/algorithm could start recommending me videos that maybe only have a few hundred to a few thousand views (or maybe 10-20K views in some cases), or from channels that have several hundred to a few thousand subs.  Also it's fine if the video is a bit older (like even several years), as long as it's from a channel that's still currently active with uploads / streams / other posts on their channel.  (By active, I mean at least doing something semi consistently over the last several months or so, if possible.)

    Yes, once in a while I do see videos / channels like that pop up in my feed, but those are pretty rare, it seems YT likes to push the already gigantic channels toward me.


    I like to, when possible, be able to interact with the creators, either through live streams, or comments, or whatever, and it's much easier with smaller channels.  I've had quite a few interactions with channels with only a few 10s of K of subs, but as for the big ones with multi million subs ... for example I don't know if I've EVER had a direct interaction with Linus, other than maybe he might have replied to a forum post / thread I was involved in on here but that might not have been directed at me anyway, I don't remember anymore.


    (I think even as hectic as my life can be sometimes, I would still remember if he directly interacted with me .... but then I probably wouldn't fanboy as much as some people would when they see celebrities, which is partly influenced by my religious upbringing.  For example, if I ran into someone like Taylor Swift, Shaquille O'Neal, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or other well-known people, I wouldn't be like "OMG I worship you can I have autograph" or whatever, I might say something like Hi nice to meet you, and maybe depending on some factors see if I could get a picture with them, but idk.  Probably would be more like general casual conversation, however brief, just like I would do with just about anyone else, to the extent that introvert me would do that.)

    1.   Show previous replies  1 more
    2. Sauron

      Sauron

      Might depend on the type of content you usually watch? I get recommended small channels occasionally and they're usually about some of my niche interests. For instance, there are only so many huge rock climbing channels youtube can recommend...

    3. Spotty

      Spotty

      1 hour ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

      it seems YT likes to push the already gigantic channels toward me.

      YouTube is only interested in pushing you content that will keep you watching more videos for longer so they can serve you more ads. If those videos with millions of views have better stats saying that more people watched more of the video and stayed on the platform after watching it and continued to watch more videos then that's what they're going to push.

    4. manikyath

      manikyath

      i've noticed an uptick in recommendations that have nothing to do with my interests lately, just big channels doing million-views-per-day carpetbomb content made to appeal to ages 9 to 95. even content from my own subscriptions rarely makes it to the front page in place of random nonsense.

       

      time to watch cheese again..

      (that video is so long and so specific it royally confuses youtube's algorithm)

  24. Just a quick update, got an OtterBox Commuter at a local T-Mobile store a few days ago. Seems pretty good so far, although I do wish the back was a bit more grippy. (Also the case was super easy to put on, in a way that makes me a bit concerned about if it has a big fall (like several dozen meters or couple hundred feet or whatever) and the case or phone files for divorce from each other.) Didn't get a screen protector, they wanted to sell me one for $40 which seemed way high. (I looked just now, and apparently in November 2016 I paid $7.95 on Amazon for a screen protector for an LG G4, which never got installed cause the phone soon started the boot loop issue.)
  25. Hmm I'm getting down to the wire, to where I need to factory reset the phone and send it in. (An email recently reminded me to ship it by the 18th, but I want to send it on the 17th (Today, it's 12:48am as I'm typing) to be a bit on the safe side. I was able to bookmark my Chrome tabs, but it was a painstaking process that took a couple days. Had to do it one at a time, putting them in folders for each window. Also some I wasn't properly able to bookmark or save, since the sites / pages no longer exist. Which reminds me ... I really need a way to be able to pull from local cache AFTER having refreshed from the server in situations like that, any ideas how to do that, so that issue (resource no longer available, or changed) doesn't happen again and I could just use my local cache? Just now I was going through a few apps, and got stuck on Kindle. There's a couple ebooks in .mobi format on the 3a that aren't in my Kindle library, and I can't open them on the Kindle app on the 6a. And I realized that a couple apps didn't get transferred at all, with at least one that's installed on the 3a not being available in the Play store at all. Also for some reason the files didn't properly get transferred when I did the original data transfer, so I had to upload them to Google Drive then re-download on the 6a. Then, when I tried to open them in the Kindle app, they wouldn't open or preview. I'm sure there's some games I have on there that don't have their progress or settings properly saved either, and my main phone settings also didn't get preserved. What can I do to fix this, and make sure everything is properly transferred / synced? I'd prefer to only use the cloud as a last resort (and would eventually like to set things up so I can be my own private cloud, but that's for another topic / post sometime), and there's no way I can fit 64 GB from the Pixel 3a into my 17GB Google Drive. Issues like this (and similar issues with PC upgrades / reinstalls, for example my parents' laptop had an issue that, when they took it to the shop, ended up having Windows reinstalled which didn't preserve their user account, firefox bookmarks (a biggie for my mom), wifi access, etc) make me not want to ever buy another computing device until the software makers (or whoever) get their act together and make it so we can completely seamlessly transfer between devices, reinstalls, restarts, etc. Anyway, I'll have to send the phone in, after a factory reset, later today. If I had known this would be such a problem (with not all the data/settings/apps/etc being transferred) I would have thought thrice about buying a new phone.
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