BobVonBob

1 hour ago, Motifator said:

Those suggestions all fail in one way or another, you do NOT need a DAC, let's get this straight. Sub might only be a need if you want higher bass.

If you have $800 to spend on a pair of speakers.. and want it loud on a small scale: https://www.voltmusicstore.com/en/eve-audio-sc204-pair.html

You can get their sub if you want... since this is all hooked up to the PC, just get a solid interface to run them off from, which would be something like...

https://www.amazon.com/PreSonus-Studio-24c-USB-C-Interface/dp/B07L9MWWDK?th=1

On the contrary, unless you have plans to add a phantom power microphone, an instrument, or a MIDI device in the near future I would suggest the setup just use a DAC or DAC/amp (i.e. any amplifier with digital inputs, and thus a built-in DAC) instead of an interface like that. You'll avoid paying for hardware you aren't going to use and you can spend that on features that might actually be useful in your situation like a remote.

Those are system files, not remnants from the old drive. Every partition you currently have should stay exactly as it is, you just need to remove the drive letters from the E and F drives.

You should be able to do that with diskpart. Launch an admin terminal (either cmd or powershell, admin powershell can be accessed in the menu opened by the shortcut Win + X). Type in diskpart and press enter, then enter remove letter=E and remove letter=F. They should have their letters removed and be gone from explorer.

This is a classic case of not my job. Let IT deal with the IT, and the consequences if the new password manager is a flop. Unless you're making the decisions there's not much you can do about bad ones except keep your CV up to date.

To get HDMI 2.1 at that length you need a fiber optic cable, every copper cable that long claiming HDMI 2.1 is a scam. I know Club3D and Cable Matters make 10m cables that will do 2.1 speeds. There are other brands out there with fiber optic cables half their price, but I can't vouch for them.

38 minutes ago, AlwaysFSX said:

and have used more batteries on a larger scale than if you had a controller with integrated battery pack

That's just the thing, if you're using rechargeable batteries not a single battery gets used up in the entire lifetime of the controller. I've been using the same pack of rechargeable AA batteries since the late Xbox 360 era and they're still going strong enough for my tastes, not to mention I'd already have them anyway because of all the other stuff in my house that needs AA/AAA batteries. Granted I'm not a heavy controller user, but they've seen enough use and time to have killed at least one and possibly two lithium ion batteries. Everything being land waste straight out of the factory nowadays is a separate issue, but I'd argue removable standardized batteries are also a boon there because at least you aren't throwing out a working battery too.

However, while the best case battery waste scenario is better than built-in batteries, you do have a point that using the AA battery form factor at all means people that still haven't caught on have the option to use and waste disposable batteries, which is an issue. (Seriously people they're like twice the price of disposable batteries now. IKEA sells fantastic rechargeable batteries almost everywhere in the world get with the program.)

44 minutes ago, AlwaysFSX said:

AA's, even rechargeable ones, are wasteful in resources and time and never made sense for controllers.

Agreed for disposable batteries, awful wasteful things that should have been phased out a decade ago. But I absolutely disagree for rechargeables.

The lifetimes of products and their built in batteries, especially for relatively low cost devices like controllers, are often tied to each other. Sure it's possible to replace built-in batteries, have a repair shop replace them, or remove and reuse/recycle them if the product they're in breaks, but that never happens. On a macro scale essentially nobody is bothering to do that, they just throw the whole thing away and get a new one. Rechargeable standard sized batteries sidestep this issue by decoupling the batteries and the product they're in.

And if the time to replace batteries is your biggest gripe, there are countless rechargeable battery packs (an additional cost, the downside of this) for Xbox controllers that not only make recharging the same as a controller with built-in batteries, but also allow the batteries and controller to be independently replaced easily enough that an average person might be expected to do so.

I don't think a 256GB SSD is enough for three operating systems, but if you want to try I think 128 GB for Windows and 64 GB each for Arch and Nobara would be your best bet. If you really want to expand the Arch space at all costs perhaps 96 GB for Windows, 128 for Arch, and 32 for Nobara? I absolutely would not try to shrink the Windows partition any more than that, and even 96 will probably be a tight squeeze.

Core Utility and Total CPU Utility include turbo/PBO speeds. It's normal (and expected) for them to read more than 100%.

I doubt the exact price will be leaked before launch day, but I'd expect them to be pretty expensive like their other original products.

1 hour ago, DoctorNick said:

What was the issue?

Not sure what it was, but taking a stab in the dark I suspect it was an issue with bidirectional bluetooth. Bluetooth massively reduces audio quality when using a device as both an audio input and output. Games are pretty likely to automatically pick up microphones, while most other applications won't.

To fix it, just disable the associated input device in your audio devices and use a different microphone.

Most string to numeric converting functions have bounds checking, and the ones that don't shouldn't be used on values that could be outside of the acceptable range. In the case of C with an unsigned integer you would generally use strtoul(), which sets errno if the value is out of bounds. You can check that as follows:

#include <errno.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
 
int main(void) {
    const char *strNum = "-40";
    char *end = NULL;
    unsigned int num = strtoul(strNum, &end, 10); // overflows
    if (errno == ERANGE) {
        // You've just had a range error
        errno = 0;
    }
}

29 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

@Kilrah

 

My CPU supports a lot SIMD instructions, as it should. Which one to use? This is a good guide - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/intrinsics-guide/index.html. Heck, its even built into C libraries!

What do you mean by this? You use the instruction that does what you want to do.

17 minutes ago, kennethk said:

It's always hard to tell in person VS a video, are there any 100ft ones you could recommend under $15?

Nowadays cheap things on internet marketplaces are all white-label, and the "brands" that sell them come and go with the seasons. Even if I did know a good LED strip brand, they might not be getting their lights from the same manufacturer this week, and they're sure as hell not doing any QC. With stuff like this the best you can hope for is to cross your fingers and pray.

100 feet of LED strip lighting is way brighter than a two bulb floor lamp. Even 10 feet would probably be brighter. Of note, if you want a good white light I would suggest RGBW lights, which have an extra white LED just to make white light. RGB lights (and especially low end RGB lights) usually have a pretty noticeable tint to them when trying to make white because the LEDs aren't well matched.

Do you have the WiFi/Bluetooth antennas installed?

17 hours ago, 12345678 said:

What do you mean?

Why can't you use Selenium (or other similar browser automation)?

12 hours ago, Frank Cas said:

 

That makes sense, are these browser extensions safe? I would assume they scan every web site you vist to work.

Extension-based ad blockers are widely used and safe. They need access to pretty much everything in your browser to do what they do, but assuming you're running Chrome on Windows every reputable ad blocker is more privacy conscious than the browser and OS you're running them on.

If you're still concerned, open source extensions like uBlock Origin or AdGuard provide some security against potential abuse, since anyone could examine the code used to run them. Open source projects are not impervious to malicious behavior, but few are bold enough to provide written record of their misdeeds, and these are projects with a long (in internet time) history of security and privacy.

4 hours ago, Frank Cas said:

 

I'm surprised there is no way do it other than a browser extension can you explain a little why that is?

 

BTW can you suggest one for chrome?

 

DNS sinkholes can only block ads coming from a specific domain. YouTube uses the same domain to serve ads and video, so there's no way for a DNS level ad blocker to distinguish between ads and the video you wanted.

uBlock Origin is the de-facto ad blocker. Others exist, but uBlock Origin is the most active with the most features for the least money (free) on the most platforms. It's the only ad blocker that would reliably work on YouTube while they were still very actively switching up the ad blocker detection a few months ago.

I will preface this with: I have next to no experience with AutoIt, but lots with other scripting languages.

Minor (but catastrophic) issue, you've got an unclosed double quote at the start of the first string, and no quotes at all around the second string.

Edit: Not unclosed, just really long. Second one has no quotes though

The more relevant problem is you've got the entire control flow of your script wrong. You've placed all the install steps in the way of the main program execution. What your script does right now is it assigns the $reader64 variable, then it immediately starts waiting for the Acrobat Reader DC window to appear, and it never will because nothing got run.

Unless you tell it otherwise, the program gets executed top to bottom. It can't know that what you actually want it to do is skip to the end, run the right installer based on the OS (via trying to execute a string with an If... Then... block, which don't believe actually works), only go through the steps for the right installer, then quit.

Edit: I misunderstood how you were trying to do this, you were making great big multiline strings and trying to execute them. That would be a valid idea if If... Then... blocks could actually execute strings (and if readerxp had quotes around it), but I think functions are a much better alternative to executing strings, which doesn't appear to be easily possible in AutoIt.

You need to restructure your program so that the installation steps don't get in the way of the execution and explicitly separate the steps for each installer, and the way to do that is with functions.

I believe something like this would work:

;Require admin so there are no file permission errors.
;2024
#RequireAdmin
#include <Process.au3>
#include <MsgBoxConstants.au3>

If @OSArch = "X64" Then
    Reader64()
ElseIf @OSVersion = "WIN_XP" Then 
    ReaderXP()
EndIf

Func Reader64()
    Run(@ScriptDir & "\Adobe Reader\AcroRdrDCx642300620360_en_US.exe")
    
    WinWait ("Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (Continuous) - Setup", "Adobe Acrobat is configured to install updates");Wait for the first window.
    WinActivate ("Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (Continuous) - Setup", "Adobe Acrobat is configured to install updates");Activate the window.
    ControlClick ("Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (Continuous) - Setup", "Adobe Acrobat is configured to install updates", "Button6");Click Install.
    
    WinWait ("Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (Continuous) - Setup", "Setup has successfully installed");Wait for the second window.
    WinActivate ("Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (Continuous) - Setup", "Setup has successfully installed");Activate the window.
    ControlClick ("Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (Continuous) - Setup", "Setup has successfully installed", "Button2")
EndFunc

Func ReaderXP()
    Run(@ScriptDir & "\Adobe Reader\AdbeRdr11008_en_US.exe")
    
    WinWait ("Adobe Reader XI (11.0.08) - Setup", "Ready to Install Adobe Reader");Wait for the first window.
    WinActivate ("Adobe Reader XI (11.0.08) - Setup", "Ready to Install Adobe Reader");Activate the window.
    ControlClick ("Adobe Reader XI (11.0.08) - Setup", "Ready to Install Adobe Reader", "Button1");Click next.
    
    WinWait ("Adobe Reader XI (11.0.08) - Setup", "Keep your product up-to-date");Wait for the second window.
    WinActivate ("Adobe Reader XI (11.0.08) - Setup", "Keep your product up-to-date");Activate the window.
    ControlClick ("Adobe Reader XI (11.0.08) - Setup", "Keep your product up-to-date", "Button8");Do not check for updates.
    Sleep(1500)
    ControlClick ("Adobe Reader XI (11.0.08) - Setup", "Keep your product up-to-date", "Button1");Click install.
    
    WinWait ("Adobe Reader XI (11.0.08) - Setup", "Setup Completed");Wait for the second window.
    WinActivate ("Adobe Reader XI (11.0.08) - Setup", "Setup Completed");Activate the window.
    ControlClick ("Adobe Reader XI (11.0.08) - Setup", "Setup Completed", "Button1"); Click finish.
EndFunc

DNS sinks like Pi-hole or AdGuard Home are great at blocking most ads, but they can't block YouTube ads. YouTube ad blocking has to be done with a browser extension (or third party app on mobile).

I'm not sure you've got the right terminology for what you're trying to explain, or there's more to the setup than you know. All of the (common) twisted pair network standards need more than the three wires in a twin and earth cable, DSL needs two transmit and two receive wires, standard Ethernet needs eight total. Are there multiple twin and earth cables in play here, or is this spliced into a coaxial cable before the modem instead?

If this is actually spliced into a coaxial cable I wouldn't be surprised at the intermittent internet. Coaxial cables for internet are fairly sensitive at the best of times.

Coil whine usually comes from internal vibration, at least in components common to current computers, and is notoriously difficult to track down to a specific component. Even if you got the right component, hot glue would do nothing but get hot glue all over your GPU.

There's a discussion in a video around the release of the screwdriver, I don't remember which one exactly, that they had tried other coatings and black chrome was the best balance of cost, looks, and durability. More durable coatings were either too costly or too ugly.

It's incredible how much motherboard manufacturers are skimping on their products these days. You'd think USB 2.0 was a new and expensive port if they can't use a dual connection.

Anyway yes, that's how you can connect it. To choose which front USB 2 port will work and which won't you can plug the header into the row of 4 pins, or the 4 pins directly across from them in the 5 pin row.

46 minutes ago, 8tg said:

You can still use windows XP to browse this forum, I’ve done so many times.

”oh no but what about the security updates”, how about how they literally have never mattered for consumers ever,

This is just untrue. Consumer viruses are still a common occurrence even on fully updated hardware. Just look at the troubleshooting category on this very website if you want a constant stream of counterexamples. Most of the users of those 240 million machines would not be able to keep themselves safe for long on an unpatched OS.

Even as a conscientious user, putting an EOL OS on the internet, especially XP, in 2023 (or 2024 for that matter) is a horrible idea. All it takes is one wrong click, or even no wrong clicks, and now your computer has stolen everything you ever put on it and bricked itself. There are hundreds of unpatched zero click/"drive-by" vulnerabilities on XP.