Not quite today, but some time ago I mustered courage to swap the Fn and Ctrl keys on my Thinkpad T16 Gen3 keyboard.

Historically, IBM/Lenovo laptops had Fn as the bottom leftmost and Ctrl to the right of it. This is backwards from most laptops, but I grew accustomed to it. For many years, Lenovo had offered the option to swap them in the BIOS, but only in the very recent generation did they change the default from Fn-Ctrl to Ctrl-Fn, and the keycaps to match. Having changed them to be Fn-Ctrl in the BIOS, I found that I press the correct key when not looking at the keyboard, and frequently get mixed up when looking at the keyboard, because the labels don't match.

Fortunately, they made the keycaps the same size now, so a swap is possible. I was a bit nervous, since I never removed and replaced keys on a chiclet keyboard, and I could not find specific instructions for this model. The underlying mechanism is quite easy to break. Fortunately, a generic video was good enough, and the trick of using a flathead screwdriver to hold down the mechanism while prying the key out was all that was needed.

This is how the keyboard looks now, and now it is consistent with every other Thinkpad I use, and I no longer get mixed up. 😀

Finally!
Swapped out solder handle with cable by changing the plug keeping the new handle with original plug still using the cheap Aixun or something power supply station.

Now new handle holds on the JBC style C245 cartridge tips with more strength. Was really bothered with the defective handle, because that stand kept catching the tip and end up with handle without tip.

My wish list to get a better quality generic station designed in likeness to the JBC type and these generic costs bit more around 200 cdn, but worth waiting for, than what I paid for this starter that uses C245 handle to take T245 cartridges. I can also can buy larger or very micro handle through aliexpress if I need to work with tiny stuff, at this moment hobby soldering is sufficient with C245 cartridges.

Do not buy Quick brand solder station, they use *proprietary* cartridges and range of very small selection. Also another thing is, Weller has issue of expensive parts and always proprietary. I had two, one brought as new in 1990 or so, and other one was bought (adjustable) was for old work. My coworker damaged the weller station handle, this which is made of plastic holding heater assy by stressing through two small screws pushing at things made screws to pull out of plastic. Replacement complete or in parts, handles for these costs over 100. Not worth doing repairs sine, those tips were expensive and not efficient at heat transfer. Heater is tubular and tip's shaft slides into it so not contacted with force means lossy heat transfer and collect keeps loosening. This means inability to react to heat demands, so you wait long time and damage the PCB if too delicate.

I really like stations using cartridge tips that are Hakko T12 or JBC. But I find JBC cartridge tips the best due to massive tip metal with best thermal transfer from internal heater where tip is. I know this since I use Hakko station which was bought previously before I got hired so have to use what is supplied at work, T12 tips works well but not enough thermal metal mass.

No, I cannot afford real JBC stations but can afford good quality JBC clone stations and replacement handles is only 20 or so.

Cheers,

After upgrading my RAM to 64GB, and my GPU to a 4070ti Super for the sake of "I don't want to worry about flight sim running well at launch", I finally decided to bite the bullet and reinstall my OS. In turn, I spent more time removing things and restoring basic functionality to windows 11 than I did installing the entire OS from scratch. The only reason I wanted to go through and do this was to remove a reliance upon Intel RST that was left over from when I was using two M.2 drives in a RAID to make them act like a bigger drive, and some odd issues that were caused by the MS store version of MSFS2020 being on different SSDs at different times. This also allowed me to go through my drives for the sake of better organization and moving certain programs without having to worry about them being unhappy about suddenly being on a different drive letter.

I truly do wish we could have a windows version that just acts like windows instead of halfheartedly taking things from MacOS without thinking them through, and then talking up how many people use on-by-default features that power users regularly remove. I hate how Apple is with a lot of their hardware and the lack of repairability that is present, but MacOS is just so much less intrusive. I don't have to disable and uninstall things to just have what I want.

Updated Magisk 27.0 to 28.0 on my Xperia E3. Now that other financial app runs again!

I was updating other stuff recently and noticed HP Print Service Plugin just crashes if installed as system app or if I tamper with its APK. I could have shaved about 30 MB off the APK by deleting useless libraries. If you have eg. ARMv7 CPU, there's no use for ARMv8, x86 and x86_64 libs. Seems apps being offered modularly (split APKs) is not universal on Google Play.

Not that I need printer much, but once in a blue moon a need may still arise...most of the time I do it from PC, but I like having options so have that thing loaded on the phone as well.

BetaC wrote on 2024-10-22, 01:19:

After upgrading my RAM to 64GB, and my GPU to a 4070ti Super for the sake of "I don't want to worry about flight sim running well at launch", I finally decided to bite the bullet and reinstall my OS. In turn, I spent more time removing things and restoring basic functionality to windows 11 than I did installing the entire OS from scratch.

Ugh, reinstalling is easy, but getting everything else in order...

I did make an image of the installed OS few year back and I'd probably still need too much time to check all the little things after restoring as a minor setting there and there was altered since...sometimes we may have only ourselves to blame to make our lives more difficult.

BetaC wrote on 2024-10-22, 01:19:

I truly do wish we could have a windows version that just acts like windows instead of halfheartedly taking things from MacOS without thinking them through, and then talking up how many people use on-by-default features that power users regularly remove. I hate how Apple is with a lot of their hardware and the lack of repairability that is present, but MacOS is just so much less intrusive. I don't have to disable and uninstall things to just have what I want.

I wonder what goes on there that they keep making Windows all over the place. I was looking at statcounter.com recently and if their stats for OS market share are anything to go by, it's interesting how MS is the odd one out where their latest OS is not most widely used. With other systems, the popularity seems to mostly decrease with each previous version in linear order. While with Windows, first there's 10, then 11, 7, 8.1, XP and 8.0

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market- … ktop/worldwide/

UCyborg wrote on 2024-10-22, 22:41:

I wonder what goes on there that they keep making Windows all over the place. I was looking at statcounter.com recently and if their stats for OS market share are anything to go by, it's interesting how MS is the odd one out where their latest OS is not most widely used. With other systems, the popularity seems to mostly decrease with each previous version in linear order. While with Windows, first there's 10, then 11, 7, 8.1, XP and 8.0

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market- … ktop/worldwide/

I do think it's partially the general plateau we have been in with tech in the past ten or so years. As much as we have seen increases in raw computing power and stuff like that, most people don't even need it for what they use their computers for, if they even use a computer outside of work half the time. People aren't being forced on to 11 yet, and are probably a year or two away from the "bought it in 2020 maybe I should upgrade" shift.

There's this lovely little forest about an hour's walk from my home. As I booked the week off work, I made the journey to the woods early this morning just to get some relaxation time in and do some sketching. I've unofficially named the place Moody Blues Woods, because I always find myself listening to Days of Future Passed, Seventh Sojourn, and In Search of the Lost Chord whenever I'm down there. Their earlier Mellotron and Chamberlin infused music just seems to fit the scenery, and the scenery is beautiful this time of year. I have an ancient HP camera from like 2001 that I like to take along with me. It really is quite dreadful, but its particular style of dreadfulness works well there, giving Moody Blues Woods a kind of surreal, taken-with-a-Vivitar-point-and-shoot-in-1990 look to it. These rare trips into the woods are the only reason I still keep that camera!

In the 20 years I've lived here, I've only come across a fellow Moody in the woods five or six times. It's as if hardly anyone knows or cares about the place, or at least about the parts I frequent. Now, I consider myself a pretty sociable person, but every once in a while (I only make the trip twice a year) I find it necessary to visit the woods alone, just to take in the magnificent natural scenery and spend some time answering any questions I may have asked myself earlier in the year but never got around to really answering. There's this old decrepit bridge down there that crosses a stream, about 40 minutes from where I usually enter the woods. One of my favourite spots, it's where I usually take a break from walking and just draw whatever comes to mind as the water gently flows beneath me.

--

Oh, and I ripped Deadpool & Wolverine to the file server because it was released on disc yesterday, and we're so totally going to watch it Friday night! I absolutely can't wait to see it again; this time I'll have a special sock ready.

UCyborg wrote on 2024-10-22, 22:41:

I was updating other stuff recently and noticed HP Print Service Plugin just crashes if installed as system app or if I tamper with its APK.

Worked-around the first issue by placing APK outside app folder on /system partition and replacing app's base.apk in /data with symlink to the real APK file on /system. Just trying to make best use of small Flash storage.

Wanted to try out Ablaze Floorp, Firefox ESR based browser focusing on privacy and customizability, but it didn't launch, apparently it wants SSE4.1 instructions.

Isn't it ironic how the evil Google actually takes the longest to obsolete older hardware?

This morning trying some x86 emulator on Android with Wine, D3D etc.. Impressive I can run 3DMark2000 on it with hw rendering on this low end Qualcomm octa ARM cpu and its GPU. Very slow like an early Direct3D accelerator but I imagine it will need much work to increase performances considering CPU usage doesn't even seem to be the real problem during game rendering.

386SX wrote on 2024-10-27, 10:28:

This morning trying some x86 emulator on Android with Wine, D3D etc.. Impressive I can run 3DMark2000 on it with hw rendering on this low end Qualcomm octa ARM cpu and its GPU. Very slow like an early Direct3D accelerator but I imagine it will need much work to increase performances considering CPU usage doesn't even seem to be the real problem during game rendering.

There are TWO of these, actually.

Defunct Exagear Desktop, (which went out of business some years ago), and WInlator.

IIRC, Winlator has a much more recent implementation of OpenGL present, and with OGL->DX wrappers, some semblence of hardware 3D is possible to squeeze out. Its not pretty, but its possible.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-10-27, 10:35:

There are TWO of these, actually. […]
Show full quote

386SX wrote on 2024-10-27, 10:28:

This morning trying some x86 emulator on Android with Wine, D3D etc.. Impressive I can run 3DMark2000 on it with hw rendering on this low end Qualcomm octa ARM cpu and its GPU. Very slow like an early Direct3D accelerator but I imagine it will need much work to increase performances considering CPU usage doesn't even seem to be the real problem during game rendering.

There are TWO of these, actually.

Defunct Exagear Desktop, (which went out of business some years ago), and WInlator.

IIRC, Winlator has a much more recent implementation of OpenGL present, and with OGL->DX wrappers, some semblence of hardware 3D is possible to squeeze out. Its not pretty, but its possible.

I was trying Winlator and impressive that it can run without even much settings to try. Performances seems not great but not terrible too. Maybe I was expecting a bit more, having tried box86 already on some old SBC with Cortex-A7 SoCs and ran even better while this phone has a more powerful SoC for sure (Snapdragon 680 serie) but it may depends on many other factors too.

The issue is that android only exposes OpenGL ES, not OGL2/3.

This makes translation of calls 'problematic'

wierd_w wrote on 2024-10-27, 11:06:

The issue is that android only exposes OpenGL ES, not OGL2/3.

This makes translation of calls 'problematic'

That's probably one of the first problems but I think something need to be optimized also on the CPU side. I tried some old Quake based game like Thief The Dark Project even with sw rendering and still running like 5-10fps. But there're many settings to try so I suppose I'll try. Anyway it's interesting and considering ARM SoC speed nowdays it should be expected to have apps to run these old games quite well at last.

There is also a double-mild-weaksauce version of Vulkan API on SOME android devices that might be targetable.

This is what, eg, android gamecube emulators wrap themselves around, iirc.

In my experience, the emulated cpu core in winlator is basically a fork of qemu in user mode. This has *never* been optimal on ARM, but enables non-native binfmt-misc type ELF loading, which is how the author gets WINE binaries to hook the linux underneath android.

Winlator is essentially a non-native chroot, abusing binfmt-misc.

Hooking vulkan (fork of dxvk?), even the anemic subset google insists on for Android, might get you reasonable dx 7,8,9 support on real silicon, even if the 'cpu' runs like a single core K6III or K7 cpu...

UCyborg wrote on 2024-10-27, 09:09:

Isn't it ironic how the evil Google actually takes the longest to obsolete older hardware?

Firefox is really a mess. Ever since their codenamed "Quantum" release (I think it was version 60), it has been such a massive RAM hog that it forced me to upgrade my computer (and I distinctly remember people telling me that nobody would ever need more RAM than the 4GB I had at the time, which wasn't enough for one tab with no extensions - I was using a custom hosts file instead of an ad blocker). Today, it crashes randomly on heavier websites.

I got an extra SSD on Tuesday to finally install Linux on my main computer. It still isn't at a state that I like, but I'd like to at least figure out how to make it work as long as Microsoft tries to force its customers to use features that were released in a completely unusable pre-alpha state. So far, the video stutter is still there (but not in all distros, which is weird), and I had a hard freeze yesterday. Also, sound quality seems a little off in random ways. Depending on the specific file or YouTube video I play, it could lack bass, sound like it's clipping, have reverb applied, or sound normal. The volume control curve is also totally different. 20% volume in Linux sounds like 4% in Windows, but 25% is roughly the same as 10% in Windows.

The freeze is concerning, especially with current motherboard prices and marketing trends. I don't want to pay over $200, especially not for some RGB gamer crap with "optimized" BIOS settings that kill your CPU (and the settings get renamed in "so critical for security that your entire family will get their identity stolen if you don't install this, even though they use completely different computers" BIOS updates). Power supplies are also ridiculously overpriced, but prices are getting slightly more normal (better than a couple years ago when gutless wonders were $50 instead of $10).

Sound quality is usually off in all sorts of random ways on youtube, they don't have a central sound engineering dept, uploaders mess it up how they like. But, since you've got some non-linearity involved I would suggest that one OS has dynamic range compression turned on, and the other doesn't. Usually on limited speaker systems, laptop, small cone desktop speakers, the dynamic range compression is helpful not to have to keep jiggling volume control to catch whispers while bangs and loud stuff is super loud.

386SX wrote on 2024-10-27, 11:26:

wierd_w wrote on 2024-10-27, 11:06:

The issue is that android only exposes OpenGL ES, not OGL2/3.

This makes translation of calls 'problematic'

That's probably one of the first problems but I think something need to be optimized also on the CPU side. I tried some old Quake based game like Thief The Dark Project even with sw rendering and still running like 5-10fps. But there're many settings to try so I suppose I'll try. Anyway it's interesting and considering ARM SoC speed nowdays it should be expected to have apps to run these old games quite well at last.

Thief has nothing to do with Quake. It uses the Dark engine.

The Japanese didn't actually get rid of phoning home to Mozilla in Ablaze Floorp. From reading around, IceCat is better for privacy conscious. Still, I'd like to have a bit more up-to date Firefox at hand and see how built-in bells and whistles compare to my usual userChrome.css mods (https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx).

I'm compiling it from source now, will probably kill the aging HDD in the process, so remind me to not do that again in case it survives, 🤣! They don't seem to provide mozconfig they build with, but assuming build flags are inherited from Firefox, compiler optimizations for SSE4.1 won't be enabled.

I only upgraded from 4 GB to 6 GB last year, I wouldn't dare to build any massive project like that on 4 GB, even 6 is pushing it. I still wouldn't dare to try building any Chromium on this old dinosaur.

I'm one of those weirdos who usually get by with Pale Moon. It's awful at handling bloated sites, which I manage to avoid most of the time, you get to use some of the classic XUL extensions from the good old days while missing out on some newer ones. You can also have Flash Player and full-blown PDF program of your choosing in a browser tab through NPAPI, none of that PDF.js non-sense! 😁 And updates don't come with surprises such as Microsoft Copilot. 😜 Though mainline builds now want CPU with AVX, which make it the least conservative compared to mainstream browsers in what CPUs it supports. They say it speeds it up somewhat, though honestly, from experience at 2018 work laptop, I can't tell SSE2 and AVX builds apart.

I also noticed Linux is much quieter than Windows at same volume percentage. Seems to be extreme with Raspberry Pi 5 in particular, messed with it few months back and plugging my monitor (LG W2361V via HDMI) and then headphones into monitor, 100% was just about normal volume I'd use. My usual desktop has some cheap VIA chip on ASUS M3N78N for sound, I guess the volume scales about the same as lti noted above. Assuming we're both talking about your typical distro using PulseAudio, if this is even relevant.

DosFreak wrote on 2024-10-27, 16:57:

386SX wrote on 2024-10-27, 11:26:

wierd_w wrote on 2024-10-27, 11:06:

The issue is that android only exposes OpenGL ES, not OGL2/3.

This makes translation of calls 'problematic'

That's probably one of the first problems but I think something need to be optimized also on the CPU side. I tried some old Quake based game like Thief The Dark Project even with sw rendering and still running like 5-10fps. But there're many settings to try so I suppose I'll try. Anyway it's interesting and considering ARM SoC speed nowdays it should be expected to have apps to run these old games quite well at last.

Thief has nothing to do with Quake. It uses the Dark engine.

I don't know why I was remembering the Dark Engine to be at least partially based on the Quake Engine which sometimes share similar problems in games using both. Thank for the correction. Something might be anyway close to the Quake Engine:

https://nothings.org/gamedev/thief_rendering.html

"The engine was written somewhat contemporaneously with Quake (despite the game being released much later), and the basic appearance strongly resembles Quake. Many of its technologies were copied from or inspired by Quake, but in many cases the way it works is slightly or significantly different."

Thinking of building modern day Firefox or one of its forks from source? Don't bother unless you have at least 16 GB of RAM and SSD disk.