Figure this counts as "modern activity" considering it's the modern internet I've been dealing with as of late; though this not necessarily happened today.

On the 16th of October, my beloved Marisa got her Twitch account "indefinitely suspended" for "violent hate speech" and the vagueness of Twitch's explanation and the fact her appeal was denied the moment she even sent it in broke the final straw I was having with the platform; I started scrubbing absolutely everything off of my Twitch account (profile picture, channel banner, "branding" settings, followed channels, and force removing everyone's follow on the channel itself, all VODs/highlights/clips deleted) and on the 22nd when I feel I've been through in my scrubbing I voluntarily deactivated the account. Been in contact with a lot of the friends/acquaintances I've made letting them know of my decision and why I made it. Never going back to Twitch ever again. Even if they paid me and Marisa a large monetary settlement for the undue trauma they caused us both and re-instated her account in full.

I still view livestreaming as a hobby; as I've always viewed it. I realize now with how things are the only way I can really do this is if I'm in 100% complete control of the "platform" I choose to do this on; in otherwords I would need to self-host something or otherwise be with a web hosting service that will only act upon court orders and nothing short of legal court orders. (which I know "online trolls" have no hope of actually getting)

Probably going to take this time not caring or being around Twitch to go through all of my WIP that has piled up over the years and actually work on them again; all the projects and project ideas I had for Starsiege: Tribes, and Unreal. All the music I haven't composed or finished covering.

Of all the stuff I've had to put up with over the years dealing with what the "modern internet" grotesquely mutated into as well as continuing to deal with the after effects of my father dying of colon cancer, internet trolls continuing to spread misinformation about my beloved Marisa, and all this current geopolitical nonsense making it harder and harder to keep in touch with certain online friends of mine; it's made me even more thoroughly cynical and misanthropic than I was a few years prior to now.

Speaking of hobbies I really miss when YouTube was about "Broadcast Yourself"; but it just can't be helped at all. Once shareholders, investors, money in general is involved in something it immediately becomes a hopeless lost cause. It stops being a enjoyable place. It stops being a simple hobby. Can't even have a simple video sharing service anylonger.

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

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

But it's pretty quick obsoleting older operating systems.

Speaking of modern activities involving browsers... I've been using Flashpeak Slimjet as my main browser on Win7+ systems for the past several years. A few days ago on my primary Win10 desktop it started crashing. Heavy and hard on each website within seconds. Bizarre. I tried every trick - uninstall, reinstall, try 64-bit versions, remove all extensions, and even clean installation (at the cost of losing all my history and site sessions). Nothing helped.

I've already been experiencing some weird problems with Slimjet on that particular system: every once in a while a few text lines on a web page would become garbled, which would get resolved when mousing over them. Suspecting some peculiar minor hardware fault, I've given up and installed Brave Browser on that PC, which so far has been stable, and the built-in ad/content blocker is nice. I'm actually trying to live without uBlock Origin, which I would not dream of with any other browser.

Long story short, turns out that the Slimjet crash was not a problem of my PC, as suddenly my other laptop started experiencing it too, and I quickly found other complaints online. The funny thing - it didn't start due to a browser update, and in fact many older versions were suddenly affected as well. I have no idea what changed in the background engine, but it seems that the new 44.0.6.0 update from yesterday resolves it. Good, because I would be annoyed having to rebuild my browsing history and site sessions on all my PCs.

So looks like it will be a mixture of Slimjet and Brave for me going forward, until I can decide which one I prefer in the long run.

dr_st wrote on 2024-10-28, 06:59:

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

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

But it's pretty quick obsoleting older operating systems.

Yeah, all these entities are kinda same at the end. These discussions what's right and wrong in this regard with system requirements can get pretty toxic...

BTW, isn't Brave also a bit shady?

DracoNihil wrote on 2024-10-28, 03:04:

Of all the stuff I've had to put up with over the years dealing with what the "modern internet" grotesquely mutated into as well as continuing to deal with the after effects of my father dying of colon cancer, internet trolls continuing to spread misinformation about my beloved Marisa, and all this current geopolitical nonsense making it harder and harder to keep in touch with certain online friends of mine; it's made me even more thoroughly cynical and misanthropic than I was a few years prior to now.

My general impression is that most people are insufferable. There might be few good among them, but they're hard to find.

Unrelated question to anyone, but are gameplay videos on YouTube blurry in general? Eg. I check an old DirectX 9, Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era game, you play it yourself and it looks crisp and colorful, you watch it on YouTube and it looks "meh". Especially ironic when the video boasts with 4k resolution while it doesn't look well even in 1080p, when played, it does look fine at 1080p, unlike when it's recorded. I do have 1080p monitor. I do have recent recordings of older games, which could be made on better hardware, at least when it comes to PC games.

I suspect Twitch is the same, though I haven't checked it in years, I don't watch these sorts of videos much anyway.

A necessary compromise? If I'm not mistaken, recording is still demanding process and needs lots of disk space.

UCyborg wrote on 2024-10-28, 10:36:

Unrelated question to anyone, but are gameplay videos on YouTube blurry in general? Eg. I check an old DirectX 9, Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era game, you play it yourself and it looks crisp and colorful, you watch it on YouTube and it looks "meh". Especially ironic when the video boasts with 4k resolution while it doesn't look well even in 1080p, when played, it does look fine at 1080p, unlike when it's recorded. I do have 1080p monitor. I do have recent recordings of older games, which could be made on better hardware, at least when it comes to PC games.

I suspect Twitch is the same, though I haven't checked it in years, I don't watch these sorts of videos much anyway.

A necessary compromise? If I'm not mistaken, recording is still demanding process and needs lots of disk space.

It's because of the video encoding process. Everything has this absolute obsession over "CBR", Constant BitRate which is inefficient and wasteful but apparently it's the norm on online streaming even though you'd think the internet infrastructure of today would handle fluctuating transmission rates already; just look at online gaming.

The H264 video codec doesn't really play nice in a lot of scenarios, especially when certain contrasts and vibrant colours are involved. Lots of high motion can upset that as well. YouTube videos also originally used to be stuck on the Sorenson Spark codec which is a weird subset of H263, when that got turned around all the preexisting content had to be re-transcoded for H264. Depending on what the "raw" file was like when it was uploaded to YouTube this can either go somewhat smoothly, or extremely poorly.

Twitch unfortunately caves in to mass reports. I've had a friend last year lose good standing status for "explicit sexual content" because he drew a twerking bear in overalls on Mario Paint while someone was going around the Retro category and just flagging everyone and getting some regulars caught in suspensions. But also around that same time Twitch were banning *all* twerking emotes whether a buttcrack or not so not even an amogus can twerk in 2023. Sounds like a silly trivial complaint, but when platforms treat it like a criminal offense is why it's so abusable. (i.e. obvious misogynists vs "titty streamers")

For some time I've had issues with sending myself email. Assumed it was ZenArmor on my Opnsense firewall. Spent an hour looking at it today....... it was a misspelled saved email address. What makes it even more confusing is emails sent fine on a cell connection but not on LAN/Wifi. I can only guess the email app automatically chose the saved working email address on the cell connection? Whatever.

Upgraded my server from TrueNAS core to Scale since core is no longer really supported. Need to look into using just straight BSD but since I use TrueNAS Scale on my other four QNAPs then I need something simple and headless and I'm too lazy to setup something custom. The jail plugin issue has always been a sore point so that's "solved" with docker now (not really). If I have yet another issue with plugins I'll just say screw it and spin up yet another VM in proxmox but so far they've been fine on the QNAPs, we'll see with my server.
I did spend about yet another hour or two figuring out how to get rid of the "Deploying" error when starting a plugin or at least I hope I did. Time will tell. It's 2024 and yet hiding information and confusing errors codes are the norm. It's a shame we can't use this processing power and memory for something useful.

leileilol wrote on 2024-10-28, 18:55:

Twitch unfortunately caves in to mass reports. I've had a friend last year lose good standing status for "explicit sexual content" because he drew a twerking bear in overalls on Mario Paint while someone was going around the Retro category and just flagging everyone and getting some regulars caught in suspensions.

Yep, that's precisely why I trashed my Twitch account; even the same reason I dead-ended my YouTube account as well.

Probably only a matter of time until these same groups end up mass reporting people I've met in the retro community like ArtyomHavok or FractalMindMike.

Assuming 8th Gen Core CPUs are considered modern still,

My desktop had a rattling fan for a couple of years now. It is one of the two intake fans on the front of the case. Typically it would rattle for a few minutes when started from cold, and then quiet down and work normally. Well, for the past few days it's been rattling non-stop. Taking off the front is a pain on this case, but the fan needs to be replaced. Having removed the side panel, I needed to determine which of the two fans is the faulty one, so I stopped them. Guess what - the rattling fan now seems completely dead and won't start. So it makes no noise either. I think it's good enough to leave as is, seeing as there is another fan right next to it.

If that isn't modern, then I don't have any modern computers. Is an old computer forum trying to convince me to upgrade?

I got Samba set up in Linux, but I still need to figure out how to make Windows computers visible in the network browser. I initially wasted a bunch of time troubleshooting why Windows kept giving me "access denied" errors, but I forgot to add users with sambapwd. All of the Internet's helpful advice is to disable security features and even force SMBv1 in Windows to "fix" everything, so I'm on my own. I can manually connect to my laptop, but it doesn't accept my Windows credentials (Windows has no password, but Thunar doesn't appear to like me leaving the password field blank).

Also, the Linux Mint installer didn't create a swap file or partition. That's nice to learn after using it daily for almost two weeks. That might explain the freeze last week, but I haven't seem RAM usage go over 6.5GB out of 16GB.

Replaced the factory cooler on my daily driver Ryzen7 5700 to a BeQuiet! Shadow Rock Slim 2 and added an extra exhaust fan.
Idle temperatures dropped around 15-20˚C, now it's below 30˚C meanwhile it's got a lot more quiet.
I was a bit concerned before when during video transcoding it got past 80˚C, we'll see how it works under load, but probably much better.

Yesterday I bought a new monitor for both my main i3 PC and BlueRay player, an HP Omen 27" the Full HD version. It cost half the amount of the 4K one and still very bright. I don't care about the gaming oriented specs mostly about having a good bright large monitor without the need of 4K resolutions. I will use the TV I bought lately in future; at the end the quality of its panel wasn't really great and even using my previous LG 24" cheap monitor had far better colors.

I'm really fond about my Sony XBA-N3AP in ears. Use it almost daily while commuting. The original cable held about 7 years. Original replacement cables are hard to find, even Sony couldn't supply me after e-mailing them. So I searched for some cables on the website of a big Chinese warehouse. 8 euros. Fake cables, but they do the trick and my experience is now that they last for about a year.

While detaching the 3rd broken cable, the IE itself broke. It was like a 😭 moment.

But we can repair stuff right!? So this happens:

Not 100% great looking, but it works.

I logged in to my 3D mark to check my modern systems, so I didn't have to run it and came across this gem, 🤣 I feel like no-one can beat my score, 🤣 Don't even know how this happened. The GPU was burnt out. I would've slowed down the CPU and ran it again, but immediately after, it was telling me no DX12 compatible device was detected.

My home NAS external backup disk decided today was its last day on earth. Trying to FSCK the thing but not sure if I will manage to recover it. Black Friday is next week so I know what to buy.

Strangely enough the SMART status is not that bad. But it does a lot of clicking noises...

1sudo smartctl --all /dev/sda
2smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-6.9.3-76060903-generic] (local build)
3Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
4
5=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
6Model Family:     Western Digital Elements / My Passport (USB, AF)
7Device Model:     WDC WD20NMVW-11W68S0
8Serial Number:    WD-WX31AC238798
9LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 207f68145
10Firmware Version: 01.01A01
11User Capacity:    2’000’398’934’016 bytes [2.00 TB]
12Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
13Rotation Rate:    5200 rpm
14Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
15ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS (minor revision not indicated)
16SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 3.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
17Local Time is:    Sat Nov 23 00:00:06 2024 CET
18SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
19SMART support is: Enabled
20
21=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
22SMART Status not supported: Incomplete response, ATA output registers missing
23SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
24Warning: This result is based on an Attribute check.
25
26General SMART Values:
27Offline data collection status:  (0x00)	Offline data collection activity
28					was never started.
29					Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
30Self-test execution status:      (   0)	The previous self-test routine completed
31					without error or no self-test has ever 
32					been run.
33Total time to complete Offline 
34data collection: 		(36180) seconds.
35Offline data collection
36capabilities: 			 (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
37					Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
38					Suspend Offline collection upon new
39					command.
40					Offline surface scan supported.
41					Self-test supported.
42					Conveyance Self-test supported.
43					Selective Self-test supported.
44SMART capabilities:            (0x0003)	Saves SMART data before entering
45					power-saving mode.
46					Supports SMART auto save timer.
47Error logging capability:        (0x01)	Error logging supported.
48					General Purpose Logging supported.
49Short self-test routine 
50recommended polling time: 	 (   2) minutes.
51Extended self-test routine
52recommended polling time: 	 ( 389) minutes.
53Conveyance self-test routine
54recommended polling time: 	 (   5) minutes.
55SCT capabilities: 	       (0x70b5)	SCT Status supported.
56					SCT Feature Control supported.
57					SCT Data Table supported.
58
59SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
60Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:

61ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
62  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   199   199   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       501
63  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   215   210   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       4216
64  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       326
65  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       7
66  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
67  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   098   098   000    Old_age   Always       -       2085
68 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
69 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
70 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       84
71192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       59
72193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       1097
73194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   116   102   000    Old_age   Always       -       36
74196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   193   193   000    Old_age   Always       -       7
75197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       4
76198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
77199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
78200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
79
80SMART Error Log Version: 1
81No Errors Logged
82
83SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
84Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
85# 1  Short offline       Completed: read failure       90%      2084         765976704
86# 2  Extended offline    Completed: read failure       90%      2084         765976704
87# 3  Short offline       Completed: read failure       90%      2084         765976704
88
89SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
90 SPAN  MIN_LBA  MAX_LBA  CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
91    1        0        0  Not_testing
92    2        0        0  Not_testing
93    3        0        0  Not_testing
94    4        0        0  Not_testing
95    5        0        0  Not_testing
96Selective self-test flags (0x0):
97  After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.

Just finished ordering all the parts for my new NAS, can't wait to start assembling it:

N100 purple CWWK motherboard (ASM1166 controller)
Jonsbo N2 case
16 GB DDR5 4800 Crucial
be quiet! SFX-L Power supply
2 x 512 GB Adata Nvme for cache pool
Noctua NH-L9i

For the storage I will be reusing disks I have to reach 10TB usable.

It will be running UNRAID - I bought the license discounted at 30$.

Aaaaargh, MS finally managed to stuff 22H2 on my laptop, everything is STRANGE!!!!

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-12-02, 17:35:

Aaaaargh, MS finally managed to stuff 22H2 on my laptop, everything is STRANGE!!!!

The update is finally going through? On my W10 laptop it loops with installation errors.
So, the virus evolved... 🤣

Just use local group policies to set the maximum version of windows allowed. No surprises after that. 😉

Yeah that's what was happening for two years on this sandybridge laptop, and I half hearted dug into it a couple of times and couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong... just kept trying though... then this morning, didn't even give me any messages just straight onto 22H2 with all my windows reopened. Weird.

Anyway, found dark setting so it doesn't look all washed out and hard to see icons now (Who the hell thought that was smart?) and what's with that stealth background look in some displays, wasting 10% of your screen space to show a background you can't change and can't tile the frames to fill, that's some 1985 alpha gui demo shit that is.

A few months ago I've upgraded an old Ivy Bridge laptop that's been stuck on 1909 to 22H2. It works better now. At least one issue (runaway Windows Update chucking at CPU core even though it is not actually updating anything) has been magically (accidentally, most likely) resolved with this update.