Circuit City on the Edge of Forever

King of Posters
1140

honestly, we’re at the point that any reasonable computer can do video editing, the great concern is that at a 5-600 dollar price point, you’re getting some dank, cheaply built chaff on the PC side of laptops and there’s always going to be a tradeoff somewhere, be it expandability (which probably doesn’t count going up against an M1 Air but you’re definitely looking at 8GB once you get cheap enough and PC laptops tend to have soldered memory with no expansion down at a certain point), battery life (this is a big win in Apple’s favor), build quality, screen, heat

the best option would be to eat the cost or save up and go for the M1 Air, which is pretty much the best not-gaming laptop

if the budget is still a concern, Black Friday/Cyber Monday should produce some stupid deal on Intel laptops (Intel is still the choice because of the Quicksync support in Premiere and other applications; you’d get more CPU oomph with a Ryzen but AMD 264 encoding leaves a lot to be desired)

the comedy option is to go to ebay and search laptops that don’t include an OS; a lot of the results that pop up are e-recycled or otherwise retired business-class laptops often missing something like storage or a battery and can make for a quick fixer upper

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1141

if you’re persistent you can get a used M1 air for like $700-$750, and I feel like dropping down to the $600 or so range just gives up way too much at that point

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1142

Any recommendations for a decent pair of on-ear headphones? Just for listening to music on the go. I’ve never gone wireless, but I like the idea of not having a cord snaking to my phone in my pocket.

1143

Portapros are still real good if you like the design

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1144

these are actually seriously cool looking

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1145

are computers bad

“I should get my capture card back up and running”

install Aja drivers, install the Aja DirectShow filters which technically aren’t filters but super basic functionality-enabling filters meant for actual programmers to make proper filters for their programs

OBS doesn’t see card

try 2 or 3 different versions of both driver before finally realizing that the filters I installed weren’t the actual filters but (possibly) extensions of the actual DS driver, a package that’s 2-3 years old at this point but whatever, I installed it and OBS sees the card

do some setup and boot Amarec and oh god the picture is falling apart. the config in OBS is setup to reference the source for reference but the card’s control panel is letting the genlock go on freerun

okay, close everything down, reboot, go into control panel, tell it to reference the video input, set it to input passthrough, boot OBS, set config, open Amarec and

amarec(20211111-232503)
amarec(20211111-232503)1920×1080 408 KB

okay, well, yes, at least the picture is a progressive image instead of lines fucking each other

do the whole thing again but add the extra step of telling the card to capture YUV-8 instead of YUV-10 and picture that’s normal

also I have to go into the card’s control panel every boot because I made the mistake of signing in to my MS account when setting up the install of Windows and the control panel sees the user directory where it would save its configuration as my MS account email instead of the actual local account name Windows has configured and

you know, the idea that the above could happen seems bad. I’m no smart program maker man but that seems bad.

but the end result is a thing that works as well as it did before except for the parts where I have to perform an arcane ritual every boot I wish to use it

–

I’m finally circling round back to home theater box, as I’ve been meaning to install a different distro that’s not Manjaro. Manjaro is nice to use and I like it in theory but there was that time they updated the default grub config to turn off detection of other OSes (Windows, I mean Windows) without telling anyone until some people on their forum started asking about it and they went “yeah, we did the thing”. also did you know the accidentally DDOSed the AUR twice in the past year? I dunno, seems bad. also there was the Bluetooth stuff what I talked about the last time I talked about this (it was an easy fix, just had to downgrade a package, no big deal)

let me run down the stupid requirements I have for this computer and specifically this computer:

  1. works
  2. Steam controller needs to work
  3. doesn’t piss me off

slapped Fedora 35 on a flash drive, installed it, enabled RPM Fusion repos, install stuff, things are great, I like it, I love it

I boot Steam

Fedora is one of the distros that have completely dropped Xorg and transitioned to Wayland and it’s whatever, I’m dumb enough to run AMD GPUs, Wayland can’t hurt me.

however

Steam is still ostensibly an Xorg program and runs under Wayland as an Xwayland instance. this creates two problems:

  1. having multiple windows open on the same monitor and/or animated friend icons makes Steam nigh unresponsive and slow

  2. Steam as an Xorg program is so completely and violently sandboxed to its Xwayland instance that attempting to use the Steam controller as a mouse only works in Steam windows and even then, the system won’t actually give up the system cursor so you move around an invisible mouse

if I was on my computer, where I am sitting down in front of it and not using a controller to do simple tasks from 6-10 feet away, this is not a dealbreaker. Fedora is nice! I like it! but the jank there ain’t cutting it.

time to go maximum lazy. I grabbed an iso for Solus Plasma (I am a creature of pure filth and I will die wallowing in the KDE mud), install it, everything I want works, it’s running X11, nothing is breaking, the default repository has everything I want to install (which is good, I’m quite frankly wary of non-Debian/Arch distros and their software support) and it has the bonus of enabling experimental AMDGPU support out of the box (this isn’t actually a big deal to setup since it’s maybe 4-5 lines in a few config files but fuck you I’m lazy)

I’m glad I did all of this so I can sit down and enjoy my Sunday by catching up on Yashahime, a show I openly hate, at 24hz, the way god intended, sitting on a couch and entering shit into the terminal

8 Likes
1146

I miss antergos. the manjaro folks are too big for their britches

1147

also I forgot to mention updating F35 broke it and I had to manually select the thankfully saved previous version to actually boot into the OS from the bootloader

for all the bad press Pop has been getting in the past week, the install of it running on my Thinkpad chugs along without issue

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1148

bad press for pop?
why’s that/what have they bricked this time…

1149

  1. they seem to be having a rather public and acrimonious split with GNOME as they’ve announced they’re making their own DE in Rust

  2. Linux HATES Me – Daily Driver CHALLENGE Pt.1 - YouTube

the short version of this is Linus picked Pop as his first choice but at the time of filming, the live iso available for download from System 76 had the Steam package misconfigured so if you installed it, apt would remove some dependencies

like the desktop environment

there’s been a lot of back and forth over “well, Linus should have read the terminal warning” and “who the fuck ships something so broken to production and then kept it up after it was patched” (also the patch was just telling apt to abort instead of fixing the Steam package but that’s another can of worms), but it’s probably the most public embarrassment I can think of for any distro selling itself as user friendly

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1150

well, … OK.

i was a bit grumpy about pop using default key-combos that do other Things in Win10 when it comes to tiling, but that’s clearly prom princess levels of complaining compared to dependency drone bombing shenanigans.

Jesus, that is something that ubuntu has learned over a decade ago, and this still happens?

:tronyell:

1151

Got my pihole working again this morning with my new wifi 6 router (TP Link Archer AX1800) after fighting it yesterday.

Discovered I didn’t even need the new router as my gigabit switch was somehow throttling internet traffic to 100mbps, and it wasn’t just my Airport Extreme dying.

Oh well. At least I’m not using an Apple router from 2007 anymore. :man_shrugging:

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1152

did i tell you about the time i tried to install antergos on your or parkbench’s good word and ended up shredding my bootloader

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1153

good news

grub will still devour your bootloader if it even so much as gets a whiff of it

if only Linux the OS was as keen on dualbooting as Linux the community

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1154

The Air Force puts another $250 billion in the budget request to make up project shortfalls

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1155

My keyboard doesn’t even go to F35 check out bov over here

1156

Linux desktop taken a little too literally https://groupbuys.mechboards.co.uk/shop/hyper-7-keyboard-r3/

image
image1920×1080 112 KB

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1157

image

incredible stuff, love it

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1158

Went to buy my mother in law, who has been around helping with house stuff after the birth of our second child, a basic IPad at Best Buy and was surprised to find out the 64gb model is sold out everywhere. Whoops.

They do have “IPad Mid-2017” versions in stock. She’s going to use it for watching Korean dramas on Netflix and playing candy crush. Is there any reason not to get this version?

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If you can find the 2018 revision or newer they have hardware HEVC encode/decode. Only thing I can imagine might impact video besides screen quality.

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