Basically the title. What do you use and what does it cost? The official syncing service for obsidian seems expensive but I'm not sure what else to try.
Desk space at my home is very limited.
Right now I have a set of speakers hanging out behind my external monitor, but I'd really rather get rid of them entirely and just have the speakers/soundbar built-in to the monitor itself. It would give me a lot more room to work with because I'd be able to push the monitor back further on the desk.
Also, presumably (and correct me if I'm wrong here), having the speakers powered by the monitor and fed audio through HDMI would free up a lot of cabling clutter as well. My setup is already very messy (2 laptops and a KVM switch), so cleaning it up will give me some relief (my theme of 2023 is "Simplify").
I know nothing about buying computer monitors. When I look them up, I'm not even sure which type I should be looking for (IPS? OLED?).
I do plan to game on it, but most gaming-focused monitors seem like overkill for someone like me who will primarily have it hooked up to a middling 5-year-old laptop that plays mostly indie stuff. I do occasionally play the more intensive/prettier game, but those are usually usually far between and definitely not a priority that's worth spending a bunch to target. I tend to tank the graphics settings on games like that anyway to keep my laptop from becoming a cooking surface, and I'll take a smoother framerate over better eye candy all day, every day.
What are the trusted brands (if any)? What pitfalls should I look out for? If anyone can help point me in the right direction, I'd appreciate it!
My use case: general browsing and (mostly casual) gaming
My computer: System76 Oryx Pro 5 (2019), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Mobile, Pop!_OS 22.04
My budget: ultimately whatever is necessary to get a quality product, but hopefully no more than $300 USD or so?
Preferred Size: 24" -- absolute maximum I could do is probably 27"
Key Feature: built-in speakers or soundbar
Let me know if there's any other key information I can provide that would help.
Questions I Have:
Will buying a higher resolution monitor (e.g. 4K) tax my graphics card more because it's rendering at a higher resolution, or can I just scale down the display resolution to something less intensive?
Same question as above, but for refresh rate.
Would audio be transmitted over HDMI, or would I have to have a cable from the headphone jack (or some different method I'm not aware of)?
I doubt I'll find any new ideas, but maybe someone here has one. I'm running out of places to turn, with no solution.
I have been in a fight with Fitbit support for a few weeks now over their push to migrate everyone to a Google-linked Fitbit account. I'm pretty sure what I've found is a rare edge case of a bug, or rather, an unaccounted for set of conditions when trying to migrate.
A long time ago, 2017 I think, I created a Google-linked Fitbit Account (via oauth, "Login with Google"). I used it briefly and then stopped, and completely forgot about its existence.
In 2022, I got a Pixel Watch and created a new/second Fitbit Account with a different email address, as I did not remember I had a Fitbit account already and I wanted to use a masked email address through my personal domain.
With the push to migrate all Fitbit accounts to Google accounts, I decided to try to do so last month. When I attempted to migrate my second account to a Google account, I got an error that I already had an account registered under my Google account. So I logged in to that old 2017 Google account and initiated its deletion. It told it me would take 30 days to delete it, so I waited 31 days.
31 days later, I tried to migrate my second account to a Google account. When I try to do so, I get an error:
Can't use Fitbit with this Google Account
This could be because you're using a Google Workspace account, or because your account is supervised.
My account is neither a child account, nor a Workspace account, it's a standard (adult) account I've had for something like 16 years.
So I tried to see if my old Google account was perhaps not deleted after all. I tried to log in to my old account via oauth (Sign In > Continue with Google), and I get a different error:
Sign in again to continue
Since you deleted Fitbit from your Google Account, you’ll need to sign in again as a new user.
I suspect that what happens when I deleted my old/original Google account is that it wasn't actually deleted, but made inactive with some "deleted" flag, but the account hasn't been purged. As a result, I'm unable to migrate my new account to the same email address I used for my old Google account.
Reaching out to Fitbit, they continually put the blame on Google for reporting my account as a workspace/supervised account, and the only solution they'll offer me is "You should create a new Google account". Google has also been unable to help, but that doesn't surprise me, as I don't think it's an issue on their end. Requests to Fitbit to escalate my case to a higher tier of support and/or someone from some type of database team have been stonewalled, and I think that Fitbit support has now just stopped responding to me entirely.
Does anyone have any idea where I could turn?
Hello, as the title says: someone registered their phone subscription using my email. It doesn't make sense as I (obviously) never permitted this stranger to use my email for their subscription.
I say stranger but I now know their first name, their last name, their billing address, and their phone number by now. It's crazy.
I would just like the emails to stop coming! I know I could just make a filter to forward everything from this domain to spam but is there a way to actually make the phone company to stop sending me things?
The emails are coming from a language that I don't know how to speak (so calling customer service is not an option here).
I tried using the "forget password" option but for some reason that's not arriving to me. Probably it's pinging their phone first to verify that it was them who initiated it.
The best customer service I can find is by WhatsApp but it's a robot that always asks the stranger to verify that it's them.
So as the title states, I am realizing that most folks don't have CD readers. I do, and I can burn my phone's videos to one, but... I also use Linux these days. I have a CD burner somewhere around here, but honestly I just want to do a "zip file" type option, where I can just group the videos and get them on a usb stick to send out.
Everything I find on the 'net is about burning CDs and whatnot... which isn't my goal. Honestly, I think windows did this just easy-peasy with select and "burn to image" or whatnot. But I dunno how with Linux (Arch/i3).
Edit: I'm asking because I don't see any options in pacman. It may be in yay, but it's my bedtime...
Edit 2: Lots of folks asking why I want an ISO and not just copy the files; my dad states their TV will play videos 'in a DVD format from a USB stick' (and I don't know how accurate it is, but it's what was requested).
I have an external drive (3.5" hdd, SATA) in an enclosure (usb 3) (purchased separately), connected to a thunderbolt dock (OWC) connected alternately to an iMac and a macbook pro. The HDD goes to sleep, and causes problems. Freezes, weird internet access problems, kernel panics.
I have done some research, and can't seem to figure out:
how to know whether it is the drive, enclosure, or computer causing the sleep, although, fiddling with various settings on the mac seemed to have no effect, although it may have increased my battery usage :(
how to adjust settings on the drive, or in the enclosure.
How to determine what the sleep behavior of prospective drives will be.
As a workaround, I tried to write a zsh script to touch the drive ever few seconds. This kinda worked, but was a struggle to figure out appropriate permissions issues and how to make it run automatically.
I welcome all guidance, pointers to resources, clarifications, incantations, well-wishes.
I'm hoping I might have some recommendations for a computer chassis. So far I've gotten away with using a couple of Fractal Designs, even got my hands on an old Cooler Master XB Evo recently that I never got to put into use.
Basically, I'm looking for a chassis with something like 6-10 hotswap 3.5 drive bays. Preferably horizontal, but vertical is begrudgingly acceptable. Are any of you aware of such a chassis, or am I forced to start looking at racks instead?
Alternatively, do any of you have experience with hacking together a case and installing drive bays?
Bit unrelated side-note: The front micro-jack in one of my cases has broken off (headset wire looped around the office chair) and Fractal Design wouldn't sell me a replacement. Any idea where I might find a female audio connector? I'll happily do a bit of soldering if necessary, I just don't know what the part called or where to look for it.
Long story short--I don't want to connect my mac to my iCloud account, but every time I login to my laptop, I get three popups in a row that say "This Mac Can't connect to iCloud because of a problem with [my email] ...".
I can't find a setting that allows me to disable this, and online searches have been fruitless.
Edit2: I'm a mac user who doesn't understand how windows explorer works. Leaving the post for some hapless mac user who may come along. Windows explorer doesn't report how it is traversing the directory tree, leading to some confusion about where the search result is, which happens to be waaaay down in a zip of a mac application installer I had inadvertantly archived on the Windows disk. I would ask any windows users, how do I make powershell ls | select-string "text" behave like ls | grep "text" on unix?
edit3: Also, why the fudge would windows explorer search find <weird characters>net but not dotnet when typing 'net' into the search box?
So I download the occasional, um, linux distro installation video. I use a vpn and private firefox windows for most.
I'm doing some clean up today, and find a file with a bunch of strange characters, including the text characters, "net." "M⌐⌐v├▒├┼⌐▒net" is the filename listed in the properties window. Inside are a series of .ase files with mostly unrecognizable names.
I don't see the filename when doing an ls in powershell of the directory reported in explorer.
doing ls | select-string "net" in powershell results in an unending peristalsis of weird text like you might get from a binary file viewed in a text editor. I do notice, however, that some of the text might be from inside a zip file. But why is select-string searching inside the zip file? ls seems to ouptut only filepath information. Upon further investigation, the zip file is several directories down, it appears adding | select-string to ls makes ls travel the full tree. Wut?
And when I say undending, I mean it kept going until I hit ctrl-c.
Any ideas to what is happening here?
Incidentally, I opened one of the ASE files by right-click->view file in notepad+, which never launched.
Edit: lots of edits.
Edit: I changed some windows settings based on advice here. The situation is improved and I am going to see how things go before buying new equipment. Thank you everyone
So I recently bought a new laptop. I use an external mouse, keyboard, headphones etc, all of which come with usb A connectors that worked well with my old laptop.
When the new laptop arrived there weren't nearly enough ports for either usb A or usb c so I invested in a peripheral that links four usb a connections to one usb c connection on the laptop. Edit, it is powered and plugged in. Now the connection with everything plugged in seems to be intermittent and the mouse and external keyboard don't work reliably.
I have read a couple of articles and I am even more confused but they seem to be saying that usb c is not plug and play the way usb a was. What the fuck. Why do this like this? What do I do now?
I just spent significant money on this computer and I don't want to replace a functioning mouse and keyboard
Hi
I figured before I start venturing into other forums dedicated to this sort of thing, I'd ask here on Tildes since I'm at least comfortable with the community and how helpful they can be here.
I'm tired of all of the subscription services I have, movies and TV shows disappearing from them, buying a film on Prime and only being able to watch it offline through a specific app. Even then, half the time we're watching comfort TV shows that we have on DVD already (X-Files and Friends for instance).
So I figured that building a home media server would give me the chance to cut the cord with a couple of these services and allow us to start using and controlling our own data again.
I have a budget of around £300 (I could perhaps push to £400 if needed) and I'm honestly not sure at all where to start. I have knowledge on how to build brand new, medium to high end gaming PCs as I've done it since I was in my late teens and built my first PC with the wages from my very first job but building a budget minded PC for use as a home media server goes completely over my head.
I've noticed that a lot of the pre-built NAS or media server boxes are very expensive so my first thought was to buy a refurbed workstation or small form factor PC that has enough "oomph" to do the trick but I don't know what ones to even start looking at and then I start to feel a little bit out of my comfort zone.
Things like getting the right CPU in these refurbed machines that offers the features I'm looking for like hardware transcoding etc., integrated GPU's, ensuring there's enough SATA ports for multiple hard drives and an SSD for a boot drive, and then to top it all off ensuring that while achieving these features the thing shouldn't draw too much power when idling as it'll be on for long stretches of time, if not left on 24/7.
I've also got no knowledge of Linux, I've never even looked at it but if it's genuinely easy enough (for someone with next to no Linux experience) then I'd be happy to give it a shot if it offers better performance compared to using Windows 10 or something.
All the server will be used for is watching TV shows, perhaps the odd film, listening to a bit of music perhaps and the odd podcast now and again. Simultaneous streaming will be fairly minimal, perhaps 2 streams as me or my partner watch one thing and our daughter watches another on her tablet. In regards to streaming outside the house that will also be almost non-existent, perhaps, again our daughter watching a kids TV show like Pokemon or Fireman Sam on her tablet when we're out but me and my partner don't tend to watch anything when we're outside the house, certainly not TV shows or movies anyway.
Redundancy isn't something I'm too horrendously worried about, I wouldn't be storing anything like photos that we wouldn't want to lose on it and while it'd be annoying, losing a drive with TV shows or films on it wouldn't be the end of the world.
Any help would be massively appreciated, thanks.
Today when I opened Messenger Lite there was a message from Meta saying " your chats will be moving to Messenger" and that Messenger Lite will stop working on September 18. I actively switched from Messenger to Messenger Lite several years ago because the regular Messenger app was draining my battery. Are there any alternatives to Messenger Lite on Android? Perhaps even FOSS?Or will my only option be to move to the old Messenger app if I want to use Facebook messenger? I have some work related groups on Messenger that would be tough to move to another platform, so Please don't just say "use Signal" or something similar.
By no BS I mean none of those online requirements or ink subscription nonsense.
Scanning isn't a huge focus but having at least some multi-page scanning functionality wouldn't hurt.
I've heard Brother is the go-to brand in the past but are they still? I thought I heard they were also starting down the anti-consumer path but I could be wrong.
I'm not kidding when I say I print like half a dozen times a year so whatever type of printer it is the ink/toner/whatever needs to have a long shelf life.
Thanks!
I had a conversation with someone who teaches research skills at the university level. They said that incoming new students seem to start with the assumption that .org and .edu domain names can be trusted for accurate information and .com domain names will be unreliable.
I didn't find it hard to find dodgy nonprofits and sketchy colleges but do you know of any extremely reputable corporate sites that they could use as counter examples to this misinformed theory about how to find reliable sources online? I'm thinking maybe Bloomberg but would love to hear more.
I have self-hosted my email for many years, but am finally encountering some straws that may be breaking the camel's back. A few email providers are now rejecting my server's mail, Microsoft in particular (@hotmail, @outlook). (In case you're wondering, I already set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. and none of that is the issue.) Self-hosting was fine, and the technical admin work was never really an issue. I'm just tired of the external factors that are beyond my control, like belonging to an IP range that is scored badly by some random blocklist company.
So, I'm now shopping for a good email provider. Privacy and security are important to me, and I am more than willing to pay for email, so all the usual "free" email providers are out of the question. (Update) Also, client access (IMAP, SMTP) is a must.
For now, I am eyeing
Proton is looking to be my choice among those two, as I like the replyable email aliases feature. 16 times the storage doesn't hurt, either.
Any other recommendations in the same vein as these two, and in the same price range?
Recently I've been coming back to my chrome browsers to find a tab open with the following URL:
(link disabled to prevent giving them any more clicks)
https ://theaisecrets.beehiiv.com/p/chatgpt-can-now-work-docs-apps-websites-emails
This is happening across all my computers, both linux, windows, and linux VM, so I don't think it's OS-specific malware, but I suspect a rogue chrome extension is opening the tab, because I have chrome synced across all affected devices via my google account.
I've searched for this particular problem and URL to no avail, so I wondered if there's a way to track back which extension opened the tab, other than by doing a binary search disabling half my extensions at a time (which would be annoying as hell - the tabs only seem to get opened once a day or so).
Hi Tildestrians! I recently acquired a broken Sony TV from work. Its older, but its 4K, and would be a substantial upgrade over my current TV, so I am hoping to fix it. My usual willingness to tinker and google prowess has failed me. I am hoping one of you can provide some guidance.
Its a Sony XBR-55X850B. It is showing an error code of 7 flashing red lights. I tracked down the service manual (Sony, you should really have this available to customers and not locked behind an "authorized service center" certification), and it says the motherboard needs to be replaced. I found a replacement motherboard on ebay (it was for the 65 inch version, but that should not make a difference). I installed, and it gave a different error code. I think it was flashing green and orange. Based on my research, that means it needs new firmware to be flashed. Sony's website doesn't still have the firmware file for that TV (should be illegal in my opinion), and tells you to contact support. Support seemingly can't give out the firmware file either. I found a firmware file on Softpedia, but I have no idea if it is legitimate or even still a working file. Threw that on a fat32 drive, and couldn't manage to get it to update. I tried multiple drives and all usb ports over the course of 2 weeks. I ended up pulling the new motherboard and returning it (thankfully I was able to return it for full price). Now I am stuck with a TV panel that works perfectly, except for the motherboard, and I seemingly can't replace the motherboard.
This got me thinking: I don't need anything fancy. I want a display with an HDMI input that takes 4K signal and puts it on the screen. I truly don't need anything more than that. Even an IR remote for power is optional, because I could plug it into a smart outlet. I don't need the speakers because I have a receiver. I know you can get bypass boards to turn laptop screens into monitors. They take the place of the support circuitry on the laptop motherboard and give you a display input, and nothing more. Is there anything like that I can get for this TV? I don't know where to start on that search.
Or are there any other routes I should explore before junking this TV? It feels really bad to throw out a perfectly good 4k panel just because the motherboard is broken.
Basically the title. I've been told my voice is too soft on zoom in spite of having tried many options. Before I buy new hardware, I'm asking advice. I have to record a presentation soon, so this is important.
What advice can you give?
Thank you
Hey all,
Over here in Australia (imagine in USA and a few other countries), the 3G/2G mobile networks are being shutdown. My carrier Vodafone is gradually shutting its down with Dec 15th 2023 being the final closure date. The 4G network will have VolTE but my device (LG V20) does not appear to support VolTE nor does it look like i can update the firmware easily (if at all) to do so.
Anyone else have this issue with their phone? (i realise it will be older ones)
Question about VolTE though - will sms and standard voice calling still work on 4G on my device or similar devices without VolTE ?.
thanks
Nig
I'm interested in domain names that are remarkable in the sense that they are short or easy-to-remember.
This idea for a topic started because I find myself window shopping for domain names. Thing is, the only use I have for a domain is for my personal website. That's why I hesitate picking up these fun quirky domains.
What are some interesting domain names you've encountered?
Do you think it's worth it (in terms of utility and/or entertainment value) to have a more remarkable domain name for a personal website?
Off the back of all the chatter and conspiracy theories being thrown around because of the OpenAI Boardroom drama, I thought I'd ask how people are feeling about AI in general.
For those of you with your head in the sand, have you heard about AI or interacted with anything knowingly?
Those of you surfing the AI world right now, what are you looking forward to AI doing and are you fearful of where it's leading?
I'll start by saying, as I've said before, I'm looking forward to living in a world where the start of "I,Robot" is a reality. Robotics and generative AI are going to be amazing, as shown in its infancy by Boston Dynamics. If we stick to the way things are going, we could end up very Star Trek with our very own "Data" androids.
My fear is that the human race isn't ready, and we're too stupid as a whole, so we end up more with T1s being actually made by the military and at some point, AI will become cognitive and conscious.
So come on, folks of Tildes, where do you stand?
I go to LinkedIn to find work.
My real name is there. My picture is there. My career history is there.
There are many places on the Internet where I can anonymously post inflammatory opinions without endangering my job, my career, or my reputation in my field.
I kind of feel like that is the situation on for everyone else on LinkedIn too.
So... why do some people post inflammatory opinions about politics and other non-career related subjects on that site?
All risk and for zero gain.
I'm helping some friends setting up a bar/little restaurant. they have some tvs and are looking for an audio system.
The idea is that they can put on some music videos/sports and it shows up on all TVs and audio goes to their (to be bought) soundsystem.
all this has to be as cheap as possible, as we're in a low income country.
The environment is quite loud. so it needs some power.
So I think I just gonna buy a cheapish hifi-system with 4 passive speakers, connect it with their "smartest" tv (they are all off-brand) and run audio cables to the different areas and speakers.
how to synchronize the tvs I still have no idea, but it is not really a priority
So my questions
If you have experience in this I would be very happy for your advice/opinion.
Looking up the Boox Palma device right now, it seems to be very handy actually. The only point where I may not be able to use it for everyday use would be that it seems to struggle with playing Spotify music. But I wouldn't mind picking up one of those 4G dumbphone devices that Nokia puts out for that usecase.
I am looking for an e reader with specific features, honestly I don't know if what I want even exists, but I figured this might be a good place to ask. Here's my wants:
Have you guys seen any devices that meet this criteria?
So I'm in the market at the moment for a GPU upgrade. I haven't spent a dumb amount of money on something stupid in a while now and I'm thinking this Christmas season is the time. My only problem is, I've been really out of the loop since the Great Shortage. I've heard AMDs cards these days are actually more than complete jokes, and NVIDIA has been getting too big-headed and making some poor consumer choices. So a switch to AMD sounds like it might be viable for me.
At the moment, I've got an RTX 2070 8GB. I've read that lately, games have been utilizing VRAM like crazy so I want to bolster my numbers on that front. Was looking at 12GB cards since the 24GB ones are all ludicrously priced. At the moment, I'd say my budget is around 500/600 USD. Is AMD worth switching to at the moment? Or should I go for something like a 4060?
My girlfriend has started a small business and is looking into a blogging platform. What she has tried so far hasn't been great. She has decided to go the WordPress route and this is where I am involved.
Any suggestions for hosting providers? What features should I be considering or anything else I should be aware of when it comes to picking a provider?
Right now I am looking at Bluehost vs Hostinger. Bluehost just seem to be the most advertised. Hostinger seemed to offer more for the same cost.
Well, maybe they're not that odd, but I've not really been paying attention to what phone manufacturers are up to these days, so I need some help with what will work for me. I've previously had a huawei p10 lite (which I only sold after the news of them selling data to the Chinese government), Pixel 3a (i used that until it dying breath and then sold it for parts), and now I have a RealMe 8 5g, but I'm having charging issues with it. I might look at getting it fixed, but depending on the cost I might sell it on and buy something else.
MUST HAVES:
IDEAL
I don't care about the camera really. I'm a photography hobbyist and so if I want to take good photos for memories I'll just take a camera with me. If it's good then thats a bonus but its near the bottom of my list of things I think about.
What would there be out there for me? I've always liked the look of Sony phones but they're typically a lot of money, how do they fit in with my requirements? I've also been looking into the Fairphone but it really is out of my budget, and i don't know how it runs.
Thanks in advance for any help :)
I recently visited my sister who has a big screen TV that shows very smooth movement including on Star Trek, the original series. Not that I don't have smooth movement on my home TV set, but hers was ridiculous. It almost looks like raw footage before it was refined down. It was like there were frames between the frames, if that makes any sense.
What am I seeing here?
Hi all,
I’m looking for advice re making a full snapshot/backup of a running Linux system (Debian).
In an ideal world, should an issue occur, I would like to be able to load a live USB with the backup, boot and write from that.
Timeshift seems to be an option but I’m wondering how the above would work in my case. A few questions.
Essentially I’d like a step-by-step guide to backing up my full system (including all files in home) in such a way that I can easily roll back should the worst happen. Do any of you know of such a guide or can perhaps offer some help?
Hi. I work from my tiny studio and I only have one table for eating and for the computer.
Might be a very silly question but: I'm usually too lazy to put the external keyboard away when I'm having lunch and so the keys eventually get sticky with oil from the food and whatnot. Is there some way to clean them? Is there a type of keyboard that would be easier to clean?
The spacebar and the ctrl / shift keys in particular are the ones to get sticky first.
I understand that one solution would be to just put it away while eating -- and maybe that's the best solution? But maybe there are alternatives?
Thanks in advance.
Edit: Thank you again to everyone for taking the time helping me with my silly problem. Especially to the ones who tried their best not to be judgmental. :)
Youtube has become rather broken of late. The nagware popup complaining about my ad blocker can no longer be removed. I don't want ads and I certainly aren't going to pay. So far, I download the videos via Jdownloader. Is there a less bothersome way? How do you go about it?
I am interested in how people are using ChatGPT, especially in a professional context. Any tips, tricks or pointers?
I would appreciate if the discussion didn't revolve around the technology's negative aspects or future perspectives.
All major operating systems have their own file-sharing protocols (AirDrop, Nearby Share, etc.) which are incompatible with each other. There do exist apps for "cross-platform file sharing", however, they require installation on both the sender and the receiver devices, which makes it a bad solution for quickly sending files to other people.
I was thinking about making a file sharing solution that acts as a bridge between those different protocols and only requires action from one of the parties. However, there's a huge issue with AirDrop - it uses a custom networking protocol called AWDL. There are open implementations like OWL, but they still require low-level wifi access, so it can't be run on Android without kernel modifications.
This means that the only way this can be implemented is by using a physical device, eg. a Raspberry Pi Zero W or a similar microcomputer that runs a custom firmware. An obvious problem is that it requires a lot of effort - you need to buy a Raspberry, flash it with the firmware and carry it around with you, just to be able to send or receive files to other devices without using third-party websites.
So I'm personally not sure if that's worth making. But maybe you'll still be interested? Is this a big enough problem for you to want to use a hardware solution?
Hi all,
Has been a while :)
I'm having an issue with upgrading an SSD on a Lenovo x270 and thought I'd reach out for some advice.
I'm installing a SATA SSD (Crucial BX500) but the original caddy in the laptop is for a NVME M.2 PCIe SSD. The only part I can use of the original caddy is the plastic shielding that can fit around the new drive.
The issue is, now I have no shielding. The new drive will fit in the 2.5 inch slot the old drive was in but it rests on top of only two small pieces of foam glued to the board. Do you think this is an issue? Should I shield it somehow? Perhaps EMI tape? If so, should I shield both the top and bottom of the drive? There's no caddy I can find for this use case in Europe.
Any help would be appreciated.
p.s I am following this article: https://techblog.paalijarvi.fi/2020/01/02/32gb-ram-for-thinkpad-x270-and-other-pimp-ups/
As you can see, in their case, some metal foil (an EMC cover?) came with the eBay cable they bought to support the SATA connection. I'm wondering if that's nesscary.
Looking for a good wireless (probably bluetooth, but happy to hear if something other than bluetooth is recommended for a good reason) keyboard to use with my home laptop/dock setup.
I've ben using my laptop's keyboard while plugged into my dock which is probably less than ideal ergonomic-wise and am looking to improve things.
I don't need to be a fullsize or compact keyboard - I think my sweet spot would be middle size with a number pad. I'm somewhat aware of mechanical keyboards but will admit my complete ignorance as to their benefits (other than sounding nice when you type?) and so am open to those if there are more tangible benefits that I'm just totally ignorant about. Battery life would be important as charging it constantly could get a bit annoying.
Appreciate any input you all have!
The release of the Meta Quest 3 seems to have been slowplayed but my take is that Zuckerberg is still going full force ahead with MR but doesn't want to have a fiasco like the last round of publicity about "the metaverse” when people were mentioning it in the same sentence as blockchains and NFTs.
I read a lot of very positive reviews about the hardware
https://www.theverge.com/23906313/meta-quest-3-review-vr-mixed-reality-headset
https://www.reddit.com/r/QuestPro/comments/17631ja/24_hours_in_my_quest_3_review/
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/meta-quest-3
so I got one and I am really impressed. It comes with a very convincing demo where cracks appear in the ceiling and walls of your room opening views onto another planet and then aliens come into your room that you have to shoot with the controllers to stuff them into a tube. I am showing this demo to people on the hopes I can sell some kind of MR exhibit to a local museum.
Karl Guttag could show that the MR quality is "awful" from an eye chart perspective but the motion-to-photon is really excellent, you can throw and catch a ball just fine wearing it, and it is totally practical to walk around the house, interact with people, read (large) text to copy, use a touchscreen, etc.
I get the feeling too that they are doing many of the right things to market it, for instance, it comes with a license for a major game that comes out in two months which will might give people who don't click with it right away a chance to re-engage. There is intensive notification based marketing with discounts and stuff which is totally textbook for a new app store and that I like at the moment but it is possible it just won't connect if the product isn't up to snuff.
I tried Horizon Worlds and ran into the problem of not being able to succeed at the fishing minigame (in real life I've only been able to catch sunfish and smelt, but you really can fill up your freezer with zero skill with the later) and also the way it is weirdly empty. I have some content that I think could be put in there which I think is often a good idea on a new platform that is heavily promoted (e.g. easy to get free publicity and other benefits from the platform) but that emptiness might mean they don't feel pressure to get content. VRChat was more fun but showed me the challenge of onboarding people to that sort of thing, I got into an entrance room where I met one person who was actually attentive and trying to communicate and I think a lot of kids who were "doing their own thing", I figured out some of how to interact in that space but the problem of "getting gud" while sharing the space with other people who might be annoyed seems tough.
My take is that the software is not up to the hardware right now but as a software developer I think that’s a great problem to have.
If you're excited about Apple Vision I think you should be excited by this. Any thoughts? Anyone tried the MQ3? Anyone developing content for it?
I saw people talking about YubiKey here a few weeks ago so I got curious. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing a lot of helpful reviews for it.
I’m personally getting tired of having to take my phone anytime I need 2FA for Okta but I don’t have a lot of super important accounts to secure so I’m going back and forth in deciding whether the 100+ euro investment (to get two so that there’s a duplicate) would be worth it.
How do you use your YubiKey in your personal life and do you think it’s worth your use case ?
I'm on the search for a good, over-the-ear headphones that actually blocks out background voices (not just noise). My wife and I share a home office and she is on a lot of calls. I'm looking for headphones that are comfortable to listen to for long periods of time and really muffle the outside world. I have two headphones I've been using, Sony MDR-7506 and Bose QC45. The Bose does great with blocking out ambient background noise like fan hum. However this has the effect of accentuating my wife's voice. Her voice is tinny but more clear even when listening to music. The Sony does a better job of blocking all noise and attenuating her voice, but I can still hear it.
Wired is better since I run multiple computer through a mixer so I can hear all the computers at once when I have the headphones on.
Hey there! Back when the pandemic was in full swing, I stumbled upon a comment that shared a link to a website with a title quite like this post. I can't quite recall if I saw the comment on Reddit, the orange site, or even here. The site was quite basic, and claimed to have a list of jobs from companies that understood that its workers would like to have a life outside of work
The job market has changed a lot since the pandemic, but if any of you awesome folks happen to know where I can find a good part-time software development job, I'd be seriously grateful.
Hey folks
I've got a couple of months to put together an overview for tools that a company could use as part of television production and I'm hoping for your input.
It goes without saying that everyone in the tech world is pushing ai heavily. Having been in IT for almost 3 decades I know what to watch, look at, out for, etc. AI is still very much regurgitation of its input but the input is vast. What I have right now is some bare bones of what I want to throw around for insight and discussion for what would help people in TV production tool wise.
For those that do not know how TV production works it's a simple idea: you generate a huge raft of ideas for shows, absolute basic outline of what the show would be about and put that in to a paper. You then sit around in your research/Dev dept and pitch to each other and the ones that people go "yeah, that could make a good show" get some extra meat added. Those ideas get pitched to dept heads who then take the best ones to channel/broadcasters execs and see if any get hooked at all. If they do, they get given some development funding to put together a taster/pilot/video version with the funding they have. This means shot on camera, run through an edit for cutting, audio, graphics, etc, still in its infancy and development state. This video and a bigger padded Treatment (documented idea with its bones, flesh and now make-up added) goes back to the broadcaster and you wait for feedback. If you get lucky you get a greenlight and order for X amount of shows and then you have a production. The production is taking the idea to it's full potential, shooting it, audio and music, graphics, the works and that's what you see on TV.
I'm after working out what tools AI offers today that would help them with this process. Right now, ChatGPT v4 will generate some great treatment ideas for shows, except I would imagine these shows already exist or have been tried to channel/broadcaster before? AI is regurgitation and not thoughtful to its own ideas and imagination. I suppose with great prompts it could generate great output.
Okay, that's the process and I'm rambling. Right now I have a short list of LLMs such as ChatGPT and Bard types that will help with the idea stage for researchers. I could use some decent links for prompters to help the research know how to ask AI for what they want out of it.
When it comes to generative AI for graphics I only have experience with txt2img using the likes of DALLE and Midjourney, along with some inpainting for changing images with lies, I mean, graphics (insert plane on fire, etc).
Does anyone have any other ideas and tools which would help production or useful things I can look at and research myself to see how they could be helpful? Auto audio generation? Graphic building that takes less time? Think of those great show intros for the likes of Game of Thrones, can that be done using AI yet or are we no where near that level for AI? Even basic video edits, where are we for AI help? Can we feed it some clips and have it autostitch based on an input document? If so, what tools should I be looking at and researching?
I'm asking here before I plop search terms in Google and Bing and then get swamped with whichever has paid the most or played the SEO game to be top of the pages. Asking for real human input is definitely better than asking AI which may actually be the whole point of my talk when it happens.
Thanks for listening and any help/pointers/sites you can give.
UPDATE:
I went off and did some research. Enjoy these if you want. I had issues linking so if a mod wants to go ahead and do that, feel free:
Generating a great idea is usually through using knowledge and research, but these days you can literally ask an AI engine to come up with a show idea. Here I will list some good AIs that use a very large language model (LLM) to come up with ideas:
ChatGPT is the best known AI out there, but essentially it's the AI that everyone uses. What's different is the data that is fed to it. ChatGPT from OpenAI has a lot of knowledge, however, it's generally backdated information and not up to the minute.
Built on ChatGPT4 AI. Data fed in more up to date as it's based around a search engine. Due to the plethora of sources being fed to the You.com Chat bot, you may find some more interesting results and ideas.
Directly leverages the latest version of ChatGPT4 from OpenAI but uses additional media from Microsoft sources. Responses are more natural due to the Turing Natural Language.
A fun LLM designed for advertising agencies and the alike. The difference here is you can upload a back-catalogue of your own data for it to analyse to take on your brand voice, mix up your ideas and generally become one of the family.
Just from picking one of the four AIs listed above, you can straight out ask for a basic show idea. All of them came back with interesting ideas from the prompt of "Generate me a great show idea for a television production treatment. The show should be a documentary for daytime viewing."
Prompting is the hardest part of any AI interaction, the results can wildly vary depending on what and how you ask. Due to this, there's a new type of website to help with prompting:
Using the line from above about generating a great show idea, promptperfect injects a lot more information into the prompt before running: "Please create a compelling show idea for a daytime documentary television production. The show should be engaging and informative, catering to a broad daytime audience. It should focus on a specific topic or theme that is both educational and entertaining. The documentary should be well-researched and provide in-depth information on the chosen topic, presenting it in a visually appealing and accessible manner. The show should aim to captivate viewers and leave them with a better understanding and appreciation of the subject matter. Additionally, please provide a brief outline of the structure and format of the documentary, including the number of episodes, approximate runtime, and any unique features or storytelling techniques that will make the show stand out." The quality of the Treatment created will be far superior to the initial request.
An interesting take on generation of prompting. It breaks down the prompts to dropdown boxes with key words such as create, design, analyse along with the focus type. This forces the ai to create some more complex and well thought out documentation for a treatment idea with explanation of how it got to where it did.
With the latest AI image searching features, you can now upload an image and get a "related" search. Using this technology, you could, for example, look for English Country Gardens that you would like to film out of. Uploading this image would give you a list of locations, similar places and website associated with the image:
On each of the following sites, in the search bar, click the Image Icon to upload the image:
https://www.bing.com/images/
https://images.google.com/
Scheduling shoots should be simple. We've seen all the fun from an Excel spreadsheet that's laid out like a calendar, through to the most complex diary entries in a shared Google calendar. We already have the tools for this in Microsoft Office:
Microsoft Bookings: This is a great tool for scheduling a diary of a single person or a whole team. It allows to have a Web Page where people can book in time for appointments, whether virtual or in person. Perfect for a researcher trying to book interviews with a host. The AI lies in the ability to cross search a calendar and pick associated times available.
Microsoft Planner: A tool for project and time management. Breakdown the show in to buckets (categories) and assign out tasks to people and teams, due by dates or exact dates, etc. You can even keep all of the documents in the plan.
Microsoft Shifts: Team management for your production using Shifts. This allows you to schedule team members in Teams, allowing them to clock in and out, as well as specifying when they need to be available.
The three tools all work with the Outlook Calendars so each person knows what their plans are well in advance.
This is the one most people are interested in for AI at this time. The tools used for image generation, manipulation, etc. The market is currently being flooded with tools and not all of them are equal, but here's a few ones to watch and use.
OpusClip, using the power of OpenAI, can take a long video and create 10 viral clips from it at the click of a button. The AI behind it analyses the video, looks for compelling sections and highlights, then seamlessly rearranges in to short videos. This tool will be great for generating short promotional videos of long form shows, documentaries, etc.
Descript is a great tool that can take a video, give you a transcription, then you can edit the transcript, where it then edits the video to match. You can remove words, create studio quality audio from a standard mic, remove common error words such as um, and er, etc. One of the bigger cool things it can do is voice mimic using AI. You read it a line and then you can type out a whole transcript and it'll narrate it in your voice and allow export.
Moving on to the more scary AI platforms, we have completely generative AI. This is where AI generates absolutely everything including the "avatar" of the human speaking. It's getting so real, you could probably make a documentary using nothing buy AI voice for narration and even have an interview with the AI Avatar.
Synthesia has 120+ voices, over 140 AI Avatars and an editing tool that is extremely easy to use. Mostly aimed at Sales, Training and Marketing Teams, but could easily be used to create development tasters and cuts by mixing in the AI with real video. An example video here.
AI Studios from DeepBrain is another tool, similar to Synthesia. The avatars are based on real humans being recorded but then converted in to AI models. Again, lots of models, full text to video.
Spline AI is a 3D modelling engine that will generate models from text prompts. It's still in Alpha stages but specifying something like "A cube", "rounded corners", "floating", "spinning slowly" will generate exactly that. This tool is aimed at animators but is likely where CGI effects will head.
Txt-2-img is amazing and growing at an ever rapid pace. With the wealth of images out there to learn from, the styles, etc, it's no wonder it's doing great. However, it's far from perfect, even now. You'll often find that it adds limbs or fingers to models, shadows completely wrong, crazy styles that are not what you asked for, and that's just the start of the issues with it. However, when it gets it right, it's amazing.
DALL·E3 from OpenAI is the current leader in image generation. If you need to whiz up a picture of a steam train, crossing a suspension bridge at sunset with a woodland in the background, this is the tool of choice.
Bing Image Creator is probably the second biggest right now and has very good accuracy of text to image due to the absolutely huge database of images with high detail being fed to it by Microsoft. It's also free.
I'm not going to list too many more as a lot of them stray off in to fantasy land, being trained on Anime, comics, however, DeepAI definitely deserves a mention. These are the folks behind a lot of the viral videos where you can scan your face and and speak a few lines, then it adds you to a section of a movie as a "Deep Fake". You can have it chat, generate images and even AI edit images with txt-2-img.
The biggest AI enhancers right now are tools that help in the Edit at a professional level.
Topaz Video AI is one of the leading tools in Post production. Upscale footage from SD to 8K and HD to 16K. Full denoise, sharpening, 16x slow down with AI interpolation including building new frames. Corrects people and faces. AI Stabilized video to stop bounce and tracking issues. This is a complete Post Swiss-army knife.
Adobe After Effects which everyone knows. The Adobe AI, called Sensei, is under constant development. Easy animations of text and logos via text to video, rotoscoping video objects to remove the background of a person and replace, or removal of all objects in a scene using AI generative filling is all extremely easy.
Adode Premiere deserves a mention, but again, this down to Sensei. The current AI tools coming in to the suite are things such as Auto Rough Cut using the transcript to generate the video, full auto transcription with subtitle creation for multiple languages. Auto Colour will fix most colour issues using AI to save time in grading. AI Morph Cut adds visual continuity to cut transitions, remix for music matching with visuals, and Auto Ducking – popping dialogue over background audio to make sure you can hear voices correctly.
ColourLab AI is a new kind of grading tool where you no longer need to spend time with an artist grading every scene. The tool is a plugin to Davinci or Premiere and will do cool things such as film grain matching or stock emulation, which allows you to match any scenes together to look exactly the same. Take a video of a pigeon flying over a statue in London, and have it grade using a still frame from The Martian to get those awesome colours automatically, for the whole scene.
The final piece is the new voiceover AI generation. No longer do we need voice over artists. In fact, Hollywood thinks the same and fired the whole staff of Snow White and replaced the Dwarfs with CGI and AI voices.
Altered Studio can change any persons voice, in any way you wish. Record your voice for narration and then adjust it to be male, female, Elvern, whatever. It also does full transcription and allows for VO with text-to-speech using AI voices.
A quick shout out to a member of Tildes who wants to remain anonymous for some of the cool links that they sent over - much appreciated.
Any advice should be suitable for a non tech person who knows how to google and follow instructions but not code in any way.
Can anyone suggest which firewall and or antivirus might be best? All suggestions for making life easier while dealing with a new machine are welcome.
I host a couple of very small websites for personal stuff and a Foundry server for my weekly RPG. Not exactly resource-intensive. And I've been paying for webhosting for a while for it, and it just feels unnecessary.
I always figured when I finally decided to do it, I'd just grab a Raspberry Pi and go to town. But they're... weirdly expensive. The Zero 2 W is sold out everywhere, they have insane resale prices, and you still need to essentially buy the 'kit' first time to have most of the stuff to set one up. So is it worth it?
I've been toying between that or just grabbing an old server off craigslist or Facebook Marketplace for $25-$30 and just going to town from there. What do you guys recommend?
So far I only managed to find two online communities in which people are able to hold a productive discussion and share interesting stuff - Tildes and LessWrong. Do you know if there are any other great online spaces like this?
With the Youtube adblock debacle going on, and my account on Firefox+Ublock getting the dreaded popup, I was trying out the Piped alternative frontends for Youtube. If you're unaware, this is basically lets you browse Youtube without using the actual Youtube site or your Google account, and there's no ads. Whenever this adblock issue comes up, everyone starts pushing other frontends like Piped as the solution. There's also a dedicated bot that automatically replies with the Piped link when anyone posts a Youtube link on Lemmy. People seem to think very highly of this site! The simping for it can be very strong.
I tried using the main instance, https://piped.video, but it was laggy! Completely, unusably slow. I've also had it crash whenever I try to watch certain videos. I heard there were other instances that would have less users and less pressure on the servers, so I tried out the other public instances. One of them worked great for a couple days, now it just stopped loading videos all of a sudden. All the other instances I've tried either don't load videos, or the domain is down.
Are they cracking down on Piped now, or are all these instances just not good and you need to self-host to get anything out of Piped? Are there any other alternative frontends that you've liked?
A recent post here made me realize how much I really wish I just could pop in a CD while driving (you can skip those, and I can make mix CDs, so no need for cassettes haha). I commute a decent amount and I'm using a Pixel with GrapheneOS. Adding a streaming service would just be one more piece of Google I'd have to add to my "work" profile. I'm listening to some great podcasts, but I'd rather go full nostalgia without ripping all my CDs.
That being said, I'd like any recommendations. USB would be nice for the constant power option, but blutooth is doable as well. TIA!
My wife has an ipad pro, and we have a baby monitor. So I was watching the baby monitor and noticed that her ipad was also in view of the camera. What I also noticed is that her ipad seems to flash an infrared light every minute or so.
After some googling I think this is the lidar scanner, although I'm not 100% sure.
Anyway, does anyone know why her ipad is doing this? It feels pretty creepy that a device is scanning your house all the time. Normally you don't even notice, it's only when you view the iPad pro from a camera that also shows infrared.
Maybe I'm just a little paranoid, but it feels like a privacy violation.
So I'm looking for a solution that's basically just a remote to scroll the web while I'm slouched down in the couch. Something that doesn't require a flat surface to work.
I'd also be interested to hear your solutions for your living room PCs. Thanks!
Recent article How can I get my engineers to accept being on call? sparkled some discussion, so I was become very curious.
If you can choose between working without any on-call duties or working where every second/third day you will be 24h on-call, what compansetion will make you accept second options?
Im in my early middle ages, and personally, I think
Looking for recommendations for a multiplatform note taking app. Needs to support Windows and Android. Some things I'm looking for:
Obsidian hits most of these features but without paying $8/mo, syncing is a huge pain in the ass. I got it to sync between machines if I store my vaults in Google Drive, but I'd prefer to have them locally then synced. I don't mind paying for software, but I'm trying to avoid another monthly fee on top of everything else I'm paying for. I'm open to staying with Obsidian if I can solve the syncing issues, too.