[X] My Assistant

Edit/update:
Fixed a key on my laptop keyboard by dabbing a tiny blob of melted plastic onto one of the clips on the underside of the cap where it had chipped (with my soldering iron).

Long time ago I had to do that for a thinkpad, though the key felt a bit weird afterwards.

I was pissed as I paid a Repair dude to fix it but he gave up and still charged me for the time.

That dude was a bit of dick. He made his money from market buyouts of new parts.


He bought out all the intel 980x cpus in my state and tried to sell them at 2x the price. He was stuck with stock for ages though.

This post has been edited by EsotericSatire: Sep 28 2022, 18:20

Mine's a thinkpad; key feels fine. I was very careful to avoid squishing the clip at all.

I used donor plastic from one of my chipped palmrests.

edit:
Worth noting that this clip still mostly was working; the tab was marginally chipped so that if you pressed the key in a specific corner it would come loose at the top and start teeter-tottering front to back until popped back in. normally while typing it would not happen. I needed the tiniest amount of rework on the order of well under a millimeter of plastic to fill in. It was also one of the top clips, which on my keyboard are the ones that don't snap into place but rather let the scissor mechanism posts slide into place in it when pushing down to snap the bottom of the switch into place.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 29 2022, 12:17

My VPN provider makes it annoying to download OpenVPN config files for all their servers, and even more annoying to use them.

I wrote some scripts ages back that do post-processing on the files (which are mass-downloaded via someone else's script) so that they're ready to load with the OpenVPN command line. I'm really glad that I did it the way I did, because there are so many goddamn steps to the process that I have a hard time figuring out what all I had to do anymore. I remember that to get country codes for the files I had to do a lookup on their servers comparing to a JSON file, for instance. Rigged that using duktape.

Right now the install script (shell script) invokes at least python script someone else wrote and I modified, a javascript thing I wrote to parse JSON (using the duktape interpreter), a C program I wrote to do the actual insertion of new configuration lines into the config files, and several invocations of 'sed' and 'grep' probably.

I hated nord, but at least they had that going for them... a nice convenient zip file full of all of their openvpn config files, with informative file names.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 29 2022, 12:54

Updated to the 102 based ESR version of Firefox.
One curious difference is that when I'm on "View New Posts" and refresh before going to the next page (as things may have been pushed down), it no longer go through a temporary white screen before loading the refreshed page.
Maybe now it download it, compare the 2 versions, and only update the display for things that changed or something?
Though it seems that method could be punishing on older/weaker hardware...

Or it just waits to update the display until the new page is rendered, instead of moving from the old one to the white screen.

Been tooling around with CD-MQA again today. Found that by erasing that data stream (setting the least significant bit of the least significant byte of each sample to zero), I can cut my filesizes in half when recompressed to FLAC (compared to a FLAC encode of the MQA'd version).

MQA really is just shit.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Yesterday, 12:32

I've never used MQA, was it just for copyright protection some crap.

I've never used MQA, was it just for copyright protection some crap.

Not really?
But in practice, perhaps somewhat.

It intentionally degrades the quality of audio slightly by stealing bits from the PCM stream to use for carrying data. Supposedly it's reversible, mostly, but it's also lossy, the decoder is proprietary and not available officially for PC's, and the decoder upsamples the output.

A lot of USB DAC's will read the MQA data stream and proceed to lie to users about the bit depth and sample rate of the music they are playing (claiming it's "24 bit 352.8KHz" or whatever, because that's what the master was captured at. But it's still a 16-bit (actually 15-bit because of MQA), 44.1KHz CD that's being resampled and effectively just doing what the brightness/black level histogram adjuster does for images in photoshop to stretch it across 24 bits.

The MQA stuff is supposedly mostly reversed by this proprietary decoder, but I think it's bullshit if they're only using one bit of the data stream to contain both sample information and data.

Finally, on supported DAC's, MQA turns on a little blue light telling the user that it has been "Master Quality Authenticated" and is what the engineer heard in the studio or whatever. Despite engineers not having anything to do with the decision to MQA encode in many cases.

So it bastardizes the CD audio signal in order to turn on a little blue light on expensive DAC's that paid the MQA licensing fees.

It remains playable on standard CD players, but the MQA stream introduces noise into the output in the bit(s) that it stole. So it is actually worse than a non-MQA CD for pretty much every use case, as it is lossy to encode and then if you don't have a decoder at playback-time it takes another hit from the data stream.

Of course, this is only the least significant bit, so it's not especially noticeable. But it is a solution to a problem no one had and it objectively does no favors to the output quality.

I wouldn't be mad if it was just used for 24-bit digital releases, where it uses the lowest 8 bits but by stripping those you get an un-bastardized 16-bit PCM track. But leave CD's well enough alone, for fuck's sake.

The original use case was to lie to users about the audio they were streaming via bluetooth or wifi or whatever being at extremely high sample rates/bit depths while cheaping out and only sending lower resolution audio and upsampling it in software. No idea why they decided to put it on CD's, too, unless it was just snake oil marketing or to actively fuck people over who don't buy $700 DAC's (like me). Plus, they get license fees from the encoder, the decoder, and the DAC manufacturers, since processing happens at encode time, decode time, and rendering time. And they only allow the third component in the chain (which is an additional upsampling) be done within a DAC itself. No external software solutions are allowed.

Someone appears to have written a perl script to strip MQA out of audio files, but it appears to be lost to time so I wrote a C program to do it for me. I am also borrowing code someone wrote to hijack a software MQA decoding library from the firmware of a linux-based DAC/wireless streamer program to attempt decodes, just so I have options.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Today, 05:52