Tech Corner

[jaylach]

I couldn't deal with a 15 inch screen for long. LOL! I run 43 and 55 inch HDTVs on my main and a 32 inch on my second desktop.

 

[MaloK]

my LT is a 17 inch and i'm glad i'm close enough, lolll all other screens are gigantic, i can use 100% windows scale on my TV and characters are one inch high. at 4K resolution... Once you understand how scaling works in the TV... Very good compromises can be done, like using a lower resolution scaled upward... there's no noticeable difference in video rendering full screen but you cut back the size of every download by a lot if you want... And the windows stuff appears super clean.

 

[MaloK]

Another step forward for the server installation. Got mister his own insulated 220 volt output. Now have 30 amps for the 2 PSUs.

Solid installation... 2 Back UPS are on their way to put the final nail in the coffin.

On the software side, File sharing is completed and secured. I migrated the Emby databases, corrected paths to libraries, installed my certificate for the web server and initiated a refresh... This should take a couple days, lolll... But medias are showing up already. The database is 17 Gigs, there's 320K metadata files and 120k images paths to update.

Next step is moving my PXE boot server, both TFTP, Web engine are installed and running. Need to copy all these files to their resting places.

I cant believe that it's going to cost less than half the power of the old one, that was always a hog and consuming 350-400 watt all the time and 600-700 under stress with 8 cores, now I have 56 cores for 124 watt idle and 478 under total load.

But it put al lot more heat in the air. Loll, and it's not finished... The GPU I'm looking at, is around 75W. But the price is not user friendly, it's a computing only GPU and there's no output on that.

So repurposing that kind of $$$ hardware can be difficult if it doesn't match... And if I go with Dell Certified Hardware Compatible, bla bla.... They all worth more than my car. I cant seriously be that serious... I dont want something that drive 700 watt... but don't want to spend a 1000 years in electricity saved in advance.

 

[seangee]

Haha. I moan about my eyes but I'm actually quite lucky. Until about 40 I was so short sighted I wouldn't even go to the bathroom without my glasses. Since then the short sightedness has steadily improved to the point where I no longer need glasses. I still use them outdoors or when I go out because my corrected vision is 6/5 - i.e. I have no problem reading the bottom line on the tests. But somehow I managed so far to skip the whole far sighted thing, my mates all get really annoyed when I take off my glasses to read a menu. I joke that the short and far sightedness balance each other out - which of course is not medically possible.
But for work I am happy with a 15" (or two!). Sweet spot is probably 24 for a desktop. But I also prefer 3 so I did order another panel. That way I can use 2 for the AVD and keep the built in 13" for my own stuff during work time. After so many years of lugging 17 & 19" pro laptops around for work I really want small and light in a laptop. The little Dell does just fine. The only time that's a bit tedious is rendering video when I'm on hols
I do have a 65 in the next room, but only use that for watching movies

 

[MaloK]

Yes. indeed multi monitor is the pinnacle for a working environment.

But... Without that... I got pretty good at ATL-TABbing and can navigate multi full screen apps pretty good.

My keyboard right shift key died and trying to get use back to the old dactilo style one I have... But 200$ for a wifi keyboard and key fails.... Logitech... what's that.... I'm really mad because the touch pad is amazing on it.

And I feel like I have boxing gloves with this one.

 

[jaylach]

Yes. indeed multi monitor is the pinnacle for a working environment.

But... Without that... I got pretty good at ATL-TABbing and can navigate multi full screen apps pretty good.

My keyboard right shift key died and trying to get use back to the old dactilo style one I have... But 200$ for a wifi keyboard and key fails.... Logitech... what's that.... I'm really mad because the touch pad is amazing on it.

And I feel like I have boxing gloves with this one.

I totally detest touch pads! My Surface, Mac Book Air and Asus laptops/tablets all have mice attached.

 

[MaloK]

Yeah it's living room stuff...

But it's hard to go back, when you had great tracking and scrolling resolution, back light, exceptional wifi connection...

To prehistoric onix slate, with 200dpi and no gesture...

All for a dead "shift" key.

I'm furious.... 10 shots micro switch... calculated... If I buy another one... It better never do that.

Cause, I have industrial strength PS/2 keyboards with touchpads that are amazing...

They sound like a vic-20 and the fracking tracking is made to have boxing gloves.

Just have to get used to the clothesline in the place...

 

[jaylach]

Yeah it's living room stuff...

But it's hard to go back, when you had great tracking and scrolling resolution, back light, exceptional wifi connection...

To prehistoric onix slate, with 200dpi and no gesture...

All for a dead "shift" key.

I'm furious.... 10 shots micro switch... calculated... If I buy another one... It better never do that.

Cause, I have industrial strength PS/2 keyboards with touchpads that are amazing...

They sound like a vic-20 and the fracking tracking is made to have boxing gloves.

Just have to get used to the clothesline in the place...

Actually, if you are decent with a low wattage iron, that dead shift key could probably be fixed as it is most likely a burnt board trace.

My very first system was an Atari 400 beefed up a whole lot. Actually a fun system to modify. Anyway, unlike the 800 series which, for the time, had a REALLY nice keyboard the 400 had a membrane board that had a habit of burning out a trace. The keyboard was also on a Milar sheet so difficult to patch the circuit burn out. I fixed a LOT of these keyboards due to being pretty good at soldering on Milar to make the patch.

I actually miss that system and have it on an emulator. Most secure system I've ever had. It was pretty much literally immune to infections as the OS was on a ROM chip, not disk based.

 

[MaloK]

There will be an autopsy and if I can find what's off I gladly try to bring it back... It might be a flex not inserted correctly because if I wack it "adequately" it comes back for a while.. But the wacks have intensified in numbers and strength... I fear this could be the last... lolll.

My first CBM basic program was called hog and would put cpu at 100% until powers off and the second was called reboot, cause the vic rebooted when I ran it...

I was marked by the syntax error / file not found... And thousands of cold boot to a 3584 bytes...

And the last 27 bytes free before your last try and everything crashes.

 

[seangee]

Not entirely convinced on the calibration but its closer, and the laptop display is no longer obviously different. As you can see the room itself is quite inconsistent but drawing the blinds would defeat the object of sitting next to the patio doors. Old software / hardware (Datacolor Spyder 5 pro) so it was a bit tedious. It recognised that I had 3 displays but could not figure out which was which, so I had to set each display as my main display in turn. Calibrations safely stored in Windows now and applying correctly to the correct screens.
It does look closer to the eye than the phone camera picked up.

 

[MaloK]

Beautiful setup... You're going to get a nice even tan with these

To my surprise the database rebuild went a lot faster than expected... And dropped the old server off line and gave a good ride to the setup....

My slowest links are all gigabyte to the devices now and the principal segment is going 100, initial communications test ran up to 128 Gigabits per seconds internally and I was able to bring it to 60 gigabits over the network... Not enough clients to check... loll.

The Truenas didn't break a sweat... The more it runs the more powerful it becomes... While the test where running, I copied 16 TB to the desktop of the win7 Vm in 3 seconds... Sorry cant take screen shots...

I also was thinking of adding a small low power GPU for x265 media transcoding, but from what I see, software transcoding is so fast and efficient that it doesn't really register as a load... I will skip that part and go to serious stuff instead...

Overpowered is the word... The raid array is able to sustain PCIe3, X16 speed with no write back cache...

Now.... This is crazy, never I seen this with any sata HDDs.

Hypervisor with 56 cores at full speed.

 

[seangee]

At the other end of the spectrum I did some debloating on the laptop today.
Nothing too dramatic, I have never really bothered with it because until now its had so little use other than just browsing. So performance has never been an issue, and the days of turning off stuff like window animations to improve perfomance are long gone. When I was running big builds on a pentium in my dev days I was fanatical about squeezing out every last ounce of performance, but these days it just doesn't matter for end users. So I just picked off some low hanging fruit manually. I managed to get the bootup memory footprint from a touch over 12Gb to just under 5Gb without breaking into a sweat.
Did I notice a dramatic difference for my normal use - no of course not. But I sure did notice when I fired up a local VM . Not worth replacing the laptop for several years yet, but with 16Gb soldered on to the mainboard upgrading is not easy (at least not for me), so happy with the results, and getting rid of the major bottleneck.
The biggest culprits were (predictably) Adobe, Dell, Citrix and of course MS.

 

[MaloK]

Freeing nearly half the memory is a very good achievement... You maybe not noticing much difference, but the machine certainly does.

I still disable all windows animations, not because of the speed but the annoyance factor... And the machine is running about half free ram with nothing running.

I agree that 16 gig ram has "slightly" shrunk in the last few years. And has become the bare basic.

 

[seangee]

Freeing nearly half the memory is a very good achievement... You maybe not noticing much difference, but the machine certainly does.

I still disable all windows animations, not because of the speed but the annoyance factor... And the machine is running about half free ram with nothing running.

I agree that 16 gig ram has "slightly" shrunk in the last few years. And has become the bare basic.

Oh I sorted most of the annoyance stuff years ago. Also a few more registry tweaks to get closer to the way my desktop works, as well as disabling loads of services that have zero value to me. Why eevryone wants to,load theor services at startup is beyond me - Adobe and Citrix were the biggest culprits here. I turned off most of the Adobe stuff altogether and the Citrix stuff can load when actually needed. I do use AVD for work so can't just remove them, but unless I'm at work I have no need for them.
Doing it manually was probably good for me as there is loads of new stuff in Windows I had no idea even existed. MS Resume was a massive hog. Maybe cool for some but I really don't need to know what documents or browser tabs I have open on my other machines. And as for putting teams everywhere and turning it on - I actually uninstall this as a scheduled task because every time I get an update or patch they seem to put it back.

 

[MaloK]

"Scheduled tasks" Another thing that is piling up too thick, in addition of startup programs that nearly dedicates the whole machine to their own software...

If you haven't checked it, take a look at this little script.