Spent the morning setting up our new ISP hardware. Spectrum Cable to Frontier Fiber. Much better! 😀

500/10 to 1000/1000, lower pings and lower cost.

I still need to do a few home network changes/adjustments to get the max out of the connection, but it's up and running!

Nice! Mine is only 1000/100. 🤣

dr_st wrote on 2025-05-22, 19:01:

Nice! Mine is only 1000/100. 🤣

I'm happy with it! Is the speed necessary, nope, but it sure is nice!

I just ordered all new CAt6 cables to rewire my home network. All 5e at the moment. Yes, 5e can go over 1G on short runs, but my cables are quite old. If I'm going to replace them, may as well "upgrade".

I've got a TP-Link Archer A8 AC1900 router, and it's served me very well, but capped at 1G wired. Thinking of picking up a much newer TP-Link BE3600 and use it's two 2.5G ports. One WAN and the other to my TP-Link TL-SG105S-M2 switch then out to my 3 main systems, they've all got 2.5G cards already.

Meanwhile, I'm on 12/1. I should check fiber availability again, but I seem to live in an area that's even more screwed than usual in ISP choices. There were two votes for municipal broadband (one being over 10 years ago and the other being in the last local election), and this town is the only place in Northern Colorado that I'm aware of that still doesn't have it. On the other had, I've heard a lot of complaints about municipal fiber in Fort Collins going down.

Of course, it's even slower today because I updated Linux and got some broken firmware. I'm now using an ancient USB thing that only works in Linux. It's using an AR9271 chip, but with the device ID reprogrammed so it only works with a Netgear driver in Windows. I might try to hack that to the generic AR9271 device ID some day just to see if the generic driver is any better. The Netgear driver randomly disconnects and reconnects automatically a few seconds later. Modern Windows hides that, but XP would give me a bunch of pop-ups to indicate that this was happening (and yes, it has been happening since XP was still supported).

Since I have some kind of weird company holiday today, I was getting some yard stuff ready and decided to check my UPS battery while I was buying a new trimmer battery. My UPS is four years old, and apparently APC stopped giving the battery replacement reminder after three years. Maybe I'll leave it another year since the Duracell SLAs don't seem to last very long.

I dug out my old desktop today, and the CPU fan was a little noisy when I first turned it on. It settled down, but maybe it's time to finally replace the stock cooler. I just need to find something that seems appropriate for an i5-8500. Liquid cooling and large tower coolers are a waste on a CPU like that, but I don't have any height limitations. Maybe I'll just get a 92mm tower cooler since they seem to be cheaper than down-blowing coolers.

lti wrote on 2025-05-23, 19:51:

Meanwhile, I'm on 12/1. I should check fiber availability again, but I seem to live in an area that's even more screwed than usu […]
Show full quote

Meanwhile, I'm on 12/1. I should check fiber availability again, but I seem to live in an area that's even more screwed than usual in ISP choices. There were two votes for municipal broadband (one being over 10 years ago and the other being in the last local election), and this town is the only place in Northern Colorado that I'm aware of that still doesn't have it. On the other had, I've heard a lot of complaints about municipal fiber in Fort Collins going down.

Of course, it's even slower today because I updated Linux and got some broken firmware. I'm now using an ancient USB thing that only works in Linux. It's using an AR9271 chip, but with the device ID reprogrammed so it only works with a Netgear driver in Windows. I might try to hack that to the generic AR9271 device ID some day just to see if the generic driver is any better. The Netgear driver randomly disconnects and reconnects automatically a few seconds later. Modern Windows hides that, but XP would give me a bunch of pop-ups to indicate that this was happening (and yes, it has been happening since XP was still supported).

Since I have some kind of weird company holiday today, I was getting some yard stuff ready and decided to check my UPS battery while I was buying a new trimmer battery. My UPS is four years old, and apparently APC stopped giving the battery replacement reminder after three years. Maybe I'll leave it another year since the Duracell SLAs don't seem to last very long.

I dug out my old desktop today, and the CPU fan was a little noisy when I first turned it on. It settled down, but maybe it's time to finally replace the stock cooler. I just need to find something that seems appropriate for an i5-8500. Liquid cooling and large tower coolers are a waste on a CPU like that, but I don't have any height limitations. Maybe I'll just get a 92mm tower cooler since they seem to be cheaper than down-blowing coolers.

Iv been picking up the Arctic 92mm tower coolers for $14-25 new on sale and have been very happy with the quietness. Absolutely overkill for the R5 2600 and R5 5600x they went on.

I need to switch VM software. VirtualBox randomly crashes with the same segfault (blaming different CPUs every time, but otherwise identical text in dmesg), but only when the VM is left idle (not the active window) for a long period of time. I can find people getting similar segfaults immediately after launching VirtualBox, but not randomly after starting a VM.

1[63282.770315] VirtualBox[52837]: segfault at 8 ip 00007feb73fd8b58 sp 00007ffff3f8b1c0 error 4 in libQt6Widgets.so.6.9.0[3d8b58,7feb73ce9000+4cb000] likely on CPU 1 (core 1, socket 0)
2[63282.770327] Code: 6c fe ff ff 66 0f 1f 44 00 00 ff 15 4a 42 35 00 e9 ff fe ff ff 0f 1f 44 00 00 ff 15 3a 42 35 00 eb c5 4c 89 e7 e8 88 fd ff ff <48> 8b 50 08 f3 0f 6f 82 38 01 00 00 4c 8b b2 48 01 00 00 66 48 0f
3[63350.417106] VirtualBoxVM[52912]: segfault at 8 ip 00007fa615dd8b58 sp 00007fffc9d28a90 error 4 in libQt6Widgets.so.6.9.0[3d8b58,7fa615ae9000+4cb000] likely on CPU 2 (core 2, socket 0)
4[63350.417119] Code: 6c fe ff ff 66 0f 1f 44 00 00 ff 15 4a 42 35 00 e9 ff fe ff ff 0f 1f 44 00 00 ff 15 3a 42 35 00 eb c5 4c 89 e7 e8 88 fd ff ff <48> 8b 50 08 f3 0f 6f 82 38 01 00 00 4c 8b b2 48 01 00 00 66 48 0f

I'm downloading virt-manager now.

Trying to troubleshoot a 1TB SATA HD.

It has a broken GPT table but a good MBR table (as per gparted).
It copies files at 100MB/s, but can fall down to 250KB/s, varying in between. One file can go at 100, but the next one starts fast and take 5 minutes for 50 megs to copy across.

No idea on how to solve this not having to format it.
It also has 624 bad sectors. Maybe it's just dying out.

I can read fine and use the files, but being all my saved ISOs over a decade I was moving stuff to another drive.

Well, it is what it is.

Edit: drive died. It crashed hard. Can fast format but i/o takes forever.

Using a brand new i3-12th config with an Intel Arc video card, basically has to upgrade various firmware so often.. I'm already at like the 5th BIOS for whatever instability and security patch, upgraded even the NVME disk firmware because it reported the wrong temp from the sensor, upgraded the video card drivers/firmware many times and still this last has the worst ever imagined cooling logic system with the fan rpm going up and down depending on the weather I suppose and making even a Geforce FX 5800 Ultra a less mind stressing video card... modern computing..

I've been thinking about making an HTPC out of some "not supported by Windows 11" hardware. Kodi looks limited (someone might want to stream something), so I might just run straight desktop Linux.

ODwilly wrote on 2025-05-27, 03:54:

Iv been picking up the Arctic 92mm tower coolers for $14-25 new on sale and have been very happy with the quietness. Absolutely overkill for the R5 2600 and R5 5600x they went on.

I looked at Arctic, and anything that supports sockets older than LGA1700 is listed as a discontinued product. There's still some remaining stock of the Freezer 7 X, so that's still an option.

Aside from that, the choices sold at places other than Amazon are lacking. Everything I've seen anyone try to buy off Amazon for the past year took a month to ship and arrived broken because it was thrown in an oversized box with no packaging material. Then everyone just accepts it and keeps giving them repeat business, which I don't understand. My closest Micro Center is in Denver, which means that I would have to drive down I-25 for an hour and a half.

Looks like I finally found both an internal and an external third-party batteries that work with my Thinkpad 25. After two internal batteries that didn't work. Let's see how long they last without bloating or failing.

I spent my weekend pulling bindweed.

I tried to get AviSynth+ working in Linux again. It appears to work, but now I have absolutely no idea where I'm supposed to place plugin (.avsi) files to get QTGMC working. VapourSynth doesn't work anymore because HAvsFunc hasn't been updated to handle changes in other VapourSynth components.

Also, my WiFi driver broke again in exactly the same way. What's going on? It would be easy to blame Qualcomm at this point (just like blaming Microsoft for problems in Windows and Office).

It's already a few days ago, but got another article out explaining certain aspects of my C# Ulid implementation:

Prioritizing Reliability When Milliseconds Aren't Enough

My WiFi seemed to be an Arch Linux problem. The last bug report I found said that the latest Qualcomm/Atheros firmware is incompatible with kernel version 6.15. The firmware package was changed again, and now it works. It's just in time because my USB WiFi dongle has become flaky under Linux. It still lasts longer before dropping the connection (while reporting that it's still connected) than it did in Windows, but it doesn't reconnect on its own. I have to unplug it and plug it back in.

I also tried running AviSynth+ in a Windows 11 VM on my Ryzen 7 9700X. Even with only two cores assigned to the VM, it's running almost twice as fast as my laptop (i7-9750H) and old desktop (i5-8500). This is going to be good once I get it running directly on Linux. I can run QTGMC single-threaded on the slow preset in realtime.

I also see that I have some power management problems. The CPU clock never seems to go below 3.0GHz, and I thought the room has been feeling a little warm since I built this thing.

Yesterday evening I put my laptop down on a stool whilst I went to get a drink. What I didn’t know is my offspring had left a half eaten chewit type sweet on the stool, but soon found out when the laptop started sticking to my legs. And naturally said sweet had gotten squished into the cooling vents…

Today I removed the back cover to clean out the vents only to find one of the battery cells beginning to swell.

So now I’m on the hunt for a replacement laptop. I was hoping to have gotten a couple more years out of it but c’est la vie. To be fair though it is an 8 year old skylake, and dual core 8gb just doesn’t quite cut it these days, especially for visual studio.

hornet1990 wrote on 2025-06-29, 00:54:

Today I removed the back cover to clean out the vents only to find one of the battery cells beginning to swell.

Seems to me like a bit of "luck". You found the bad cell before it leaked and caused damage.

Shouldn't be to hard to find a generic/compatible replacement cell.

Most laptops have removable batteries in enclosures (you wouldn't see them by taking the back off) - are you just talking
about a board-mounted cell to maintain the real time clock etc?
Those are easy!

DaveDDS wrote on 2025-06-29, 03:56:

Shouldn't be to hard to find a generic/compatible replacement cell.

It is the main battery and yeah they are available for around £35-40. I’m not sure how much I trust generic batteries or how “new” they really are given the age of the laptop, especially off a certain auction site.

Like I say the device is struggling a bit and isn’t 11 compatible so only has until the end of 10 LTSC support in two years anyway.

My daughter got a new case for her system. Transferred all the hardware over, lit it up for her. She's quite happy. 😀

Forgot to order a splitter cable for the RGB, that's why the CPU fan is dark, but it's on its way!

Updated some apps on the smartphone. I bought it primarily to be able to run the bank app since old Android 7 is no longer supported, but the old version still works on the old phone 5 months later. Can't migrate all its data to new one due to Android Keystore bullshit, will just wait 'till it breaks before I bother with re-activation process.

Still, not running out of RAM is nice, usually have 6 GB free, funny to think the phone has twice the RAM than my computer (6 GB vs 12 GB).

On somewhat related note, why is aurorastore.org on one of uBlock Origin's default lists now?? What is one supposed to use instead of Google Play Store?

Been wanting to play Hogwarts Legacy, I'm a huge Harry Potter fan, but I just now got around to picking it up. Steam Summer Sale + 75% discount = $15 well spent. 😜

While downloading the game, my old brain was still in awe of the fact I can download a 68GB game in under 12 minutes in 2025. Having had a computer at my fingertips since 1981, how far we've come will always amaze me.

I thought I had downloaded the offline installer for at least one Office version (either 2016 or 2019) and even made a forum post about the hoops I had to jump through to download it instead of signing up for an Office 365 subscription. Now I can't find the installer, so I'm waiting hours to download 4GB over DSL again.

A few days ago, I updated the BIOS on my main computer. I thought the OS was installing BIOS updates (a bad idea), but I actually had the oldest BIOS listed on MSI's website. Now the CPU runs at 600MHz at idle instead of 3.0GHz, but it doesn't run any cooler. I still need to get some kind of power meter because this thing seems to significantly heat the room up. Since we're on the path to set record high temperatures every single day for the fourth summer in a row, I need to minimize power consumption to let the air conditioner keep up. Even if I set the temperature to 80°F (26.7°C), it won't cycle off. Meanwhile, social media promotes conspiracy-level content that says that we're actually seeing global cooling while releasing PR statements about censoring that stuff.

As long as I'm on a rant, every new product less efficient than what it replaced, and only a few people seem to notice or care. You can reduce power limits on modern CPUs and GPUs and still get good performance (a small performance drop that's really only noticeable in benchmark scores) at much lower power consumption. I kind of remember hearing that an RTX 5090 is still faster than a 4090 at the same power limit. Even LED lighting uses more power than it used to because everyone switched to cheap linear regulators and started using fewer LEDs at higher current (purely because consumers complained about cost, not because of any "designed to fail" conspiracy).