>>3298
not a pc builder person, but aren't these both just DACs? Seems like you'd be better off using that money to buy a better speaker instead, since I highly doubt you're going to notice any difference between the two.

>>3299
>aren't these both just DACs
I guess? I'm not really sure. Feature-wise, I think they're distinct from products marketed as a DAC. They're also inside of your computer, which I prefer.
>buy a better speaker
By speaker, do you mean audio listening devices in general? Sure I could do that, but I'd like to know all my options for improving things.

As I understand it essentially is a DAC though, just built into the pc. When you plug in a headphone into your headphone jack, something needs to convert your digital PCM signal into an analogue waveform and supply voltage to drive the speakers, and that is the soundcard. I'm sure people will be eager to sell you soundcards claiming it'll improve audio quality or whatever, but I have not yet seen a compelling argument as to why it would be beneficial; and until I do I'll lump it in the audiophile snake oil category.

Pretty much the only argument I can see for a fancy sound card is if you have some special speaker setup (high impedance, or need surround sound). Maybe there's some argument to be made about fancier soundcards having better EMF shielding or something, but I'm skeptical of that unless it can be shown quantitatively .

>do you mean audio listening devices in general
Well whatever you're going to plug into your computer to listen to the audio. And if you're using headphones supposedly most of the audiophiles use an external DAC anyway as opposed to an internal way (this does have some benefit in that it's portable so you can use the same setup with your phone/laptop/whatever).

>>3301
This guy seems pretty convinced. I know different sound cards can differ in fidelity at least.

edit: Looking at more reviews from all over, I'm starting to have doubts.
>The main value of this card is that between the e-mu chip and the alchemy drivers you can still get hardware 3D audio on modern systems. Testing only "does it sound good" is something you would worry about in the 90's. Today almost all consumer audio hardware is more or less perfect in that regard. This is a retro gaming card.

conversely...
>The 106db is one of the least important things about the card, yes it does have some importance (in this case, is means that the older 106db is going to usually sound a tad bit more warm/nice/fussy which is good when dealing with PC sound. But I have heard newer onboard sound with a much better DB, that sounded a lot worse!
>What happens with sound is that, when you clean it up so much be removing distortion, and still have bad/weak/small onboard parts, it just sounds like plastic, and that is okay as long as you play games and mostly only deal with sound effects, but for REAL music, you notice that it does not quite have that little bit of magic that draws you in.

Post edited on 9th Dec 2023, 1:37am

>This guy seems pretty convinced.
That guy seems to not know what he is talking about, because unless I'm completely out of the water then mentioning HDMI is a non-sequitur. If you're outputting HDMI, you're transferring digital audio and hence bypassing the sound card entirely. Well I suppose a soundcard could offer a dedicated hdmi jack or whatever, but the quality of the soundcard won't matter, it's just transferring digital data.

And I have not seen any technical argument from him as to why an EMU10K1 DSP is superior to whatever bargain bin chinesium probably comes built in by default. As I understand DACs are basically a solved problem; the signal processing theory behind them is well understood [1], so there really can't be much different between them besides maybe tweaks in the FIR parameters used.

Also looking at Amazon reviews is the worst way to buy something. At least look at the hydrogenaudio forums.

[1] https://www.ti.com/lit/pdf/slaa523

>>3303
I asked on an audiophile forum and got a somewhat in depth answer.
https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/69096-m2-to-pcie-to-add-a-sound-card-is-there-any-benefit-over-onboard-audio/

The main thing being
>Benefits of PCIe sound card over USB audio devices
>Lower latency : It contributes competitive gaming, lower sound latency means more wins. Sound monitoring feedback for musician requires 10ms or smaller latency. I read somewhere, on some special hardware/software combination, it is possible to achieve ～1ms latency with PCIe cards.
>Multichannel output for movie watching: It is related to #1, lower latency means less prone to exhibit lip sync problems. Many PCIe sound cards have 7.1ch analog out. But more serious movie fans use HDMI and dolby atmos AV amp rather than PCIe sound card

>Modern onboard sound is sometimes surprisingly good. Still, Its amplifier has lower damping factor than better quality external sound cards, it means external sound cards provide slightly tighter bass.
>If your motherboard audio implementation is not good and/or your IEM has high sensitivity, you may hear constant hiss noise on quiet passage or, beep/buzz noise when mouse moves. Better quality external sound card provides lower hiss.

I haven't noticed any hiss, but "tighter bass" sounds pretty good. At the very least, it probably wont hurt, and based on anecdotal evidence, it does sound better. So if I have an extra $200 bucks at some point, I'll get an AE-7, since cheaping out of this makes it more likely it'll be completely pointless.

How can I manually backup gave save data from android 8.0.0? When I connect it to my computer it doesn't show the game folders. I know there's some fuckery with hidden folders in android but how do i get to see them and transfer them to my pc?

>>3318
I believe to do this without root, only approach is via adb. See https://gist.github.com/AnatomicJC/e773dd55ae60ab0b2d6dd2351eb977c1.

Spammers have figured out they can circumvent url blacklists by using paste sites. This wouldn't be a problem if those had spam prevention, but for some reason, that isn't the norm. The only solution I can think of is creating a list of paste sites where this isn't a problem, and informing users about it, so they wont be surprised if one they try to use is blacklisted.

This still isn't optimal since many(most) users will probably ignore any such list.

edit: another solution could be getting the contents of linked-to sites and checking those for spam.

edit2: looking at it closer, this new spam links to pastes which don't have spam links either, but telegra dot ph and bitaps dot com addresses.

Post edited on 22nd Feb 2024, 12:36pm

>>3350
>many(most) users will probably ignore any such list.
If users don't read the rules, the content they were going to post probably wasn't very high quality anyway.

>>165
Apparently you can't visit tohno-chan if you have HTTPS-only enabled on your browser. You are generally left with the opt-in choice to ignore self-signed certs or lack thereof but not for tohno-chan. I had to disable the feature or I'd get redirected to a sort of 404 page from DreamHost. Do you know if there is a way to add an exception for this website while keeping HTTPS-only enabled?

>>3376
Oh nevermind, I did it. I had to manually add these exceptions to the list. Not visiting the HTTP version won't forcefully redirect me to the DreamHost HTTPS 404 page

My pc has been getting these insane slowdowns today. It started when I was in middle of playing some gba games on mgba. Task manager does not show anything that could account for this, only suspicious thing is this Host Service conected devices windows_abda6. I can't find anything about this abda6 windows service. This only has a very small amount of memory use and disk usage. What could be causing this?

>>3404
Do the slowdowns persist even when not using the emulator? What's your RAM and CPU usage? How old is your CPU and RAM?

Post edited on 5th May 2024, 1:10pm

>>3404
Windows 10 has a way of slowing down itself for lulz. Never used it since I figured it out. I'd reinstall it and few months later it wouldn't be just slow, it would take nearly half an hour just to boot and then plague me fucking slideshow. I've never used a worse OS ever in my life.

>>3406
Maybe it's because I use LTSC, but I haven't had this issue.

>>3406
>half an hour to boot
There's probably some sysinernals tools to debug this: discover autoruns, profile launch time, etc.

>>3405
I waited a bit before replying to see how the computer would perform on the following days. The slowdowns on that day persisted regardless on whether the emulator was running or not, but it was more noticeable with mgba running. Later on that day other processes related to win10, this time the usual suspects, started popping up on task manager. On the following everything returned to normal and I resumed my games. I think this may be another case of win10 fucking things up.
My CPU usage right now is around 3%-9%, sometimes higher, occasionally rising into around 18-20%. RAM usage right now is around 3,8 - 4gb out of 5,9.

>>3409
>RAM usage right now is around 3,8 - 4gb out of 5,9
Gotta say, that's a minuscule total amount. Good that it's fine now though.

>>3410
Linux can be easily brought down to 400-600mb of ram usage without sacrificing usability, so 6gb ram total is a lot, unless you use heavy virtual machines or heavy corporate software. That's not minuscule. It's crazy how people grew to think about ram. And it's stupid how modern software sometimes fucks you up so badly, that even with 16gb of ram you reach swap.

>>3408
Maybe, but instead of debugging bad software, it's more reasonable to try to avoid using it at all.

>>3409
It might have been swap usage then, which would explain the transient period of slowness. I like to log cpu and memory usage so that such transient issues are easy to diagnose.

>>3411
It's a lot in absolute terms with a lightweight OS, but for something modern and bloated like win10, 16GB is really the minimum. And then add on top of it modern browsers/frameworks which assume memory is endless.

I want to get an external HD. Which brand do you guys use and/or recommend? I looked onto Seagate first, but apparently there's some sketchy shit going on with them, with some reports saying it's the worst brand. Toshiba looks nice and at least where I live it seems much cheaper than Western Digital. But I heard the control board is directly built on the HDD itself and if the USB port develops any issues it's over.

>>3432
You can check backblaze drive stats: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2024/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/

Seagate generally seems to have higher failure rates, WDC and HGST seem to have the lower ones.

They say Seagate have SATA to USB adapter even on low volume disks. I really have no proof though. If it's true it means even is USB connector dies you can still save your data at no cost by shacking it. WD only have SATA to USB on high volumes and 3.5'' form factor. All this info is from reddit, though. I haven't bothered to seek a better confirmation, because at the time I didn't know how or where, honestly. I have a Seagate disk and it's been working OK for three years or so now. If you're up to more research, I'd say it's better to go with higher failure rates than buy a WD disk and then pay probably lots of money to restore data if USB fails. So I'd go with finding out which disks have SATA to USB inside, so you can shack and connect SATA directly if needed. I hope you understand what I'm saying

https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/37bday/has_anyone_upgraded_their_hdd_to_the_new_seagate/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/jkf5da/deciding_between_2tb_external_hdd/
Sadly, I don't know where else except reddit such info can be found. Anyway as far as I remember this is the kind of threads I used to decide to buy Seagate. I don't care about reliability I care about not having to pay. And my drive has served three years now. Even if it fails in a year or two it will have done its job just fine.

If anyone knows some niche forums beside reddit that deal with this kind of stuff you're welcome

>>3434
How often do USB connector failures occur though? I can't find any stats. That being said, HDD failures also are relatively rare even amongst the worst manufacturers like Seagate. Honestly probably the better option is to just buy more of the cheapest and then mirror your data (or RAID if you're fancy).

>>3436
Seagate disks are not exactly expensive, as for USB connector failure it depends on you. If you're careful, maybe it won't ever fail. Cable and connector quality are OK, at least as far as my disk is concerned.

Oh yes nearly forgot. You may want to keep this in mind
https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SAT-with-UAS-Linux

I moved a linux install from a smaller drive to a larger one with Clonezilla. The size of the partitions stayed the same, so the drive has a bunch of free space, but it isn't adjacent to the primary partition. I want to add all the free space to it without deleting any partitions. Using 'print free' in parted gives me this:

Model: ATA CT1000MX500SSD1 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags: Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1024B 1049kB 1048kB Free Space 1 1049kB 255GB 255GB primary ext4 boot 255GB 255GB 1048kB Free Space 2 255GB 256GB 1023MB extended 5 255GB 256GB 1023MB logical linux-swap(v1) swap 256GB 1000GB 744GB Free Space

What do?

There is no way to do it without deleting partitions and recreating them with different sizes. Instead of using clonezilla repartition manually and use rsync -aAXUHS to copy your files.

>>3521
I'm not experienced with manual partitioning and am having a hard time getting swap and all of that bullshit working. Isn't there an easier, more automated way?

>>3520
>>3522
Going back to Clonezilla, this time using the r and k1 parameters, did the trick.

My asus k45a wont work anymore. A few days ago I did some browsing and left it on while I lay in bed and from the corner of mu eye i saw a blue screen and it went off. When i try turning it on it will go as far as to boot the windows logo but then it will be stuck loading or on a black screen. I tried advanced options but when i click afvanced options or restore pc it will freeze. I can enter the bios. Im posting from an cellphone . Is this a problem in the hdd? What can i do to solve it?

>>3524
If you can turn it on, and the bios works, it's probably your HDD. I would get a 2.5 SATA SSD and a SATA to USB adapter. Replace the HDD with the SSD, reinstall your OS to it, and use the adapter to check the HDD for damage and recover data from it if possible.

There's software for that, like CrystalDiskInfo on windows
https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

If you don't have a USB from which you can install an OS, I guess you could use this app on your phone to make one. It doesn't seem to support Windows ISOs, but you could install Linux, then use balenEtcher in Linux to make a Windows install media.
https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.depau.etchdroid/

Anything from the high-end SATA box in this would be good. You don't want to cheap out on SSDs. I've personally bought the Crucial MX500, so I can vouch for it.
https://ssd.borecraft.com/SSD_Buying_Guide.png

Post edited on 28th Nov 2024, 10:00am

How do Tohnos manage having multiple computers, that they actively use? For the longest time I used my desktop for virtually anything and used my laptop just for watching a movie or anime in the evening or read some PDF I downloaded, but never actually used it for anything else. This changed and I use my laptop far more frequently than my desktop, simply out of convenience sake. Now I have the problem, that I'm basically always on my laptop, but have all my files on my desktop. I've contemplated using something like a locally hosted Nextcloud instance, or an FTP server, or a network file system, but I'm not sure what to choose. What do you guys use for this issue? I assume the simplest solution would be do get a docking station for my laptop and basically use my laptop as a laptop and as a desktop, but that's not ideal either as a desktop has performance and storage capacity perks, that are hardly possible to imitate with a laptop, but I digress.

ideally nfs but like all truly unix software it is a barely usable piece of shit that you end up having to integrate with kerberos which is another bizarre piece of shit, so in the end you probably just want a samba share. don't take me wrong, samba is also a piece of shit but at least you won't spend eternity contemplating some stupid autistic design, because it just works. or fuck them all and use sshfs. i have been researching this topic regularly for years and my conclusion is that all network shares fucking suck and there isn't any brainfuck-less ways to share data between devices, not even when they run the same OS family

>>3538
>ike all truly unix software it is a barely usable piece of shit that you end up having to integrate with kerberos which is another bizarre piece of shit, so in the end you probably just want a samba share
Does Windows or MacOS have a better solution? Also, this might be worth exploring:
https://alexdelorenzo.dev/linux/2020/01/28/nfs-over-wireguard

Post edited on 2nd Dec 2024, 1:44pm

>>3539
SMB is what windows had. Macos used to have afp but they removed it. Both kind of suck and any slight misconfiguration can catastrophically degrade speeds.

>>3539
integrating wireguard with my current vpn that might occasionally become two vpns or even more, is all the more pain in the ass. i could do it with openvpn, but did you ever count the amount of hours it takes to get openvpn running on both sides and doing exactly what you want? even though i have some experience and, on the surface, know how how openvpn works, i still wouldn't like to touch it's configuration ever in my life. wireguard is 100 times more pain in the ass, because it takes retarded approach to routing, wg-quick is dumbass schizo piece of horrible shit that can't be integrated literally in any existing setup, so you rewrite the whole configuration framework yourself and in the end it still ends up fucking you in some subtle ways, especially with routing. and oh yeah let's also mention that there isn't any fucking documentation even on how to properly configure the fucking firewall, so you don't even know what half of the manual is talking about, and just a kind mention that iproute2 man pages fucking suck as well. so yea go get a degree and a few certificates in networking before you're entitled to make your text editor work. fuck it

So basically, I've been subscribed to a physical Linux magazine up until a few days ago and probably have dozens of those laying around in my room. I picked it up at a gas station and at the time it seemed interesting, so I subscribed. However, it quickly turned out that it's not the 90s anymore and everything this magazine was, was a collection of news articles about Linux and a DVD with Linux and Windows software, which you could just as easily download or look up on the internet. Time has gone on, but the subscription stayed and since the fee was minimal, it wasn't too bothersome. Eventually I didn't want it anymore and unsubscribed to it a few days ago.

What interesting things can you do with dozens of paperbacks of a magazine with old Linux news and DVDs having old software on them? Should I leave them untouched and maybe wait until they gain some value? I thought about archiving them online, but 1) this is copyright infringement 2) nobody cares anyway, when you can just download it. As of now, they aren't particularly old (around 2018-2024), so nothing worth selling. The software on the DVD are popular distributions, utilities like 7zip, Unetbootin and Putty. Any ideas?

>>3544
you could turn the CD's into artistic wall decaration, e.g. spraypaint them and lay them out in interesting patterns.

Unless there are specific important interviews or original articles/programs in the magazine that might become historically important for one reason or another, I doubt you'd be able to sell them for much. But check eBay and similar sites for older Linux magazines, I might be wrong.

>>3432
I use toolless drive carriers for NVMe drives, HDDs are big and sensitive to shocks so I don't like them for external drives. The cons of this approach is that NVMe drives are relatively expensive and the interconnect is slow unless you're willing to spend a lot. They're small, light, durable, and are easy to pop out of the enclosure and into another PC. For example, when I bought a new laptop I just wrote the whole image to the new drive I wanted to use, popped it out of the case, and into the laptop. I like this workflow a lot better than trying to do a netinstall or copying a config or something.
>>3537
I use NFS for this, but if you're actively editing common files on both computers, this is an unsolved issue in my opinion. I found NFS easy to setup and configure (less than 10 minutes total) and I replaced an sshfs setup with it. I had permissions issues with sshfs and NFS is so far much more of a seamless experience. There are applications which are supposed to seamlessly enable sharing files e.g. syncthing, which I hated, file management control like git or git-annex that lets you manually sync files, and applications which are supposed to make it easy to seamlessly send files, like magic wormhole. I had problems with all of these. They are of course also more basic linux programs like rsync. In my case I have a third computer (server) with all my files that is accessed by both my desktop and my laptop, which mount it over NFS. It's not good to have the same file, e.g. a text file, being edited in two places though, this is what causes conflicts. For files that are only read, e.g. anime, manga, videogames, it works great.

How do you manage following threads? RSS and a thread watcher like 4chanx includes work pretty well, but is there a functional universal "webpage has updated" checker? I end up not posting on interesting websites that I simply forget to check.

>>3566
>less than 10 minutes total
Literally how? NFS lacks basic common sense features and the only way to make it useful is kerberos. You can't even map UIDs by default. I looked at NFS from all sides and no matter how hard I try it's just pure scam. Unless you know how to configure the damn kerberos.

>>3568
Well, I don't know what kerberos is. I have a big zpool on another computer. There's a systemd service called nfs-server that keeps NFS running, and it exposes the drives to the network. There's a configuration file you need to write, then you just mount the drives on your other computers with mount and they work as if they were local. It was all pretty seamless.

>>3569
>what is kerberos
A gatekeeper

>>3570
>A gatekeeper
And a damn good one
>>3569
>systemd
I'm sorry but no

>>3571
You can use whatever service manager you want. I prefer and mostly use shepherd anyway, but this server is still running debian. I don't feel like I need kerberos, I can mount the filesystem anywhere on my LAN and I already have a VPN that I use to access all the other services I host. I didn't find any of this particularly hard. If you're struggling a lot with setting things like this up I'd consider switching to a declarative configuration system like Nix or Guix. It's much easier to copy configurations, and it's much easier to help people with their configuration because it doesn't rely on them remember whatever they tried to copypaste from stackoverflow over the last three days.

>>3572
Not him but somehow I don't think switching to guix is going to make anything easier...

Besides SSHFS, how about one of these?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace#Remote/distributed_file_system_clients

rclone with nextcloud sounds interesting.