techsupport

Next semester is starting up soon, and one of the most useful things I've taken to doing is recording lectures. I doubt I'll ever be able to get the quality anywhere that would be considered 'good', but I have no idea what I'm doing outside of some trial and error, so I imagine I can probably get it quite a bit better with some optimizations.

Set up... recording with a laptop, and a Ugreen 15728 to capture both video and audio. Everything's done on OBS Studio. I sit at the front of the class with the webcam mounted to a little tripod and aimed at the projector screen with the end goal of basically having narrated powerpoint presentations.

The field of view of the webcam is way higher than I need it to be, so I zoom it in by fitting just the presentation to frame in OBS... which works, but probably 75% of its resolution potential is lost to just cropping it out. I don't think anything can be done about that, since the webcam doesn't have a physical zoom and I can't position it anywhere closer to the screen than I have previously. ...and the resolution as-is comes out... okay. They're powerpoints, and with the exception of the odd bit of unusually fine font, the final product is readable, in a 1995 jpeg kinda way.

I think the real room for improvement is managing the lighting settings - the issue is that the camera is still recording the bits that aren't actually being saved, so if the room lights are on and the ppt has a dark background, it gets 'corrected' to where the light font on the page also get kinda blacked out, I think because it's compensating for the bright surfaces beyond the edges of the presentation. Room lights off with a light background ppt, it all gets white-washed. Tweaking the gamma and... backlight? whitelight? in the device-specific settings I can usually get it to where the text is readable, but again, it kinda looks like shit.

Audio... I used to have some of those interview mics for the prof to wear, which were great quality for the... like two or three? times they actually decided to wear it. They were for some reason opposed to doing that, so they'd just set it on the podium and let it record from there... and then walk all over the front of the classroom, making audio quality all over the place. Tried using the mic on my gaming headset, with the entire headset perched next to the webcam, but it captured me breathing and typing more clearly than the prof; admitted defeat on audio quality and have since used the ones built into the webcam, and they do okay, but with that same kind of barely passable quality as the video.

I've seen some optimization guides, but pretty much all of them are geared toward streaming or web conferences, not lecture halls, and their tips only yielded slight improvements.

I don't really understand what any of the settings actually do, so I just fuck with the sliders or check the toggles and if it makes it better I keep it, if it doesn't I put it back... but I'm probably doing something in a stupid order or overlooking a whole category of settings. Literally just figuring this all out as I go - no prior experience with this or similar software.

...I know my recording conditions and equipment are all far from ideal, but I do share these recordings with my classmates, so if any of know any optimizations I can make with the tools on hand, please let me know!

Thanks all!

So last summer, our oven/mw (Whirlpool JQ280) broke (i'm thinking of overheating since it was very hot, but it may as well be electrical default). I tracked down the problem to the motherboard, which has indeed some weldings that burned. I bought a new one and the oven is working again.

I now have this defective motherboard, separated in two parts. The burned weldings are on the back part, and the front part still has a four-number display, a button and what i assume to be the main chip. I figured that i maybe could get only the front part and make some kind of clock with it.

The easy version would be to feed it 5V current, and if it's not broken it should work as if it was still in the oven, providing a time display. Is there anything dangerous or tricky about that ? I already built/modified a few electrical circuits (spotlights, guitars) but it was always with simple components used for their intended purpose, and i have close to 0 knowledge of electronics. I specifically have no idea if there might be danger of electrical shocks and if it's important to ground it (There are two circuits that are labeled GND on the connection between the two parts, and a yellow/green cable that was connected to the metallic structure of the oven going from the bottom of the back part).

The more complicated version would be to also reprogram the chip, out of curiosity. From Internet, i deduce that it takes some specific hardware to "flash/burn" the chip : either some box in which you put the chip, either some clip that you put around the chip. The problem here is that the chip of this motherboard seems to be 64pins : i think un-welding/re-welding it would be far beyond my welding skills. But on the other hand, it doesn't seem to exist clips adaptators for more than 16 pins. Can you confirm that reprogramming this chip would involve precision welding ?

Anyway, thanks in advance for your feedback, have a great day !

So I grabbed this up at the thrift store today, when I got it back home I have it a quick clean and tried powering on, but it didn't seem to respond.

Turns out it is turning on, but it is turning off nearly as quickly. I tested the volts on the power supply briefly and it shows up as ten on my multimeter (States it is 9.6 V).

Any help would be appreciated. I do have a video showing what is going wrong if needed.

What are your thoughts on using the Eee PC 1005PX for basic tasks today? It's from around 2010 and it's still working. Though all the Raspberry Pis have better specs... What OS would you install?

Specs:
Intel Atom® N450 1.66 GHz Processor cores: 1 25.6 cm (10.1") 1024 x 600 pixels 5:3 1 GB DDR2-SDRAM 250 GB Ethernet LAN Lithium-Ion (Li-Ion) 8.5 h

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/31229826

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/33569521

Does anyone know why the "render" of the data would be wrong? I changed it from the US format to the ISO 8601.

Edit: Adding some spaces in the equation helped.

I recently purchased a new NAS / Server and while I'm waiting for it to arrive I'm planning out my storage and RAID configurations.

I'ce mostly decided on using 5 20TB or 24TB drives in RAID z2 as my primary storage pool. I'll just use a 500GB nvme as a read cache. But I still have a gen 4 by 4 nvme slot available, and I'm considering buying a stupidly large nvme drive to put in it.

Problem is, I want some fault tolerance, so I'm wondering if I can just make a virtual drive in my primary pool and use a RAID mirror between the nvme and the virtual drive to make my secondary pool.

Would this work? Or would the performance overhead and instibility make this a fool's errand?

(Stock reference image because im terrible at taking pictures)

I got this dell laptop for 10 dollars at a thrift store and it powers on but i beeps 5 times at me before reaping the beeps. I oped up the laptop to give it a light clean but to notice this model has the storage and ram embedded into he board. I took a gamble with this laptop, im thinking the cmos batters need replacing but im unsure. What would you advise? This is a dell inspiration 11 3000 series from 2010.

If you need more info leave a comment.

Coworker is building one of the fancier surround sound setups, and mentioned we wished he could find the THX Deepnote in full surround sound. Seemed like a simple enough request, so I did some searching myself, and am only seeing YouTube videos like this one, or .mp3 files, both of which (afaik) only support two audio channels.

Even THX's own website just links to more YouTube videos.

I don't actually know jack about surround sound or audio formats - taking his word and the web articles I've stumbled across all at face value... am I just being stupid about this? Is there somewhere to download the full-quality thing?

My use case: I have an M3 MacBook, but a much more flexible and powerful gaming PC that I'd like to hook up to my MacBook to act as a display receiver with zero/low latency. I make use of the MacOS virtual desktops and would ideally want to be able to fullscreen an app that just sits there and will display the input when I turn on my PC.

Same thing under Linux: I'd like to connect a console to the gaming PC which then displays on MacOS. I don't play any competitive console games, so I'm not necessarily worried about a small amount of latency (<50ms).

Currently, I have both my Linux gaming PC and MacBook connected to the same monitor, but have to switch between the inputs on the monitor itself. I want to be able to be within MacOS/Linux and just flip on a display input and connect my peripherals to the other PC and use it seamlessly, for example, I'd connect my controller and boot into Steam Big-Screen and game. If I need to web search something, I can just use my trackpad to change virtual desktops, do something, then swap back.

Is there something like a lightweight OBS that will ONLY display the input once it's all set up? I want the app window to be literally the Menu Bar with Close/Maximize and nothing else so I can just fullscreen the app and never see anything but the input itself.

This morning I picked up my old smartphone with a notification saying not to remove SD card without ejecting.

Turns out it just died overnight.

I tried putting it into some other devices, and they also don't see anything. It did incorrectly show up as "127MB disk" on 2 different SD card readers when I sprayed it with liquid butane from air duster can, but that's just something like -1°C as far as I can find, so pretty lame.

Anyway, I can't find the backup anywhere, aside from a partial one from 2020. It's not worth spending money on, but perhaps some effort it would.

I seem to have all but 1 apks backed up on a DVD, a few photos from 2020, root/unroot zips and CWM recovery, and modified cacerts.bks with newer root certificates, so what's missing is Monte Gallery apk, and few unknown photos, and perhaps some app data.

Ideas?

Are CAT6 RJ45s supposed to be physically different from their CAT5 counterparts? I've bought some CAT6 RJ45s to match my cables and feel like I'm hallucinating because they don't fit into the Ethernet port. I've looked around in local tech stores, bought online and see all the CAT6 RJ45s are the same everywhere else, but when I use a CAT5 RJ45 it actually fits into the Ethernet port in literally anywhere. Crimping is suddenly exponentially harder with CAT6 RJ45s too for some reason too and after years of practicing crimping I feel like it's a skill issue at this point. I even searched up just to be sure but while answers say they're the same my eyes and fingers are feeling the difference. What's going on? What am I doing wrong? I'm now doubting whether CAT6 RJ45s are even supposed to fit in my Ethernet ports at home.

Update: The answer really was the crimper all along... until I get a CAT6 crimper I guess I'll just crimp harder for now - now everything fits, 1 year and 2000 jacks later, how embarrassing...

Thanks very much, everyone!

Post-update: So the cable worked at 3am... only to crap out at 10am - apparently both my test cables are bad in the same wires (3-6) because as the ISP service guy says, "it could've broken on the inside since the shielding's so soft". They rewired everything and now everything's fine, I guess...

Note the at least 3 literal errors on the pass screen...

Edit: Votes don't matter to me, but if you missed the three obvious errors on screen, you shouldn't be a technician. The problem was failed integrated GPU capacitors.

Are there options? Since the official Signal app cut support for SMS fallback it lost its one killer onboarding feature and now I have to balance who I'm messaging between Signal and Google messages. It was better when it was all in one app. Since it's open source I want to know if there are any forks available on Android.

I want to switch from my current gmail address so I thought it might be worth it to finally get a custom address for portability reasons

However I have no idea which service to choose Most of all, I really want to find a solution from EU, in particular that doesn’t involve any kind of USA companies

I get asked to check the box to prove I'm human multiple times a day, from opening an article on here, to going to cloudflare.com to see if they had advice on not getting hit with it all the time.

If I have a VPN active and/or I am using a secure browser I always tend to get it. Currently using PIA and Cromite. Is there anything short of just giving up privacy that can be used to verify and maybe hold like a token lease so I can maybe only do it once a day or once per VPN connection?

I'm planning to buy a new phone, and would like advice. I will probably get one of the following:

• Pixel 8a running GrapheneOS
• Pixel 8a running CalyxOS
• Fairphone 5 running CalyxOS

Either one of these phones will effectively be without warranty from the start. I can't file a warranty claim for a Fairphone 5, because they offer no warranty in my country. I can't file a warranty claim on a Pixel 8a, because I can't create a Google account.

Free open source software is important to me, and these are the free-est phone OSs I could find.

I'm planning to install Magisk to root the phone. I need adb root at a minimum. Will this prevent automatic updates?

Why do the GrapheneOS people say that rooting breaks the whole security model of Android? I can't understand this, because only a few specific apps are granted root access, or possibly only adb.

Reasons I need root access:

• I need a comprehensive backup system. Non-root backup systems skip files.
• I want to block connections using the hosts file.
• I want to study the filesystem to learn more about Android.
• I want to mess with apps' internal states.

Hi there, I've got these really odd issue where certain windows will cause random lines like the one in the screenshot appear on my screen. They will often flicker a bit and will dissapear if I hover my mouse over them. The lines will display what is beneath the window itself. These occour quite frequently and are frankly getting quite annoying to deal with.

Is this a known issue with KDE right now? It does not happen while using Gnome on the same machine + screen. If it matters I am running CachyOS.

If there is anythign I can do to fix this then I'd greatly appriciate some pointers!

Hi tech support! Please don't laugh at me for this, I'm old enough to be your mother and awful with tech.

When I search on insta it's started showing only one result at a time instead of a load of them but smaller. I get loads of lemmy memes from insta so it's making it far harder.

I googled and looked in settings and I can't see how to change it. Any ideas?

Whenever I press or hold the shift key the fans stop spinning properly and make a slight grinding sound.
It only happens with the one on the right side of my keyboard. The hashtag key does the same, but the grinding sound is louder. The laptop is a thinkpad e15, and it is (unfortunately) running windows.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.abnormalbeings.space/post/5580780

Just sat down to do my finances and some budget planning, and the settings are suddenly missing the aqBanking item:

Old view from a guide screenshot:

I checked the changelog and did a quick online search, which did not yield a clear result to me why that could be the case. (I did a text search on the changelog for "aq" and "online b", none of which gave me results. Online search results yielded tutorials for configuring aqBanking from how I was used to utilising it.)

aqbanking is installed, as per my package manager (I'm on Garuda Linux, so, Arch based), and everything worked before the update. Nothing that looks right appears in the plugin list of KMyMoney, and there does not seem to be a way to add more plugins from within that menu:

My accounts are still shown as mapped to something - as I get the option to "unmap account", but I cannot, as before the update, use the "update account" function to get a statement from my bank automatically, as before:

It's not critical at this point, but I really enjoyed using KMyMoney and was very well used to the workflow I had established with it - so any help would be appreciated (including, perhaps pointing something obvious out to me I may have missed).

Technically it is the same hardware as the international version.
Thanks in advance!

I'm not sure if this is an actual problem or just me misunderstanding how screens/resolutions work.

My issue is this; whenever I watch movies, series or just YouTube, quite often it's at this really small rectangular resolution with black boxes all around. This will also occur in video players such as MPV and VLC when watching latest season Andor for example. However, it does not happen on all videos - which is why im confused regarding this.

My screen is an Alienware 34 Curved QD-OLED Monitor - AW3423DWF.

Is there a way I can scale the resolution up?

Let me know if I can supply any additional details and thanks for any help!