Computers

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An update to my previous post, but dropping priority to “Normal” mode.

General system responsiveness is normal. Handbrake’s average frames per second county thingy now goes to ~8.1 on average with extremes being more like 7.7~9.3, but it pretty well hovers at 8.1.

By contrast, applications like writing this post in a browser are now normal performance. It’s even possible to watch previous encode without glitches and artifacts in the decode. But things like writing this post cause more dips in Handbrake’s frame rate.

Overall, it seems fair to say “High” -> “Above Normal” priority loses 5% if you want a nice round number instead of a range for the average. “High” -> “Normal” priority loses 15% by the same method.

Where “High” = cripples the desktop session, “Above Normal” = makes the desktop session feel a few hardware generations behind, and “Normal” = makes it just another process.

I guess that solves that, lol.

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A while back, I remember tuning the default priority in HandBrake’s preferences, back when I made the leap over to HEVC. Mainly because the encode times are so long on my old Core i5-3570K, and because I tend to leave such jobs running overnight.

Well, for curiosity sake I’ve decided to see how monkeying with this changes things a bit.

In my experience, nicing processes on my unix systems is rarely worth the bother. That is to say, a nice system like Linux this side of multi-core processors tends to remain pretty responsive, and most people I encounter screwing with niceness tend to be pissing down the wrong problems to start with. But NT is not unix, nor Linux, so who knows.

Looks like the default priority I had configured was “High”. Task Manager also shows a “Real Time” but that isn’t in the GUI.

Net result is Handbrake proceeds at a pace of roughly 8.9 ~ 9.5 frames per second. Which works out to being closer to 9 than 10. Set to high priority also means that while the encode is running my desktop session is virtually useless, as things like updating UI state takes a back seat to next Tuesday.

After the first item in my queue finished, and the next began: I lowered the priority to “Above Normal”. Impact on encode is roughly 8.9 ~ 8.3 frames per second on the average county thingy. So that’s a performance loss of about 3 ~ 6 percent, but my desktop session is actually usable. UI updates like the process table in task manager now update in something closer to real time than melting an Titanic sized iceberg with a zippo lighter, and general productivity is passable. Typing this post is about on par with running a web browser on an older computer. Small price to pay.

That roughly equates to the encode takes less than five minutes less, if I render my desktop useless until the task finishes. Provided current pace keeps. When the entire encode takes a bit more than an hour per episode, it’s kinda a meh perspective. Also a little nicer seeing my processor bouncing between ~70% and 99% in task manager instead of 97 ~ 99 %, lol.

I’m kind of reminded of XP, and my opinion that it could be very stable if you didn’t do nasty things (or need shit drivers) to it, but being user responsive when under heavy loads it was not. As beautifully as the NT desktop has evolved since then, I still don’t think melting a Windows box is as smart an idea as melting a Linux box, if you’ve really got to melt your system’s load.

When the third file starts encoding, I’ll probably try dropping the priority to normal and see what happens.

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First impression of Edge 80, based on Chromium:

“Holy fuck that’s fast”
“Is this powered by nitromethane or something?”

The main reason that I had converted my games machine back to Chrome was thanks to Edge being flaky release to release about my tab change / load habits, which could vary from smoother to an effect like watching the GUI thread block for background tab loads or something. Moving it back to Chrome was mostly to get performance that was consistent.

In the time that I used Edge on that machine, I was otherwise very happy with it as a browser. In fact if they had been more consistent, I probably would not have bothered to change things around.

With the move to a Chromium base, I doubt that there’s much reason to care anymore. The only reason that I’m actually left to care about is the bookmark and history syncs with my Debian machine, and I don’t really do that much with bookmarks anymore. Most interesting history bits can probably be solved by Google’s activity page, since doing anything in Chrome’s history usually rolls as “Gah, crap, I’ll just type a search term”, lol.

iPad Pro -> Laptop mode

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ProCase iPad Pro 11 Keyboard Case 2018 [Support Apple Pencil Charging], 360 Degree Rotation Swivel Cover Case with Wireless Keyboard for Apple iPad Pro 11 Inch 2018 Release -Black.

I finally broke down, and gave in, and giving this a shot. There’s the reality, that most of the time I find a tablet an ideal form factor. But it is also a reality that I am not always near a desk or table like surface when it would be effective to have an external keyboard.

Thus far this is looking good. Study enough that I’m not worried about tap-tapity-tap-taping it over, or gravity getting the sudden best of me. Big enough that I can get a decent typing experience, and light enough not to have to remove the tablet constantly. Although to be fair, ease of removing the tablet is one of my goals—most of the time I actually want my tablet to be a tablet, and the lighter the better.

Hitting https://10fastfingers.com/typing-test/english I was able to get a decent result after 10~15 minutes of putting around. 85 words per minute with 91.81% accuracy isn’t a bad first attempt. Close enough to my full typing speed, that it’s more a matter of accuracy and getting used to the keyboard, than it is the actual size.

Which is really nice: because that was my primary fear. See, keyboards for smaller devices have generally been a failure for me. A widescreen 10.1” works pretty well, and 11.6” is probably my idea of the perfect sized keyboard in terms of widescreen. For standard laptops of yore, I usually would vote for the ~12” range. A 7” or 8” tablet keyboard is so small that I am better off using two-thumbed touch screen typing, for both accuracy and speed. A 9.7” iPad size keyboard is too small, but at least approaches a size where I don’t feel like snapping the keyboard in half. Given that sordid history, I’m happy to find that the iPad Pro 11” in this dock, is pretty effective; much like how my old 10.1” systems were big enough to use as a full time keyboard but more error prone than a standard PC keyboard.

Yay, it doesn’t suck!

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Unsure what disturbs me more: that I don’t think I’ve ever used my journal’s rss/atom feeds to test a news reader before, or that I feel tempted to setup one, lol.

In the increasingly distant past, I made fair use of news readers, and eventually welcomed Google Reader with open arms: because it solved the problem of syncing state between my laptop and desktop. I used it a lot until I didn’t.

What primarily changed wasn’t the demise of Reader, so much as my migration to different sources. By the time Reader shutdown, I hadn’t actively used it in several years. Typically, I now consume such content from my tablet: not my laptop, or desktop. Likewise feeds from sites that aggregate stories related to my interests, like ye ol /. gradually got replaced with things like Flipboard, Google News, etc. They are what really killed off my use of news feeds.

Today, the sync problem means less because I don’t wanna look at my feeds on my PC things—I wanna lean back, and read the feeds off my tablet. As time has gone on, most temptations I get to add some feed to my list, usually takes the form of a blog somewhere that gets updated with interesting stuff once in a while. More often, generally geeky news or world affairs populate through other sources.

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The more time passes, the more I would like to see our future reflected in Corning’s old A Day Made of Glass videos.

It’s less something I view as necessary, so much as one I view as progress. We have all this frakking technology, why not use it?

There’s nothing wrong with having my tablet or a laminated recipe handy when I’m baking something, but wouldn’t it be nicer to just ask for my favourite cornbread recipe, and have it pop up on a surface near where I am preparing stuff?

One of the things that have changed over the past decade is how I view the future. Once upon a time, my vision likely had more in common with early Star Trek or Alien. After all, I was born in an era where having a VCR was pretty damned awesome sauce :P. Today, I rather think of the future looking more like The Next Generation or Prometheus–with interactive displays everywhere. Networking is already gone from pervasive to ubiquitous in my lifetime; I doubt most people in the first world can even get from their bed to their job without > 1 microchips being involved along the way. Today, many folks will pass that mark by the time their morning alarm chimes.

Something that I really do love about Corning’s old videos: is the attention to interface. See, I imagine by the time I’m old as heck, we’ll probably have stuff that looks more like the Enterprise-D: which had bloody interactive touch screens literally all over the place. But real software doesn’t tend to look like LCARS, the way real equipment tended to look like Kirk’s ship. As a UI, I think a lot of what we’ve seen on Star Trek is pretty bad from a getting real work done perspective, and that’s alright: it wasn’t made to be an interface that people used ever single day to do every single thing we will ever do with a computer. It was made to be an inspiring, and effective on screen graphic. Plus let’s be honest, the Okudas did a lot of really amazing work.

Cornings video on the other hand is riddled with software experiences that are so close to what we have now, that it makes it more plausible, more accessible. Much like how the physical controls of Jefferies’ Enterprise were very believable when my mother watched Star Trek back in the ’60s. By contrast, I look at LCARs, and I see a pictures of what could be. I doubt we would envision the future so easily without Okuda’s work, it’s just the software will be very different.

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Windows 10X: Everything you need to know about the foldable PC OS
https://flip.it/tk_HYE

I for one, am more interested in foldable devices like these than ones we see harped on in phone space.

For me, there’s only two points of interest in a foldable phone. Either one that “Pops” open into a tablet, around the size of a Nexus 7 or iPad Mini; or something very compact ala the old Motorola Razrs. That’s about it. I don’t really want or care about most of the other things that have come up in phones, nor about a seamless display.

Now when we move into the size of a tablet or laptop: my tune changes! A device that can be the size of one, or two iPads; a device that can be a massive tablet or a dual screen book, that’s something I could use. I’m less interested in a seamlessly folded one piece screen than I am a layout more like a notebook with a thin bezel at the spine. See, PC operating systems like NT have better handling of multiple displays than contemporaries like Android and iOS. It’s a faster leap to abusing two screens if your starting point is something like Windows 10 than Android.

I want to see productivity gains from having two related, but not unified displays. It’s less about having a 14” tablet that can fold in half, and more about how two monitors that can interact—touch screen monitors, running mature software.

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Microsoft to deploy ElectionGuard voting software for the first time tomorrow

I for one, see two good things about this.

Firstly that it has an open source base. Voting machines are not a problem domain where we should accept proprietary software from a contractor as good enough. Some form of open review and code auditing is a good thing, and obscurity is not security here: unless you’re the one hacking the ballet.

Second is that Microsoft, for all the crap we give them over Windows, is actually competent. They have both the experience and the suffering to be an ideal player. Microsoft as a company is more aware of security woe than most of us. Plus, did you catch the open source part?

I never actually thought I’d hear about something involving computers, and voting, and not find myself rolling my eyes, or cursing at stupidity.

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Microsoft shows off how containerized apps will work in Windows 10X

My interest in dual screen productivity to go, aside, I’m kind of interested to see where this goes. Most of the experiences I’ve had with containers in Linux, be out Docker, or building on top of chroot, have been a largely positive experience. Combine that container concept with the stability of the Win32 ABI, and there’s some viable good sides to this.

As software becomes increasingly long lived, the need to support software no one is ever going to recompile: keeps going up. Not to mention software that no one is ever going to port forward to more modern APIs and tool chains.