Computers

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Over the years I have uttered many words at the software I deal with, mostly profanity.

I’m pretty sure the loving to hateful words ratio between me and ALSA is about 0 : 1,000,000. Or in short if I ever say “I effing love ALSA”, it’s a pretty safe bet that I’ve been replaced by a bodysnatcher or something.

Generally I have used ALSA directly as much as possible over the years because at the end of the road on Linux systems you will always, sadly, end up with that. But I also find that configuring and living with it tends to be a bitch on wheels of fire the more complicated people make things. Let’s say that ALSA is something I suffer not something I love.

Well, recently I’ve had a bit of a pain in my arse dealing with ALSA, GStreamer, and trying to do audio passthrough. And I’ve learned that I really do like PulseAudio.

mpv is able to do passthrough but that doesn’t suit my purposes, or let’s just say scripting that ain’t my real objective.

$ mpv –aid={track #} –audio-device=alsa/{device} –audio-channels=5.1 {my file with fancy audios}

GStreamer is smart enough to passthrough audio if you send the bits to the sink. Most elements that manipulate audio expect audio/x-raw data like you would get out of your audio decoder. But the sinks can also take other formats–much like my surround system knows how to decode pretty much anything.

What I ran into was alsasink never reporting any of the compressed formats my graphics card supports, after GStreamer tries to decipher what the device is capable of.

Enter PulseAudio!

$ gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=”{my file}” ! queue ! {demuxer} ! audio/x-ac3 ! queue ! parsebin ! pulsesink

Where I had no luck getting this to work with alsasink it was easy as pie with pulsesink.

Deciphering the documentation to configure the default profile for my card via pactl and add the formats I want to passthrough to my surround sound system was a snap that only took 15~20 minutes. Figuring out the device names used for pulsesink based on pactl list was a bit tricker. I spent 2~3 days screwing with ALSA before that.

For bonus points: I could test ahead of time using my laptop’s HDMI port and pavucontrol to configure the outputs, letting me know if this would be possible at all before I started learning how to do it with pactl.

I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the guy who wrote PA, or that I truly gave a flying hoot when the Linux desktop world went to PA and we all threw out things like aRts and ESD. My only horse in that race was I wanted audio to work in applications like mplayer and firefox without having to screw around.

In retrospect: I should have just learned how to use PulseAudio a long fucking time ago instead of dicking with /etc/asound.conf and amixer and all that BS. Because those aspects of PA really do suck less in my honest experience.

And then I find myself remembering FreeBSD and its OSS, in which the only issue I ever really had with audio was whether or not there was an suitable driver for my card, lol.

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Cheapskate Handy repurposing of old stuff: turning my multimedia dock into a spare tablet stand.

After writing this the other day, I was a bit tempted to get another stand similar to the Anker I use in my living room or just transition one of my Breffo Spider Podiums to my desk.

Rooting around in the closet to see if I had any spare Spider podiums to use as a headphone stand, I foumd my old Samsung multimedia dock. Sadly it became a paper weight when I upgraded from the Tab S2 to the Tab S3, much as I traded external monitor support for S-Pen capability when I did. Without Samsung’s old 11-pin MHL/MicroUSB and driver support the ports are basically useless. Shame because it was a great one cable and done docking station when I used my tablet as my workstation.

But the little fellow still remains physically useful as a stand since my Tab S3 still fits in the slot. Thus one problem solved by recycling, and not having to spend a dime; this makes me happy even if the poor dock is no longer able to fulfil its original purpose. It is still useful for more than keeping makkuro kurosuke from settling in /dev/closet.

It also puts my tablet at a fairly convenient angle, hehe.

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Wccftech: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER Benchmark Leaks Out, Almost Titan V Tier Performance For $699 US.

This reminds me: my hand me down GTX 780 fell into that price range when it was young, back in ’13. Far from New the old ‘780 still kicks more than a little ass at plowing through games. I’m also inclined to believe most of my issues with FVXV’s performance are due to my processor not aging equally as well, since the stutters revolved around my Core i5 spiking to 100% usage.

And that’s exactly why you would pay such a fortune for a top dog GPU: because you won’t have to buy a new one for quite a freaking while. 2019 – 2013 = 6 years and only now showing signs of age.

Personally, I’m more interested in what follows the GTX 16 / RTX 20 thing. But cards at that level have very long service lives to match the ludicrous price tags. Pretty much regardless of generation. By the time such cards age out it is because the mid ranged cards have finally caught up quite a few years later or because of more Direct 3D and driver level advancements leaving you in the dust; which isn’t so often.

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I wonder what’s technically worse: when you’re sitting at your desk and using your tablet/pen to finish something. Or when you’re still sitting at your desk and consider transitioning your keyboard over to aforementioned tablet rather than switching to a PC.

An odd artifact of my small desk space is how well it meshes with my tablet.

The mousepad dominates most of the working surface; the Razer Goliathus because I wanted a large pad and the SteelSeries Rival because I got tired of how fast Logic MX rats wore out^. Years ago, I had bought my K810 as a way of sharing a keyboard between my tablet, laptop, and desktop at work; these days it just serves as my desktop keyboard. Underneath the headphones and xbox controller off to the left is a USB keyboard of similar size and layout.

This lack of space is what lead me to such a small keyboard–full size but with the “Right” matter, the numpad and navigation clusters removed. Basically a few hairs larger than the smallest you can make a physical keyboard without me calling it useless.

Conveniently my tablet fits in much the same spot. Since swapping the wired keyboard for the Bluetooth one, I find it much less hassle to simple push my keyboard aside and put my tablet in the same spot; whichever I am using at the time usually takes center stage and the displaced ends up on the side-zone or next to the charging cable.

I think it is quite possible that if I had a dandy stand in here like I do on my living room end table, I’d probably would have dropped my tablet in it and toggled my keyboard over to my tablet; rather than writing this on my desktop. Yes, I’m kind of lazy 🙄.

^ Two left mouse buttons in 10-15 years is too much 😜. I loved both my Logitech MX-series laser mice but wanted something with claims of “Many damned clicks” before it dies.

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Ctrl blog: Investigating why my 7-year old Windows 10 laptop became unbearably slow.

While some might be quick to harp on the DRM aspect and tune out the rest, or ditto the unjoy that can be Windows, I’m kind of reminded of the times when DEP and the rise of dual core processors. New things equal new points of failures.
I don’t recall encountering many problems when those features came to NT but whenever I did it usually involved I video game doing squirrelly things. Because running old, poorly and hastely written software on newer operating systems and hardware sometimes bite you in the arse.
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AppleInsider: I replaced my Mac with my iPad Pro for a week — here’s how it went.

Kudos for not publicly blaming the app developer when you’re test driving a beta version of the operating system and relatively young features.

The concept that things aren’t difficult but more time consuming, and the feeling of jumping between apps is typical of pushing modern mobile-centric operating systems harder than most. Or at least that’s my opinion having been a tablet but since Android Gingerbread and Honeycomb.

What I think people should really ask themselves are three things:

  1. Do I really do that often?
  2. Is what I do most, smooth?
  3. Can I do this here?

When you do something very often it becomes more important how smooth the process is.

If you spend a lot of time shuffling data between applications, paradigms like: Android intents (sharing), drag & drop, and the almighty Unix pipe become more important IMHO. Spending time juggling file open and save as dialogs; etc can become a drag pretty rapidly when what you’re really trying to do is manipulate and share data instead of leaving a trail of temporary files. I get happier when I can quickly move my data between applications without having to go out of my way to make the transfer happen.

Just because a method of operation or workflow is different doesn’t mean it sucks or that it is great.

What’s the quality difference between one tap and two menus deep? How often you do it! We find ourselves doing certain tasks more frequently than others. You will evaluate a function in a spreadsheet cell far more often than you will lookup what function performs any given task. As a side effect it’s effective to be able to smoothly insert common functions with a little typing; a menu to find a specific type of function instead of Googling it is a plus. Having to walk through several menus and a multi page wizard as the only way to input data would just be deranged and painful for an application like a spreadsheet. Software for getting real work done will care more about the tasks you do all the damn time than software just trying to do the task once in a blue moon.

But here’s the one that tends to be most cut and dry: can you really do this? Yes, odds are you can or you will give up pretty quickly. Just because you can run a word processor on your phone doesn’t mean you should write that five hundred page novel on your phone. Just because it’s backed up to the cloud doesn’t mean you won’t cry when you drop your phone in the toilet either 😜.

Software takes time to mature and different people (and problem domains) have different ways of working. There is a big gap between what you do constantly and what you do occasionally, and that tends to be where it goes south.

Ahh, now I’m rambling 😂.

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Testing a pair of headphones, what is the first thing I fire off? P!nk’s Funhouse!

So far for a cheap pair of headphones the Mpow H7 Plus definitely exceed my ears requirements but I wouldn’t recommend it for anything base heavy. Sometimes headphones are more convenient than my antique 2.1 system, which usually means having to jack my Xbox headset into its AUX IN or Centauri’s motherboard.

Ordinarily, I think I’d just get a second pair of AF32s as I’ve been very happy with my pair from back in ’13. But the prices on the current gen are a bit too steep for my blood. Unlike the pair I use with my tablet there isn’t a 50% off deal.

But that’s where in lays the rub. When I want to use headphones it’s a bother to screw with things. When you’re turned into a dog chair sometimes having a wire between your desk and head isn’t convenient and neither is repairing devices often. Being cheap and lazy has its side effects.

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Prime Day Deal on Fire TV Stick 4K

So $25 for the 4K stick and $15 for the 1080p sick? Well I’m likely sold.

A while back I was debating if I wanted to retire my first generation (2014 iirc) Fire TV box with one of the modern iterations of the Fire TV Stick just for the upgraded codec support.

Pretty much my old first generation box and Sandy Ivy Bridge desktop are the last Gizmos I use that lacks H.265 support. My desktop, well it doesn’t spend its days playing video and can probably brute force anything 1080p at this point.

The only reasons to hang on to my first generation box is it still works damned great and the Ethernet port happens to be a short trip to my network. That and the dollars per year of usage must be ludicrously awesome by now, lol.

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Some thoughts on long term planning,

At this point the kind of off machine that fits my “I’m done, that’s close enough” form adds up to about $1,500 if you shop off the rack. But that means 2 kilos of luggable with a GTX1650, a Thunderbolt expansion port and non soldered memory for its upgrade path. Something less awesome could be found quite a bit cheaper if combined with +$300 worth of eGPU dock but that usually means giving up something like the ability to reuse my ginormous SSD or having to suffer 8 GB of soldered on system memory, and aforementioned eGPU dock would be a prerequisite for handling games, as far as cheaper notebooks go.

Frugality makes me look at future upgrades for my desktop.Where good old Centauri principally hits her limits are games like Final Fantasy 15 and Resident Evil 7. Games that either hit harder than normal or that you wish had more fine tuning put into them, lol.

A trend that will only continue over the next 5 years of her extended life–I have already exceeded the retirement age I had designed Centauri for, and am tempted to see just how far she keeps on truckin’. Because while showing the signs of age: Centauri has been a superb machine.

Replacing the Core i5-3570K with a Core i7-3770K would cost about $200 and deliver a major CPU bump. On the downside this would mean a really nice processor goes to /dev/closet. But the crunch boost would probably last another lustrum quite easily.

A modern Core i5-9400F would deliver comparable enough crunch power for about the same costs when factoring in the motherboard replacement it would need. But then it’s + $75~$100 more for making the generational leap in memory. On a machine originally built for 8 GB and retrofitted to 12 GB when her older sister retired; needless to say forward motion is 16. And that would tally about $300 between processor, motherboard, and memory.

On the flipside one can find pretty decent deals on the GTX 1660 Ti and original RTX 2060 for between $300 and $400. Both solve one of the limits of my antique GTX 780 which is being limited to only 3 GB of graphics memory.

While my general suspicion for RE7’s performance issues vs RE2 running quite smooth has been expecting my processor to be the bottleneck, in FFXV I am running virtually full of VRAM all the time. So much so that I wonder if many of the performance dings align with the allocator trying to decide which textures to flush and which to keep. or if the game was designed to maximize usage. Performance drops often coincide with with the games FPS overlay showing graphics memory usage at holy crap full levels, relative to the near constantly full levels.

Hmm, think I’ll screw around with FFXV’s benchmarking program.

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Forbes: Shock Samsung Confession Fuels Galaxy Note Cancellation Fears.

Another part of why I believe more in tablets then over sized phones: you’ve got more room to spare. Not to mention a bigger screen and sizes that trigger tablet UI layouts in applications.

But in the flip side tablets don’t really do phone calls that well enough you’re doing speakerphone or headsets. You do use your expensive phone for answering phone calls, right? 😉

Also the overall usage gap between my phone and tablet is such that you don’t wanna know how many incoming calls I take on my tablet instead of my phone; be it in the next room or in my pocket.