What Have You Done Today - (Computer Version)

[sesselpupser]

I finally got the last piece of my new WFH/"WFH" setup, a 1m Club3D DisplayPort cable that's "definitely" capable of 144Hz at 1440p (without DSC, I mean, because my monitor doesn't support it) - at least I assume it is because the 2m Club3D cables I lost somewhere in the garage were perfect. It came after I finished work on Friday and I'm not due to WFH until Wednesday though so I won't know if it actually does do the job for a few days yet.

Anyway, I've gone from needing to have my laptops stacked on top of each other on the desk with several cables (USB to my screen with the keyboard and webcam plugged in, 3.5mm audio jack for my headset, USB-A for my mouse dongle/charging cable and other devices, USB-C for video and another USB-C for charging) going everywhere to having both laptops in a vertical stand and a USB-C dock with everything connected, so the OCD side of my brain is pretty pleased with that.

The "WFH" part is that the USB-C dock in question is the official Valve dock for the Steam Deck so I can in theory sling my Deck in there to play games with a keyboard and mouse, I really want one of 8BitDo's new Ultimate controllers with a dock and a Sinden lightgun to complete the look but I don't think I can disguise those as WFH peripherals like I could the Valve dock, which actually is a great dock for the money considering it comes with a power supply and does 4K at 60Hz!

 

[JohnBM01]

Do any of you set up a whole Bookmarks HTM/HTML file to use to visit websites? Well, I've done so since I used Netscape many moons ago. What I've done recently was re-model my Bookmarks files to better sort everything. Links were also updated for the bookmark files I made.

 

[JohnBM01]

Yesterday. my travel mouse died on me. I wanted to use it because it wasn't so erratic with my Chromebook. It was probably good I got a regular big mouse instead because I wouldn't think my wired onn. travel mouse would last only a few months. I actually can't really remember when I bought that travel mouse. So now, I am using my other big mouse I bought to use with my Chromebook.

 

[JohnBM01]

I am currently enjoying my new 4TB external hard drive! I am in the process of porting over as much of my material from my 1TB external drive as I can. I may use the 1TB external drive for my Chromebook once I get on enough material onto the new 4TB external hard drive. It will be a bit long, though, because I am using my USB 2.0 connection to the new drive. I do not have a USB 3 hub to use, so the process is going to be a bit slow until I get a USB 3 hub. The three extra terabytes will futureproof me for a few years.

 

[Brett]

I was gifted the bottom keyboard for Christmas. I helped build it late Christmas Day. I snapped most of the switches onto the PCB, but only soldered maybe a quarter of them into place. This one will probably be going with me to work.

 

[MSZ]

Spent many hours yesterday and this morning to figure out how to change my BIOS settings to meet the Win 11 requirements. I finally managed to make the boot drive work in GPT mode and turned TPS and secure boot on without wiping out any existing files.

 

[Grayfox]

Spent about 4hrs getting the blue gem in Crash 4.
Between the random game freezes due to me running it on linux and the natural difficulty of this game.

 

[JohnBM01]

I have my four terabyte external hard drive for storage, but I made some big gains getting space off of my main hard drive. I went from 2.8 GB left on my main hard drive to about 18.9 GB left on my main hard drive by deleting Steam. No worries- I operate the copy of Steam on my external hard drive. To avoid confusion, I linked to the external hard drive version of Steam I have. I basically deleted the Steam on my main hard drive manually because there was no uninstall program for it. So if you are strapped for space on your hard drives, look for some stuff you can port over or delete entirely.

 

[Darla Starch]

Finally pruned the excess images off my old Photobucket that I'm 95% sure won't break something somewhere on some message board but likely will inadvertently.

Me of the past, what the actual blue hell is wrong with you?

 

[sesselpupser]

Is there such a thing as a USB 2.5" drive enclosure that can take four (maybe five, I forget) SSDs and present them to the host as JBOD?

Oh, yeah, one that is neither absolutely awful or very expensive? I've seen both cheap ones with lots of negative reviews saying the thing died or never worked new out of the box or expensive NAS enclosures... I'm looking for something like a Drobo DAS but without the fancy RAID stuff because I specifically want to keep it JBOD - I want to finally remove the 2.5" SSDs out of my PC, make one a Windows 10 boot volume and use the others for games to dual boot my Steam Deck since I've got like 4TB just sitting there doing nothing as it's been almost a year since I powered that PC on.

 

[Sonygamer455]

Restored my iPod Classic today since it was giving me problems and tried twice to copy all my music back onto it and got a blue screen both times. Unfortunately, after that 2nd time, it corrupted my iTunes library.itl file, which I didn't know was the database for my library.

I have the damaged .itl file on hand and I've already looked up ways to fix it and haven't really had any luck. Most sites say to copy the most recent .itl file from the "Previous iTunes Libraries", but my most recent is from 2018 and it's been changed a lot since then, so that's a no go for me.

Unless I find a way to fix the damaged .itl file from before, I guess I'll just have to rebuild my entire library from the ground up. Fortunately, I keep my files on my computer pretty well organized, but it's going to take a while to go through it all. I really hate the dates of when I added them to my library are gone now because that's something I really like to keep track of. Oh well, at least now I know what file keeps up with all this and I know to back it up now.

 

[Prince.M5]

I changed all the switches on my mechanical keyboard from MMD Holy Panda to Akko Vintage White. Turned out I'm not really a heavy tactile kind of guy, so I reverted back to light linear switch. Aside, I replaced the thin foam in the keyboard base with a 2.5mm poron foam. Now my keyboard sounds creamy, just exactly what I wanted.

 

[Sonygamer455]

Never did figure out how to fix my itl file, so I just restored my iTunes library a few days ago, but then for some reason, I noticed there were 3 extra songs there that weren't there previously. This annoyed me because I didn't know what they were or if they should even be there, and since they were living rent-free in my head, I went through the process of looking through my entire library to weed them out and fortunately, I think I found them.

However, I think now I am going to go through and embed album art into every song I have because I am getting tired of iTunes assigning the wrong ones to some songs and my iPod Classic has been reacting weirdly to those that don't have it already embedded in the file. (which ironically is where this all started)

 

[JohnBM01]

VLC used to be a great program for me to listen to music on my Chromebook and even on my old Android TV boxes. Once a certain update to Chromebook happened, I started having issues with it, and so I didn't listen to too much music on my Chromebook. I even only played music through VLC Android when not browsing. Usually, the audio would skip if I tried browsing or reading YouTube comments to videos. It recently would stop trying to read my SD card into my Chromebook. After lots of frustration and disappointment, I retired/uninstalled VLC and only used Gallery to listen to music.

...until I recently discovered Musicolet. The program runs fine on my Chromebook. The only problems with this program are it not reading all of the folders on my SD card, nor is it able to play streaming media. That's okay. I usually use TuneIn Radio, iHeartRadio, and maybe even Spotify for streaming audio. So my faith in listening to audio media on my Chromebook has been restored.

 

[Sonygamer455]

Recently decided to completely reorganize all my iTunes purchases as well as that of my family members into folders for the sake of neatness. Previously, everything in the iTunes media folder was just structured as Artist/Album/[the actual content being here] and I didn't like this much, so I changed it to be a bit more organized. The structure now being [insert owner name here]/Genre/Artist/Album/[the actual content being here]. Upon learning more about Rockbox recently, I decided to do this because whenever I get my iPod up and running again, I intend to put literally everything that isn't country music on Rockbox. Having them a bit more organized will help when copying them over and plus I never really liked how the iTunes media folder was organized anyways. From this point forward, this is how I plan to keep it, even if I have to manually move every new purchase to the appropriate folder every single time.

 

[Darla Starch]

Finally pulled the trigger on downloading my Photobucket images and closing out the account.

They really expect me to fork out $6 a month to host 8 MB of images.

 

[sesselpupser]

I plugged my PC in for the first time since last March today, and boy did it remind me why I stopped using it in the first place. All I wanted to do was download some old backups I'd put on my Google Drive but I didn't get far before I just turned it off again. I'm so glad I've got Android and ChromeOS for my day to day and SteamOS for gaming because I absolutely can't stand Windows or MacOS if I'm not literally being paid to use them (which is just as well because my job is done about 50% on Windows and 50% on MacOS...)

 

[JohnBM01]

Let me update from my latest post. I think some Chromebook media programs expect you to take files from your Play Files folder. The only program I can use to listen to media outside of my Play Files folder on my Chromebook is the built-in Gallery program. So I went ahead and re-installed Musicolet. I may see if VLC works any better or if I need to end my attempts to try to make VLC work properly on my Chromebook again.

I kind of went on a fun run of listening to voices in Microsoft Edge. When I found out that Microsoft Edge has a bunch of Natural/Neural voices using for reading aloud, I started looking at various sites to have text read back to me. I had an idea to try to use some text-to-speech for some voice acting for some media projects in mind. The Microsoft Edge Natural Voices sound impressive. You can surely use these if you have Windows 11, but I'm still using Windows 10. At least these sounds are worlds better than the generic robotic voices supplemented by Microsoft.

 

[Tornado]

I swapped my NR200:

With an NR200P, which I then inverted so I could topmount the radiator.

This more or less required stepping down to an Arctic 240 from an Arctic 280 (I've seen people make it work on Reddit but sheesh it looked like a lot of work). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this still resulted in cooler temperatures than the 280 tightly wedged into the side of the case.



Then I made another, minor change:

I was extremely pleased with the size of the reference card vs the obscenely large 32cm monsters that most of the AIBs are (I was going to get a Pulse but they were constantly sold out).

 

[INEEDNAWZZZ]

I swapped my NR200:

With an NR200P, which I then inverted so I could topmount the radiator.

This more or less required stepping down to an Arctic 240 from an Arctic 280 (I've seen people make it work on Reddit but sheesh it looked like a lot of work). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this still resulted in cooler temperatures than the 280 tightly wedged into the side of the case.



Then I made another, minor change:

I was extremely pleased with the size of the reference card vs the obscenely large 32cm monsters that most of the AIBs are (I was going to get a Pulse but they were constantly sold out).

Completely off topic but is that a JVC X'Eye with a 32X attached I see lurking in the corner there? Both holy grail items for me but not something I could justify spending the money on these days (I did have a 32X a few years back, but had to part ways with it due to monetary requirements... I miss that thing).

 

[JohnBM01]

I been briefly making a website while also learning a newer language called Markdown. Markdown seems very simple for a lot of the website programming. I am using Markdown to work on a static website I hope to deploy on Github Pages. I been using several websites to learn Markdown syntax. For my program of choice, I am using Visual Studio Code for Markdown and for building the Github Pages I want to make the static website with.

 

[Sonygamer455]

So after getting my new external drive Friday, I spent literal days moving games and content relating to them from my other 2 drives and finished up just yesterday. (mostly anyhow) Now I have a majority of what I want on there and theirs only a few things I think I am missing. One game got corrupted in the process because my old flash drive apparently didn't like me browsing around while it was copying stuff from it, so I'll have to deal with that sometime.

Something I didn't realize is I had to change the folder permissions on one folder in order for one of my apps on Xbox Dev Mode to write to it, which threw me off a bit, but I got it. Decided to do everything else while I was at it just to avoid having to deal with this again in the future. Really nice being able to move all of my games onto one drive because now that's one less terabyte hogging my old portable HDD I had been using for years. And after all that, I only used about 1.3 terabytes on the drive and still have a ton of room for anything I get in the future. 😎

 

[TJ13]

So I am in this process.
Current system is

R5 3600
RTX 2060
32GB ram.

Just got the 4060 ti ordered.
Will combine that with a R7 5700X and 64GB ram (in time)

Now I know the backlash is not enough VRAM, or I can go bigger and brighter.
Well my monitor is only 1080p with a 144Hz rate, so I think it's an okay.

I thought of waiting for the 4060 but with the less core clock and less cuda made me do the ti now.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

A few days ago I checked Crystal Disk Info and noticed my storage hard drive had quite a few uncorrectable sectors so I decided to get a replacement hard drive drive along with an additional SSD to store games on. Currently in the progress of copying vital files over to the new hard drive

Now there's a total of 5.5 TB of storage in this bad boy

• 500 GB boot SSD (Western Digital SN750)
• 2 TB hard drive (Seagate Barracuda) (with uncorrectable sectors)
• 1 TB SSD (Western Digital SN770)
• 2 TB hard drive (Seagate Barracuda)

​

 

[TJ13]

Still running a 1060?
That's impressive.

I already know my 4060 ti when I get it will bottleneck my r5 3600

 

[ProjectWHaT]

Still running a 1060?
That's impressive.

I already know my 4060 ti when I get it will bottleneck my r5 3600

Yeah, it's honestly been fine for me so far. I don't play too many modern demanding games anymore. I'm still on a 1080p monitor too, so its been completely adequate for me. I do want to eventually upgrade to a newer card eventually, but that's not a priority for me right now

 

[Sonygamer455]

So yesterday I noticed my drive letter changed for my new HDD and one of my games was not working as intended anymore, so I tried to change the drive letter back to what it was before. This proved to be a fatal mistake on my part because not only did I get an error message upon doing this, but now it's no longer showing up in Windows Explorer and I can no longer view the contents on it and neither can my Xbox! Talked with a friend about it later that day and we tried various things to fix it, but to no avail. Despite him working on computers for 20+ years, he had never encountered anything quite like this before. Fortunately, everything appears to be on it still, just inaccessible and he thinks he knows one other thing to try and I sincerely hope it works.

Although I have a small amount of optimism and most of it can be obtained again, I am still pretty torn up about this because I had a lot on there that took literally 2 days to move and it's hard for me to remember all of it. And maybe I am overreacting, but I fear I may have to format it again just to use it and I do not look forward to going through all that again. Fingers crossed I won't, but right now I am not sure what to do at the moment. 😨

 

[Sonygamer455]

Well as of early this morning, I was able to move my stuff off my new external drive and format it. Curiously I could not do it with my laptop, but Xbox did and I later formatted it on PC just to be safe. And shortly after I started moving it all back and apart from reinstalling my Steam games, it's back in working order again! Really glad I got it fixed because I feared I was going to lose all my data, but fortunately that wasn't the case!

 

[TJ13]

Should be getting my 4060 ti on Tuesday.
Thinking I will get the 64 GB total ram now. As I have notice even at idle I am around 20% ram usage on a 32 GB setup. Some of those are just background stuff.

Then eventually get to the Ryzen 7 5700X

 

[Tired Tyres]

Updated and set up my new Mac Mini. It's my first Mac.