[Rant] Tech Whine Like a baby thread

I think the GTX 750 Ti is probably my option, but unfortunately I have a few other big-ticket items I'm going to have to worry about over the next few months before I could even consider a graphics card.

That, of course, means BeamNG.drive is UselessWare on my Steam account until then.
 
I think the GTX 750 Ti is probably my option, but unfortunately I have a few other big-ticket items I'm going to have to worry about over the next few months
Wow, you weren't kidding.

ygbkm_ti.png


...and that's not even for the Ti version. But hey, at least the shipping is free.

--Patrick
 
Yeah, I know it's just another example of the auto-listing Amazon bots getting a little too price-happy (as often happens), but COME ON that's ridiculous to the point of "SOME sort of limiter should've kicked in by now!"

--Patrick
 
Yeah, I know it's just another example of the auto-listing Amazon bots getting a little too price-happy (as often happens), but COME ON that's ridiculous to the point of "SOME sort of limiter should've kicked in by now!"

--Patrick
You'd think. But you'd be wrong. :D

I once took one of my books offline for 24 hours because I fixed a few typos, an it takes about that long for amazon's systems to review and get everything back online.

By the time the book came back online, the automated bots worked themselves up to a frenzy and one of them was offering the paperback version of my book for $16,000
 

GasBandit

Staff member
The latest update to google hangouts removed the function to set notification sounds individually by conversation.

I know it's pointless to gripe at them since they're shutting down Hangouts anyway in october, but I'm mystified as to why they would go through the effort to remove features piecemeal between now and then.
 
The latest update to google hangouts removed the function to set notification sounds individually by conversation.

I know it's pointless to gripe at them since they're shutting down Hangouts anyway in october, but I'm mystified as to why they would go through the effort to remove features piecemeal between now and then.
They aren't getting rid of it as much as they are rebranding it for the millionth time.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
They aren't getting rid of it as much as they are rebranding it for the millionth time.
Right now the "rebranded" version is only available to gsuite users (paid business clients)... so until we hear otherwise, it's as good as going away.

I'm still pissed they decided to put extra effort into removing a feature.
 
Supposed to have gotten a new rack in this week so we could setup my location as a backup data recovery site, but the delivery company says that I told them to deliver it today. I certainly said no such thing and never even spoke to them about delivery. I did notice my name in nice big letters on the side, so I'm thinking they had a snafu and used my name to cover their asses. I think this because they said that they had talked to "Matthew" when anyone who speaks to me for 3 seconds knows I prefer to be called Matt.

I'm kinda pissed off about this, but I'm also not high enough up the ladder to really complain about it.
 
Welp, looks like my PC is borked. For a while now I've had a recurring issue where on the login screen Windows is registering phantom keypresses like a key is being held down. Naturally this makes it impossible to type in my password & log on.

It's not a problem with the actual board itself as I have tried with different keyboards & it makes no difference. I had a workaround for a while in that if I swapped my keyboard into a different usb port before switching my PC on the problem didn't occur, so I just switched between 2 ports. Now that doesn't work anymore.

Pressing every key on the board to try & force Windows to detect a key release doesn't work. Booting up with no keyboard attached doesn't work - it still detects the keypresses. Booting into safe mode doesn't fix it. Wiping & reinstalling windows? Doesn't. Fucking. Fix it.

I give up. I have no idea what to try next & I'm exhausted. I'm going to bed. Maybe tomorrow will bring some new ideas.
 
If you have no keyboard installed, you shouldn't have keypresses.
Disconnect all peripherals, ALL OF THEM (check every USB and PS/2 port! for dongles, etc), even your Internet connection, no wifi, no Bluetooth, nothing, just a power cord, the tower, and the monitor, and see if it continues. If it does, try a different monitor (a TV over HDMI, maybe?) to rule out the monitor, too. The suspicion is that something (Internet, USB accessory) is somehow passing keystrokes, either by accident or by malice, and if it goes away with only a monitor connected, then you start looking for nasties. If it does keep doing keystrokes with only monitor and box connected, try booting to a Linux LiveCD/DVD to rule out the Windows installation itself. If you boot to a different monitor and a LiveCD and it is still passing keystrokes, then it's something inside your computer, either a hardware bug or one of your internal cards.

--Patrick
 
Woo, back on my PC! Thanks @PatrThom - it was an old bluetooth dongle for a keyboard I don't even have anymore but forgot to remove the dongle from the back of my case. No idea where it was picking signals up from, but it's been binned now anyway.
 
so powerdvd(the predominate physical media software for computers) just updated with a ton of new features(incrementally too btw, FUCKERS!) the upgrade price is 50 bucks and the feature thats killing me is screen ratio scaling for HD/UHD/4K/8K media(something thats been impossible due to how you cant modify the signal on blu-rays once they are transmitted) Ive been getting a lot of older anime on blu-ray that was shot 4:3 and its kind of annoying to see the bars again after 20 years but vertical this time.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
so powerdvd(the predominate physical media software for computers) just updated with a ton of new features(incrementally too btw, FUCKERS!) the upgrade price is 50 bucks and the feature thats killing me is screen ratio scaling for HD/UHD/4K/8K media(something thats been impossible due to how you cant modify the signal on blu-rays once they are transmitted) Ive been getting a lot of older anime on blu-ray that was shot 4:3 and its kind of annoying to see the bars again after 20 years but vertical this time.
Gimme a couple months, I'm sure a copy will fall off a truck. Right now all I'm seeing is v18 though, not 19.
 
Once upon a time, there was a music tagging app called TuneUp. It was supposed to run alongside iTunes and automagically fingerprint your music and correctly sort and fix your tags.

Only it didn't. For starters, it was a memory hog, and a large library would bring the thing to it's knees. A click could take minutes to register... if you were lucky. And then there were the tags. It liked to sort artists by first name. So a Frank Zappa would show up in the F's. That is, IF it managed to get the tags right. Which it often didn't. Other times it would tag an album from obscure ROW releases that 98% of us would never have seen.

Lastly, the damage to the folder structure when you download your tracks back off the cloud. A multi-artist compilation might have individual folders for each artist. Or different folders for variations on an artist's name. "And" or "&," for example.

I've long since switched to Musicbrainz.org's Picard tagger. A more robust database, and held to much higher standards for its entries. For the first time in years, I'm retagging and more importantly RESORTING my library. Finally, everything will be where it's supposed to be. OR as close as I can get to it.

TuneUp has revised it's app and is relaunching it, but when something like Picard exists for free, why would anyone pay money for that hot garbage?
 
TIL Microsoft Store apps do not play nice with addons compared to their standalone counterparts. I found this out when trying to convert some FLAC files to AAC with Foobar2000. First, Foobar2000's codec pack that contains the AAC and LAME encoders wouldn't install when I had the Microsoft store version of Foobar2000 installed. Went to their own installer and all was well.

UNTIL...

Every time I tried to convert a file, error code 2 came up. At first, I thought it was a problem with a bad encoder per their forum. But no. It was the Store version of iTunes. The encoder didn't like that version. So I uninstalled the store version and reluctantly go to Apple directly for theirs. Conversions to AAC now go off flawlessly.
 
Game pass was $1 so I tried Crackdown 3(shit) and intended to try Sea of Theives but my time ran out.

That's all I've ever got off it
 
AAHHHH forgot I was never supposed to register a .us domain name and grabbed one on sale AAHHHH
Canceled it after 4 days, hopefully not too much damage done.

EDIT (for @figmentPez and others): The .us domain is one of the TLDs that prohibits proxy admin registration, meaning that for that brief period, my personal address/phone/email were visible for all to see. I must've gotten 20 spam phone calls on the 20th alone, not counting all the emails offering to design my brand new website for me, etc.

--Patrick
 
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so apparently windows ten will shit itself every time it tries to sleep as long as it needs to update. it showed being all up to date but i randomly noticed the new "I REALLY NEED TO REBOOT TO FINISH UPDATING" yellow dot on the power button in the task bar and thought, wtf ill give it a try. yeah now everything turns off automatically again. well i never cease to be amazed! this is the kind of shit that @PatrThom always gives me ribbings for lol.
 
Heh I doubt I would've ribbed you about it. For one thing, I've never noticed the dot you mention.
Though that might be on newer hardware. My computer only tells me about updates a dozen or so times/year, after they've finally made sure it won't brick my machine.

Before year's end, this machine is going to go back to Win7 anyway, but not until I have the contents backed up AND am on my way to building its NVMe-powered, UEFI-based, WinX-native replacement.

--Patrick
 
The yellow dot is something that started appearing in newer builds of 10 - it didn't used to pop up. I didn't see it until I updated to 1903.

My whine for the day is in finding out that when you turn MFA for Office 365, when setting up Outlook, the prompt after the MFA prompt is for an app password - yet it doesn't look any different than for a normal password. Spent all of work yesterday trying to figure out a user's issue (after they turned on MFA for most of the users) and found a link today that explained that and that fixed it. As a note: the user was in our sales department and was on our Citrix environment (which I am primarily a Citrix support engineer) - nobody else below me figured it out and I was thinking it was a Citrix issue since it came to me... First major time for me to troubleshoot Office 365 with MFA.
 
The yellow dot is something that started appearing in newer builds of 10 - it didn't used to pop up. I didn't see it until I updated to 1903.
Ah, that explains it. I’m one of those people whose update has probably been delayed due to 1903’s incompatibility with older AMD RAID drivers. I’m probably going to have to upgrade to more recent drivers before I’ll be allowed to upgrade...IF the newer drivers work properly with my “ancient” 880G chipset. And I’m not even going to make that attempt until after I’ve backed up my system.

—Patrick
 
Weird.
I mean, I get that there are probably Windows updates that never got installed pending restarts, but so many?

--Patrick
 
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