A thread for boring computer questions.

why trn over slrn. I ask this because slrn is availible through fink and trn isn't and will be harder to install.

It's a bit like Ed's malfunctioning, isn't it?

Stereo playback quality is far more important than lots of inputs (I won't be using it for multi-track recording) or 5.1 capability. An S/PDIF I/O would be nice, as would some bundled analysis/DSP software (Cool Edit, Sound Forge, etc). Are the ones with breakout boxes the only ones guaranteed to be low noise?

I'm hoping to pay less than £100 but I may be out of luck unless I import from a US online retailer or score on eBay. Creative Audigy, M-Audio Audiophile, Echo Mia...

Soundkartenkatalog has a good selection to browse.

Watch out for customs duty and VAT on importing stuff from the US.

By 'import', I probably meant 'ship to friend in US and get them to stick it in their luggage next time they visit'.

I know SoundBlaster have a rotten rep (though why I'm not sure), but the Audigy 2 is only £99 at Maplins. Elsewhere I've found a good stripped-down card in Terratec's EWX24/96 (£119 from Digital Village) which is bundled with WaveLab Lite and GigaSampler LE.

(Also, it was probably last August when you mentioned, which says something about how memorable that term was)

ed, yeh it's all plugged in corretically and I run my sound through a stereo amp anyway. the hiss only happens when there's sound playing and only when i do certain things like play DVDs. So when people are talking it sounds like "Yeahscchhhhhh I knowhhhhh..." and there's a quiet digital crackle. It sounds even worse when I play it through Impulse Tracker.
I'm surprised by how few outputs there are on the soundcard - there are three sockets - SPK, LIN and MIC. I can't work out whether LIN is line out or line in so I just use SPK.
I never know the specs on my computer but it's running Windows ME with summat called C-Media Wave Device as the mixer. what other info might you need?

Try and track the signal path within the computer when doing these tasks, it can be a pain because its all virtual. I know much more about doing it in macs than in pc's i'm afraid. I do hope its not hardware.

Graham, yes, you need to get the cd player to pass the audio to the computer digitally and have the computer interpret it, this is a pc question isn't it, I don't know how to do this but there are ways. I remeber reading something about it on http://www.usb-audio.com/

Yes if you are using XP/2k go to the the CD Drive in Device Manager, goto properties and tick Enable Digital CD audio for this CD-ROM device, this will allow programmes access to CD audio data across the IDE cable.

No other cable will be needed.

Yeh, the CD player PLAYS but I can't get the computer to record either from mic or CD. I've checked all the levels on everything and theoretically it should work but it just doesn't. I think the shop sold me a crap soundcard (even though I did explain I wanted the computer to do music on - wankas!).

Thoth all the way. Halime as a second choice.

Or for that matter an X11 that'll compile for OS X. knode is not doing it for me.

Why not use the pre-compiled one from Apple?

downside is it's slow (although you could probably fiddle with the settings to speed things up at the expense of quality)

upsides: free, slim program, have a lot of control over the encoding process. most importantly, this setup is not clipping the ends off of my music files, as many many other progs do

1) The "background-color:white" property for a center <div> is not understood by the browser. I don't know how to fix it! Something with <layer> tags? I have tried, and no luck. Is there a hack?
2) When there is a lot of content in the center <div>, the browser scrunches it all up so that it prints over itself ! What to do?

Daria: apologies if this is patronisingly obvious and that was an example of a much more general case, but what if you specify the colour as a hex code, i.e. background-color: #FFFFFF? But Netscape 4.x is really not good with CSS; I've seen that scrunching problem many times and apart from doing a drastically simplified NS stylesheet - no messing with floating or "position:"s either absolute or relative and half my paddings and margins removed, ugh! - I never found a way round it. I have had problems like the first too but can't remember how or whether I fixed it.

Quick hacky way to do extra styles for IE without bothering with any JS or server-side client checking: the line of CSS "@IMPORT url(ie-styles.css);" will work in IE but not in Netscape - I don't remember which way other browsers behave - so you can put your basic styles in one stylesheet and add an import line in it for the IE stuff.

Unfortunately if you're doing anything very fancy with DHTML and CSS I have a nasty feeling you may have to do a cutdown version for Netscape users. Having said that, I too did some work for a university campus with a lot of stubborn NS4.x users and didn't actually have to do anything too drastic apart from the trick above.

Disclaimer: I don't know too much DHTML myself, and for my previous jobs it's been fine to settle for less than perfection in order to meet deadlines. I was also lucky enough to be the most knowledgeable about HTML of anyone there, frightening though that is considering my ineptitude, so if I said something wouldn't work then nobody else would contradict me. There are some fancy pieces of DHTML out there that work fine in Netscape, so maybe I just don't know enough. But from the CSS end Netscape is definitely a mess, even newer versions than 4.

**

Dog Latin: Impulse Tracker doesn't like Windows very much, unfortunately. IT3 has now reached beta stage, but it's taken a very long time to get that far, so who knows if it'll ever really happen? Besides, I am rather suspicious of it because Pulse is no longer on the coding team. I have a feeling that the finished product, if it arrives, will turn out different enough in feel to IT that I won't get used to it but still be a long way behind a lot of its current rivals (from Buzz and Psycle in the based-on-trackers arena to all the expensive professional stuff out there). My disappointment with Sk@le (basically Fasttracker 2 remade for Windows) and Renoise makes me wary.

About IT: use the MPU401 drivers if they work at all! Try it S19 and hope it will autodetect; if not, look for the settings in control panel and try specifying them manually. I think this is the closest IT can come to using your modern soundcard to full effect. Unfortunately this doesn't always seem to work even with cards that should be MPU401-compatible. It works now and autodetects on my SB Live but I remember last time I tried it didn't. I have no idea why this might have changed. Unfortunately I can't get any further because of memory and graphics mode problems. I used to get around that with a boot disk but with XP I'm not sure there's anything I can do. I'll try later.

IT's sound drivers are out of date and your modern soundcard's backwards compatibility with cards that existed when it was written is probably a bit dodgy. This could mean that the driver autodetect selects isn't the best - try choosing some others, if you haven't done so - or that you have to use a driver much worse than your card is capable of. On my SB Live the SB Pro driver works but isn't the one autodetect selects and the SB16 and SB AWE (both better soundcards than the Pro) drivers won't work at all, so by default I'd end up using the SB2 drivers. I had a Soundblaster 2 a decade ago. I don't want my computer to sound like that now.

What kind of soundcard do you have? My motherboard has onboard sound but I found it too noisy to use. I don't think it's that the chip itself is that bad, though it's obviously fairly cheap; it's more that it picks up so much interference from other board activity. If you're using a sound chip built into your motherboard I recommend not doing so. If you're using a separate soundcard, try rearranging your card slots so that the soundcard is in the furthest slot from the main section of the motherboard and not immediately next to any other cards.

One last thing: I believe Modplug tracker will read and write (not 100% identically to IT but it sounds fine most of the time) .IT files and can be set up so that the command codes and keyboard layout are as IT's was. I can't stand Modplug personally, so I can't confirm that, nor do I particularly recommend it. I just thought it might be worth a look since it was designed for Windows and will use your card's Windows sound drivers.

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Apologies for such a long post when I suspect none of this will be any help to either of you. I may write boring and badly phrased posts like the above but I'm not really much good at techy things.

 [page content would be here] 

<div id="bodytext" style="background-color:white;position:absolute;visibility:visible;width:700px;left:165px;top:
144px;"> [page content would be here] </div>\

Netscape 4.x won't read background-color and is scrunching content. Argh! But don't trouble too much about it, I can always bother my techie brother, he might know. :)

P.S. yeh, I thought of shifting to Buzz or ModPlug but they're just not quite the same, y'know?

At least, those are the things I'm currently blaming, but even before XP completely stuffed my ability to use IT (it nearly worked in 98 if I didn't mind reinitialising my sound drivers - ctrl-I, I think - every few minutes when a weird buzzing noise would start) I'd stopped getting any tracks finished, so maybe I've just lost whatever inspiration I ever had.

If you can tweak Modplug to use the same layout and commands as IT then it should be far less of a leap since it's really just a plain tracker and no new commands to learn but the interface certainly put me off, you're right that it doesn't feel the same.

I give up on the DHTML thing but I would suspect that Netscape doesn't like the absolute positioning in pixels. If you could rewrite it in tables that should work, as long as you don't have too many tables nesting in convoluted ways inside each other.

not heard of that. do you mean for bent license keys?

lol first look at redditbay is people selling pornhub premium accounts

i found out from a thread on there that people sell product keys on e-bay, got one for £1.74 that has done the trick.

you don't actually have to ever activate W10, it just has the nag screen on forever iirc. unless this changed in the last year

you can still get security updates

I'm in more or less the same situation, but not done a win10 install yet. Read that it's still possible to update 7 -> 10, but unsure how legit this claim is - could be that I'm left with unregistered as well.
If I try tonight and all goes wrong it will be full linux build time. It's my secondary pc so not that bothered, as long as i can run java minecraft on it and some rudimentary paint packages meh.

question from someone very ignorant and dumb about IT/network stuff in general:

when i'm at home on my personal laptop i can log into my work email via outlook.office.com, which requires duo verification. not installing anything, just using the website. what kind of access is this giving my employer if any? are they able to see traffic/data usage or any sort of activity while i'm logged in?

i wasn't spooked by this until i realized i can open and edit docs (in chrome) that are hosted on the work network, which hasn't come up until recently (for obvious reasons)

no local access if that is all you’re doing. there’s no web browser permission to allow traffic spying without permission, file access is sandboxed

unless they have other shit or a truly heinous browser extension installed, which outlook doesn’t do, they have your actions in email and other office bits

that is to say, they have as much access as ilxor

nice, ty!

I've got a UTF-8 text file with smart quotes and such created on MacOS. cat and vim see it fine. I sftp it over to a FreeBSD machine. "file" reports it as UTF-8, but cat shows all the extended characters like so: <80><90><70>. And vim thinks it's latin1, shows extended characters as gibberish, and throws up when I try to force utf-8.

hexdump gives the same bytes for the file on both systems. If I sftp it back to MacOS, it displays fine.

I just ...

Is your locale set to UTF8 on the FreeBSD machine?

That is, if your LC_CTYPE environment variable is not set to a locale with UTF-8 in it, none of those behaviors would entirely surprise me.

oohhhhhhh

that worked, thank you

yw!

lol character encoding

have just bought a new laptop after my 10yr old one basically became unusable and since it is brand new i feel i should adopt good practices from the get-go. i am however mostly clueless, beyond extensions on firefox: what are the things i really need to do? anyone have recommendations or a good website listing essentials?

i recently bought a brand new Dell to replace my old 2012 Windows 7 Asus. It's proved nothing but useless since I got it out the box. I get intermittent lagging/freezing whihc happens every few minutes. File Explorer menus often take several seconds to load up when being accessed from my external HD, even if there are only a few files in the folder. When I'm using Serato, the wave animations are juddery and hard to look at. Never had anything like this with my old laptop which is significantly lower spec.

I've tried to get Dell to help me but all they've done is run a few stress tests and asked me to try it on Safe Mode for a day (as if I've got loads of time on my hands to do this).

It's been a few weeks and I've spent most of my free time trying to diagnose issues and work out whether the problem is to do with the computer, whether it's down to external devices, following online optimisation guides (a lot of the settings and options in these guides appear to have been hidden by Dell in my version of Windows), and now I'm at the end of my tether.

I've asked Dell if they would be able to refund me, and they've said I'm past my cooling period. I'm sure I can argue that much of the cooling period has involved me trying to fix the problems inherent since unboxing the machine, but I would really rather just get to the root of the issue.

Anyone else experienced this kind of thing before I start kicking off properly at them?

Sounds like some rogue process running in the background , have you checked task manager ?

What model/specs? And have you had any success updating drivers w Dell Update?

dear lord, I've been trying to pair two brand spanking new Lenovo tablets via bluetooth (for work reasons) and I'm losing my mind

With bluetooth enabled on both devices, I can see them show up on each others' devices list. I can select the device, see a pairing prompt, and "pair" them. The device is then listed as currently paired. but then, if I browse away from that screen for any reason, the device is no longer listed. I can find the device on the "previously paired" list, but the Connect button does nothing. My only option is to "forget" the device and try again. No dice, every time, after many resets of both devices

The behavior is exactly the same on both tablets. When I pair my Android phone to either of the tablets, the device stays in the phone's "currently paired" list, but they're...clearly not paired. so it's an issue on the tablet end for sure.

attempted a factory reset on one of the tablets to see if it changed its behavior. It did not.

anyone seen this sort of behavior before?

What are you pairing them for? File transfers or something?

I have to test / collect screenshots for an app for work that has some features you can only use with paired devices.

Maybe update the Bluetooth drivers

Bloody ell.

This isn't a question as such, but maybe there's something someone could suggest.

The inadequately refurbed laptop I got a few years ago has been pretty good. However the BIOS has password set and I don't know it. Today I wanted to change some settings so in order to wipe the CMOS memory and clear the password I tried disconnecting the coin cell battery.

Left the battery disconnected for a while, screwed it back together and... Windows now won't boot. It gets a short way, brief blue screen with some error I can't read and then back to the boot menu. And the password is still there.

I was able to run the diagnostics and the hardware mostly seems OK although it did complain about the LCD cable. The display works as well as it ever did. It's a Dell Latitude E5420 running Win 7 Pro.

Need to get hold of a Windows boot disk maybe. Not good timing and I really didn't fancy having to buy another computer right now.

Snap a picture of the blue screen and post it, these days I basically troubleshoot Windows BSoD’a for a living

Thanks, Stevie.

That was another fun challenge - I had to film it to catch the single frame as it flashes up. Guess I'll have a look at the HD connections next.

https://imgur.com/a/CSwUrUe

I would say maybe

1) try unseating and reseating the CMOS battery again after like 10 min

2) update BIOS, I think a lot of times you can get a BIOS updater that can be run on like a bootable USB stick? But you’d need a separate computer to do this

I'll try those things.

Booting from USB will depend on the boot mode which obviously I can't change. Actually j can't get back into the BIOS setup at the moment for some reason.

I've a suspicion that the BIOS did lose settings including those pertaining to the HD mode (hence the error) but not the password which seems to be more persistent. Which could mean this machine is a write-off as it's unlikely I'll be able get any help from Dell and it doesn't seem worth delving into the shady world of backstreet BIOS password pedlers.

1234
Welcome
Password
trustno1

in all seriousness, have you tried "Dell"?

When you press "unlock" on the BIOS does it show you a system number?

If you try typing it in here, it may be able to generate your default/master BIOS password for you:
https://bios-pw.org/

(I recall doing this for a work Dell laptop at one point, though am not 100% sure it's the same website, but a few other sites seem to vouch for it. Good luck!)

By "does it show you a system number" I mean that the blurb in the password entry box may list a "system number" in approximately the same format as the Dell examples on that page.

(Seems to be the serial number which may be on a sticker on the underside of the laptop plus 4 extra hex digits, not sure where they come from.)

Woohoo!

That site delivered. Thanks so much. I did a little dance.

Changed the SATA mode and the BSOD went away.

Glad you got in and even more glad the BSOD went away!

(Be careful because Win7 is end of life and won't be getting many security updates - but you probably already knew that..)

Yes.

That machine has actually never been online or connected to a network since I got it.

I started looking at the local free ads and see I can get plentiful desktop units that would be a step up in terms of CPU with Windows 10 installed for about £60-£100 so that's exciting.

dunno if anyone still has this thread bookmarked but I have a weird problem.

My lag on my desktop to bluetooth speakers is normally two or three seconds. That is annoying.

BUT when I play music from the amazon music player app there is no lag. In fact there is no lag for any other app as well- there's no bluetooth lag with any streaming app as long as I have the amazon music app playing. It's madness.

I've uninstalled the amazon app but the lag is still there. Updated the drivers etc.

Any advice?

Baffling. Maybe the Amazon app is a red herring? What’s the speaker?

yeah I think you're right - turns out the lag is only for Visual Studio. When I'm debugging in the VS environment the audio lags, badly. I'm working on a game using VS. After testing youtube, twitter etc again there is no bluetooth lag.

However the solution for the VS problem is the same - I have to play another audio source in order to get rid of the lag which is still strange.