Root Access

Paul

12:12 AM

Oooh hats are back

Anonymous

yup

Anonymous

winterbash2013.stackexchange.com

Blog bot

Blog - Stack Exchange: Winter Bash 2013 is here!

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The gatherings of family and friends, the giving and receiving of gifts, the making and/or breaking of New Year’s resolutions – however you and yours celebrate, the end of a calendar year heralds many traditions.

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Bob

12:47 AM

@Paul @Pato @Blogbot nice timing

Anonymous

ty

Journeyman Geek

blah

ok, switching back to the old SD card, setting up samba again and hoping nothing goes wrong this time

Bob

@JourneymanGeek how about a UPS? :P

they should be pretty cheap, considering the low power draw

you could even DIY one with a bunch of AAs and a voltage regulator

(and even DIY the voltage regulator)

Braiam

ok, Root Access need a DIY tag... or some kind of 4th rule?

Bob

1:20 AM

LOL

I was trying out the jsfiddle collaboration thing

it auto-generated the nickname "Friendly Fox" for me :D

Journeyman Geek

1:31 AM

@Bob: power did NOT go out yesterday

so its just ... annoying

Bob

o.O

Paul

Chuck Yeagar

Journeyman Geek

2:58 AM

@Bob: precisely

I'm just going to stick the big card in the camera

Hennes

4:48 AM

Morning

yurkennis

7:49 AM

@YuviDroid Re your "Tabs Backup and Restore" extension (superuser.com/questions/430876/…): have you considered setting up a public voting for improvements? BTW, is the extension still maintained?

Bob

@yurkennis You can only ping people in chat when they have been in the room recently. You're probably better off leaving a review on the extension page, or emailing the developer.

This is the listed website: droidahead.com/contact-us

Thor

8:04 AM

Putting it out there: where goes the divide between "super user" questions and tech support questions?

Bob

8:15 AM

@Thor Eh, the site's name is SuperUser, and that's arguably its main target, but there's no hard and fast definition of "super user questions".

Tech support questions, on the other hand... I personally think they're better off in chat or other forums, because there tends to be a lot of back-and-forth

Journeyman Geek

8:30 AM

o0

turns out I MIGHT have made a full system tarball of my old install

whoot

Thor

@Bob I agree, and that's why I get kind of... uncertain looking at the fresh questions, and particularly unanswered ones. There are a lot of really weird tech support issues that aren't really about "computer enthusiast" or similar, but just hard issues to solve.

I find it difficult to appropriately assess them, and furthermore it's not the type of question you really want to answer. That is in part due to the reasons you specify, there's a lot of back-and-forth and it becomes troubleshooting.

Is it entirely unreasonable to feel that there should be a separate site for that, or would that bring down the user and "subject surface" too much? :/

Journeyman Geek

@thor: my litmus test is the help pages

Bob

@Thor I don't think it's very suitable for Q&A in the first place.

Journeyman Geek

in general, if its hard (or as we called it in my KMT classes "a wicked question"), hasn't been asked before, and is a real problem, chances are its askable here

Oliver Salzburg

Dual hats, nice

Journeyman Geek

8:34 AM

on the other hand, while its tempered by having multiple folk doing closevotes and such, its fairly subjective what's on topic, and not.

Thor

@JourneymanGeek I feel they only help define that there is a gray area, rather than sufficiently close the gap. Pretty much all the tech support questions are relevant to computer hardware and software, but it doesn't... ehh.

Journeyman Geek

@Thor: yet we have people asking us questions on phones or programming

or worse, purchase recommendations

Thor

@JourneymanGeek Well, that would indeed be another gray area, although I think personally I'd vouch that mobile software has their own sites that are more appropriate. Programming can be part of that though, as a "super user".

Journeyman Geek

@Thor: a lot of these are gimmethecodez questions, often from people question banned on SO

scripting is usually ok here

Thor

8:54 AM

@JourneymanGeek Yeah, and that I can agree to an extent, at least when it comes to automatizing elements in a "personal like" manner.

I just can't wrap my head around the concept of typical "ermahgerd halp" - obviously the questions can be improved, but for specific tech support it feels wrong.

Psycogeek

do all the android devices now play matroska , AVC and handle AC3 and AAC, by default? My old stuff pre-2 never did, and i am wondering if the newer stuff probably will.

Journeyman Geek

@Thor: I'm pretty sure we've had the exact same conversation before

@Psycogeek: I don't think mine plays mkv

AAC, yeah

Psycogeek

9:10 AM

@JourneymanGeek ok that helps to know. I keep converting sstuff to play with my portables, and the crusty old mediabox on my tv. before it was convert a few things , now most of the encoders are all doing 264 instead of 263 (easy way to say it). I am wondering if getting 4.??version android devices would stop the insanity of converting.

Andy

I installed *Fedora* on a the same disk as a *Windows 8*.When the installation process was complete I restarted the system,and tried booting into Fedora,but I get this error:
![image description](http://i.stack.imgur.com/qCG7J.jpg)

**What can I do to fix this issue?**<br>
Windows 8 is the factory OS and I don't have it's original CD.

Bob

@Psycogeek MKV is just a container, though

i.e. it's easy to get a video player that can play it

the actual codecs are more important

Psycogeek

@Bob where did i say MKV? :-) dude dont go there again.

Bob

Android has had H.264 support for as long as I can remember

@Psycogeek MKV == Matroska...

Psycogeek

@Bob no mkv is just a container :-)

Bob

9:14 AM

@Psycogeek Uhm... Matroska is a container too?

> The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture, or subtitle tracks in one file. It is intended to serve as a universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows.

> Matroska is similar in concept to other containers like AVI, MP4, or Advanced Systems Format (ASF), but is entirely open in specification, with implementations consisting mostly of open source software. Matroska file extensions are .MKV for video (with subtitles and audio), .MK3D for stereoscopic video, .MKA for audio-only files, and .MKS for subtitles only.

:\

I think most commonly found MKVs contain H.264, but I'm not really sure

Psycogeek

i wasnt trying to start a technical discussion. i just want to play the flipping videos :-)

Bob

Ya, and I'm just saying that MKV support is easy to find - generally, as long as the actual video stream is encoded in H.264 Android should have support for it.

I think most Android devices have hardware accel decoding for H.264, actually

the codec is the hard/expensive part, the container... maybe not the default, but somthing like MX player should have no problems

Psycogeek

@Bob which player do you use in android that plays most of the stuff?

Bob

@Psycogeek MX Player

it also has software support for a bunch of codecs, but they can be a bit laggy

try to find a codec that hardware accel works for, it's much better

depends a lot on your hardware, but H.264 has been the de facto standard for the last few years

Journeyman Geek

@bob: I got my visionaire

Its pretty nice

Psycogeek

9:19 AM

@Bob I am looking at a china 720p type res phone, with the usual china processor, and using android 4.2 probably they claim to have quad 1.0-1.2 mabey 1.5. IS the LAG issues due to file sizes or lack of grafics processosrs and crappy china CPUs?

Bob

@JourneymanGeek :D

@Psycogeek I've had laggy playback with some videos on my S2

it's old now, but it was a flagship

those videos were 3000kbit, I think

very very high res

and they were WMV, so it was software decoding? I think

I ended up downconverting everything

chucked everything into native resolution with H.264/MP4

made them much smaller too

didn't really care about optimal quality

perfect/high quality is for archiving, not viewing - you probably can't see the difference anyway, unless you're at 4k or something

@Psycogeek MX Player is more optimised for specific CPU architectures, I think

they even have codec addons with specific ARM versions

do you know what the CPU model is/will be? or at least the brand?

Psycogeek

@Bob I been converting everything, but also for 2 other pusrposes, which still may keep converting crap in the loop. 1) to get the audio to use more range, because mobile devices sometimes dont get loud. 2) to get it a bit smaller , but with big fat mini cards now size is nto as important.

Bob

a lot of those cheap Chinese things are actually kinda media oriented

@Psycogeek oh yea, MX Player can do "200%" volume as well, if that matters

though of course the quality isn't great

if you want better quality, amp it after it leaves the phone :)

Psycogeek

@Bob sounds about par.

Bob

I wonder how mature VLC on Android is now

the beta a few months ago was decent

> This version is for devices with an ARMv7 CPU or a x86 CPU. ARMv6 devices will be supported in a future release.

eh :\

Psycogeek

9:25 AM

some of the china devices have even had lower sounds still, by having the headphone output be a very low (or safe) level, making that sound level thing a disaster.

Bob

ah, the restricted ones to protect ears?

or maybe they're just too cheap and found out half their devices were melting, so they restricted it

wouldn't be the first time

Gowtham

@Psycogeek talking about the mt6589 phones ?

Psycogeek

@Bob dont know why, the speaker output is higher than the headphone by quite a bit. i tired to find where they were trimming it back in the hardware , but got no-where.

@Gowtham Sure. i am still looking. thinking of going IPS for the screen. and still am not set on screen size , i want 5.5" size.

One odd thing about some of the China units, is the screen lighting is upside down from american (being on the other side of the world and all :-) american things will get brighter and lose contrast when viewed at a lower angle, chian ones will have it set so the higher angle gets brighter and less contrast.

IPS screens dont have angle issues, But, when using the least ammount of light to get the most brightness out of anything, the light is "aimed" so to speak.

Thor

@JourneymanGeek Nobody arrived at any conclusion? :(

Psycogeek

an IPS might have a diversified view angle, but that also likely means that the light is disperced from the screen at more angles. In all logic that should require more light behind it to get light to the back of the users eyeballs.

Journeyman Geek

9:36 AM

@Thor: not really.

Psycogeek

@Gowtham which media player do you use to get playback of all the crasy codecs out there being used ? Like say stuff that exists in torrents and all?

Gowtham

@Psycogeek Gallery app can play xvid,h.264,h.263 files

MX player can play the rest

Bob

@Psycogeek yea, I think there was some EU legislation on max volume of headphones

might be a software limitation

in fact, I remember there were some apps designed to break that limit

@Psycogeek ...what's the point of IPS on a cheapie phone? o.O

@Psycogeek nah

Gowtham

@Bob he is talking about phones > 200$

Bob

TN actually blocks/absorbs the light going at more extreme angles

IPS simply lets that light through as well

I don't think TN reflects the light back out

i.e. I don't think IPS actually 'loses' any more light to the sides than TN would have absorbed anyway

@Gowtham ...just get a Nexus?

Or a Moto G?

They're around that price point, and far more reliable/powerful than a Chinese one :P

Psycogeek

9:41 AM

@Bob not really cheap anymore. I am looking at higher end china phones. the only cheap is the same thing in a real phone is $500-600 . it is mosr about a portable device that will do GPS , Hiking maps, Play movies, in the car and outside in the sun. . . with a phone existing in the unit.

Bob

@Psycogeek Thing is, a Nexus 5 is only, what, $299 in the US?

Maybe $399?

So around the same price as your Chinese phone.

And a Nexus 5 is the reference Android phone, and might as well be a flagship as far as features and performance goes (though it's missing a few things, I htink, they're the more gimicky stuff anyway)

Gowtham

nexus line >>> china phones ?

Also Mediatek doesn't release source code for android :/

Bob

And a Moto G is $179 (?) in the US, and the same story again

Psycogeek

@Bob more than 5" hopefully. because i have things that are 5 inch now. and american stuff is loaded with unremovable and undesired applications quite often. I find that the china junk has acted way more open, without hacking it.

Bob

@Psycogeek Nexus phones are stock android

no bloatware

that's one of the main attractions

(I've actually had more issues with my Chinese S2, with all the random bullshit they put on it)

though, yea, it is only 5"

you probably aren't going to find any big brand phones > 5" around that price

I'm not sold on the benefit of a phablet, personally :P

Psycogeek

9:48 AM

@Bob in this situation the P is put last :-) tableP . throwaway phones are cheap $40 and work great. but i dont really require a phone at all, and where i go there is no service.

Bob

@Psycogeek how about a full 7" or 10" tablet, with an independent phone?

Psycogeek

Usually i assemble my mobile device to work more like a zombie apocalypse device, not a connected one.

Bob

ooh, the galaxy tab 3 can make phone calls too

$200, not bad at all

consider that

7" screen

Psycogeek

@Bob oddly even a 5.7" device (in wide screen) still fits in a pocket of a shirt. although i am more likely to have it in a jacket pocket or pack.

Bob

hm. probably more expensive for the 3G model

oh, looks like it's specifically the T211

gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_tab_3_7_0-5422.php

> Tablet with support for GSM voice communication, SMS, and MMS.

:P

pretty shitty camera and resolution, though

Psycogeek

9:52 AM

6" starts to get to big, and 7 is way out of size, and begins to take to much power. Somewhow i have to see it outside in the sun.

Bob

and of course the Samsung bloatware

@Psycogeek ya, definitely go LCD

AMOLED absolutely sucks in the sun

Psycogeek

@Bob i found out, that sucks, because looking right at the leds should have fixed the sun issue .

you should see the array of crap these poor leds have to go throught to get light out the face of these things. layers and layers, to get the clean smooth light behind it.

Bob

@Psycogeek well, LCDs can let the light through and reflect off the back

OLEDs have to overpower the sun

Psycogeek

@Bob there used to be some reflection off the back, but once they went all high-res the effective light bouncing back (game boy style) was mostly useless.

Bob

@Psycogeek eh, I still kinda get that effect with LCD Nokia phones (Lumia 520)

same thing with my older E65

both my Nokia (N8) and Samsung (S2) AMOLED phones have been disasters

Psycogeek

9:58 AM

@Bob on what a white screen? what movies and series programs have the light valaves all open?

Bob

the N8 had a red tint on certain shades of grey

the S2 is currently suffering from burn-in

both fail in the sun and drain the battery like nothing else

well, the S2 is even worse on that front

@Psycogeek Normally web browsing

I can still read the tiny text, so it's all good

Psycogeek

@Bob all of which makes zero sence. so i am glad i saw some tests on youtube.

Bob

@Psycogeek hm?

well, the burn-in is just something OLEDs suffer from

especially the blue cells die first

the battery drain... that's a bit more debatable

Psycogeek

@Bob if you hear them selling them, that is all fixed LOL.

Bob

@Psycogeek sure, sure

my phone with the nice bar at the top says otherwise :P

though it is two years old, who knows, maybe they have fixed it recently

I mean, made it better

nature of OLED is you can't really get rid of burn-in completely without drastic changes

Psycogeek

10:02 AM

@Bob the blue ones of all leds of all led types die first, but all phosphor white leds start with a blue led behind the yellowish phospors. Weird, china white leds do not last long, but even putting the boost on the leds used in mobile devices they work pretty good.

Bob

@Psycogeek LEDs are different from OLEDs, though

they both emit light, but that's about it

the technology behind them is rather different

the orgnaic compounds in the blue really hate water and have a comparatively short life

Psycogeek

@Bob along the saem lines. OLEDs are rgb, white leds used in mobile devices are about 3X more efficient due TO the phosphors. Before they blow more than half of it in difussion.

Bob

@JourneymanGeek I'm catching up! :P

How's the Visionnaire?

Psycogeek

I have doubled up the led row used in a mobile device, having a row at both top and bottom, and that was some of the best i got for outdoor viewing, other than the sun backlight, which isnt practical yet.

Bob

I stopped fiddling with phone screens after one of those E65's broke

those connectors aren't designed for a lot of replugging :\

Journeyman Geek

10:09 AM

@Bob: I like it

Psycogeek

because leds last much longer at a lower drive for them, if they would double it up, then put in a Boost :-) button for cranking it up, it would finnaly turn a mobile device into a mobile device.

Journeyman Geek

Its suprisingly hefty, and writes well

Psycogeek

@Bob which is another reason for a 1/2 priced china POS item as the base to start with. A little more "nothing to lose" as i frankenstein it.

Bob

@Psycogeek once it goes >$200, I honestly wouldn't consider a Chinese phone

but then I don't look for 5.5" ones

go a little bit above standard size and boom another $400

@JourneymanGeek I need ot get up the courage to try it sometime :P

keep thinking I'll break the nib or something

Journeyman Geek

lol

not too likely

Psycogeek

10:14 AM

some of the propriatary batteries on the real phones make adding in more battery a bit of a pain. china dont give a poop, have even seen them cut the info wire from the battery.

Bob

@Psycogeek ah, the ones with non-removable are annoying

I think I can expand mine just by replacing the (removable) back cover

Psycogeek

@Bob and almost all the GPS devices have a non-removable. Lifetime maps :-) 2-3 year battery.

yurkennis

@Bob Thanks, I wrote to email address as well. Frequently I miss ability to send private messages to other users.

Psycogeek

10:34 AM

@Bob "standard size" for a phone is (thankfully) changing. used to be 2.2-3.5" screen sizes were "big" :-) All the phone makers thought that people would not want to stick a massive phone up to thier ear. Well they were wrong again , there is a fair sized market out there for a phone that is more than a phone.

With all the noise about pummeling your brains with microwaves, and the high use of bluear devices for people who have to talk half the day, the phones could have a big screen AND a freaking battery that lasts a few days when using it.

-because "Mobile", now means you dont really leave a car :-) and handsfree is a requirement in many locations to use a phone. the market could continue to grow. If they put a good GPS in, and a Really good speaker (speaker phone) , there would be a quantity of people using the phone as a gps, and as the handsfree. All the stuff we have been doing for ages, they might wake up and start providing. Instead they dont want to break ground.

_ provide people with a phone that had a descent speaker, and people talked about it. Provide phone which had a descent camera and people talked about it. Provide a phone that doesnt cost an arm and a leg, and people talked about it. But it takes some act of god to put that all in one package and charge a normal price for it.

Oliver Salzburg

10:52 AM

110 questions before the magical mark! :D

Ash

12:06 PM

hat over hat

pabouk

1:10 PM

I have noticed a wrong answer with many upvotes about removing first N lines from an active log file on Linux. Here it is with my comment: superuser.com/questions/405219/… --- Could you please consider upvoting the other two correct answers (I prefer the one providing an alternative solution - log rotation) and downvoting the wrong one? Thank you.

Oliver Salzburg

@pabouk The answer has that many upvotes because it was what people are looking for. They probably didn't care if a new file is written or if the initial file is shortened

pabouk

@OliverSalzburg I did not think of the fact that people were looking for an answer to a (slightly) different question. Unfortunately this answer is certainly wrong for the question. Is the voting the best what can we do here? Is it right that I ask for the votes here?

Braiam

!!help hv

ChatBot John Cavil

@Braiam hv: User-taught command: <>http://i.stack.imgur.com/TlV1F.png

Braiam

@pabouk the accepted answer reflects what the question answerer looked for, the most upboated answer is what people that were looking for something similar found useful. If you don't agree, comment and/or downvote but do not ask for downvotes for valid workarounds to "that can't be done" questions

@OliverSalzburg huh? really?

pabouk

1:32 PM

@Braiam Do not you feel that it is a mess that the most highly upvoted answer is wrong? This can badly fool people which are looking for an actual answer to the question. BTW Unfortunately my comment is not shown by default because there were multiple comments posted before it.

Braiam

i can't promise this won't ever clobber anything, but it worked for me. — RubyTuesdayDONO Jun 10 at 18:31

it worked for somebody, why you should be too snarky about it?

Oliver Salzburg

1:51 PM

@pabouk You can vote on it and leave a comment, which you've already done. Beyond that, it's up to every user themselves to cast their vote

pabouk

@Braiam Because RubyTuesdayDONO probably upvoted the answer as an answer to a different question and the wrong answer has currently 12 votes vs 4 votes of the most upvoted correct answer. Could you please check yourself that it does not work? I tested it right now and the code is below:

@Braiam i=1 ; while true ; do echo $i ; i=$(( i + 1 )) ; sleep 1 ; done

@Braiam sed -i '1,10d' log

@Braiam After truncating you do not see new logs any more. They are going to the unlinked file which is not accessible any more. Unfortunately this could have catastrophic consequences for some users.

Before writting here I have checked the meta and it seems that on some sites it is normal to discuss "wrongly" voted answers: How to deal with upvoted yet clearly wrong answers, Recommend Deletion of a wrong answer.

Braiam

@pabouk you are reading too much into it. The accepted answer appears first, only the ones that keep reading enough will see the sed answer

also it worked for me as intended on a non-"actively appended by an application" file

you should read the title and see what people looks for

the people that stumble upon that question looks for: Remove first N lines from (...) log file

they most of the times doesn't care if it's being appended or not

if you only edit for the answer to say "this should work only on non-"actively appended by an application" files, for everything else, it do what it's supposed to"

pabouk

@Braiam That is the problem -- both the title and the question explicitly state that the log file is active (i.e. being written into).

As I understand it we should not edit posts of others to change their meaning.

Braiam

google doesn't agree

Oliver Salzburg

@Braiam And that's how it got all the upvotes ;P

Braiam

2:04 PM

@OliverSalzburg that's why I'm trying to explain :(

Gowtham

4

Braiam

@Gowtham debatable!

(or so will say someone in The Bridge)

Jimmy Hoffa

@Gowtham what on earth is that thing on the bottom? What are they going to cut with that saw?? WHAT THE HELL??

allquixotic

Fus! Fus Ro! Fus Ro Dah!

Gowtham

@JimmyHoffa it's a huge ass bucket !

allquixotic

2:15 PM

@JimmyHoffa Likely shopped

Gowtham

@allquixotic no !

Psycogeek

@JimmyHoffa they are going to dig out the core of the earth :-)

allquixotic

Crawler-transporter

The crawler-transporters are a pair of tracked vehicles used to transport spacecraft from NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) along the Crawlerway to Launch Complex 39. They were originally used to transport the Saturn IB and Saturn V rockets during the Apollo, Skylab and Apollo–Soyuz programs. They were then used to transport Space Shuttles from 1981 to 2011. The crawler-transporters carry vehicles on the Mobile Launcher Platform, and after each launch return to the pad to take the platform back to the VAB. The two crawler-transporters were designed and built by Marion Power Shovel...

Gowtham

aha

Bagger 288

Bagger 288 (Excavator 288), built by the German company Krupp for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine. When its construction was completed in 1978, Bagger 288 superseded NASA's Crawler-Transporter, used to carry the Space Shuttle and Apollo Saturn V launch vehicle (itself built by excavator manufacturer Marion Power Shovel Company), as the largest land vehicle in the world, at 13,500 tons. Objective The Bagger 288 was built for the job of removing overburden before coal mining at the Hambach stripmine in Germany. It can exc...

allquixotic

ohh

Gowtham

2:17 PM

> When its construction was completed in 1978, Bagger 288 superseded NASA's Crawler-Transporter, used to carry the Space Shuttle and Apollo Saturn V launch vehicle (itself built by excavator manufacturer Marion Power Shovel Company), as the largest land vehicle in the world, at 13,500 tons.

Braiam

> this allows the excavator to travel over gravel, earth and even grass without leaving a significant track

13.5 k tons and don't leave a mark!

Psycogeek

@Braiam tell that to the trees , we will put the creator of that statement in the path of it, and see if they still agree :-)

rapes the land, and doesnt mess up your golf course. now you can have your cake and eat it too.

Journeyman Geek

oh

probably low ground pressure

Braiam

2:33 PM

@Psycogeek there is a problem with your statement, they essentially said "floor to step on", not any object