Root Access

12:00 AM

@JourneymanGeek Should've gyfcat'd it...

Should have done it on my other display

@MichaelFrank: Its more that its a 5mb gif, and avoidable had I set youtube for a smaller size and resized the window, and probably used my other screen ;p

Michael Frank

Why does it matter what screen you used? o.O

Michael Frank

12:31 AM

stuff.co.nz/world/72471067/…

This kid is super lucky! :o

Journeyman Geek

@MichaelFrank: er... UI scaling, some wierdness with licecap. Screencaps on this are huge

Ben

12:54 AM

Question: Who knows about Ghosting?

Bob

@MichaelFrank Yea, Poe's Law...

> I have seen many of my OSs been sold, or redistributed or extra modded and is uploaded. This is really the hideous thing i wouldn't like to see.

The irony. It burns.

Michael Frank

@Ben You mean the act of walking really closely behind someone without them noticing?

Bob

@Ben Needs more context. Fading/shadow images on a screen? The Ghost imaging program? Screen-cheating in games? Haunting other people?

Ben

Lol. Sorry. The Ghost Imaging program. We're looking at setting up a secondary (backup) hard drive for our server, as it seems to be getting old, making funny noises etc. and we're thinking the easiest option is just to ghost the hard drive so we can just replace it when necessary, with minimal set up required.

Data is a separate thing that we've already got managed.

Michael Frank

@Ben I guess if you have the time to take it down while you Ghost it.

Not a bad idea.

Bob

1:05 AM

shrug you could just rsync live

though ideally you'd have the whole thing set up with a mirror for redundancy in the first place

not only after you start hearing funny noises

Ben

Unfortunately my idea of how it all works and everything is fairly vague... so is it possible that someone might be able to explain how it works, then figure out whether or not it would be possible/worthwhile?

Michael Frank

Mirror would have been my next suggestion.

Bob

(at which point data corruption might've already occurred for all you know, though the only way to be sure is to use a checksumming FS like ZFS or XFS)

Ben

@Bob I came in after it was all set up, so can't blame me for missing that :P

Michael Frank

Eh... when it fails you'll get the blame as you're responsible now.

Ben

1:08 AM

Hence why I'm looking into it now

Bob

Linux server?

Or Windows?

Or some other obscure OS? :P

Journeyman Geek

Yeah, what it runs is a pretty important thing

especially if you want to do an online backup

Ben

@Bob Windows Essentials

Bob

erk

if it were Linux I'd say just rsync the whole thing

Windows... a tad more complex

Ben

@Bob You don't know the half of it XD

Journeyman Geek

1:12 AM

veem endpoint would work on it

I donno/don't remember if you need a reboot after initial install

but after that it should do ok

(but anything with a driver would need a reboot I guess)

@Bob: I'd consider windows to be easier simply cause there's so many decent options for it.

on linux, typically its some variation of cp

Ben

@JourneymanGeek So what does this do exactly? What I want this for is so that if the current hard drive crashes, I can just install the new one, which should have an exact copy (of whenever we made it) for all the settings, accounts etc.

This has that capacity?

Bob

@JourneymanGeek eh... thing is, with a conventional linux install it's enough to collect all files with permissions and then restore them

Windows... tends to not like it when you do that

Or at least there's no commonly-accepted/standard way to do so live

Journeyman Geek

@Ben: It does a backup, keeps backing up

if it fails, pop in a new hard drive, boot off a USB key, restore.

It'll let you keep a week or more of incrementals, and only backs up changes after the initial backup so each snapshot is small

Bob

or rather, there is a standard way but it tends to be a bit complex

Journeyman Geek

and it works on server. A lot of free options will just barf on windows server cause its windows server.

Ben

1:21 AM

Ok. We only really need to make one copy, but if it can do regular copies that's a bonus :)

Journeyman Geek

this will do that too, but there's no disk to disk copy option

Michael Frank

superuser.com/questions/979017

10K only obviously... but lololol

Ben

@JourneymanGeek So gain - just to clarify: It will copy all of the current settings; (background, sounds, user accounts, server settings) for us to load back on when we need to?

nhinkle

Did he ever actually post in chat?

I'm trying to clean up after this cheerful fellow, and it seems that if he was in chat, then I'm missing an account.

Journeyman Geek

@Ben: It'll backup the entire system

Michael Frank

1:24 AM

@nhinkle I don't know.

nhinkle

>_> thanks clippy, it sure does look like I'm trying to clean up after...

Journeyman Geek

@nhinkle: SOCK!

Ben

@JourneymanGeek Awesome. Now you're saying there's no disk to disk copy...

Michael Frank

Never been personally attacked like that. I feel honored!

Journeyman Geek

superuser.com/users/502536/windows7sucks same user

@Ben: It does a backup, you'll need to restore it.

nhinkle

1:26 AM

@JourneymanGeek I know, and a user##### which I found too, just seeing if there were more than 3, because none of them would've had enough rep for chat

Ben

Oh right. No, the plan is that if the original dies, we're just going to switch it out for the replacement. We don't plan to restore the old drive

Journeyman Geek

@nhinkle: yuuuup

I even mod messaged him!

@Ben: so reinstall?

ghost does not back up settings, ghost images the drive

Ben

@JourneymanGeek Yyyyeessss.... So that's not what I want to do...?

Michael Frank

@Ben A ghost image is obsolete the moment something on the original changes.

Ben

Ah. Right.

Michael Frank

1:30 AM

It's good for base builds and uniform deployment.

Ben

So if the old HD gets reset, the image is pretty much useless then?

nhinkle

Welp cleaned up what I could, if anyone finds a relevant chat account let me know.

Michael Frank

@nhinkle It wasn't today, or at least not in the last ~7 hours.

@Ben Not really sure what you're asking there

Bob

@nhinkle You sure he didn't consider comments "chat"?

Michael Frank

@Bob That's what I thought originally.

nhinkle

1:33 AM

@Bob totally possible. It seemed even from the deleted actual post I found that there was some kind of previous question he had asked though.

He kept referring to "you *%&# were sooo mean when I said I use XP, so fine I tried it on Windows 7 and IT STILL DOESN'T WORK I HATE YOU!"

Ben

@MichaelFrank Well what I'm getting from this is that if anything happens to the original HD, the ghost drive is useless.

Michael Frank

@Ben Ahh, not really. The ghost drive will be usable. But any changes made after the image creation will have been lost.

So if there are things like databases or configs that are frequently updated, they will all roll back to the ghost date.

Ben

@MichaelFrank Oh right. So you're saying if I added a new user say, then the HD died, and I didn't back it up after creating the new user, I could still use the image, but the new user would be lost? That's obvious... but I still feel like I'm missing something here :/

Just to re-clarify, I know next to nothing about this whole process

Michael Frank

Ghost is good. But it's probably not what you want.

@nhinkle There hasn't been much chatter about XP in the transcript recently.

Ben

@MichaelFrank OK, so what options are there to avoid having to set up the same OS on a separate hard drive, with the same server properties, user accounts, etc; just so that I can switch them out when necessary?

Michael Frank

1:45 AM

@Ben You're basically describing a hot-spare. You're probably better off speaking to @allquixotic @JourneymanGeek or @Bob about that. I'm not really up with the backup/redundancy game.

@nhinkle You might be looking for this guy: chat.stackexchange.com/users/130483/3v0

Ben

OK, so I had a bit of a look at the "Ghost" and "Hot Spare" on Wikipedia, and I'm still thinking that the Ghost is the way to go. The Hot Spare is basically an exact copy, set up previously, so that I can just switch between the two at a moment's notice. So if anything I would want to use the Ghost to set up the Host Spare?

Michael Frank

@Ben Yea, so they could work together. You could also use a hot spare as part of an array. So if one disk fails, just swap the raid to the other device, remove the failed drive and get it to mirror back over.

Journeyman Geek

@Ben 'ghost' is a specific backup software made by Symantec

What you essentially need is disk to disk imaging. If you can manage downtime, clonezilla would work.

Ben

@JourneymanGeek What's the general term for that kind of software... Imgaging?

Journeyman Geek

Imaging. Yes.

And disk to disk rather than a backup image.

Ben

2:02 AM

@JourneymanGeek Ok... so in that case I can use that as a separate drive - It's a copy of the original at a certain point... yes?

DragonLord

Blood moon is just not going to be visible tonight. Complete cloud cover—we're pretty much smack in the middle of a storm system.

😿

Journeyman Geek

Yup

Ben

Right. Yes that's all I want haha

@Journeyman so you would still suggest CloneZilla for that?

Michael Frank

2:19 AM

Since none of you have seen my daughter yet! :D

HackToHell

3:03 AM

@MichaelFrank cute ! How old is he ?

*she

Michael Frank

3:18 AM

@HackToHell 7 weeks tomorrow.

Journeyman Geek

4:02 AM

@Ben: From what you've said, yeah

wee

gigabyte's distributor here is awesome

"its broken, We'll bag up your ram and HDD for you. Tech's not in at the moment so we'll swap out the motherboard and get someone to drop it off since its nearby"

Journeyman Geek

4:23 AM

@Insane: Oh, about your deleted meta question... sometimes it takes a while.

Insane

4:40 AM

@JourneymanGeek Oh so it wasn't just my cache? I felt so stupid I just deleted it (and because if it was cache there wouldn't be a point for anyone else to see the question)

Bob

4:51 AM

@allquixotic I managed to get my hands on a G4 to test

I like it. Except the button placement.

The power button is below the camera, on the back... and vol up/down are above/below the power button

it's easy to press with the middle finger with normal grip, but could get in the way

and would wreak havoc on attempts at casing it

also got to play with a Moto X Style

it's nice :P

too bad it costs so much/is basically unavailable

Bob

5:09 AM

I'm seriously considering picking up the G4 now

Journeyman Geek

@Insane: It was the cache

like the site takes a while to update things

(I was hovering over the site rankings when I finally overtook ignacio to be #6 ;p... trust me, it takes a while)

DragonLord

5:58 AM

!!/xkcd heartbleed

6:52 AM

...

@allquixotic

73 tweets, 12 followers, following 46 users

steamcommunity.com/id/allquixotic

@allquixotic, why no tubecat avatar in the latter two?

github.com/allquixotic

As for me:

User:DragonLord

== About me == As a WikiGryphon, my work on Wikipedia is varied, but most often involves cleaning up vandalism and fixing up little mistakes in articles. You can also find me on Stack Exchange and Pentax Forums. More recently, I have been involved in rewriting Wikipedia:Rules for Fools in an effort to end the annually recurring dispute over what is and is not allowed on April Fools' Day. == Articles on Pentax lenses == I've started writing a series of articles on Pentax lenses because there were previously no articles on any Pentax lens. Here's what I've done so far: Pentax DA 18-55mm lens Pentax...

Brian 'DragonLord'

@fierydragonlord, New York

Computer and technology geek with broad interests

298 tweets, 15 followers, following 32 users

DragonLord

7:10 AM

Gotta sleep, see ya.

XKCD

7:44 AM

Why are we spending billions to ruin Mars with swarms of robots when Elon Musk has promised to ruin Mars for a FRACTION of the cost?

marcusdoesstuff

8:15 AM

@DragonLord Isabel wants pages about "snakes but not too long"? Well I do too now!

(re: heardbleed xkcd)

Journeyman Geek

9:29 AM

woof.

I'm a tired pup.

My brix was handed over, and they'll be returning it to me with a motherboard replacement. I then ended up having to go to get a new battery for my dad's dell mini 10 (and dell dosen't sell first party batteries), and to go fetch a new pair of slippers for him cause his old ones fell apart.

allquixotic

1:14 PM

@JourneymanGeek :(

I'm a sick kitty

mew ):

@DragonLord either they don't use Gravatar, or I don't have it hooked up to those sites...

@Bob :S

still, removable battery and SD card with a top of the line SoC makes for a pretty awesome phone

Boris_yo

@Mokubai I wanted to get Trackball M570 but reports are that quality control fluctuates. They claim that after a year some contact starts working and some say you have to take out and clean the ball every week... You can also replace ball with one in there model which is bigger and more comfortable. Not sure if it's worth the hassle. I am non-US and it's not that easy to use warranty.

Journeyman Geek

@allquixotic: battery shop is cool tho ;p

Even if @Bob would disapprove ;p

Boris_yo

Anyone familiar with Centon and EMTEC SSDs? Not sure about their reliability.

Journeyman Geek

._.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMTEC their history page seems wierd

allquixotic

@JourneymanGeek I don't follow

"battery shop"?

Journeyman Geek

1:30 PM

@allquixotic: Quite literally a physical store where you can walk in with a laptop battery, and walk out with a new (third party) laptop battery of the same sort

they also sell other sorts of batteries, solar cells and...

allquixotic

huh

never heard of that in the US

Journeyman Geek

;p

allquixotic

and if I had, 99% chance they wouldn't carry the battery I needed

I don't exactly run the highest-volume laptops ever

Toshiba Satellite? No. ThinkPad T530. Dell Inspiron? No. Surface Pro.

Journeyman Geek

er. Donno, Almost certainly yes, I just got a battery for an old mini inspiron

Not sure about the surface pro.

allquixotic

must be a Singapore thing

and the surface pro requires removal of glued pieces in order to replace the battery. not fun

Journeyman Geek

1:32 PM

Oh, its a specific shop

Inside my favourite local mall ;p

battery.com.sg

I've also walked in with a random UPS battery annnnd...

SLS is very much a singapore thing ;p

marcusdoesstuff

2:13 PM

Heya

Small MS Access question, if anyone has any experience...

How might I rearrange those hazard pictograms in this form?

So they are displayed horizontally or perhaps bunched into a 4 square diagram.

allquixotic

@marcusdoesstuff it's not even clear to me how those images are being rendered based on the layout of the design

1540 microTeslas when putting the magnetometer up to the laptop chassis of my work system by the CPU @_@

marcusdoesstuff

@allquixotic image box that has a control source that contains filename links.

allquixotic

@marcusdoesstuff okay, but I don't see any "image boxes" in the form design-time

DavidPostill

@Boris_yo My M570's have never caused any problems (I had to replace 2 because I dropped and broke them - my own fault). I remove the ball every couple of weeks, remove the fluff from the sensors and polish the ball with a lint free cloth (to remove any grease). Batteries last a least a year.

marcusdoesstuff

that yellow box

DavidPostill

2:29 PM

@marcusdoesstuff Isn't it quicker just to combine the 4 into an new image? ;)

marcusdoesstuff

this one is maybe easier to see.

i'm not sure

some products only have corrosive

or only irritant...

or another combination of pictograms

allquixotic

@marcusdoesstuff clearly you need some way to tell it whether to wrap horizontally or vertically

marcusdoesstuff

four is the maximum that i've seen... but that idea has been suggested. but i'd have to make quite a few different separate images for every combo... and what if i miss a combo and it breaks when something new is added?

yeah that's what i was thinking...

allquixotic

@marcusdoesstuff you could generate it on the fly with imagemagick

don't even need any bindings to VBA... just have a copy of imagemagick.exe on hand and call it dynamically at runtime

marcusdoesstuff

or even better would be if i could place each pictogram in a precise position rather than in a line :P

not heard of that yet

allquixotic

2:35 PM

google it.

marcusdoesstuff

yeah i am :)

would any new user who uses that need that .exe too though?

Bob

@JourneymanGeek ...battery shop?

@allquixotic @JourneymanGeek Oh, those. I got an extra extended battery for an older laptop back in 2011, in HK.

And, yea, I prefer genuine for batteries, usually.

Third-party can be good, but they can also be a tad explosive.

@allquixotic That it does. I'm reaaaally tempted.

Other option is ZenFone 2 (4GB RAM model) for $340.

The only problem there is x86 and potential app incompat, but I think everything I use should work.

allquixotic

@marcusdoesstuff Yep. You're going to be very hard-pressed to find an image manipulation library written entirely in VBA, so you're going to have to use some kind of external dependency, whether it be a DLL, EXE, remote server, or something. You could, of course, Base64 encode the EXE and extract it at runtime.

Us folk who are stuck using extremely sub-par platforms (like MS Access) to do things they're grossly unqualified to do (like display safety information) stick together. If there's a will, there's a way.

marcusdoesstuff

:D

Bob

The RAM would actually make a big difference to me. 30% more RAM? Yes please! :D

But apparently the camera is worse too... decisions, decisions.

allquixotic

2:42 PM

If, on the other hand, you were responsible for picking MS Access, and you had an opportunity to pick something different, you should be struck repeatedly with a rolled-up newspaper and you should feel bad.

marcusdoesstuff

@allquixotic i think i'll just leave it as it is if i can't rearrange them without other software in this case. thank you for your help though. at least i'm more certain that i'm not missing something simple. :)

allquixotic

@marcusdoesstuff well you can just try changing the size of the image box to see if it'll arrange them horizontally for you

but, like you said, if you want to change the "precise" location of each image, that would be... difficult with that specific control

maybe have some kind of layout table and put one image in each square? idk

it's been years since I've used MS Suckcess

(mercifully)

Bob

@allquixotic That sounds too much like "success"

allquixotic

Failcess. Better?

marcusdoesstuff

hah

yeah i did ponder the idea of getting a new table for each pictogram... would it be possible to tell a frame to only display the second or third field in a query result rather than all of them? :P

allquixotic

2:47 PM

well you just need to adjust your query in that case - and I assume by "field" you mean "row" (I hope)

you could adjust the source of the control to the appropriate query at runtime

marcusdoesstuff

and that's why i'm using access... because i'm still a db noob :P

allquixotic

@marcusdoesstuff trying to learn programming or databases by using Access is like trying to learn how to ride a bike by repeatedly getting thrown off the back of an enraged, greased bull.

good tools beget good practices and deeper, higher quality knowledge.

Access is not a good tool. Not in any way, shape, or form.

the tight integration between UI and DB may be appealing, but it oversimplifies things to such a ridiculous extent that, often, there is simply no way to do what you're trying to do (or there is a way, but it involves much more complicated contortions and pains than in any other environment; e.g. calling into the native Win32 API.)

marcusdoesstuff

i'm dealing with around 1200 products on this... and i needed a tool that gives me a simple to use gui for others who don't understand sql to use.

allquixotic

if your use case doesn't fit precisely into the "mold" that the developers of Access envisioned, you will have great difficulty getting it to do what you want.

Bob

> While the battery is impressive on the G3 as mentioned earlier, the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi modules feel like they suck down far more battery than they actually should.

marcusdoesstuff

2:51 PM

in which case i will bend

or will have to :P

i mean gui stuff is not exactly essential :)

Bob

@marcusdoesstuff if you're the one designing the UI and you can make the decision, IMO you're better off building something custom with an entirely different toolkit

marcusdoesstuff

i'm amazed that i've gotten this far with this project.

@bob i'm not a programmer by trade, as i'm sure you noticed before :P

but hey @bob... this is actually working!

and all that data is scraped by python, thanks to your help :)

Bob

Oh god => youtu.be/XewXEA8aWr8 (G2's default alarm tone)

marcusdoesstuff

i can actually use the data and start tagging on risk assessment stuff now... it's just not as pretty as my designer brain would like. :)

Bob

@marcusdoesstuff I notice you didn't end up splitting the codes with +s?

djsmiley2k

2:56 PM

yawn

windows 8 started installing in VM last night \o/ so that key worked

after everyone told me it wouldn't. lul

marcusdoesstuff

well that's how they are displayed on the labels and SDS so I figured it best. @bob

Bob

@allquixotic Yup, that just screams FUD.

djsmiley2k

rofl

oh noes radios

not like life has been bathed in radiation since time immorial

Bob

> Its magnitude at the Earth's surface ranges from 25 to 65 microteslas

djsmiley2k

i remember a biologist explaining thats why we are safe with most types of radiation, but uranium etc is dangerous because it's not naturally occuring, so we never got used to it.

Bob

2:58 PM

That's the Earth's magnetic field, btw.

Which is always there, always has been (as far as humans are concerned), and quite literally protects you from cancer (solar wind = bad).

allquixotic

@djsmiley2k actually: we've been "bathed" in extremely small amounts of ionizing radiation and even smaller amounts of non-ionizing radiation until recent times. Unless you catch a whiff of Chernobyl or Fukushima, we still aren't bathing in (much) more ionizing radiation than before modern times, but we're bathing in a lot more non-ionizing microwave radiation.

Bob

@djsmiley2k There's only two types of radiation: ionising and non-ionising.

allquixotic

and we are certain that the ionizing radiation, even in tiny amounts, occasionally causes cancer.

djsmiley2k

k i need to learn more.

Bob

The latter won't harm you except by heating (where you'd need massive amounts)

allquixotic

3:00 PM

medical studies have been inconclusive about non-ionizing radiation. That doesn't mean it's harmless. It means we don't conclusively know what's up with it yet.

djsmiley2k

yeah

hmmmm so biologist was talking outta their butt?

D:

Journeyman Geek

@Bob Couldn't get genuine. I prefer em too.

allquixotic

@djsmiley2k Think of it this way. Ionizing radiation is a type of energy that's such a large "amount" (quantity) of energy in a tiny space, that when it hits an atom, it can knock that atom senseless, per se, in a way that fundamentally changes the makeup of that atom.

djsmiley2k

yup

allquixotic

When non-ionizing radiation passes through, it just adds a tiny bit of energy, but it's not enough to change the composition of the atom. It might make it more energetic though.

Journeyman Geek

3:02 PM

Also you can get chinese cells (for half the price, and presumably double the explosiveness) or japanese ones.

djsmiley2k

but the plutoinum stuff was rubbish?

@JourneymanGeek Anker ?

Bob

@allquixotic You sure about that? => skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/14501/…

djsmiley2k

/me got a anker battery for his S3, was awesome til I traded it.

actually no, my daughter decided to wash it, now I remember XD

Bob

The only common reference I see is that WHO declaration.

djsmiley2k

The biggest problem I see with phone use, is that the phones themselves get hot. And that can't be good.

Bob

3:04 PM

@djsmiley2k When we talk about "radioactive material", we normally mean those that emit ionising radiation. Specifically, by alpha, beta or gamma decay.

IIRC all isotopes of plutonium are unstable and will decay.

allquixotic

@djsmiley2k Plutonium, uranium, americium, and other radioactive isotopes emit ionizing radiation. The fact that it damages us has nothing to do with our biology. We would have to somehow adapt the ability to create a very strong magnetic field around our bodies in order to deflect or absorb highly charged particles without them hurting us. And that's not likely to be possible, evolution-wise.

Bob

As will uranium, but the commonly-occurring one has such a long half-life (=> slow rate of decay) that the amount emitted is trivial.

allquixotic

The biology that we know, based on CHONP (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorous) seems completely unable to evolve itself some kind of a "radiation shield".

Bob

It's literally impossible to have 0 ionising radiation. At some point it just becomes a question of what an acceptable level of risk is.

allquixotic

So, in the absence of a radiation shield, just about any kind of life would be "harmed" (slowly transformed into other types of matter, and thus deformed from its original purpose) by ionizing radiation.

You just have to hope that the ionizing radiation that hits you (1) doesn't lead to a mutation that develops into malignant cancer, and (2) that your body can repair the damage caused by the radiation -- either one or both of these factors can make radiation very dangerous

Bob

3:08 PM

(An example I often use is UV light, from the sun. The shorter-wavelength parts of the UV spectrum are ionising, and that's where "sunburn" comes from, and melanoma. "sunburn" is not a burn in the traditional heat sense; it's literally your cells committing suicide when short-wavelength UVA/UVB alters their DNA, and cancer is what happens when they don't suicide as expected.)

@allquixotic Generally, repairing basically means cell suicide (apoptosis) or externally killing the cells (immune system)

allquixotic

@Bob right, but because of the telomere system, and other factors, we only have a finite ability to repair cell damage, and the more extensive it is the harder it is to repair and the less likely that it will repair completely.

Bob

@allquixotic Telomere shortening prevents infinite duplication. Cancer is what happens when a cell mutates so telomere shortening no longer occurs.

allquixotic

And organism death is what happens when telomere shortening is allowed to continue unabated. Can't win. :P

djsmiley2k

@Bob basically cancer is evolution to living forever...

Bob

@allquixotic Pretty much.

djsmiley2k

3:11 PM

unfortunately some parts end up growing out of control at the same time...

Bob

@allquixotic That's more acute radiation poisoning.

Where you have so much radiation that a large portion of your body dies/shuts down.

Cancer is rather more long-term.

Journeyman Geek

@djsmiley2k laptop battery ;p

djsmiley2k

@JourneymanGeek ah.

nm then.

Bob

o.O G4's display is curved

> the LG G4’s camera app can shoot in RAW

:D

I need to get an aptX sink sometime, to test if nothing else.

But you did say SBC had issues too, so...

allquixotic

@Bob If anything, SBC was worse, because a dropped buffer where bufsize ~ 130ms is more jarring than a dropped buffer where bufsize ~ 20ms

it was still dropping 'em, just more audio lost

not a single drop with my Sennheiser M2OEBTs on the iPhone 6S Plus. not a single shotgun sound. perfect. flat volumes. couldn't be happier. and this is with three devices paired: car, Samsung Level Ons, and the Sennheisers. All work flawlessly.

only slight rub is that the Sammy cans don't support AVRCP 1.4 (I guess because they figured why bother if it's mostly broken in Android anyway? :P) so I have to manually turn up the volume in iOS and turn it down on the cans. but no audio drops anyway so they're fine

Bob

3:22 PM

shrug I've basically decided to buy the G4, assuming they don't run out of stock in the next two days, so I'll test that

I did have absolutely no problem with my E1 though, so who knows.

allquixotic

I doubt there's a way for me to figure out what codec is being used, but the M2OEBTs support SBC, AAC, and apt-X. Based on the time it takes for a manual song change to propagate to the cans, it's not SBC. Could be AAC if its latency is lower than SBC, but it might be apt-X.

Song changes occur with an imperceptible amount of latency, similar to being plugged in to the wired jack. With SBC, there is a very noticeable lag.

Bob

@allquixotic Definitely not aptX.

iOS doesn't support it.

allquixotic

But yeah, I don't think Android is all bad. If you're fine with wired headphones, or get "lucky" with a specific configuration of headphones and handset, or just don't listen to music much or at all on your phone, it's great. Probably better, overall, than iOS. But I'm definitely not missing it. Every app I need is there, and the UI is faster. Better battery. What's not to like?

Kinda envious of the prospects of having a microSD card again like the G4 has, that's about it.

But, I have the 128GB model so I'm not very worried

my Note4 only had 32 GB internal + 128 SD and I had plenty of free space

Bob

shrug I'm using 32 GB cards at the moment. have a 64 GB spare.

But i like having the option.

Also, it doesn't cost nearly as much, so there's that.

I don't care overly much about speed. It's mostly for bulk data anyway.

I htink I'll stick the 64 GB card into the G4... 20 MB RAW photos :D

allquixotic

iPhones are way too expensive. And I didn't sign up for their monthly payment plan. I think, if I'm staying with iPhone, for my own financial sanity I'll have to summon the willpower not to buy a new phone every year. Will get one every other year.

Bob

3:28 PM

(I'm not a particularly good photo editor, but I've saved some photos before thanks to RAW. Yay for being able to adjust white balance after the fact.)

@allquixotic I went with prev-gen phones the last few times.

allquixotic

Then again, the 6S will still be viable in 2 years, probably. The entire smartphone ecosystem is slowing down in terms of the rate of improvement of the hardware, both Android and iOS. Only Windows Phone has some room for improvement, because they pick mid-grade parts.

iOS is so well-tested and efficient to begin with, and most apps are designed to run on devices with an A8 (or older!) and 1 GiB of RAM. With the A9 and 2 GiB, I should have above-average specs at least until the "7S" (2 years from now) is out.

With Android you often see new/updated apps being designed to run on the latest OS version (which you're not guaranteed to (ever!) get), and fairly demanding of flagship or near-flagship specs for the best performance.

Bob

@allquixotic I haven't seen that at all.

What kind of apps are you running?

Some bleeding-edge stuff that relies on new features (NFC, etc.), sure.

But the vast majority will work down to 4.0 and maybe even 2.3 at times.

allquixotic

@Bob Many/most apps these days require 4.0 or 4.1. This was a major issue back when I was stuck on a phone with 2.3 that technically met hardware requirements for 4.0 but just wasn't getting the update due to Moto dragging their feet. Granted, there's not much requiring KitKat, but stuff tends to work best on the latest one or two stable releases of Android.

Vague claims, I know, but when certain things like Google Maps and games are lagging on a top of the line Note 4 running 5.0.1, and grocery shopping lists are almost unusably slow on my mom's two year old Droid Maxx....

I don't even want to imagine how slow that stuff would be on a device with a less than flagship SoC, or 1 GB of RAM.

Bob

3:44 PM

@allquixotic I'm still on 4.3 and everything works.

allquixotic

@Bob That's a Snapdragon 800, right?

djsmiley2k

CM!

Bob

@allquixotic Snapdragon 600.

Galaxy S4, GT-I9505.

allquixotic

@Bob O.o?

you sure? I thought the S4 was all 800

Bob

@allquixotic gsmarena.com/samsung_i9505_galaxy_s4-5371.php

So going to an 808 would be a pretty big upgrade for me. Not that I use/need much CPU power on my phone...

@allquixotic 4.0 has been out for 4 years. The advantage Apple has here is that they control the entire stack, and can continue releasing updates for older phones.

The problem is these updates tend to make older phones slower, from what I've heard.

allquixotic

3:47 PM

I guess it's a bit like the PC marketplace. People still use Core 2 procs with the latest software. Does it run? Yes. But you'll be waiting a few more seconds for certain worst-case tasks that demand more than your I/O or proc can fulfill in a short period of time.

Bob

They didn't release the Exynos S4 model here.

allquixotic

If your criteria is "it runs", then yeah, you can keep using an Android phone for 4 years :P

Bob

@allquixotic Somewhat different with a phone - you wouldn't expect to run much demanding stuff on a phone.

allquixotic

@Bob Workload varies from user to user. And, "demanding" is in the eye of the beholder. Some stuff that is not at all demanding for a desktop or full-fat laptop is rather extremely demanding of a 2 or 3 year old phone SoC.

I'm not doing HPC scientific computing or video encoding (aside from whatever the camera does) on my phone, granted, but I use it a bit more than most, probably.

Bob

About the most demanding thing I run is my web browser.

...which is actually pretty demanding, 300 tabs and all.

$100 more and I could get a GS6

...nah

allquixotic

3:51 PM

the most demanding thing I run is Hearthstone, though modern remote desktop is pretty demanding due to the network-efficient encoding/decoding on both ends

not very demanding for a Haswell Xeon, but pretty demanding for a phone

Bob

Eh. RdClient runs fine here.

allquixotic

4:33 PM

WOOT

fixed the second of two issues with upstart manically restarting failed processes for services that my containers didn't need

cd /etc/init; for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6; do echo manual > tty$i.override; done; mv /sbin/getty /sbin/fucky

CPU load is way down

took some digging to isolate the problem

DragonLord

4:51 PM

The thing I hate about Android is that it's so inefficient compared to iOS.

Google can never replicate Apple's complete vertical integration and is left in the dust as a result.

Google can only design for the lowest common denominator, not for a narrow set of devices for which the precise characteristics are known.

Nexus devices are better than others, but nothing beats iOS for responsiveness and performance.

ART has come a long way in improving Android device performance, though.

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