Computer Forum Chat Thread

[pkm]

I picked up a hyper x elite keyboard and am very happy with the purchase. The keys feel very responsive and satisfying to press. If anyone was thinking of purchasing one then I highly recommend it you won't regret, unless you are into the whole RGB light thing.

[DeltrusDisc]

There is XZ1 Compact, but that's like the only <5" phone left.

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@DeltrusDisc Firestone XXI anniversary is a bit sweeter but have a similar flavor profile to the Avery's Uncle Jacob, although not surprising since they're both bourbon barrel stouts. I'd give the edge to Firestone's cause I prefer a bit sweeter beer. I'm debating whether I like Stickee Monkee or Rumpkin more, lol.

Generally the Firestone anniversary beers really aren't any one beer style, as they are a mix.

But yeah, all of those mentioned are fantastic beers. I can only hope I get to try another Firestone anniversary beer soon! Last one I got to try was 18 and it wasn't in very good circumstances to sip enough to really appreciate it. (Was at a bottle share and MAYBE got one ounce. There was like 50 people there.)

[Remilia]

Generally the Firestone anniversary beers really aren't any one beer style, as they are a mix.

But yeah, all of those mentioned are fantastic beers. I can only hope I get to try another Firestone anniversary beer soon! Last one I got to try was 18 and it wasn't in very good circumstances to sip enough to really appreciate it. (Was at a bottle share and MAYBE got one ounce. There was like 50 people there.)

Oh yeah aware it's a blend, just that 90% of the blend were some variation of bourbon barrel aged stout, lol.
Also bottle share for this kind of beer is lame.

[Remilia]

Glad to see you're using it quite a bit, and yeah I guess it's cause for me the inconvenience of just taking out the phone isn't that much. I guess if I ever get a smart watch out of curiosity or what not I'd find different uses for it.

10 years ago it was pretty normal to travel internationally without your phone - one one of the first trips I brought my (original) iPhone I ended up with a $650 bill because I accidentally loaded a page of Wikipedia when I landed at an airport in Mexico. People typically left them at home for fear of theft or damage, though international roaming charges played some part there.

And this I know the feeling of. Used to travel back and forth to Taiwan quite a bit. Still do really, but we never used the phone outside of the US cause fees like $2.5/MB was/is nuts, and for like $2 send/$.50 receive sms. That said though, cause my parents go back and forth to Taiwan 2-6 times a year, and I potentially might end up having to at some point or prolonged stays (2+ months anyways). So recently I ended up setting up one line to Project Fi and ordering free data sims to hand out to the entire family for no additional charge / throttled roaming. Use Google Voice + Hangouts Dialer to just use data sim to call each other normally over data and what not.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Glad to see you're using it quite a bit, and yeah I guess it's cause for me the inconvenience of just taking out the phone isn't that much. I guess if I ever get a smart watch out of curiosity or what not I'd find different uses for it.
And this I know the feeling of. Used to travel back and forth to Taiwan quite a bit. Still do really, but we never used the phone outside of the US cause fees like $2.5/MB was/is nuts, and for like $2 send/$.50 receive sms. That said though, cause my parents go back and forth to Taiwan 2-6 times a year, and I potentially might end up having to at some point or prolonged stays (2+ months anyways). So recently I ended up setting up one line to Project Fi and ordering free data sims to hand out to the entire family for no additional charge / throttled roaming. Use Google Voice + Hangouts Dialer to just use data sim to call each other normally over data and what not.

I once forgot the charger when I went on holiday and didn't find I missed it.

And data charges are a good thing about the EU: EU-wide roaming charges (both calls and data) were abolished last year.

[Remilia]

I once forgot the charger when I went on holiday and didn't find I missed it.

It's kind of different for us now cause going to Taiwan nowadays isn't really always a holiday thing, so communication with each other can be pretty important. Say at points me and my brother may be in Taipei and my mom in Kaoshiung for a while, or whatever.

And data charges are a good thing about the EU: EU-wide roaming charges (both calls and data) were abolished last year.

That's really only in the EU however and doesn't help for anywhere outside of it. For the US at least, as bad as the big 4 may be, they all at least now have free roaming for NA. It's just that you know, doesn't help when relatives aren't in the NA.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

It's kind of different for us now cause going to Taiwan nowadays isn't really always a holiday thing, so communication with each other can be pretty important. Say at points me and my brother may be in Taipei and my mom in Kaoshiung for a while, or whatever.

That's really only in the EU however and doesn't help for anywhere outside of it. For the US at least, as bad as the big 4 may be, they all at least now have free roaming for NA. It's just that you know, doesn't help when relatives aren't in the NA.

I got lucky when I visited the States that Vodafone (Verizon in the USA) allows me to use my domestic data in the USA, but yeah roaming charges can get really ridiculous (to the point where I'd consider buying a pay-as-you-go sim if I were on holiday for more than a week overseas).

Here I run a pay-as-you-go SIM with a 4-weekly €9.99 subscription that gives me 2GB of data and 200 minutes/SMS.

[Remilia]

I got lucky when I visited the States that Vodafone (Verizon in the USA) allows me to use my domestic data in the USA, but yeah roaming charges can get really ridiculous (to the point where I'd consider buying a pay-as-you-go sim if I were on holiday for more than a week overseas).

Here I run a pay-as-you-go SIM with a 4-weekly €9.99 subscription that gives me 2GB of data and 200 minutes/SMS.

Vodafone no longer owns any part of VZW (as of 4 years ago), so that's extremely lucky. Don't think you'll be able to get that anymore =\

[Artorius]

To be honest whenever I go anywhere else (I mean, out of BR) I just get a local SIM, works flawlessly.

[BicycleMafioso]

Comparatively speaking, I get 6 GB of data, unlimited calls and texting too, with EU+Norway roaming. Any unused data rolls over (currently sitting with 96.5 saved!) and if I exceed my saved data (ie below 0 left), I can still use data but at reduced speeds.
I pay 60 sek per month for this, including tax, which historically has been equivalent to 6 usd when adjusted to living costs et c. The ratio of usd per sek has quite weakened the SEK as of late though. I'd still call it 6 usd.
If I wasn't a student, this would cost me 120 sek however.

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Also, why has Chrome for Windows become so incredibly ugly?

[DeltrusDisc]

Hey if any of you fine ol' computer forum friends have a LinkedIn and want to connect, DM me. <3

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So, here's the update because I think I failed to inform you all...

My internship came to an end and I am basically unemployed, because my coffee shop has been more or less ignoring me for the past few months. =/

On the bright side, I will be taking the A+ certification and studying for the Network+, but my now former supervisor from this internship has leads on another entry level position at a different credit union in their IT department, so we will see!

[DeltrusDisc]

Sadly, I can't help much here: Linked always gave me the creeps and I've never had an account.



Good luck on that.

I've been considering buying a farm - nothing big, just 20-40 acres or so. The goal would be to turn enough profit to cover property tax and leave the extra cash with the people doing the planting/harvesting(whom I'd hire). I don't want be a farmer, I just want a bunch of land between me and the rest of the world. Finding information on how to go about doing this has been surprisingly difficult.

I'll be in Washington next week - some quiet time away from home to wander museums and such.

As in DC? Have you ever been there before? I'd love to go back! Their museums are incredible!

[Remilia]

So, here's the update because I think I failed to inform you all...

My internship came to an end and I am basically unemployed, because my coffee shop has been more or less ignoring me for the past few months. =/

On the bright side, I will be taking the A+ certification and studying for the Network+, but my now former supervisor from this internship has leads on another entry level position at a different credit union in their IT department, so we will see!

Good luck with that.

I've been considering buying a farm - nothing big, just 20-40 acres or so. The goal would be to turn enough profit to cover property tax and leave the extra cash with the people doing the planting/harvesting(whom I'd hire). I don't want be a farmer, I just want a bunch of land between me and the rest of the world. Finding information on how to go about doing this has been surprisingly difficult.

I'll be in Washington next week - some quiet time away from home to wander museums and such.

Owning a farm and being a responsible owner.
Need more of that.

Might need like, a lawyer with possible regulation laws or something? I have no clue either.

[DeltrusDisc]

@evn, I hope you have fun sir!
@Remilia, thank you! ^_^

[DeltrusDisc]

Thought you guys would appreciate this.

24 days of up-time on my computer and 20.5GB of RAM being actively used. Ahhhh. I love this system. Soooo much more stable than my old Sandy Bridge i5-2500k Windows 7 system.

[Artorius]

I don't want to be the guy that's fun at parties but 24 days isn't exactly anything close to impressive.

[DeltrusDisc]

I don't want to be the guy that's fun at parties but 24 days isn't exactly anything close to impressive.

Yeah. I do recall having an up-time of 70 days one time. I'll get there.

Unless I take my computer to the LAN party at my college this Friday.

Anyways, which of you have taken the A+ certification exam relatively recently?

[Remilia]

Hm, anyone know of a decent bluetooth mouse with onboard memory for macro (at least 2 profiles)? New laptop has arrived and realized that I don't really have a wireless bluetooth mouse. Yes it does have USB-A, just don't want to populate it / have a dongle sitting there that I forget exists.

Otherwise I'm looking at Logitech G603 as it fits the bill for the most part (except for the 2+ profiles).

[Artorius]

Doing some random testing today, regarding how much better it would be to simply use AVC/HEVC/VP9/AV1 or fucking whatever decent video coding you prefer for images too instead of using the good old JPGs... HEIF supports both AVC and HEVC and AVIF is supposed to make it able to accept AV1 bitstreams too. So why not compare and see how much better that would be?

Anyway, after testing a single test sample (1920x1080@rgb24 PNG of an anime screenshot) and at completely arbitrarily low bitrates, at ~75KB, AVC was giving me a PSNR about 4dB higher than JPEG, HEVC was ~8dB higher and AV1 was whooping 10dB higher.

But you can't trust PSNR completely, so running SSIM for those gave me 0.9479 for JPEG, 0.9770 for AVC, 0.9883 for HEVC and 0.9906 for AV1.

This was done running both x264 and x265 at the veryslow preset (which is supposed to reasonably give you the best results), and libaom at default settings. Since giving them a constant bitrate parameter for a single frame was apparently broken (even when setting it to 1fps or any other arbitrary number), tweaking CRF settings was somewhat okay enough to get the bitrates within each other.

The extremely unscientific conclusion is that JPEGs are as dumb was GIFs at this point, the AV1 encode was 6x better (on a peak signal to noise ratio measurement) for the same filesize at that specific arbitrary amount.

And because I suck and I want to post the same part of the image countless times so you guys really see it, here it goes:

Reference (PNG @ 1833KB):



JPEG @ 78.9KB



AVC @ 75.8KB



HEVC @ 77.2KB



AV1 @ 75.4KB


Sending them all as PNGs for ease of viewing.

TLDR: Use gifv (mp4) or webm (mkv) for your animated "images" instead of gifs. And jpegs are as dumb but you have no choice because heif isn't widespread and putting them on fully featured matroska containers would be dumb.

[Remilia]

Doubt you'll see heif anywhere anytime soon. Gif by nature only is 8bit / 256 colors, so it's going to always have crappy quality. JPG by nature is a compressed file anyways, even if it doesn't make sense, like an entire white background will still see some compression artifacts. That said, that JPG's compression was pretty bad, though yes it is arbitrarily low as you put it.

The closer to the lossless / png reference would be AV1 for certain details however soft edges were lost like around the character outline but the stone's detail was kept intact where as HEVC the opposite occurs where it's more fuzzy. Neither are perfect really but better I suppose. Comparison between HEVC and AV1 however varies a lot for content iirc. So taking one image isn't really a good comparison. Granted it's not meant to be scientific but overall they're comparable.
I'd still keep files as PNGs and please make sure to have compression on PNGs. It's a DEFLATE compression so it's still lossless but it does take longer to save the image, especially when working with bigger files. (Do note I'm not really talking about videos at this point, :P). My hobby is really with illustration related stuff, it's why I have like 300k files saved up.

As for animated image alternative, there is actually a thing called APNG / Animated PNG. It's just you know, no one uses it. Firefox plays it fine iirc and believe Edge should too, no idea about chrome. It is essentially a stacked images but with PNG like a GIF file. File size is however absurdly huge since it's additive with all the file size you shove onto it.