The Tech Random Crap Thread

It's just hard for me to justify spending money on a new card when the one I have isn't unsatisfactory (for everything but VR).
Oh, I get it. I'm still using a 7970, myself, and will be until I get all the parts for a brand new system of my own. But there are some people here who are a bit further along in their upgrade journey that I thought might benefit from the released info, especially since they decided to sneak it in after hours.

My biggest complaint is the 192-bit memory interface, which means memory will most likely only be available in multiple of 3 (6GB, 9GB, 12GB) rather than allowing an 8GB option without having to step up to at least the *070 tier.

--Patrick
 
this a thousand times this, my case is a big black double insulated box with no windows and just a led for the power button
My new 270R is solid on the sides and front, but the open grill on top makes for interesting patterns on the ceiling when the room lights are off.
 
@figmentPez @Eriol Rainmeter is an app for skinning your windows desktop. I found about it this week. Brought it up in another forum and got "now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time" treatment. Thought I'd show off the desktop I came up with anyway.
 

fade

Staff member
This is weird. I returned a motherboard to Amazon (it went directly to the actual seller), and I got my refund.....but then I got the motherboard back. That was weird. It was the same box, and it looked as if it had not even been opened. At first, I thought the return label had not printed correctly, and I'd accidentally sent it on a long trip to myself, but no. It was a new label, new date, new tracking number. The return address was "NO RETURN". But I definitely got my refund. Really odd. I wrote the seller to ask if they meant to do that, but no reply.

EDIT: Oh, it wasn't an immediate refund, either, so it's not "oh now they're going to take it back". It was marked received and approved first, then the refund was issued.
 
This is weird. I returned a motherboard to Amazon (it went directly to the actual seller), and I got my refund.....but then I got the motherboard back. That was weird. It was the same box, and it looked as if it had not even been opened. At first, I thought the return label had not printed correctly, and I'd accidentally sent it on a long trip to myself, but no. It was a new label, new date, new tracking number. The return address was "NO RETURN". But I definitely got my refund. Really odd. I wrote the seller to ask if they meant to do that, but no reply.

EDIT: Oh, it wasn't an immediate refund, either, so it's not "oh now they're going to take it back". It was marked received and approved first, then the refund was issued.
Sounds like there was a mixup somewhere. I've known some places to just not take damaged/faulty equipment back and will refund you while letting you keep it. It's strange that they bothered to put a new label and ship it back to you, though.
 
Nope. Just means you want to be an island. It's not like you're putting your laptop on no-net November or something. The hardware won't care. Some software might get mad you haven't "checked in" in a while, tho.

--Patrick
 
Update: while my computer is fine, for some reason the airplane mode symbol is stuck in the lower right corner display whether it's on or off. Pretty much what I expect from Windows 10 these days and it'll likely go away when I restart; just thought it was funny in light of my question :p.
 
Right, so, incredibly low-fi tech question, but I'm getting desperate. I'm looking for an alarm clock app, that is free, preferably ad-free, and where you can set multiple alarms with DIFFERENT SNOOZE DURATIONS.
Samsung's standard alarm clock allows this, but Huawei's doesn't - nor does Google's, or pretty literally every other alarm clock app in most on line top-10s. They all just have one setting to chage snooze duration that applies to all alarms I set. My GF has been nagging me about this now for months, ever since she got het new phone.
I don't actually need any other funky options like having SPotify sound, needing math puzzles solved to stop, movement-based snooze stop, whatever. Just regular old sound files are fine, lay-out doesn't matter all that much, just separate snooze timers.
Anyone a good recommendation?
 

GasBandit

Staff member
The google assistant will set multiple alarms, and if you yell "hey google five more minutes" it will snooze for the number of minutes you say.

Downside is... well, "hey wiretap, ten more minutes!"
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I'm sure glad that, in my installation of windows 10, I decided to drop 30 bucks on another 240 gig SSD and install it THERE and dual boot 7 and 10.

I'm still mostly using 7, but every day I get 10 a little closer to where I want it to be. It's been handy to be able to say "hrmm, this doesn't look/feel right... how did I have this set up again in 7?" and then be able to reboot at SSD speeds back into 7, make note of the settings, then reboot back into 10.

I swear to god though, even with the exact same settings, Vermintide 2 looks blurrier in windows 10 than it does in 7.

Also I liked that 7 didn't try to start up the oculus home environment every time I put on the headset... 10, it does. I mean, I like being able to use remote desktop overlays in all VR applications now, in 10, but that stupid home environment just uses up system resources for no actual useful purpose.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Anybody ever have this problem where discord occasionally just kinda... de-rezzes? This has only been happening to me since windows 10...

1551145350248.png


Note, I included text around in adjacent apps so you can see that this is NOT a compressed image, this is a direct screenshot of what has been occasionally happening to me. Usually if I click on the discord window, it immediately fixes itself.
 
Anybody ever have this problem where discord occasionally just kinda... de-rezzes? This has only been happening to me since windows 10...

View attachment 28669

Note, I included text around in adjacent apps so you can see that this is NOT a compressed image, this is a direct screenshot of what has been occasionally happening to me. Usually if I click on the discord window, it immediately fixes itself.
This is the app? I still just have it in a browser tab. No headset. :(
 

GasBandit

Staff member
This is the app? I still just have it in a browser tab. No headset. :(
Yeah, it's the app. Sometimes it's not even the entire window, just part of it that does that. Never had this problem in windows 7, so I wonder if it's another buried errant setting.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
Reminds me of what happens to 2D games when anisotropic filtering is applied. I'd be surprised if that's the case, since it's not a full-screen application, but maybe check to see if it's getting treated like a game by your graphics drivers?
 
I had something similar happen with text thanks to the Morphological Filtering setting, but only in Diablo III.
maybe check to see if it's getting treated like a game by your graphics drivers?
See if Discord has one of those "Use Graphical Acceleration" settings and play with that.

The only problem I have with the Discord app is that I have it installed on Windows, Mac, and iOS, but use it most often on Windows and iOS. So when I go back to the Mac client after 3 months of not launching it, the "check for updates at launch" part just sits going "couldn't get the updates/retrying/couldn't get the updates/retrying" endlessly until I just manually remove all its components and reinstall it from scratch. Then it's fine once more until such time as I let it languish again.

--Patrick
 
Thanks. I noticed that my mouse was behaving oddly, with the mouse cursor feeling "off" in games that require aiming, and I didn't notice this until after the latest update, so that may indeed what's going on. I wonder if this is a security mitigation that reduces mouse precision for apps that try to fake click.

EDIT: Strange. That update does not appear to be installed on my machine, even though I performed a manual check for updates yesterday.

EDIT2: Stranger still, my machine appears to still be running 1803 and not 1809. Hmmmm...

--Patrick
 
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