Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

At this point I’m going to note the product key, set aside 100GB or so for a Windows partition and give up on this idea.

So far my impression from using Windows for a few hours to try and set up dual booting (in case my kids want to eventually use this gaming PC to play some Windows-only games) is that Windows feels aggressively user-hostile at this point.

Maybe that’s just always how it’s been (I remember having to constantly tweak a bunch of stuff whenever I booted up a new machine), but wow does it feel gross after several years using Linux exclusively.

Looks like you also can’t enable Full Disk Encryption unless your device meets certain standards? WTF, Windows? There is no way that this PC I have doesn’t have enough hardware to do FDE.

Presumably the Microsoft account is to manage authentication so that you get the same character every time you connect (no matter what IP they come from), and so that the custom servers can manage permissions and access.

Kinda fair, though also I imagine most people would be perfectly happy with each user generating a UUID and access being managed with an optional TOFU model where admins are asked when someone tries to join a server.

Oh, also apparently you need a Microsoft account to connect to even custom Minecraft servers, and you need to pay for a Nintendo Online account AND have a Microsoft account to connect to Minecraft servers on the Switch.

Haven’t interacted with a #Microsoft product in a long, long time, then my son got really into #Minecraft and I bought a Windows computer. So far I’ve found:

1. Not only is internet required to install Windows, you also need a Microsoft account¹.
2. The Switch, Xbox and PS4/PS5 versions of Minecraft can only connect to “featured” servers rather than custom servers.²

Not a good track record for like… 1 week of interacting with their products.

¹I realize that there’s some convoluted way to do this, but it definitely derailed me from doing the Windows install when I wanted to. Particularly since I’m just dual-booting Windows as a “just-in-case” type situation.
²Luckily someone has hacked around this requirement, though who knows how long that can last.

Better double check with ChatGPT.

Now, I’m not an expert in #spanish, but I think this may mean something slightly different than what #ChatGPT says it does…

OK, for a while I’ve been thinking I’d like access to a GPU to do some local #ml jobs. Probably don’t need to train a bunch of models from scratch, but I can imagine wanting to do some fine-tuning.

Right now I use Whisper on CPU and image generators like Stable Diffusion via pre-existing endpoints. I can imagine in the future my heaviest use will be image generators like SDXL and text-to-speech, and possibly I’d want to use them for high quality speech-to-text workflows as well.

I’ve got this small media server that has a free PCiE slot, anyone know if I can just throw something like this in there and call it a day?

#gpu #pc #whisper #stablediffusion #llama

In the long run I need to find a different way to power the blinkers anyway — either pulling power directly from the ebike battery (if I can get a line in there) or switch to using like a drill battery or something.

I’m thinking that in the short run I’ll just plug in a second circuit that just burns the minimum amount of power to keep it awake, and unplug that circuit when I’m not actively riding the bike.

Anyone know if it’s possible to wake up a USB battery pack that has gone to sleep?

I’m using a battery pack to power a blinker circuit, but the pack goes to sleep like right away. I was hoping that the blinker circuit drawing power would be enough to wake it up, but apparently not.

Most of what I’m finding when I search for this are ways to keep the battery awake all the time (for powering low-power circuits), but I really just want to wake it up when I’m actively using the blinkers, and let it sleep otherwise.

#electronics

Though TBH I am kind of shocked that there are quality variations (sometimes the sound comes out tinny, sometimes it crackles, etc). I would think that it would basically just be doing the exact same math and outputting the same waveforms, so I don’t really get why it’ varies at all.

Maybe it uses some sort of compression or heuristics based on the output, and I can tell Tone.js “Take your time and give me the highest quality version of this” (possibly I could even write this to a cache…)

Does anyone know if there’s a mature Python or Rust or something version of this? https://tonejs.github.io/

I mainly want the feature where you can take samples and turn them into a synthesizer so that I can give it a bunch of recorded piano notes, then feed it something like (["C4", "F4", "A4"], 2) and have it play that chord for 2 seconds (then presumably output that to a file).

Right now Tone.js is working really well for me in most cases, but I’m getting inconsistent results depending on the browser and whether or not you’ve got headphones plugged in, which is… not great.

My needs are pretty limited, so I think I can just generate all the sounds I’m going to want ahead of time and serve static files to improve consistency and quality.