techsupport

I'm planning to buy a new phone, and would like advice. I will probably get one of the following:

• Pixel 8a running GrapheneOS
• Pixel 8a running CalyxOS
• Fairphone 5 running CalyxOS

Either one of these phones will effectively be without warranty from the start. I can't file a warranty claim for a Fairphone 5, because they offer no warranty in my country. I can't file a warranty claim on a Pixel 8a, because I can't create a Google account.

Free open source software is important to me, and these are the free-est phone OSs I could find.

I'm planning to install Magisk to root the phone. I need adb root at a minimum. Will this prevent automatic updates?

Why do the GrapheneOS people say that rooting breaks the whole security model of Android? I can't understand this, because only a few specific apps are granted root access, or possibly only adb.

Reasons I need root access:

• I need a comprehensive backup system. Non-root backup systems skip files.
• I want to block connections using the hosts file.
• I want to study the filesystem to learn more about Android.
• I want to mess with apps' internal states.

Hi there, I've got these really odd issue where certain windows will cause random lines like the one in the screenshot appear on my screen. They will often flicker a bit and will dissapear if I hover my mouse over them. The lines will display what is beneath the window itself. These occour quite frequently and are frankly getting quite annoying to deal with.

Is this a known issue with KDE right now? It does not happen while using Gnome on the same machine + screen. If it matters I am running CachyOS.

If there is anythign I can do to fix this then I'd greatly appriciate some pointers!

Hi tech support! Please don't laugh at me for this, I'm old enough to be your mother and awful with tech.

When I search on insta it's started showing only one result at a time instead of a load of them but smaller. I get loads of lemmy memes from insta so it's making it far harder.

I googled and looked in settings and I can't see how to change it. Any ideas?

Whenever I press or hold the shift key the fans stop spinning properly and make a slight grinding sound.
It only happens with the one on the right side of my keyboard. The hashtag key does the same, but the grinding sound is louder. The laptop is a thinkpad e15, and it is (unfortunately) running windows.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.abnormalbeings.space/post/5580780

Just sat down to do my finances and some budget planning, and the settings are suddenly missing the aqBanking item:

Old view from a guide screenshot:

I checked the changelog and did a quick online search, which did not yield a clear result to me why that could be the case. (I did a text search on the changelog for "aq" and "online b", none of which gave me results. Online search results yielded tutorials for configuring aqBanking from how I was used to utilising it.)

aqbanking is installed, as per my package manager (I'm on Garuda Linux, so, Arch based), and everything worked before the update. Nothing that looks right appears in the plugin list of KMyMoney, and there does not seem to be a way to add more plugins from within that menu:

My accounts are still shown as mapped to something - as I get the option to "unmap account", but I cannot, as before the update, use the "update account" function to get a statement from my bank automatically, as before:

It's not critical at this point, but I really enjoyed using KMyMoney and was very well used to the workflow I had established with it - so any help would be appreciated (including, perhaps pointing something obvious out to me I may have missed).

Technically it is the same hardware as the international version.
Thanks in advance!

I'm not sure if this is an actual problem or just me misunderstanding how screens/resolutions work.

My issue is this; whenever I watch movies, series or just YouTube, quite often it's at this really small rectangular resolution with black boxes all around. This will also occur in video players such as MPV and VLC when watching latest season Andor for example. However, it does not happen on all videos - which is why im confused regarding this.

My screen is an Alienware 34 Curved QD-OLED Monitor - AW3423DWF.

Is there a way I can scale the resolution up?

Let me know if I can supply any additional details and thanks for any help!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31950758

Anyone else in IT, or I guess other fields since windows is so widespread, experience a bug on the Outlook app where a jpeg logo in someone's signature has been altered to a similar photo?

Today I had a client show me an email on his phone, he sent it, it displayed a logo for another real estate company, but not his. This was only visible on the app, not on his PC, and anyone else receiving the email saw the correct photo.

Solution was to uninstall the app (and delete it's data) and reinstall it.

What I think happened is some kind of AI spillage. It's the only thing that makes any sense, especially because of the similarity between the photos, both being real estate companies. Another person within this same company has the bug too, same way, but a separate photo of yet another real estate company. It's also worth noting that the link that sits under the photo was still correctly linking to the correct company although it showed another companies logo.

Anyone else have an explanation of what it could be?

This very well could be proof that they do in fact have zero control over what Copilot is referencing/doing in certain scenarios and could be problematic for people that work in law firms, hospitals, security, etc.

I'm using putty from my win local machine to connect to the server, and so far what I've done is simply selecting text from putty terminal and pasting it into a text editor on my local machine and after editing I just paste it back to nano on the server. I could do that because all the text files I was editing were pretty short, but this config that I want to edit is longer, so I would need to scroll to select all the text from the nano, but that is not possible from the putty (as far as I know), and copying within nano doesnt seem to share the clipboard from server to local machine.

So I'm looking for a better way to do it, but something simple, quick and dirty.

I hope this is the right tech support comm for general Lemmy issues; not sure if this is limited to just Lemmy.World nor do I know if my problem is instance related...

Anyway... Got a DM from a user about an hour ago, but when I try to reply I am given an error that the user does not exist. Their profile is viewable. They just messaged me. I know they are active on the site, as I see them posting pretty regularly... Not sure why I can't DM them back tho.

Hello! I just visited seven different tech subreddits to try to post this question, and laptop hardware recommendations were against the rules in all seven of them, so if this is still not the correct place, can you direct me to a better community?

With that out of the way, I am trying to purchase the Legion Pro 5i Gen 10 for first year Mechatronics, and while I am very proficient with anything software related, I don't really know much about specific cards and their performance. This model that I am looking at has the following options:

Processor

• Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 255HX Processor
• Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 275HX Processor

Graphic Card

• NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 5060 Laptop GPU 8GB GDDR7
• NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 5070 Laptop GPU 8GB GDDR7

I have chosen to upgrade to 32GB of RAM for that necessary speed.

Does anyone here have any advice? Thanks.

Edit:

Found my school uses Fusion 360, not Solidworks, so I changed the title

After replacing my TV, I can't get my blu ray player to properly play. It's driving me nuts and I'd really like to avoid buying new stuff.

Here's the setup that previously worked:

• An old Samsung plasma TV to display stuff.
• A fire tv stick to stream stuff.
• A Teufel Impaq 3000 AV receiver with a 5.1 speaker system that unfortunately refuses to directly play back blu ray discs since it overheated brutally before I realised the fan was broken.
• A Sony BDP-S370 that we use to play back blu rays and DVDs.
• A Sonos connect box attached to the teufel as well, but that doesn't really matter.

I attached the blu ray disc player to one of the TV's HDMI inputs and the AV receiver's digital coax input. While the TV had an optical out, using that to get the audio channel to the receiver resulted in loss of quality (I know it's all digital, but the TV seemed to mess with the audio before sending it out), so the coax cable helped with that. That worked well. Until I replaced the TV.

Current setup is essentially the same as before, except the fire tv stick got removed and we replace the old Samsung plasma tv with a

• Sharp 55GL4260E.

All hate for smart devices aside, the primary use case of streaming from German public broadcast "mediathek" services, netflix and prime works well so far and we no longer have a messed up glass front, which is a big plus. However, I can't get the blu ray player to work properly. Essentially, I have tried two approaches to connect the devices.

• As previously, bdp to TV via HDMI. That doesn't work. Like, at all. The TV doesn't show anything unless I force the bdp to only output SD signals, at which point the TV at least shows something, but the image then is an artifact-ridden mess of purple weirdness. Searching for that issue leads me nowhere, except some very old forums with replies that are 90% clueless and some indicating it might be an issue with the devices being unable to perform their HDCP handshake. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures, but there are some websites that show similar issues (albeit usually at least at full resolution). I tried several different HDMI cables.
• Connecting the bdp via HDMI to the AV receiver (which has two HDMI inputs), which connects to the TV. Oddly enough, this works - so the receiver must do more than just pipiing the signal through (remark here: I used the same cables for this, so the pink-image-issue really can't be a cable problem). However, after I briefly thought I had solved the problem, I realised that with this setup, the audio and video signals are out of sync. I hate it. Sometimes the video will stutter briefly and the audio will lag a full second or so behind afterwards, but even without that issue, audio and video are almost always slightly out of sync, which is just annoying as hell. I use physical media primarily to have better image and audio quality and this ruins the whole experience.

I'm kind of at a loss. My next step woul be to buy a new blu ray player, but it feels like overkill for something that should still work somehow. Any ideas what I could try?

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/40624933

Several different, random seeming files across various different Syncthing folders keep failing to sync even after restart, rescan, and reconfiguration, with the below error

syncing: finishing: opening temp file: open /storage/emulated/0/Pictures/Webcam/.syncthing.2024-07-1621:42:30.jpg.tmp: operation not permitted

I don't how how to fix it, the desktop app has the required permissions, and the Android app has as many storage permissions as I can give it under Android's horrible SAF limitations.

It seemed to used to be happening only to some specific old files, but now it's happening to all the new files I add onto my laptop under Videos or Music.

In addition, when trying to sync files with a specific server, it shows as disconnected, even when both are online and connected to the LAN (my phone via WiFi, the server via Ethernet), and there is some error about encryption expectations

2025-06-20 23:33:38: Failure checking encryption consistency with device server for folder "Music" (8ipwu-ehye4): remote expects to exchange encrypted data, but is configured for plain data

The server is running Syncthing GUI on Fedora GNOME, same as the laptop (which does work besides for the first issue), so I don't know what the difference is that would be causing this, not a single file has been synced to the server.

This is honestly making me want to get a Fairphone 5 with Ubuntu touch to get rid of these issues, but I can't do that now.

If anyone could advise, I would really appreciate it!

I have an upcoming interview for a position developing iOS apps using SwiftUI, but I don't have experience programming for SwiftUI (my prior experience was in ReactNative) and don't own any Apple devices so I can't use Xcode to practice. I have tried setting up Oracle VirtualBox on my PC with Windows10 to run Mac OS v12.01 Monterey (64-bit) several times with different settings, but every time I start it up, it gets stuck on the following lines:

• ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin::start - waitForService(resourceMatching(AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement) timed out
• ApplePC::notifyPlatformASPM - registering with plugin with ASPM Support false
• AppleKeyStore: 7492:109: unexpected session: 100000 uid: -1 requested by: 109
• AppleKeyStore: 11150:109: operation failed (sel: 7 ret: e00002c2, -1, 100000)
• IOConsoleUsers: time(0) 0->0, lin 0, lik 1,
• IOConsoleUsers: gIOScreenLockState 3, hs 0, bs 0, now 0, sm 0x0

I admittedly don't have much experience with VirtualBox or MacOS, and any time I've tried to search for these specific messages I come up empty. Is there any way of getting this virtual mac running to the point where I can start using Xcode, or am I just out of luck?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/31866530

I am looking for an ebook reader which can highlight text in various colors. Everything should get synced across iOS and desktop. By sync, I mean that highlights I make in a PDF on one device should be treated as an editable highlight on the other device, and not as a permanent part of the PDF. This is to be used for textbooks.

Currenty, I use Apple Books but it is very slow and I cannot sync it outside the Apple environment.

I am okay with free options, self hosted options and one time purchases. I am not so keen on subscriptions but will consider a cheap one.

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.

so this isn't for me per se, but for an acquaintance. they're trying to upload a transparent png on a discord server with the intention of keeping it as a transparent png, because it's a game asset. unfortunately, for some reason, their iphone keeps converting it to jpg on upload, making the background white and littering the image with artifacts. this only seems to happen because it's an iphone. is there a way to upload it to discord without it turning into a jpg?

many thanks, sillyplasm

Hey all has moved today to [email protected] can anyone help with a technical post about issues members might have? For example only the piefed app works with our instance, and there's bound to be other issues I've not thought of.

Apologies I'm in my 40s and awful with tech stuff, no clue at all.

I have two wireless mice. One is a really good mouse that served me for years until it got too beat up, and now the scroll wheel doesn't work very well. The other is a newer HP mouse (specifically HP 280 Silent Wireless Mouse, product number 19u64AA) that is a bloody piece of shit and I hate it.

The HP mouse currently has two main issues with it. 1, it doesn't "sleep" or turn itself off after a period of inactivity. It just stays on, even if the usb dongle is disconnected, until the battery just dies on it. 2, it's clicking software/firmware had a fucking stroke or some shit. It only clicks on the active screen; so for example, if I have Firefox open and fullscreen, it will not click on the task bar on the bottom of my screen at all. It won't even register that it's hovering over something down there, it just refuses. That, and the middle click won't work. It's genuinely annoying, because the mouse used to work with no issues. I have no idea what caused this, and my conspiracy theory is that HP just kills mice that are alive for too long, because this is fucking horse shit. I do not recommend this fucking mouse at all for this.

What's funny is, I tried both my previous mouse (the one with the broken scroll wheel), and my desktop's wired mouse, and both worked excellently. No issues at all, unable to replicate the issues experienced by my HP mouse. Crawling through the journalctl logs don't show anything wrong with any of the mice, at least not that my noob ass could tell, and the HP support page for the 280 doesn't have a fucking user manual for it. There just doesn't seem to be one at all, not one I can find at least.

Anyways, /rant. How can I see what's wrong with the 280, or fix what might be wrong with it (or factory reset the mouse, if that's a thing)? Alternatively, how can I fix my other mouse's scroll wheel (Victsing Wireless Mouse model PC106A my beloved)?

Edit: Forgot to mention, on Linux mint 22.1 cinnamon, on an HP laptop oddly enough (you would think HP accessories would work with HP products). if you need any information, journalctl, inxi, my fucking social security number, whatever, lmk.

Edit edit (workaround found): So I reset my laptop, with the mouse still plugged in. Upon reboot, the functionality was still broken, and so was the touch pad. So I took a look at xinput list to see what was going on; my thought process was, maybe there's some interference between the mouse and touch pad. I went through, disabling things one by one to see what it did; a number of the things listed didn't seem to affect anything, but i found my mouse was 8 and my touchpad was 13. When I re-enabled my touch pad, suddenly everything was working as expected. I don't know why. I tried restarting my pc again; same issue, but this time i tried disabling and reenabling my mouse, and then suddenly functionality was restored. In both cases, the order in which xinput displayed things was changed, but they were changed differently both times; I don't know if there's a load order that's reflected in xinput or if it just reads things off as it finds them. Either way, for whatever reason, functionality with the mouse and touchpad have some interference when the mouse is first introduced. Though, the touchpad settings in the system settings doesn't seem to have any effect when the 280 mouse is plugged in; its set to be disabled if there's a mouse, which doesn't happen. I don't know what's causing these issues; disabling and enabling through the terminal seems to be the only workaround. There are other devices on my xinput list, I couldn't tell what each of them did, but disabling/reenabling them doesn't seem to have any effect.

Here's the output of my xinput list if anyone is curious about what I have going on:

$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer                    	id=2	[master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer              	id=4	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ GTCH7503:00 2A94:D009                   	id=11	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SYNA32D8:00 06CB:CEE7 Touchpad          	id=13	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SYNA32D8:00 06CB:CEE7 Mouse             	id=12	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ HP 285M HP 280/285 Wireless Mouse Consumer Control	id=9	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ HP 285M HP 280/285 Wireless Mouse       	id=8	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                   	id=3	[master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard             	id=5	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus                               	id=6	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                            	id=7	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard            	id=14	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Wireless hotkeys                        	id=15	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ HP WMI hotkeys                          	id=16	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ HP 285M HP 280/285 Wireless Mouse Consumer Control	id=10	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ HP 285M HP 280/285 Wireless Mouse System Control	id=17	[slave  keyboard (3)]```

I just don't have the record button at all! I've tried phone, tablet, laptop none show an option, not even greyed out. I just tried googling for 30 minutes and I couldn't find the settings bits suggested to me!

Sorry for being useless but I'm old and neurodiverse so this really ain't easy

I found my old iphone 3g, and want to use it as an mp3 player for my niece. However, I can't, for the life of me, remember the pin I set for the restrictions, and I can't reset it without that. Is there any way to reset it without that pin? I already got everything I wanted to keep off of it, so I'm fine if everything gets deleted. Like I said, I want to give it to be niece as an mp3 player, but want it reset first.

I have a desktop computer (running windows) and a chromebook (running xubuntu), and I'm looking to do this so I can use the desktop's processing power to play games in bed

P.S. Some latency is fine, most games I want to play aren't real-time anyways

this appears to be the video, I have no clue why this is happening

Two days ago, my SSD stopped showing up on my computer (it doesn't show up in file explorer, disk mgt., device mgt., bios). There was little warning of drive failure; i was downloading a new game to it that morning (had to restart a failed download twice, but the third time succeeded). It's been humming along without issue for a couple of years now. There are some personal projects, photos, maybe game saves i'd like to retrieve if possible. Any ideas or tips would be helpful?

So far i've tried:

• restarting
• scanning with device mgr, disk mgr, in the bios
• power cycling the drive with the sata unplugged
• switching the sata cable to another port (no show)
• switching out the drive for a blank drive(no show as well)

next steps are to try cloning the drive with a 2 bay docking station

spec info:

• drive: 1 TB western digital SA510, working as the secondary drive.
• OS: Windows 10

Edit: thanks for the advice. It looks like this is out of my range of abilities to recover so I'm looking to a professional service now. Let me know of a good data recovery service in the greater Vancouver area of you know of one.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30417070

I've been scratching my head with this one for close to a year now.

About a year ago my OnePlus Nord CE3 (Android 14, now Android 15) suddenly stopped recognizing the mic on any Bluetooth devices -- even when a device is connected, it stubbornly uses the mic on the phone itself, never the one on the device.

I've tried this with two pairs of TWS earphones and a Bluetooth speaker, all running either Bluetooth v5.2 or v5.3. All three of these devices work perfectly when connected to my Windows laptop.

Help? This used to work, I can't for the life of me figure why it stopped.