Jimmycrackcrack

When I started using Connect, all the other apps I'd tried for Lemmy were so janky that I considered this too small an issue to ask about but after many versions I'd like to get to the bottom of it and see if it's just my phone.

In landscape mode, images will frequently not scale to fit the screen so you're essentially looking at a small section of the image greatly zoomed in. This would be frustrating at the best of times but it couples with another oddity of Connect, which is how it handles standard touchscreen ways of interacting with images. When the image is incorrectly scaled as I described you can't zoom out so you have to have this zoomed in view and try to pan around to view the image in sections but that can't really be done either because there's flow on effects to this glitch making that impossible. You simply can't move the image around enough to be able view the whole image when no matter how careful you are because there's some kind of imposed limit on the movement which is very small and if you exceed it, the image closes back to the comments again. Often though no always, if you zoom in by double tapping, you can't then zoom out again to where you were before and sometimes this also goes for pinch to zoom, if you try to move the image around to see at least a bit more of it, you have to do so very carefully because if you move by too much, or too quickly it closes the image and returns to the comments or posts view. Also if you single tap an image, it closes the image as well. It will also frequently kind of rubber band the image back to where you started if you didn't move it in just the right way.

If you view in portrait mode, things are a lot better, but still odd. You still have all the weird image navigation issues described above, but they are made worse because to adequately view most landscape images in portrait you're really going to have to zoom significantly but that means lots of extreme movement and if you're not very careful with this, you end up closing the image and also sometimes you'll zoom in on a feature and now it won't zoom out again and you need to reload the image. Also in portrait mode, the image loads at the very top of the screen under the UI 'x' in the corner for quitting the image which means to actually see that part of the image unobscured you have to move the image by a large amount which puts you at great risk of accidentally closing it. On phones with notches this is especially annoying because loading the image at the very top puts it below the notch as well.

Is anyone else getting this? I've heard it a few times but the 2 recent examples I bothered to remember were this one:

https://youtu.be/oSG7HpdQ34w?t=876

Where at around 14:37 the entire video actually, not just dialogue in this instance, went mute mid sentence and remained that way until 14:49

And then this one again today:

https://youtu.be/hS2emKDlGmE?t=1788

At around 29:48 where only the dialogue cuts out. The first few times I ran in to this I assumed the video had just had an editing error but it's happening too often for that to be it. I noticed recently that my laptop will do some kind of automatic downmixing of 5.1 audio so I can hear it in stereo, but only if playing through my laptops speakers and not through the dock it's connected to with attached speakers, in which case it only monitors some channels in a 6 channel audio source but I checked that by switching to the internal speakers for the sections of mute video in question and it made no difference.

I used to search for a video file using spotlight and it would return several results and when it was a file I accessed more than a couple of times it'd be the top result. I'd see an icon of the application used to play the media type and the name of the file.

Nowadays, with the same keyword, I frequently can't find the file I successfully found before but also, even when it does find it, it doesn't display it anywhere near the top results, it's down in a section called 'photos from apps' which presents a grid of options, rather than a list, all of which represented by the VLC icon as it's my default media player but with NO filename. I have found it before because usually it's the one preselected, although not always. It's super frustrating not being able to actually see what's found. I think this is probably supposed to display photos as photographs or maybe videos using thumbnails, to make it easier finding an image compared to filenames given the name of the section 'photos from apps', but I'm not even looking for an image anyway and besides if I was and the thumbnails actually worked, I'd have to have typed the exact or at least similar filename to the image I'm looking for anyway making a visual search pretty useless.

To be clear, I'm not looking to get rid of the ability for spotlight to be able to search media such as videos or images, I just want the results of that search presented in the sane way they used to be back on High Sierra. (Probably persisted beyond that but I jumped from HS to Sonoma and now Sequoia).

It's way cheaper than the app store and Steam and Humble Bundle

This used to be an option, now it isn't. I found command line solutions which would be fine, but they're all for scheduling sleep for set times, I want set durations.

When this feature first came out I immediately disabled it because I noticed you couldn't stretch windows across two screens. I thought I might try putting up with it, but at the time I found it made it damn near impossible to use Avid Media Composer effectively.

It's been disabled in all the years since and I've never thought about it since until just recently where now twice in one month I've come across situations where something only works if it's enabled. One is for disabling the behaviour where fullscreening a video makes a second monitor turn black and now with Sequoia, the ability to use the native window tiling they just introduced.

I've always used magnet and then later rectangle to achieve the same and will probably just revert but I thought I'd try and give the native option a shot. I checked to see if that stupid shit with not being able to span windows has been fixed in the intervening period but it hasn't. Does anyone know if you can make it work with separate spaces enabled or at least why it works this way?

I don't really buy games much these days. I was trying to see what games would work on Mac and was pleased to see a new Assassin's Creed game is coming out on Mac natively. I was pretty stoked with this news, I've never played any of the AC games but they've always looked good.

I thought I'd check the Apple App Store to see if there were any other AC games that might already be out and there was only one option (actually on some 'App Store Preview' thing not the actual app store), called Assassin's Creed Mirage. It was listed as free to play with in-app-purchases. I'm really just not participating in that, can't stand that shit. I don't think I've actually bought any Ubisoft games since the Nintendo 64, are they all like this or is that just some unfortunate anomaly? I noticed also that it'd listed them collecting data about me, which, WTF?

Keen to wait till November for AC Shadows but not if it's going to be any of that nonsense.

I love that game and it's the best RTS I've played. It seemed to basically rip off the CIV games heavily but simplify them and put them in an RTS context. Everything I loved about Age of Empires as a kid but much better and also spanning the ancient age to the information age.

I run an M2 max mac, which makes things complicated, but I'm open to jumping through some hoops if such hoops exist to make something that wasn't supposed to work on Mac, work on Mac, but would need to know if it even can be done for that particular game. Also obviously direct compatibility out of the box would be great.

I really don't want anything that's multiplayer only, as I'm unlikely to ever play online and prefer single player games

I really hate free to play games and just want to buy the game in its finished state outright that will stay the same for as long as I own it and then just pay for any expansions or new additions at my discretion if they get released.

I'd like it to have the same all of history spanning scope for tech.

I like there to be air units and navy units.

It doesn't really make any sense how this could possibly be related, and for that reason I don't rule out some other factor being at play, but the correlation has been pretty evident on all 3 occasions when I tried to do this and the absence of the same effects when I don't do this and instead do pre-boil the pasta all seem to point it being the relevant variable.

Assuming the no-pre-boiling somehow is responsible, the obvious solution to the problem is to just stop doing that and indeed I have for fear of a repeat of the horrible experience, but it's just that the ease and efficiency of the method is so appealing and I would like to try it again, but I also really don't want to gamble on that unless I can be pretty well assured that the results were unrelated to the lack of a pre-boil or if that actually is a plausible cause, I'd like to learn by what mechanism this could possibly play a role and why it doesn't bother most people.

I recently bought an external PCIe enclosure so I could make use of a specific PCIe device in an editing setup. One of the nice things about this particular enclosure is that it also happens to come with an m.2 slot for NVME drives as well.

Usually when I edit with my home set up, I'm provided with the storage by the client, and even if not, at the very least, video media, plus backups takes up a lot of room and NVME drives are expensive so I'd usually opt for something cheaper as the actual location for the footage and assets. I figured then that it might be take advantage of an NVME drive of a smaller, more affordable capacity and use it just as a location for video render cache that I just clear after every project wraps. The high speeds of these drives seems like it would be a good fit for this purpose.

However I've heard that SSDs, including NVME are famously short lived and have particularly short life spans in terms of number of write operations. Is that still the case and would the constant writing and clearing of relatively small video files actually be kind of the worst use of one of these drives?

My understanding between TB4 and TB3 is that they're essentially the same, it's just that the standard of TB4 essentially mandates that the device must do all that TB3 maybe could do. Minimum bandwidth is increased and I think I read something about power delivery minimums as well. This eGPU chassis I bought came with it's own TB4 cable, which is actually the first Thunderbolt cable I've seen that specifically says "4" on it.

I assume the reason they supplied this is because, given what it does, an eGPU chassis is going to need to support some pretty bandwidth for a GPU. In my case though, I'm actually using this chassis not for a balls to the wall kick ass Graphics card, but actually to allow me to attach an old and very humble i/o card from Blackmagic. It's currently working just fine for that purpose.

Thing is, the supplied TB4 cable is pretty short and the chassis along with the ATX power supply mounted on it makes for a pretty hefty desk-space consuming setup. I'd like to move the whole setup somewhere fairly far off from the laptop to save me some precious desk space. I looked up 2m thunderbolt 4 cables which I understand is the longest distance you can get for TB4 and still maintain bandwidth and while it's not too bad, the prices are high for a cable. It occurs to me though that since I'm barely using a fraction of the available bandwidth anyway, could I use other, cheaper, long cables. USB4 comes up a lot in my search for 2m TB4 cables for example. (although they are mostly from AliExpress so don't know how good an idea it is to buy from them). If the chassis has TB4 controllers in it, as does the laptop to which it's attached, can one just put a USB4 cable between them? Are they physically different?

For that matter, since my bandwidth needs are so tiny, could I just find cheaper, longer TB3 cables?

I don't know my terminology very well. I just bought this eGPU enclosure. It also comes with an m.2 slot I suspect that's probably what this 4 pin power slot is for.

I have a spare ATX PSU to power this thing with and it's not modular, the cables come out of the PSU box in a big messy bundle and there's no where to detach or attach cables. There's lots of different connectors that come out of this bundle but alas no square arrangement of 2 rows of 2 pins as needed by this chassis.

There are however 2 such connectors that are kind of joined together through a little plastic catch, but in a manner where you can slide them apart. It's clearly intended that you can be able to separate these if you want to, but them being attached to each other in the first place has me a little worried.

The cable from which they each branch has TKG written on it and each of the connectors has L and R printed on it respectively. If I separate them, I can definitely fit one in to the slot, but is there any reason one shouldn't do this?

UPDATE: It works!! Initially the chassis wouldn't power on but I discovered that if I simply don't plug in the 4 pin slot at all then it does. I'm pretty sure that slot is for powering an m.2 drive if you have one and that was one of the things that made me decide to buy this particular chassis so it doesn't look great but I'm hoping that if I actually had an m.2 drive to test it with, that plugging in that PSU connector to the 4 pin slot would work, but at the moment, when there is no such drive connected, the entire chassis doesn't power on. Even better still, the blackmagic card works!! This is great because the manufacturer actually responded to my email asking if it would work too late and I had already ordered it and they said it wouldn't work so the fact that it does is a big relief. Word of advice for anyone testing this with standard computer monitors instead of proper reference monitors like me, it might say "out of range" or similar on your monitor for a lot of standard video frame rates, but for testing purposes, I was able to get it to work at 60p. No good for a real project, but hopefully with a real reference monitor that wouldn't be an issue.