Random Thoughts on Tech & Life

One of the problems I've been facing re-archiving my media collection is that Handbrake is sometimes cutting off the end of movies. At this point I suspect my weird setup is to fault: I'm using a 3rd gen NVME on a motherboard, Atermiter X79, that combines some very old technology with modern tech like NVME. The problem is other people have also mentioned having this issue on Windows (I'm using Xubuntu 20.04). They don't mention their setup, but I imagine they can't all have an unusual setup like mine. So I went digging around the world wide web and found a blog post suggesting it could be the CPU overheating then crashing Handbrake. I'm not sure I believe this theory as Handbrake doesn't crash, in fact many of my issues have come up while archiving television shows, and Handbrake just moves on to the next episode after cutting one short. Sometimes the cut off is after only a few seconds, sometimes it's near the end. It happens with both brand new and use

At the Computer Recycling Project we standardized on Xubuntu Linux several years ago. I've been using Xubuntu at home on all my machines pretty much since we switched from Ubuntu to Xubuntu (around 2010). I've experimented briefly over the years, but found myself always going back to Xubuntu since I work with it on a regular basis at work. Xubuntu is great because it works on some pretty low-powered notebooks/laptops. Because I have to support Xubuntu at work it makes sense I use it on my machines at home. But every now and then I like to try different Linux distributions to get a sense of what else is out there, and what things one distribution might do better than another.  Recently there's been a lot of criticism of System76 by a number of groups of people. System76 is the company behind Pop!_OS and some really cool Linux hardware. From the designs on their cardboard boxes, to the cool things they're doing with Coreboot, I think there's a lot to admire about the

I don't remember exactly when I found the Memorex OptiFix Pro CD/DVD repair kit, but I recall that I was browsing through the electronics at a thrift store where I almost never find useful electronics. At first I thought it was just a DVD player in a box, but when I pulled it out I was surprised to see that it was a DVD/CD repair device. Most simple electronics tend to be less than $10 at thrift stores, but this one was priced at $14.99 plus taxes. I thought it was probably a waste of money, but I hadn't seen one in stores before so I picked it up. Over the past several months I've tried to repair approximately 6 discs in the unit, and only yesterday did I manage to "fix" a disc. I use the word fix lightly because the OptiFix didn't remove the scratches on the disc, but it did get the disc to the point that the Blu-ray drive in my computer was able to read the 3 titles on the DVD. Prior to the repair the disc was damaged to the point where the drive couldn'

There is a maddening bug that seems to have crept into Xubuntu 20.04. I've now tested and found this issue on every computer I've installed Xubuntu 20.04 on. The problem occurs when you try changing the printer driver for an existing printer. Printers > Right Click on the Printer > Properties > Beside Make and Model click Change At this point the printer user interface freezes up and just sits there infinitely. The printer you're choosing doesn't matter. I've had the same experience with a variety of printers, on a variety of different machines. system-config-printer frozen The program responsible for this printer dialog on Xubuntu is called system-config-printer. I filed a bug report several days ago, but it's currently sitting at the bottom of the pile of 75 or so bugs for this program dating back several years. I seem to remember this wasn't an issue on Xubuntu 18.04, but I'm going to install 18.04 to check and see if the issue also crept int

This afternoon we were refurbishing an older AMD Phenom II X6-based computer and we ran into an issue that when we put a DVD into the drive VLC would open up and start to play, but we only saw black in the VLC window. The video was definitely playing, but VLC wasn't displaying anything. Video is visible if you disable Hardware Accelerated Decoding in VLC: VLC > Tools > Preferences > Input & Codecs Settings Hardware-accelerated decoding > Disable  We're not sure if this is an issue strictly related to a bug in VLC since when we opened the video with Parole Media player it played just fine (no adjustments needed). In our case this happened with a Radeon 7950HD Twin Frozr 3GB/OC video card. If you have one of these cards, are running some flavour of Ubuntu, and experience this or a similar issue please leave a comment below. We also tested Xonotic using Phoronix Test Suite and it seemed to run pretty quickly. For the curious, the system has the following physical s