Debugfs

It looks like I might be upgrading my home desktop workstation sooner than I wanted to. That system was put together December of 2014 and has: AMD A8-5600K APU Gigabyte  F2A85XM-D3H 16GB GSkill DDR3 1866MHz RAM 2GB NVidia GeForce GTX 650 TI Boost video card (currently a 1GB Radeon HD 6670 for testing) 500GB Samsung 860 SSD (Xubuntu Linux) 1TB WD Blue Drive (Windows 10) Corsair 430 Watt PSU The system has been relatively stable over the years but has recently started to develop a few issues: When recording audio in Xubuntu the audio is stuttering. This may be due to a Pulseaudio update since I don't have the issue in Windows 10 (and I do have the issue with multiple audio sources - web cam, microphone, and in several recording programs: audacity, obs studio). More concerning the system suddenly reboots in the middle of playing Diablo III. I suspect the power supply might be to fault, but if it's not this might mean more expensive purchases. I wanted to hold off to

A few weeks ago Irvin (not his real name) came into our computer recycling project. Irvin is 82 years old. He walks with a walker and somehow managed to lug a fairly big desktop Lenovo Thinkcentre down to our recycling project. Irvin had been to several computer stores over the past few months trying to get help with his computer. Unfortunately it seems that he wasn't able to get the help he needed despite paying repeatedly for help. Irvin doesn't speak and didn't appear to understand much English, his native language is Russian. Initially one of our volunteers spent a couple of hours over two weeks trying to help Irvin with different issues he was running into. Irvin's computer was old, even by our refurbishing standards - it was running the Lenovo version of Windows XP. Many of the issues Irvin was running into were due to the fact that he was still running Windows XP. Communication was our first issue, but Google Translate seemed to work well enough that we we

It occurred to me that I started posting to debugfs as if I just left off from my old domain (a story for another time). I had something in the order of 300 articles on the site so naturally posts on this site don't have the context they had on the old site. When I first started debugfs I talked about the Handbrake command-line script I run on our KODI server to shrink the size of Blu-rays (since they can be huge). I didn't really get into the details of the whole process and I've since changed how I rip and encode media. When I buy a DVD/Blu-ray the first step I take is to back-up the media using MakeMKV. MakeMKV is great for dumping both Blu-ray and DVD content to a .mkv file. I prefer .mkv over .mp4 because I love subtitles and the .mp4 container only lets you "burn" one subtitle into the file. Files in an .mkv container can contain as many subtitles as the DVD/Blu-ray has. I normally rip these on my desktop workstation which has a late 2013 AMD A8-5

Lately I've been collecting a lot of movies. Each week Maria and I set a small budget for personal "wants," much of mine has gone to DVDs and the occasional Blu-ray disc. I've been lucky to find some really great deals, but it's got to the point where I'm backed up because ripping all the media is taking more time than I have on evenings and weekends. From what I've read ripping Blu-rays (unless you're also re-encoding them) is entirely dependent on the Blu-ray drive - there's little to be gained by upgrading to a new CPU/motherboard. I use a licensed copy of MakeMKV to rip my Blu-rays. Then I transfer the ripped mkv to our KODI machine and using HandbrakeCLI (the command-line version of Handbrake) to compress the large Blu-ray file to a smaller file. I could compress the file on my desktop, but my AMD A8-5600K APU doesn't have the same power as our KODI machine (which has an i7-2600 and is cooled with a Corsair H60 water cooler). The

I've been using my Thinkpad T430s for game development using the GameMaker Studio engine (GMS). GMS only runs on Windows, though it can produce Linux and Mac OS X files. My desktop computer has 2 drives inside it, a 512GB SSD that I just upgraded from Ubuntu 18.10 to 19.04 and a 1TB drive running Windows 10. I already have both GMS 1.x and 2.x installed on my desktop computer. Additionally my desktop computer has 2 monitors, so it makes more sense that I use it for game development. I've been uploading some Youtube videos to my @chaslinux account lately, always recording them in Linux. These have all been recorded on my desktop computer - which isn't located in the best place for recording. It makes much more sense for me to record on the laptop, so I'm switching the laptop to Xubuntu 19.04. Actually I should say switched because in the time it took me to start this post to this point the installation finished (actually it finished about 4 minutes before I got to t

I just finished upgrading my home workstation from Xubuntu 18.10 to 19.04 and the upgrade not only went smoothly but finished in less than 30 minutes. This might seem like a long time, fresh installs can literally be minutes when using a flash drive to install to an SSD, but upgrades usually take a long time. Lately when someone asks what they can do to speed up their computer I almost universally recommend they upgrade to an SSD over upgrading RAM/CPU/etc. One of our local computer shops has been carrying a 120GB SSD for $26.99. I bought one of these SSDs about 2 years ago for $69.99 and at the time felt it was a pretty good deal. Although the write speed on this particular SSD is only 350Mb/s it's still much better than the speed of a 'spinning rust' hard drive. During a distribution update more than a thousand files get updated and often more than 2,000 files are downloaded. The process also involves deleting some packages, and unpacking a number of programs befor