Technology

I’ve Been Busy!

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After a long delay in transit I finally, FINALLY got my 6800XT today! I’ve spent a better part of the evening benchmarking it for performance… what a beast! Unfortunately Manjaro won’t boot in properly with the new GPU in place, but I was planning on already doing a reinstall when the card arrived anyway. Manjaro has been giving me issues on every other boot, and I’m hoping Manjaro 21 might fix the issue, and hopefully not create new ones… Manjaro is already pretty easy to setup, so I might even be able to get back to work on my video project tomorrow! or at the very least be ready to tear back into it on Friday. I would have done it tonight, but I wanted to verify that the card worked properly PLUS I have an early work day tomorrow and need as much rest as I can get. I should be sleeping now actually, but I need my tea hydration fix.

I’m sure about one thing; this weekend is going to be awesome!

My Wacom Works Out Of The Box Under Linux!

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I got that creative itch recently to revisit drawing, and I also wanted to see how easy it was to get it running under Manjaro. So today I killed two birds with one stone, and surprisingly it’s quite a lot easier to setup compared to Windows. The drivers were installed by default, and it was practically working right from the get go! The only “difficult” thing I really had to do was configure it to run on one monitor with an easy shell script:

Now I can shitscribble to my hearts content! I played around under Krita for a bit, just doing different doodles and playing with different brush settings. I’m waaaay out of practice, my drawing hand is kinda shaky, and it gets tired after about an hour. I really need to build up my drawing muscles again. 😛 I’ve been meaning to get back into drawing, but the time was never there. That’s the problem with having too many hobbies, but hey! you’re never bored.

The Swag Fairy Did Not Disappoint

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Today was a busy day. My deliveries arrived today, except they didn’t… I had to collect five packages from the post office, not sure why they couldn’t have been delivered to my door but… meh. At least they all arrived in one piece! My lights arrived for the green screen, and my new monitor is plugged in and making my eyes happy. 8) It was nice to do some animation tonight on a large screen that doesn’t randomly cut out on me.

I also played with lighting my greenscreen a bit, and I can tell I’m on the right track. If I have the time and the energy I’ll have to try and stream something this weekend to take full advantage of it!

If I do I wonder what it’ll be…

Spoke Too Soon

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After having the desktop on for about 15 minutes today my Samsung started randomly committing seppuku again. I’ve swapped out with another cable and so far it seems to be behaving, but I figured I’d just say fuck it and buy a new toy. I’ll be trading my Samsung for an LG of all things believe it or not. It seems to check off everything I need on a monitor. I’ll try to make due on the current one, and if it keeps giving me trouble I’ll just torture myself with one of the other spares around the house; They’re smaller but better than nothing, especially if I’m contemplating doing another livestream.

Forced Upgrades: Gaming Monitor Edition

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As of yesterday I’ve been experiencing random blackouts on my secondary monitor, and not a typical black screen but a full power off. I’ve tried plugging it into another computer, and for some reason it doesn’t repeat the same result, even after leaving it on for hours. I thought maybe it was a cable issue, but it dies even with all cables replaced with different ones. I also tried swapping Display Ports, but again that was fruitless. I have my older Acer plugged in as a second monitor to test, and so far that seems to be working perfectly. Meanwhile I’ve let my Dad borrow the defective monitor to see if he can get it to die on his computer. This problem is quite bizarre; every time it shuts off the monitor goes completely dead, you can’t even power it back on again. Like a zombie though it eventually wakes back up again.

I’m thinking it might be time to upgrade my secondary monitor…

New Years Day Evening Open Thread

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Happy New Year!

I spent my first day of it at work, and for the most part it was pretty quiet. I’ve spent the evening researching webcams, a co-worker of mine is getting into livestreaming, and he needs a decent camera. I have a Logitech C920 that I’ve been using in private with select friends for a few years short of a decade, and it’s a good enough camera that I didn’t feel like getting a better one despite the 30FPS framerate limit and the inability to cheat my way around it. I was going to put  the money towards one of Logitech’s higher end streaming cameras, but after doing some research I’ve found my new EOS Rebel T7i  actually has the capability of being seen as a webcam! I think I’ll have to play around with that this weekend, because if that works properly I can have a super professional setup with a proper camera and microphone. I would just need to find a good mounting setup, this camera is designed to be DUMMY THICC, and I don’t want something that would crumble if you even so much as think of sneezing. It needs to be a robust mount for a robust setup. For fun I should also check out other lens filters, just to see what they have available.

Methinks I’ll be spending a little quality time with my new camera this weekend.

MangoHUD is Sabrosa

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One of my favorite websites to read is GamingOnLinux, and recently they had an article about MangoHUD. I compiled it to try today, and I have to say it’s pretty nifty.

MangoHUD lets you view your CPU/GPU stats on the fly, and it also reports what API your game is currently using.

This could come in handy for benchmarking purposes. There are more ways to configure it, including an optional GUI you can install separately called goverlay..

I might look into doing some comparison videos on Windows vs Linux performance as I continue to perfect my Linux Gaming studio. Given that I can record Vulkan (under certain conditions) things are looking on the up and up.

RIP New Monitor

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After a couple days of use my new monitor developed a dead pixel near the center of the display. This was a refurb I directly purchased from Acer (via Ebay). I’ll have to go back to bumming it on a 60hz refresh rate until I get a replacement, but meh… first world problems in a new third world country and all that noise. :v

I’ll endure.

Giving Myself A Heart Attack

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I did a big oops recently. I saved a good chunk of my Windows and Linux data folders, but somehow when I transferred my Home folders over to another drive my Shotcut projects didn’t make it. Fortunately I had an even older backup from when I did a Mint reinstall for the previous build. It’s a bit more raw but I won’t have to do nearly as much work. I still don’t know how I missed those fucking files, maaaan was I livid. I probably would have said fuck it, saved the assets for later and moved onto the next project out of frustration. My previous save is a little more raw compared to what I had back in Mint, but it’s all a matter of just piecing things together and playing with audio levels. At the very least I managed to save all of my assets.

On the plus side I rendered the above video clip (the “cold opening” to one of the Skyrim videos) at 1080p 60fps with Lossless settings using the h.265 codec, and had it complete in about 3:25 minutes; safe to say that  the 3900x is doing a good job.