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Author Topic: The Generic Computer Advice Thread  (Read 482968 times)

wierd

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3615 on: April 17, 2018, 02:39:44 am »

Ok-

Random problems with the Spigot minecraft server I installed on my old NAS box (after re-purposing it.)

1) Users cannot connect unless I put it in offline mode. For some reason it *INSISTS* that the mojang auth servers are down, when they totally aren't. I cannot find reliably good information on how to fix this, and instead am inundated under a deluge of 12 year olds squealing about their clients.  I dont care about the damn client-- I want to have authentication working properly, as I know for a fact that the auth servers are indeed up.

2) I can only connect to it on the local LAN. I have forwarded the proper ports, I have tested that the port is open-- but I cannot connect via the public IP for some reason.

Any suggestions?
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wierd

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3616 on: April 17, 2018, 10:25:19 pm »

Update:

I grew a pair, and contacted my mini-server while at work.  Apparently my router is smart enough to not use an internet address when trying to connect to the server when the computer is on the local network.  When I am outside the network, I can connect just fine.

Still not sure what to do about authentication though.
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Sensei

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3617 on: April 24, 2018, 10:37:09 am »

You might be able to connect from inside if you run a local DNS server (on your NAS box or possibly configurable on your router) to resolve to address locally before going outside. Don't know about authentication though. You might try pinging the relevant servers from your NAS box and see if you get anything weird.
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NullForceOmega

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3618 on: April 27, 2018, 04:36:55 pm »

It's doing it again.  There seems to be something wrong with windows, all of my UI is laggy, scrolling is jerky and unresponsive, video and audio playback are choppy, but for no perceptible reason my download speed is back up to 11-12 MBs.  I have no idea what is going on here, every kind of diagnostics I can find say there isn't anything wrong but the problems persist.

I've tried just about everything short of re-installing windows (which I absolutely do not want to do, but if that is what it comes down to I will), can someone help me out here?

It occasionally clears up after multiple restarts, which makes me think that something is failing to initialize somewhere.

This is completely insane, the problem is now constant, nothing I do has any impact at all, every single diagnostic shows no problems and reports that my system health is good.  Every device shows green, even booting from the install disc did nothing.

I looked into slowdown causes and the only thing that is even remotely recent has to do with a recent set of security patches, but I didn't install any of those until after the slowdown started, so they can't be the cause (tho' they could very easily be compounding the issue).

It effects everything with an animation, there's a three second delay when I scroll, when playing Skyrim my mouse control is completely smooth and normal but every single animation plays out in slow-motion.  I've checked every setting and none of them are wrong, but this inexplicable lag keeps happening.

Opened the case, cleaned then re-seated everything, on startup the system was much faster but very noticeable lag issues persist, especially when opening a window or refreshing the contents of an open window.

Download speed once again inexplicably throttled to 1.5 MBs.
« Last Edit: April 28, 2018, 09:09:15 am by NullForceOmega »
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Lord Shonus

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3619 on: May 03, 2018, 12:40:55 am »

Have an obnoxious networking problem, which is semi-related to one I've asked before. I picked up a nice router with USB drive support recently, and have two computers connected directly to it.

Both computers can see the printer that is connected to the router.
Both computers can see and access each other
Only one computer can access the USB drive connected to the router.

The other PC can see the router in "Network", but throws a "network path not found" error if you try to access it. I've tried everything I can think of - rebooting both PC and router, turing off the firewall (temporarily, of course), trying to direct map to it, connecting with IP address instead of hostname. I just can't figure it out.
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scriver

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3620 on: May 07, 2018, 08:50:51 am »

Okay so I have a basic computer knowledge level question that I'm too embarrassed by to ask anyone.

I recently found a bunch of old photos and I want to change their file type from .jpg to .png or whatever the format is called (what kind of a camera saves photos as .jpg anyway, that's horrible practice). My first instinct was to just change the ending of the files but I don't know if that actually changes the file type. Does it?
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milo christiansen

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3621 on: May 07, 2018, 09:48:41 am »

No, it does not. You need some kind of converter.

However, why do you want to do that? Converting to PNG does not magically recover the quality lost to JPG.
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scriver

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3622 on: May 07, 2018, 10:19:14 am »

Of course not, but it stops further loss of quality.
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wierd

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3623 on: May 07, 2018, 10:40:28 am »

Pretty much all cameras use jpeg compression. They do this for a number of reasons.

1) it lets them use lacklustre ccds that aren't the most consistent (jpeg compression averages regions, and blurs out the anomalous pixels)

2) it let's them use cheaper/slower nand, because a jpeg is smaller than raw pixels.

3) there are cots hw accelerated jpeg compression chips they can leverage to get jpeg format data from a CCD very quickly and cheaply.

I too have longed for a high quality camera that can optionally capture as PNG (Software compress raw mode data, save as PNG) even if it is slow to take pictures and drains battery.

Such devices don't exist. It was hard to convince camera makers to even offer raw saving as an option, and only really expensive cameras support it.
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Rose

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3624 on: May 07, 2018, 12:46:56 pm »

Fun fact! Most canon point and shoot cameras support third party firmware that can enable raw saving.
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Reelya

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3625 on: May 07, 2018, 11:23:27 pm »

No, it does not. You need some kind of converter.

However, why do you want to do that? Converting to PNG does not magically recover the quality lost to JPG.

Of course not, but it stops further loss of quality.

"further loss of quality" for a JPG only makes sense if you edit the photo in an editing suite, make changes and save it again, and choose JPG deliberately. Storing, copying, and viewing JPG files doesn't change them at all. Converting to PNG just gives you a PNG that looks exactly like the JPG. So if you've got jpg photos then you can just leave them as JPGs and not worry about any loss of quality: the loss of quality was a one-time thing when the file was first created.

The only time they can get further degraded is if you open them in a photo-editing program, and save them again as a lossy format, especially if the format isn't exactly the same as the original JPG, or if you make changes such as applying filters to the whole image, or cropping it (since that usually throws the JPG blocks out of alignment). The rule of thumb here is to just leave your image files alone as whatever format they happen to be in, but remember to choose PNG for saving, when you edit pictures in a paint program. It makes literally zero difference if you convert them to PNG before editing.

~~~

Some of the new AI-based filters might help out in the near future. The premise is that they train the AI on millions of "sample" pairs of high-quality / low-quality versions of the same images, teaching it to repair the damage on the low-quality images so that they look as much like the high-quality images as possible.

You can then use the resultant neural network to clean up other images. However, the closer the training set resembles the data you wish to clean, the better. e.g. if you had low-quality JPGs of anime images, and wanted to upscale them while removing JPG compression artifacts, you'd want to get a huge number of high-quality anime images, downscale them, then convert to JPG, with as close to the same settings as possible as the images you wish to clean up. Then teach an NN to reverse that specific degradation for that specific class of images, and you'd have a custom filter which was really, really good at repairing images exactly like those ones.

EDIT the concept here is that if you teach an NN to upscale images of e.g. ... WWII planes, then it becomes really good at working out what WWII planes are meant to look like, so when you give it a new image of an unknown WWII plane, it fills in missing details intelligently, rather than just using a generic upscale filter. Sure, it will still upscale other types of things and might do passably ok, but it's going to be really good at the class of things it was trained on. In the future there might even be intelligent online filters that work out what something is, e.g. object and edge-detection, then apply specifically trained filters to subregions of the photo which hold those things. e.g. if there's a blurry plane and a blurry tree, it could apply different upscale filters to both regions of the photo, and do better than applying only one filter to the whole photograph.
« Last Edit: May 08, 2018, 12:29:20 am by Reelya »
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Maximum Spin

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3626 on: May 08, 2018, 01:52:56 am »

On the other hand, having an AI designed to upscale WWII planes run on a set of low-quality animu jpegs would be hilarious.
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scriver

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3627 on: May 08, 2018, 02:11:16 am »

Ah, I see. I was under the impression .jogs decrepited every time you copied them. How else would pics on the webs artifactify?
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wierd

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3628 on: May 08, 2018, 02:24:20 am »

JPEG has a configurable option at compression time to determine the quantization matrix. (EG, how much data to cut out using the quantizer). This is usually given the name "Quality".

When people make images for the web, they usually want to make the file size as tiny as possible, which means they crank the quantizer really hard (turn quality really low).  The result is really noticeable artifacts.

It is important to understand what an artifact is, and how it gets generated. JPEG looks for edges inside a fixed rectangle 'tile' of the image, then averages the pixels that do not meet edge threshold, and have similar color values. The issue, is that the average of one tile, and another, (especially with a very high quantization value) can be noticeably different.  This creates a rectangular artifact.

When the quantizer is not set on "Mangle! DEATH TO QUALITY!" settings, JPEG does not look that bad on natural images.  However, hosting companies dont want to pay for people downloading a 300kb jpeg on every visit. Instead, they want users to download 30kb jpeg on every visit. (Or smaller!!). So, they set the quantizer to MANGLE! and go on.

Most cameras (most..... ...) dont set the quantizer on MANGLE when they generate the jpeg from the CCD array's output. They still produce artifacts, just not really horrible ones. They only show up on post processing because the tile boundaries are what they are, and averages are averages. If you try to enhance edges, the edges between tiles will also be enhanced, for some algorithms. This makes JPEG undesirable for professional photography, and why professional cameras have the option to save as RAW.
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Reelya

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3629 on: May 08, 2018, 02:50:42 am »

Ah, I see. I was under the impression .jogs decrepited every time you copied them. How else would pics on the webs artifactify?

A normal copy is the same size and is digitally identical to the original, like copying any other type of file.

The degradation could happen if a site is storing all images in lossy formats, but then they decided to re-format the files with higher compression to reduce bandwidth costs. That would compound the problem: the new format is more lossy than the old one, but it's also not working from a clean version, but from another lossy version.

e.g. say the first filter lost 10% of detail, and the second filter lost 20% of detail (with linear reduction of file size). If you applied filter 1 to a raw image, you have 10% loss, and if you apply filter 2 to an image you have 20% loss. However, say you didn't store original images anywhere, to save space, then apply filter 2 to images that already used filter 1, then you're down to 72% detail, but the real kicker is that the file still takes up the same amount of space as one with only 20% detail loss created from the original file.

So, not storing original clean images actually backfires in terms of bandwidth, since if you always convert from 100% perfect copies you can compress the resultant images to smaller sizes for less perceptual loss of detail compared to trying to shrink an already-shrunk image.
« Last Edit: May 08, 2018, 02:59:00 am by Reelya »
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