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Erkki

Damn it, but computers have become really complicated

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While I would throw a recommendation to a Blue microphone, you did ask for a little mic to clip onto the wire and I used to use this one with my trusty pair of Sennheisers I had to retire about a year ago - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00029MTMQ/

 

Me, though, I don't like having an extra wire whenever I can help it. I toyed with any number of microphone + headphone setups including a Blue Snowball + Sennheiser and I wasn't very happy with all of them. I recently switched to a Astro gaming headset with a built-in microphone and I'm loving it, though they are slightly uncomfortable because they're on-ear which doesn't work great for someone with glasses such as myself. After spending way too much money on audio setups, I think I will move the Astro headset to the living room for dedicated use with my PS4 (the Astro A30 and A40 both come with three-pole, mobile-style plugs that work great with phones and the PS4 controller) and pick up this really well reviewed headset with circumaural/over-ear cans and a retractable mic - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003N636VI/

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For some reason, ScummVM doesn't let me bring up the Steam overlay when I launch it from Steam. I like having that shift+tab for chat and I'd like to be able to force a screenshot so that it won't just display a plain black background when I choose ScummVM from my list of games. Is there a way around this?

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For some reason, ScummVM doesn't let me bring up the Steam overlay when I launch it from Steam. I like having that shift+tab for chat and I'd like to be able to force a screenshot so that it won't just display a plain black background when I choose ScummVM from my list of games. Is there a way around this?

 

Some games just don't work with the Steam overlay. Be prepared that it might not be possible.

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 Moo. Ok, so i use Downcast on my iphone for podcasts. When i stream a podcast over BlueTooth or USB, the quality is terrible. Very boomy and a fair bit graney. This happens both in my car and on my BT speaker at home. Music sounds fine (played via the default Music app).

Any ideas?

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Something weird is going on with the trackpad on my 2009ish-era MacBook Pro. Sometimes when I click, it only sort of half-registers the click, and then doesn't complete the action until I click again. For example, the most common way I encounter this is when I try to switch tabs in Chrome. When I click on a different tab the first time, it doesn't switch tabs, but the tab I'm currently viewing sort of stops working -- I try to scroll up and down and nothing happens. Then if I click again, it sort of catches up -- the tab switches and whatever I tried to do in between clicks happens (so the page will scroll up and down, and if I hovered over any other tabs I'll see them highlight and un-highlight), as if it had all been getting queued up waiting for me to click to confirm.

 

It happens intermittently and I don't know how to determine what part of the process is the problem. I don't think it's Chrome because I've occasionally seen it happen in the Finder or Steam. I would Google it but I don't even know how to describe the problem in a searchable way.

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That's super weird, I wonder if it's a mouse/trackpad driver thing. Can you try plugging in a mouse and seeing if the problem persists?

 

In my computer news, I accidentally started building a PC. My wife's computer is my old one and probably isn't up to handling The Witcher 3, which is her most anticipated upcoming PC game. I can't really afford the $600-700 to actually make the PC that she deserves, so I decided that I would downgrade myself and give her my Ivy Bridge i5 CPU/mobo/RAM. Since I play only a fraction of my games on PC and she plays almost all of her games on PC, it seemed the natural choice. Anyways, this was a plan for the next four months or because Witcher 3 is coming out in February or something.

 

But then a very overclockable Pentium had a good sale, and then a good mobo + RAM combo came up and I suddenly have half of my new PC. Deals totally destroy my free will. :(

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Something weird is going on with the trackpad on my 2009ish-era MacBook Pro. Sometimes when I click, it only sort of half-registers the click, and then doesn't complete the action until I click again. For example, the most common way I encounter this is when I try to switch tabs in Chrome. When I click on a different tab the first time, it doesn't switch tabs, but the tab I'm currently viewing sort of stops working -- I try to scroll up and down and nothing happens. Then if I click again, it sort of catches up -- the tab switches and whatever I tried to do in between clicks happens (so the page will scroll up and down, and if I hovered over any other tabs I'll see them highlight and un-highlight), as if it had all been getting queued up waiting for me to click to confirm.

 

It happens intermittently and I don't know how to determine what part of the process is the problem. I don't think it's Chrome because I've occasionally seen it happen in the Finder or Steam. I would Google it but I don't even know how to describe the problem in a searchable way.

Have you replaced the battery ever?

 

Mac batteries, I guess because they're designed with very little tolerance, have a tendency to swell up over time as the chemicals react and gas gets trapped inside. The exact location where the battery swells is right underneath the touchpad, which can cause it to have phantom clicks and missed clicks, and also just overall weird behavior.

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Have you replaced the battery ever?

 

Mac batteries, I guess because they're designed with very little tolerance, have a tendency to swell up over time as the chemicals react and gas gets trapped inside. The exact location where the battery swells is right underneath the touchpad, which can cause it to have phantom clicks and missed clicks, and also just overall weird behavior.

 

That's an interesting theory. I haven't ever replaced it, and it does tell me to replace it when I click on the battery icon. Maybe I'll try that; I've been needing to do it anyway.

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New problem: I have a Logitech G27 racing wheel that I use to play Euro Truck Simulator 2. But it seems to be interfering with using my Xbox 360 controller. Games seem to be considering the racing wheel to be the "joystick 1" input and either ignoring the 360 controller completely or combining it with constant input from the G27 pedals.

 

I know I could probably solve this by unplugging the G27 when I'm not using it (if I want to crawl around under my desk like a fool), but is there a way to set which controller gets mapped to which input on the OS level, and/or temporarily disable one of them? (This is in Windows 8.1.)

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I don't know, but if you find out, let me know, because this is a continuous problem with my HOTAS setup.

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The microphone on my wireless bluetooth headphones doesn't work properly with Windows 7 (recording on Audacity or Sound Recorder comes out really distorted) until I use them on a website like clyp.it, at which point I'm asked in a little drop down bar in Chrome for permission to use my microphone; once I've said yes to that, everything starts working properly, including the installed software.

 

Is there some way to give this permission without going to the website?

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Is there some place where you can post pc build components and wizards will tell you if it will all work? Enough power, will all fit the case, heat sink will fit the processor, etc.

 

I've never built one before and I finally have enough of my own money to do it but don't want to end up crying after trying to assemble it because I made some dumb mistake.

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http://pcpartpicker.com/

 

Though that will only give you the power and heat sink parts of the equation. Pretty sure you have to do the "will all fit in the case" manually. Check Newegg reviews for each case, usually people are pretty quick to complain if there is not a lot of clearance for video cards or if third-party heatsinks don't clear the width of the case.

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I've been slowly buying parts here and there for a fresh PC, and I need some advice!

 

Is there a noticeable performance difference between M.2 SSDs and Sata3?

 

The mobo/128gig ssd combo would add about $200 additional to the machine, as I got a sweet half price 256gig Sata3 SSD, which I was planning to use as a primary install drive anyway. 

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It's kinda complicated, changing technology that I don't quite understand, that's why I don't personally bother with M.2. I believe that some of them will hog two SATA3 ports (as in, if you plug in an M.2 two designated ports will no longer work) while others basically use two PCI-E lanes. In either case, bandwidth is technically higher than a single SATA3 port and so transfer rates have a higher ceiling. As far as I know, nobody is really making screaming fast M.2's in a reasonable price range so I don't think it'll matter much anyways. To me, 550 mb/s read is plenty fast and even the relatively slower write rates of budget SSDs still beat the crap out of most HDDs, so I'll take just about any SSD I can get (from this generation, where most of the NAND controllers aren't garbage).

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Something weird is going on with the trackpad on my 2009ish-era MacBook Pro. Sometimes when I click, it only sort of half-registers the click, and then doesn't complete the action until I click again. For example, the most common way I encounter this is when I try to switch tabs in Chrome. When I click on a different tab the first time, it doesn't switch tabs, but the tab I'm currently viewing sort of stops working -- I try to scroll up and down and nothing happens. Then if I click again, it sort of catches up -- the tab switches and whatever I tried to do in between clicks happens (so the page will scroll up and down, and if I hovered over any other tabs I'll see them highlight and un-highlight), as if it had all been getting queued up waiting for me to click to confirm.

 

It happens intermittently and I don't know how to determine what part of the process is the problem. I don't think it's Chrome because I've occasionally seen it happen in the Finder or Steam. I would Google it but I don't even know how to describe the problem in a searchable way.

 

A follow-up on this in case anyone was curious: it wasn't a hardware problem. I transferred the entire contents of my laptop hard drive to a different laptop (for unrelated reasons) and it was still happening there too. I managed to get it to stop happening by going into the Accessibility settings under Mouse & Trackpad and turning off the "Enable dragging" option. I'm pretty sure I'd been using that option for a long time without issue, but I guess at some point something somewhere broke it. So now I can no longer drag things around without clicking, but that's much less annoying than the other problem, so good enough, I guess.

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That dragon sound at the start really makes me excited.

 

edit: ok christ that video is hilarious. The contrast between the dragon intro and the dude's voice, the ridiculously long wait between the start and the piddly payoff of the fans turning on. Dude, I would have believed you if you just said the fans turn on when the thing gets hot.

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I got an MSI 970 a few weeks ago. The Zero Frozr™ took a while to get used to, every time the fan noise stops I instinctively assume that it's broken and about to catch fire.

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man its sad going back to a old piece of software you used years back and finding it's become a bloated peice of ad infested trash, but sadly that seems to have been the route utorrent has took.

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man its sad going back to a old piece of software you used years back and finding it's become a bloated peice of ad infested trash, but sadly that seems to have been the route utorrent has took.

 

Yeah, but that's why qBittorrent is used these days! It's essentially utorrent pre-buyout.

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man its sad going back to a old piece of software you used years back and finding it's become a bloated peice of ad infested trash, but sadly that seems to have been the route utorrent has took.

 

There are guides to turning off the ads and "featured" content, to the point that it resembles classic 2.2.1 utorrent, but it's hardly worth it.

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Huh. I use a torrent server these days because it's integrated with our media server, so I had no idea uTorrent had fallen down a well.

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I had the same reaction recently, Codicier, and, like others, I was also going to mention qBittorent. Everyone loves the Q!

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