On my AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS mini PC, NVDA is a bit sluggish in some cases in Firefox; e.g. cursoring through messages in Gmail folders. For reasons I don't fully understand, setting the processor affinity to a single CPU core and setting the process priority to "above normal" helps significantly, even when the CPU is nearly idle. I don't currently have the time/energy to debug the root cause for this or write a proper add-on, but I wrote an NVDA global plugin to make the change for me automatically when NVDA starts. If it breaks something, you get to keep all the pieces. ``` import ctypes
import globalPluginHandler
class GlobalPlugin(globalPluginHandler.GlobalPlugin): def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs): super().__init__(*args, **kwargs) p = ctypes.c_void_p(ctypes.windll.kernel32.GetCurrentProcess()) ctypes.windll.kernel32.SetProcessAffinityMask(p, ctypes.c_void_p(1)) ctypes.windll.kernel32.SetPriorityClass(p, ctypes.wintypes.DWORD(0x00008000)) ``` #nvdasr
@kev This isn't about changing overall CPU settings. It's about changing the way Windows schedules the NVDA process, both which core it uses and what priority it has relative to other running apps. You can do this from the Task Manager context menu, but the global plugin I provided does this automatically from within NVDA.
@kev I can understand above normal priority anyway but how does the afinity help? That's strange. I thought NVDA would have a couple relatively busy threads running at once and so should be distributed over a couple cores, especially when doing all that IPC and managing a virtual buffer.
@x0 @kev I honestly don't even really understand priority. If the CPU is near idle, there shouldn't be much contention (and thus nothing should have to wait), especially with multiple cores, since there are more than enough cores for all the things. As for affinity, NVDA is largely single core, primarily because GUIs (and thus accessibility APIs) are pretty much main thread only. Most of the work of a virtual buffer actually happens in NVDA's injected code in the GUI thread of the remote process; e.g. inside Firefox. I haven't tested this, but I think this is more likely to be the many cross-process COM calls NVDA makes to query the focus, etc., not the buffer stuff. That involves a lot of context switching.
@x0 @kev not sure about how NVDA manages its work, but restricting processor affinity can help keep memory cached closer to the core that's running the thread. if there's lots of state (either lots of small allocations or a few big ones), you can pay a price waiting for it all to be paged in
@vt52 That's my best guess too, but I'm just surprised by how much that seems to impact things in this case. There are a lot of very small IPC calls, which I guess could result in a lot of small allocations, but we're talking maybe 10-100, not thousands. @x0 @kev
@vt52 @x0 @kev It'd also be interesting to know why this problem anecdotally appears to be worse on AMD CPUs than Intel ones, though of course there are just so, so many variables there, no pun intended.
@kev My original post included the code. That can go in a .py file inside %appdata%\nvda\scratchpad\globalPlugins, but that requires developer scratchpad to be enabled. If that's not something you're familiar with, you're probably best leaving this one alone for now. I don't want to go through the process of creating this as an actual installable add-on at this stage.
Also, for some reason, the process priority does not get set with this code but the affinity does. However, if I run the code as a one-liner in NVDA's Python console, it returns "1" and does what it's suppose to.
@twynn Hmm, I can't repro that here. Both get set by the plugin. I'm running latest alpha, which... might make a difference because of 64 bit? I tried to write the code to be independent of that though.
Not sure if I'm checking it properly, but when I invoke the code in the Python Console, it returns 1, and Task Manager reflects the change. If I just, say, restart NVDA, only the affinity gets reflected. I don't need it anyway, so it's not a big deal.
I don't use email in a browser like that, so maybe that's why, but on my 2012 3570K, NVDA is never the thing that lags, it's always everything else around it. To be fair it's actually not a laggy machine at all despite it's well-warn age, but if anything does, it's never the screen-reader.
@FreakyFwoof What's really intriguing about my situation is that clearly, it's not really anything in particular that is slow, but rather, how NVDA gets scheduled by Windows. That's not a bottleneck I ever expected to be noteworthy. One of these days, I might try to profile it and figure out what's really going on, but definitely not today and probably not any time soon.
oh yeah I've been doing this for quite a while now on a HX370. I have very little experience with NVDA addons so entirely possible I messed something up somewhere, but it works for me. This let's you set CPU affinity and priority in NVDA settings. Addon: iamtalon.me/cpuPriority-1.0.0.… Code: code.iamtalon.me/Talon/cpu-aff…
@talon Even though I have no problems, I'm gonna try it anyway because I'm curious if I'm just used to this old machine being slightly laggy, and since I don't know any different, I just deal with it. Got me curious.
@FreakyFwoof If you don't have a cpu with high performance and high efficiency cores this will probably not do much for you. But hey been surprised before. Let me know what happens
@FreakyFwoof You might get a very very negligible boost from setting the process priority to high but honestly I'd be surprised if anything at all happened. lol
@talon I think you're right, honestly. I won't see any performance gains until I upgrade this machine's well, everything. It's running better than it ever has though, Jake hooked me up with a GPU instead of Intel onboard graphics, and I upped it from 16 to 32 GB RAM. Windows 10 but it's not end-of-life because of the I guess, EU mandate so I still get updates. Never felt so good lol
@talon GTX 970 for the curious. On a hunt for the 3770K from Ebay just to really max it out. Plan is to donate it to the boy once I'm officially done with it, would make a perfectly usable NAS/Linux box, refuse to scrap it just because MS says I should.
@FreakyFwoof That's what we've been doing as well. Our homelab is pretty much entirely made of old parts that eventually got upgraded. Very happy with this setup.
Oh wow. Surprised you need this on a CPU like that. Makes me wonder whether there is some weirdness with AMD processors that NVDA is hitting because as much as Intel irritates me for other reasons, I don't have this issue on my Intel laptop.
Not entirely sure, and also not even sure how I'd debug that. I'd imagine since it's a mobile CPU it's related to the power profiles, and changing them does improve things a little, but it makes a huge difference especially if you're running in a more energy saving mode. It switches to them especially when running on batteries and I haven't found out how I can prevent it from doing that, but to be honest sometimes I don't even want it to do that because it means giving up quite a lot of battery time. But setting CPU affinity and priority seems to do a good enough job that I kinda forgot about it until recently when I tried to get it working as an addon and not as a weird set of external scripts.
@talon My 8845HS is in a mini PC, so still a mobile-ish CPU but theoretically less of the power saving silliness. Obviously an older generation than yours though and I was thinking that was the cause, but I guess not. I'm definitely curious about the underlying cause, but now that I have an interim solution, I'm not quite curious enough to be motivated to dig into it further. I might get nerd sniped enough one day, we'll see.
yup, this is pretty much my situation as well. This works well enough for me that I don't feel like digging, and there are people out there that know much more about this than me that have a much higher chance of figuring out what's going on here.
As if today couldn't get any worse, the bill for the server that runs this instance came out today and it was £1.60 more than expected. I never got any emails saying I'd gone over any limits or anything, but anyway, I'm now £0.02 negative. Some support to help keep this server going and help my other services grow, as well as covering personal costs, would be greatly appreciated.
At a critical moment, the tech press are failing to connect the dots between Apple and Google's craven capitulations and the authoritarianism they have nurtured within their own ecosystems. Apple is now corrosive to democracy itself, and we have to get smarter about the way these forces interact:
Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate.
The majority of people hate rich people because it's been proven that many show narcissistic/psychopathic tendencies. You only have to look at the various big tech CEOs and many in the current administration to see this play out in real time.
@ZBennoui Yet I've met rich people and they are interesting people who don't even discuss money, of course, most were not billionaires, but millionaires, for sure.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to imply that all wealthy people are narcissistic jerks who deserve nothing, but the fact of the matter is that many are. It also depends on how you got rich in the first place. If you were born into wealth, you will simply not relate to people who either don't have the extraordinary amount of money you do, or who have come into it honestly by doing good work. There's a lot of nuance here, as with everything.
@ZBennoui Most of the milionaires I've met, including even some blind ones, made businesses. I only met 1 person born into it, and he's british royalty.
When using Microsoft Word or Google Docs, don't just make text bigger and bolder to make it a heading. That will work for sighted users, but screen reader users will miss that and just hear it as normal paragraph text. Use actual heading styles, like level 1 through 6.
In addition to working better with screen readers, this also matters for Braille transcription (I used to work for a company that develops a Braille translator). If a document author properly uses styles, then the software can infer what she is trying to do and do an appropriate thing when formatting the corresponding Braille document. It is harder and a lot more error-prone for software to try to have logic to, say, try to infer that a heading is intended based on text being bigger and bolder.
In the late 1980's there was an MS-DOS program called PIANOMAN. Yup, in the docs, it's written in all caps like that. This program would let you compose, play, edit, and save tunes, and even compile them into self-contained executables to give to others who didn't have a copy of PIANOMAN themselves. This program's claim to fame was that it could create pseudo-polyphonic music through the monophonic PC speaker by playing different notes extremely rapidly. This was a shareware program (try it for a while, if you like it, send in a registration fee to get the latest version and another disk of sample songs). I just found the shareware distribution of version 4 on Archive.org. One of the included tunes, which exists here only as a compiled, self-contained executable, is a version of a Tom Lehrer classic. Naturally, I figured some folks might be interested in this. It's set up to play repeatedly until a key is pressed, so I've only included three playings in this recording, and the last one fades out. Enjoy! #TomLehrer
Ah, the memories! PIANOMAN was one of the programs I used to play with when my brother got his first PC back in the 80s. I never figured out how to record songs like those demos, but it was fun to play the keyboard like a monophonic piano. Drove everybody crazy when I played it during Computer class at school, but I didn't care.
If you put solar panels over all the fields where corn is grown for ethanol today, you could power all of North America and still harvest shade crops underneath them.
Anthropic stole the books I co-wrote in order to train their planet-burning hallucination machine, so I've filed a claim. They wept that if every plagiarised author does so, the company will go bankrupt. Boo emdash hoo. www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com
У меня есть приятель (у него есть «остаток», — на нашем жаргоне это значит, что он не совсем слепой, немножко видит). Так вот, он говорит, что ему прям вот супермегаудобно платить часами и что он бы в жизни не отказался от них только ради этой функции. Ну в смысле, платить в кассе в магазине, например.
“Apple is now treating federal agents—who are public employees exercising government power—as if they’re a vulnerable minority group in need of protection from ‘discrimination.’ This isn’t just a misapplication of content policies; it’s a fundamental inversion of what those policies were designed to do.”
Just when you think corporate content moderation can’t get any more absurd, Apple has managed to redefine “protected class” in a way that would make Orwell proud. According to int…
- use mimalloc as default allocator in scenarios where we know memory safety domain violations are unlikely (Rust, managed languages, ...). this probably solves most of our multi-thread SG performance issues actually, since the pattern is mostly prevalent in Rust and interpreted languages like Node
- let browsers use their bundled mallocs, since they are tuned for the browser
- figure out how to improve the global lock in musl's malloc-ng, probably by using atomics more heavily (but this may actually hurt performance worse since it's multiple atomic ops)
What does SG stand for in this context? I've heard of poor performance in Rust programs when using musl's malloc-ng. I wonder if this is an indication that Rust encourages a bad pattern of overly frequent memory allocations that we, meaning Rust programmers, should try to avoid.
@matt scatter-gather. i think the allocation pattern is fine for a language like rust where we don't need a hardened malloc. it's on us to fix alpine's rust toolchain to use mimalloc instead.
It looks like mimalloc is just over an order of magnitude larger than musl's malloc-ng, by (stripped) object code size. Presumably having a larger, more complex implementation of such a fundamental component is a liability. And if one has chosen Alpine over all the glibc-based distros, one presumably values smallness, simplicity, and security (which I guess comes partly from simplicity) over speed.
@pj Ouch. I like Rust, and I'd rather not write any more new C or C++ code than necessary because, while I value smallness and simplicity, I value safety and correctness more. But I recognize you have a valid point about the size and complexity of the Rust project, and it does make me uneasy.
hay humans: recommendations for good strings midi things? We want to maybe add them to a few of our tracks to pad things out a bit, especially if the songs are slow and depressing...as they inevitably are.
Fracture Sounds Blueprint series, all free. ProjectSAM TFO, again free. Self-serving demo but it uses some of these things. The music I made for my podcast was all made using free instruments. Sending so you can hear what can be done with purely free things: youtu.be/Ra7prQ6d9Pw
This piece of music is for the podcast 'StroongeCast' I co-created with my wife Kirsten. Every podcast needs a musical intro (or at least I believe so) and t...
The majority of the tech industry has no valid vision how to contribute to a liveable future for humanity on this planet. Their dystopian fantasies don’t match with human needs. That’s why we will keep sliding from one bubble to the next. Everything has to be artificially inflated to hide the massive abyss of meaninglessness behind it all.
@jcsteh Hey I read about your App2Clap project. I'm curious how you can isolate audio from one particular application. For years now, I've been using Total Recorder to record system audio. Before definitely Windows 7 and possibly Vista, in other words, as late as XP, I could record audio as received by the system, exclude applications, do accelerated recording, etc. But then with the newer audio driver, I had to record after processing by Windows, which meant all audio was resampled to the default output sample rate, I could no longer exclude apps, etc. When you said App2Clap requires Windows 11, that gave me the impression that Windows 11 restored some of that older functionality, but I really can't find anything, and Total Recorder hasn't been updated in years. Thoughts? Thanks.
Windows 10 (see previous message about that) added WASAPI functionality to allow capture of audio from a specific app instead of loopback audio for an entire device. I think it's still processed by Windows though.
Microsoft wrote a sample app for this API which does this, but you'd have to build it yourself, which might be tricky if you don't have dev experience. I also don't know how well it works; it was only intended as a sample.
Here's a link to the sample, but I can't help you any further with this. Ultimately, I think you're going to have more mileage and flexibility using OBS or REAPER, but I also understand the desire to avoid being entangled in yet another tool. learn.microsoft.com/en-us/samp… @TheQuinbox
As someone who's seen a lifetime's worth of corporate union avoidance strategies, Ruby Central's attempts to discredit gem.coop and prevent it from blossoming into a community-led competitor mirror that combination of misinformation and abuse of power so perfectly that I'm unable to see it in any other way. What's happening in Ruby right now is the closest thing I can imagine to a union busting campaign in open source.
Uh... cool. My Synology NAS seems to be doing this thing where no services are available after a restart. I can't get to the web interface, samba isn't available, and a bunch of scripts don't seem to work from command line. I really didn't have let's go through a bunch of logs and see what's broken today on my non-existent bingo card, but here we are, I guess.
There is an awful lot of CPU and disk IO happening. The CLI is basically unresponsive most of the time. I'm sitting here waiting to see how long it will take to respond to "exit" from the shell. Five minutes and counting. Yep, something's good and proper broke. And this is after a fresh reboot.
I definitely have a dead CMOS battery. Unfortunately, replacing it requires removing the motherboard of the DS-1815 Plus, which I am (probably) capable of doing without screwing things up. Well, this should be fun. And no guarantee that things will work after the replaced battery.
Good news: Taking out the motherboard and replacing the CR-1220 battery wasn't particularly difficult. I've done way worse things.
Bad news: Other than the new battery, I'm still right where I was before.
The RAID isn't mounting, whatever is supposed to sync the time isn't, and everything is still broken... except now it keeps time after a reboot. And, by the way, due to whatever IO junk is going on, it takes about 7 minutes to reboot after executing sudo shutdown -r now.
sudo reboot just never works. So, yeah, fun.
Next step, probably, is to install a single, initialized drive (which I don't have) and set the operating system up as new to see if it will import the RAID from the existing pool when I put all the original drives back in, unless someone has a better idea.
So, I want to post some questions about this DS1815Plus problem on Reddit.
I've never used Reddit before, and the official Synology support forum has a big stupid CAPTCHA that, yes, I could solve with AI or whatever, but I just don't have the spoons to deal with all that today.
So, trying to sign up on Reddit, I was greeted with no fewer than seven "something went wrong" errors in different places, and a verification code but no place to put one in. Very exciting.
It seems like the NAS is trying to repair itself. All my shares are now visible under /volume1 again, even though essentially none of the built-in services -- web management, samba, etc. are currently useable. The drives are chugging madly, and the shell is still not quite completely unresponsive.
Also, I manually set the clock less than an hour ago just to see what it would do, as it went back to January 01, 2014 again, since NTP isn't happening for whatever reason, and it's already gained about 24 minutes since then.
So, I guess I'll just let it sit here and do whatever it does, and hopefully it will fix itself in time, and not blow up and make terrible noises in the middle of the night.
It's probably just coincidence that the CMOS battery was dead.
Hopefully, at some point, I can just restart this thing again, and it updates the system clock, and things start working as normal.
I've got a couple of projects that are currently in limbo until I can access resources again. Great timing.
Update: Samba just came back online, though it's very, very sloooooow.
Basically, all this happened because at least one drive has completely failed, and another one wants to very badly. This pool has two disk tolerance, so I have to do stuff now, right this very now, to prevent data loss. But, for whatever reason, I got no notifications. No beeps, no emails or push notifications. Anything that should have alerted me completely failed to do so.
On top of that, the CMOS battery just happened to die, which turned out to, I think, be mostly unrelated.
I've just ordered four 12TB Ironwolf drives. Can't afford to buy eight in one go, so I'll replace half now, half later, obviously one disk at a time.
Continuing to play with this messed up NAS, because I can't put it down:
I have no idea how I'm going to deactivate drives and replace them in the prescribed way. The Synology web management portal is brutally slow, often times out internally, and sometimes, elements of the page just don't appear at all for minutes at a time in it's current state. There is also a potential accessibility problem highlighting a drive in the storage manager, when I can even get to the storage manager. I say potential, because I can't tell if it's not working due to accessibility, or because the interface is so ridiculously slow in it's current broken state. This is so much fun!
Edit: It was the thing being slow. I'll have to be very careful replacing the drives on this thing.
Drive 1 of the first set of 4 has been physically replaced, and is now theoretically being integrated into the raid.
Too bad I can't figure out where to go in the stupid DSM web management interface to get status on that so I know when to replace the next drive, and email notifications are all still broken. A thing to fix the notification system requires a DSM update, which I don't want to do while it's repairing the raid.
RAID recovery is now at 71% with the first drive replaced. Looks like it will be done in a bit more than 6.5 hours from now. The rest of the drives haven't shipped yet, though. Just replacing this one drive will buy me a little time, anyway.
The raid is now fully repaired. Now I just need to do that 7 more times (eventually). It took a bit less than a day, which is honestly quite a lot better than I thought given the state of things.
Happy, joyous day. It seems as if three of the original set of four hard drives I ordered are now scheduled to arrive on October 10. I can cancel and order from another seller, but don't think I'll find them at this price again.
Looks like three of the initial four replacement hard drives I ordered will now arrive on Wednesday, October 8. Two days earlier than initial estimates, but about two weeks after I thought they would show up. However, it's kind of fitting that they will arrive exactly twenty years after I made this silly production for an internet radio show I used to do, called Things and Stuff.
The rest of the initial set of four replacement drives showed up today, so I am now repairing the raid after replacing drive 8. Drives 6 and 4 will be replaced next, then, eventually, the other four, probably next month.
Worryingly though, it seems to think that drive 7, which I just replaced, has bad sectors. I'll scan it again after this is done. Maybe it's a holdover in the log somewhere from when the original drive 7 was basically unusable.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! says my Synology DS1815+, alerting me that yet another drive has completely failed. Well, time to order the next set of four, I guess... except not now, because Amazon is still broke.
Edit: Amazon is now less broke. Drives ordered. They'll be here on Friday.
Hopefully, I can use the quick repair option now that my raid is not so full, and replace all of these drives much faster than the first four when I get them.
I've just replaced drive 2, the failed drive from earlier this week. While doing that, I started getting errors from drive 1, one of the original drives that hasn't yet been replaced.
I selected the "quick repair" option when rebuilding the raid, but it's not going any faster than it did before. Still has about a day ETA.
So, assuming nothing else falls over, I should finally have all the new drives in place by Thursday, and I can stop updating this thread.
Today, I ordered a 4TB drive to replace a dying 500GB drive. I've never replaced a drive in Unraid before, so that should be fun. The 500GB drive was making a terrible sound as it spun, plus the dreaded clicking that speaks of doom for mechanical drives.
After replacing drive 2, the fifth of 8, the NAS felt the need to reshape the raid after repairing it. Basically, it's shuffling all the data around the various drives.
So, this particular raid repair is taking three times longer than it did the first four times.
The process started Sunday afternoon, and it looks like it won't be done until early tomorrow afternoon.
Seeing you go threw this makes me really glad I have never tried to do it. I wouldn't have the pationts for somethihng like that at all. At least I can admit that.
It looks like the NAS is going to re-shape after each new drive is added now, post raid repair. If it goes as slowly as the last one did, I will finally be done with this process by about November 5th or so.
@adam When I used to spec out hardware arrays I went with the largest number of drives I could afford due to this issue. Its nerveracking enough when your dealing with this NAS repair, but imagine that on a large enterprise database where you know the repair is going to really throttle the drive performance.
Reshaping seems to go much faster after it reaches about the 72% mark, so it takes about 2.5 days per drive, not the full 3 that I was expecting. I also changed a setting to give higher priority to RAID repair this time, and it's going ever so slightly faster.
I just replaced drive 5 (8 of 8 on this NAS). The dumb junk since late September is finally almost at an end... until it all breaks again, hopefully not for another nine years.
@SylvieLorxu I tryed installing catima on my parent's phone. Unfortunately, catima doesn't exist for iOS. What alternative app would you suggest for iOS?
Scan documents, tickets, bills, cards ... anything you want!Then you can detect text in them, share the detected text or the whole document as a PDF.The whole app is open source!
OSS Card Wallet is an Open Source app to scan and store all your cards. You either scan using your camera or by importing an image. The app will automatically detect you cards and barcodes within the photo and will crop the image.
The year is 2025. AI has taken the world by storm, self-driving cars are on the roads, and brain-computer interfaces are being tested on humans. Yet, amidst all this modernity, blind and visually impaired individuals are still stuck utilizing a CAPTCHA service that requires your email address, uses a web browser cookie, and only (sometimes) functions if you scale back your privacy settings. SMH
Getting an email at a reputable email provider is now one of the hardest things for a machine to do. This is exactly why we need captchas like these.
Recognizing garbled words or distorted images is something a machine can do. What it can't do is provide a "proof of humanity."
As AI gets better, cheaper and more ubiquitous, all captchas will devolve to either "precious resource verification" (where the precious resource is something like an email, phone number or device-specific token), or straight up government identity verification.
This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
Very thankful for the handful of people we have in this community who report not just the spammers, but the trolls, the sealion-ers, the harassers, the bullies.
We're not omnipresent and we can't possibly know everything that's going on across the fediverse; we rely on member reports to find and take action on bad behaviour, not just on mastodon.art, but on other instances.
Part of hosting and building a safe community is having clear, strong boundaries and enforcing those boundaries -
#FediHelp needed: the final phase of our metadata reorganization is now in progress. During our cleanup, we a.o. found a bunch of no longer maintained apps which we think might be considered "niche" – but are not sure which of those are really still useful, and thus should be kept.
So if you use one of them and still find it useful – or recently tried one of them and it didn't even work, can you please check codeberg.org/IzzyOnDroid/Every… and leave a comment? Thanks!
This is a spin-off from #10 where I'd like some input from the team, concerning how to handle the following unmaintained apps which might be considered niche:
* [ ] [`com.ionicframework.backingtrainer763961`](https://apt.izzysoft.de/packages/com.
@jahtnamas of course you are allowed – and thanks for the hint! The version we ship is the latest release available in their repo. Unfortunately, it seems they've stopped providing newer releases there. So maybe you could ask them to provide releases with APKs again? They'd be picked up again by our updater automatically. Should they say "No", we'll have to remove the app of course. Thanks!
Appreciate the shoutout! The feedback from folks like @zersiax and @fireborn has been invaluable. We’re going to keep working to improve our accessibility story and build something that we can all be proud of 🩷
Hubert Figuière
in reply to Carolyn • • •