Random Tech Questions you want answered.

I've always just used Podcast Addict, it gets the job done.

Is Overcast on Android? I had tried a few others but keep coming back to that one.

Never had an issue with Pocket Casts, since it was recommended here, when I switched from IOS.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Is Overcast on Android? I had tried a few others but keep coming back to that one.

Nope.

Does anyone have a good system for switching all your monitors and peripherals to be controlled by a second PC?

I have a work laptop and work from home somewhat frequently and I'd like to be able to use my mouse/keyboard, 2x monitors etc. The best solution I've been able to come up with is buying a multiport USB switch an HDMI splitter and a Display Port splitter (if that exists). This means I've got 3 switches to switch and 3 things to plug in and out of my work laptop every time I make the switch.

Anyone aware of a clearer/simpler solution?

Skiptron wrote:

Does anyone have a good system for switching all your monitors and peripherals to be controlled by a second PC?

I have a work laptop and work from home somewhat frequently and I'd like to be able to use my mouse/keyboard, 2x monitors etc. The best solution I've been able to come up with is buying a multiport USB switch an HDMI splitter and a Display Port splitter (if that exists). This means I've got 3 switches to switch and 3 things to plug in and out of my work laptop every time I make the switch.

Anyone aware of a clearer/simpler solution?

The thing you're looking for is a KVM Switch (Keyboard/Video/Mouse).

I have a similar setup to you. I did some research into them and my takeaways were as follows:

  • They're not great for gamers - can be a potential source of lag.
  • They often won't support fancy gaming keyboards (of which I have)
  • They're expensive. Expect to pay a couple hundred bucks. More if you're looking for > 1080p support.

I ended up not bothering. They're really targeted at AV folks, video editers and the like. I didn't find one specifically for gamers, which I suspect is what I want.

Do let me know if you find something that works. I even started a thread for it which got zero replies.

EDIT - There does seem to be one targeted at gamers....But $330 is too rich for me.

My first instinct is to tell you to look into some kind of network streaming/remote desktop solution, but I don't know if there are any that work gracefully with multiple monitors.

What you want to look for is a KVM switch, just find one that has the display connections you want. Probably worth getting a laptop dock too just so you don't have to unplug/replug into the laptop every time you bring it home.

I have owned and have used as part of my job a few different KVMs over the years. I have seen all sort of wonkiness with them. For one of the ones I owned I had to plug two keyboard into to get it to work correctly with my Mac keyboard despite the packaging saying Mac was supported. I had to buy a cheap Windows keyboard to plug into the keyboard port and then I could plug my Mac keyboard into a spare USB port. At my last job we had a couple of computer labs where each seat had two PCs (one was for a regular PC and a special digital forensics PC, the other classroom had a regular PC and VM server). They used the cheapest Belkin KVMs they could find in both rooms and we had to keep a supply of spares on hands because we would have about one per month stop working (luckily this came out of the CIS departments budget and not ITs).

So all that said be prepared to spend $300+ if you want a quality one. I suggest avoiding the Belkin SOHO line. The network admins at my last job seemed to like one of the StarTech models, but I am not sure which one. Money and performance wise you may be better off with the USB switch and a video switch.

Thanks for all the replies. I definitely don't want to introduce any input or video lag into the mix as my primary PC is for gaming. Looks like multiple switches may be the answer. Now to find USB and video switches that offer little/no lag.

There is a cheaper solution.

Mouse and keyboard can be handled by something like Synergy (multi-OS) or Mouse Without Borders (Windows only) which allows you to move your mouse pointer between displays/machines and switches keyboard input to them as well. You can keep the hardware attached to whatever machine you want to be 'least laggy' (your game machine) and control everything from there.

As far as displays, I have a work laptop and a single external display - so I can change the input of that display depending on whether I want to use it with my home PC or as a second one for my work laptop. Pretty simple and easy to do. Since you have more than one external monitor that can complicate things more than a bit. You could have one dedicated to your home machine and one shared though. Synergy and Mouse Without Borders both play nicely with changing displays.

OH! And if your monitors have a stupid clunky interface, you can use something like ClickMonitorDDC to control them instead. I have batch files which send commands directly to the monitor to tell it to switch to another input, or to change settings between "watching a movie" and regular computing. Double click an icon and the monitor changes exactly how I want. Simple and free!

(You can also define hotkeys. but I haven't gotten around to that.)

LouZiffer wrote:
Hobear wrote:

Is there an easy way to search what hardware is accessing my bad driver NDIS.sys? I looked through all network items and in properties didn't see it being utilized. It is being called but not sure by what hardware.

Are you sure it's being called by hardware? That's typically used by the Windows system process. Sometimes malware can try to disguise itself as ndis.sys though. Process Hacker should be able to tell you if there are multiple copies out there and what's using them.

EDIT: Use "Find Handles or DLLs" if it doesn't show up under anything else.

Finally got around to doing this and the tool only detected one instance and I am still not sure on which adapter or tool is pulling this. It is a really odd problem. I am kind of at my wits end. I will keep looking but it is pretty hard to narrow down what might fix this stutter problem.

EDIT: So I tried a few fixes and finally tried one suggestion of turning off wireless and plugging into the Ethernet port instead. Fixed for now. Something with the wireless or the driver. Hmm. For a future night, for now the wife commanded me I go game for a bit! I will do her bidding!

Nice diagnosis, Hobear! Your wireless driver may be interfacing incorrectly with ndis.sys, since ethernet is playing fine with it. That also rules out (well mostly) a problem with ndis.sys itself. Updating or rolling back the wireless driver are potential fixes if the version you're on is the culprit. There was one time I saw bad hardware cause ndis.sys BSODs under certain network conditions, but that's pretty rare from my experience. (To get a good idea of when that was: It was a token ring card under Windows NT, and the error followed that card no matter which server we had it in. Never seen anything like it before or since.)

LouZiffer wrote:

There is a cheaper solution..(stuff)

Thank you sir! I'll look into this a bit more over the weekend. I think having 1 shared display may be a viable option here.

Thanks Lou! Yeah I will also take the machine apart and check for any lose connections this happened after I moved and I could have knocked it loose as well. Had that happen with my power connector to the board a few years back, basically disconnected it self from heating up and cooling down as it wasn't fully clipped on.

So I just got a new Mobo, Ram, and CPU and after installing them I have very audible mic static. I've looked in my case to see if anything near the audio section of the motherboard would be causing the interference but didn't see anything.

My Seasonic gold PSU has not changed and the mic audio was fine with the older motherboard so I can't imagine it's interference from that but the audio section is close to it. I'm a little peeved because I got this motherboard specifically because it has better AC1220 audio and an "isolated" audio section. A lot of good that did. I don't get any static in my audio though, just the mic.

So I was wondering if I went the USB mic route rather and audio jack would the static go away? I don't want to buy the desktop mic and just have the same problem. My last option would be to buy a $30 or so sound card like it's 1998.

Tempest wrote:

So I just got a new Mobo, Ram, and CPU and after installing them I have very audible mic static. I've looked in my case to see if anything near the audio section of the motherboard would be causing the interference but didn't see anything.

My Seasonic gold PSU has not changed and the mic audio was fine with the older motherboard so I can't imagine it's interference from that but the audio section is close to it. I'm a little peeved because I got this motherboard specifically because it has better AC1220 audio and an "isolated" audio section. A lot of good that did. I don't get any static in my audio though, just the mic.

So I was wondering if I went the USB mic route rather and audio jack would the static go away? I don't want to buy the desktop mic and just have the same problem. My last option would be to buy a $30 or so sound card like it's 1998.

It did for me. I have a fancy Asus Maximus Extreme Mobo too. I ended up getting the Samson Meteor Mic.

EvilDead wrote:

It did for me. I have a fancy Asus Maximus Extreme Mobo too. I ended up getting the Samson Meteor Mic.

That's the one I saw randomly today that gave me the idea of this bypass.

Tempest wrote:
EvilDead wrote:

It did for me. I have a fancy Asus Maximus Extreme Mobo too. I ended up getting the Samson Meteor Mic.

That's the one I saw randomly today that gave me the idea of this bypass.

FWIW: My friends think my voice sounds crystal clear and it doesn't pick up much noise from the A/C unit, sitting 2 feet to the right, on hot summer days.

Hmmm a $50 mic... do you use a separate headphone? I imagine it would pick up game sounds, otherwise...

I would be using headphones of course but I am worried that it will pick up my mechanical keyboard and mouse swipes. I may have to mount it above my monitor.

Either that or I just get a USB gaming headset instead of 3.5mm.

Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:

Hmmm a $50 mic... do you use a separate headphone? I imagine it would pick up game sounds, otherwise...

You would with pretty much any mic. However if you don't have your speakers blasting it does pretty good directional audio only picking up your voice.

Tempest wrote:

So I just got a new Mobo, Ram, and CPU and after installing them I have very audible mic static. I've looked in my case to see if anything near the audio section of the motherboard would be causing the interference but didn't see anything.

Does your case have front panel audio? If so try disconnecting the headers for that.

Rykin wrote:
Tempest wrote:

So I just got a new Mobo, Ram, and CPU and after installing them I have very audible mic static. I've looked in my case to see if anything near the audio section of the motherboard would be causing the interference but didn't see anything.

Does your case have front panel audio? If so try disconnecting the headers for that.

Yup, that was the first thing I tried. Same amount of static. I'm bringing home a crappy USB headset from work and see if that will do the trick and confirm USB will work. I wish I had another 3.5mm jack mic to see if the Hyper X 3.5mm is actually thr problem

Maybe something like this cheap adapter will work too:
IMAGE(https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71sXEACnekL._AC_SS350_.jpg)

The $7 adapter above did the trick. No more mic static and WIndows installed it in seconds. No problem.

IMAGE(https://www.commitstrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Strip-Saint-graal-650-finalenglish.jpg)

Yeah, I really dislike that crap.

We're going on a long trip in a couple of weeks with a loooong flight from Chicago to Seoul, followed by a looong flight from Seoul to Manila. We have an iPad Mini and a Kindle Fire tablet to load up with entertainment.

I'm up-to-speed with saving stuff offline on iPad, but ours has a measly 16gb of storage. The Kindle Fire I know I can pop in a beefy microSD card. Besides stuff I can save for offline from Prime Video, what apps for Kindle Fire can I use for playing movies and media files off the microSD card?

If you have a decent selection of movies on DVD or blu ray, it's pretty straightforward to rip them and then use handbrake to convert them to MP4 and then you can just load them up and play using the stock video player.