Random Tech Questions you want answered.

Robear wrote:

All I know is that the perf hit is usually limited to single-digit percentages, and is heavily dependent on the the available storage *throughput*.

Right. A blazing fast CPU pushing 30 Mbps to a slow USB stick is going to barely notice but may notice when pushing 5000 Mbps to a NVMe.

I was messing around with one of my OpenWRT routers today to see how OpenWRT works for travel. I configured it so that one of it's wireless radios is a WAN device. Worked pretty well as a client to my home guest wifi. Should be really easy to use at a hotel but I'll need to delete the upstream WAN network and add a new one for each hotel. Use MAC cloning as needed to get around captive portals.

The biggest issue with this setup is the router is a bit of a beast with 5 antennas about 10" long. So, yeah it would work but I'm not likely to ever want to take this thing with me anywhere.

Those small GL.iNet travel routers are looking pretty tempting now

Is there a way to reset the permissions of Windows 11 system accounts and services without resetting Windows?

I don’t know why but my dads computer is in a weird state where a ton of services fail to launch due to access denied. Reading posts I’m now under the impression that LOCAL and NETWORK SERVICE accounts don’t have the correct permissions but I haven’t found a way to repair that.

My fallback is I backup his important files and reset windows but I’d like to avoid that if at all possible.

Edit:
Seems to be a permissions issue where the account the service is running on can't access the registry keys it needs. In some cases I can hand modify the permissions to fix but a lot of services have this issue and it's a bit annoying figuring out the specific permissions each needs. Seems like something Windows should know how to fix itself but I'm not seeing a way.

Edit edit:
Ive managed to fix a few services but then I find more in a weird state. Pretty sure I’m just going to reset windows. Backed up his important files and now I’m doing some more malware/rootkit scans just in case there’s some hanging around I didn’t find before that might survive a windows reset.

Set up his account as the Admin account?

Robear wrote:

Set up his account as the Admin account?

His account is an admin account.

The problem is that NETWORKSEVICE and LOCALSERVICE accounts don’t have proper permissions to some of the registry keys they rely on.

I have no idea how this happened. There’s no weird software on here and I’ve not found a single bit of malware or rootkits using spybot and malwarebytes. It’s odd. Maybe some corruption happened. I used my usual corrupt system file repair stuff and while it found and fixed some corruption it didn’t fix the problem with derive account permissions.

So now I’ve given up and am resetting windows.

Perhaps the disks are old? Or the RAM?

Robear wrote:

Perhaps the disks are old? Or the RAM?

All the hardware is 5-6 years old but it's passing hardware tests so far. I'm still running more just in case.

Resetting Windows has fixed the issues. The biggest pain now is de-crappifying things again because this is a consumer device from a brand that just loves to include tons of junk and it all came up with the reset.

I wish I'd found a way to reset just service account issues without resetting the whole OS but I've also never see this issue before so maybe it's too rare to worry about. I need to build him a new desktop one of these days as this one is not aging well.

having an issue with java in windows 10 that i can't manage to fix.
i'm trying to use a jar that i've used in the past successfully. after some troubleshooting i've discovered that java isn't installing properly.
in command prompt "java -version" returns the expected info but whenever i try to run any jar it just doesn't do anything. in command prompt i get the cannot find or load main class error and for the life of me i cannot figure out what's wrong.
all of my jars are doing this now. I've uninstalled and reinstalled java 8 (32 and 64bit) with not improvments, any thoughts?

I wonder if you've accidentally upgraded to the paid version of Java 8 unwillingly?
Have you tried the java clones? something Monkey I think. It is what Salesforce recommends as a free alternative to use with dataloader.

Jars are not all executable. But if it is running "java -jar [jarfile]" will run it from the command line.

Check that JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to the java root directory and the system path only includes the java bin directory once. From the command line you can run "set" to see what your environment is.

i have not tried any java clones, no history with them so not sure what to do with them (barely knew they existed).
the jars i'm trying to use are executable, i've used them before with no problem. the odd thing is, there is no environment variable related to java, and I don't know why, the installer doesn't seem to be creating any.

They're not clones, they're alternate builds, potentially with changes (different VM, different security library configuration, different GC methods, etc.), from other vendors.

A bunch of potential solutions can be found here. I haven't personally tried them, but they seem reasonable.

the batch file option worked, any thoughts on what that means the problem is?

Did you try Jarfix? Also, it could be that your account don't have some permission that the Command window does have. Or, there could be an issue with a version mismatch between the JRE and the .jar file, apparently that can still be a problem.

Are you using the Oracle JRE and JDK? If the JDK is not the Oracle one, there could be compatibility issues, according to what I found. But JarFix can probably help with that too.

Just shotgunning here. It's Windows. If the .bat file method works, take the win and move on lol

Have not tried jarfix yet, getting it running via batch has made it a less immediate issue. I would be surprised if it's a permissions issue thoughmy account has full admin privileges and I've tried running it with admin override.
I'm using the JRE version.
Yeah I figure it's windows being a dick, I just wish I could figure out why, it's inevitable that one of these days I'll need a jar to work and the batch fix will slip my mind long enough to get me grouchy.

Which JDK are you using?

oracle's jre version Version 8 Update 371
the basic one from the java website https://www.java.com/en/download/

Yeah, but what I'm getting at, is that if the JDK used to make the jars is older, there could be some incompatibilities at play. (Which from a former JAVA idealist, is disappointing, but that's Oracle I guess.)

Usually that's only going to apply after version 8, after which they actually started removing packages and features that were once only deprecated.

/me pours one out for javax.activation

Yeah, but the JDK is up to what, 17? 19? now... I think the last version of JDK 8 was in like 2013.

pandasuit wrote:

Those small GL.iNet travel routers are looking pretty tempting now :)

I think if you travel a lot, it's worth it.

If you don't and want something as a stop-gap, Android lets you connect to WiFi, then share that WiFi as its own hotspot.

Not sure how the performance compares (I've only done it once on an airplane, so the WiFi was already crap, but I didn't want to fuss with how it forces you to register each device), but if you just need something basic it might be good enough.

Robear wrote:

Yeah, but the JDK is up to what, 17? 19? now... I think the last version of JDK 8 was in like 2013.

Nope. 2022. It just dropped support last year. But Java release schedule has changed since Java 9.

ccoates wrote:
pandasuit wrote:

Those small GL.iNet travel routers are looking pretty tempting now :)

I think if you travel a lot, it's worth it.

If you don't and want something as a stop-gap, Android lets you connect to WiFi, then share that WiFi as its own hotspot.

Not sure how the performance compares (I've only done it once on an airplane, so the WiFi was already crap, but I didn't want to fuss with how it forces you to register each device), but if you just need something basic it might be good enough.

I ended up ordering the GL.iNet GL-SFT1200 (Opal) as it seemed like the right compromise for my needs. Based on my experimentation with an OpenWRT router I already owned I suspect the GL.iNet should work really well. I will still get each device to run it's own Cloudflare WARP connection as I don't trust any unencrypted connections over hotel wifi.

I frequently use the hotspot feature of my iPhone to share my data plan across devices and I did use that some during my last trip to avoid using the hotel wifi much. It's good for myself but not ideal when I'm with a group who all want to use a lot of data. I'm not sure if the iPhone can bridge wifi like Android but I doubt I want to do that for a bunch of people anyways.

Anybody have experience streaming to YouTube Live? I'm in charge of setting up the AV for a group meeting where I stream a browser window and the audio from a connected set of microphones connected to a mixer. I'm using OBS for streaming.

I have verified that the audio coming into the PC sounds great. When I do an audio test recording directly from the microphone input, I can everyone in the room from the different microphones coming into the mixer. I can hear background noise, side conversations, as well as the people who are speaking.

The problem that I'm running into is that when I stream to YouTube Live, the background conversations seem to get cut off. Even when there's background noise and someone is speaking directly into one of the microphones, the entire audio stream seems to come and go. When there is only a single person speaking, either close to the microphone or much further away, they can be made out pretty clearly. The problem seems to be when there are multiple people speaking at the same time.

The only thing that I can think may be going on is that either OBS or YouTube Live is doing some sort of background noise filtering of some kind. Maybe it's assuming that the quieter voices in the background count as "noise" and tries to remove them? Unfortunately, when that occurs, it cuts out ALL the audio input for a short period of time. Then it comes back. Then it gets cut out again.

Most audio tutorials that I've found for OBS and YouTube Live seem to focus on trying to REMOVE background noise (e.g. a single speaker doing a video or something) rather than trying to capture all of the audio input -- no matter how weak. We also had a similar issue with Facebook Live streaming and we switched over to YouTube in the hopes that the issues we were seeing were mainly due to Facebook.

Try recording instead of streaming. If them problem happens there then it is an obs issue. I always have a noise cancelling filter on so I never noticed that issue.

I tried installing the latest sdk from oracle and still nothing, uninstaller doesn't find any installs and jars only open if i use the batch file to run them.

ZombieCoyote wrote:

Anybody have experience streaming to YouTube Live? I'm in charge of setting up the AV for a group meeting where I stream a browser window and the audio from a connected set of microphones connected to a mixer. I'm using OBS for streaming.

I have verified that the audio coming into the PC sounds great. When I do an audio test recording directly from the microphone input, I can everyone in the room from the different microphones coming into the mixer. I can hear background noise, side conversations, as well as the people who are speaking.

The problem that I'm running into is that when I stream to YouTube Live, the background conversations seem to get cut off. Even when there's background noise and someone is speaking directly into one of the microphones, the entire audio stream seems to come and go. When there is only a single person speaking, either close to the microphone or much further away, they can be made out pretty clearly. The problem seems to be when there are multiple people speaking at the same time.

The only thing that I can think may be going on is that either OBS or YouTube Live is doing some sort of background noise filtering of some kind. Maybe it's assuming that the quieter voices in the background count as "noise" and tries to remove them? Unfortunately, when that occurs, it cuts out ALL the audio input for a short period of time. Then it comes back. Then it gets cut out again.

Most audio tutorials that I've found for OBS and YouTube Live seem to focus on trying to REMOVE background noise (e.g. a single speaker doing a video or something) rather than trying to capture all of the audio input -- no matter how weak. We also had a similar issue with Facebook Live streaming and we switched over to YouTube in the hopes that the issues we were seeing were mainly due to Facebook.

I've been been having sound issues with YouTube streaming/archived live streams of my church's services. It sounds good on our end. It sounds good on Facebook. It sounds good on some phones. It sounds like it's underwater on other phones. If you watch through the YT website it tends to sound like crap, but if you watch the same video through a set top box it'll sound just fine. Near as we can figure it's an issue with how YouTube itself is compressing the sound in certain instances. It does tend to have more trouble when there's more background noise, but that isn't the only time it acts up.

We're using a Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini Pro for our streaming.

I expect you're right about something in the chain attempting to clean up the audio and failing catastrophically. I'm not sure what you can do about that except maybe try and improve your microphone setup, though it sounds like you've put a lot of effort into that already.

Welcome to the modern Internet, where you're SOL if you aren't trying to do exactly what Google/Meta/Microsoft assumes you'll want to do...

Hi all not sure what’s happening here but I am stumped. My 5 year old Lenovo win 10 laptop crashed ( not sure how my wife was using it but was just transferring photos) when it restarts it goes to the Lenovo screen then into automatic repair mode before hitting a black screen albeit with a moveable cursor on it. I can’t get to safe mode because despite numerous hard restarts it just follows the same loop and most advice online revolves around at least getting to safe mode. I don’t have a boot disc for w10 either! Any advice greatly appreciated.
Cross posting from a new thread at merphles suggestion ( thanks merphle)

My immediate expectation would be drive failure. It's possible Windows is just so borked that it can't even do recovery/safe mode, but I would not consider that the most likely scenario.

Either way, you're going to want to make the Win10 boot media that you're missing. As long as you have access to another Windows PC and a USB stick, it's relatively easy.