While sometimes logs aren't too difficult to follow, there's also often times they're inscrutable to those not in the weeds of their respective OS. So I was wondering if anyone around here might have some pointers to guides or the like for where to find, and help understanding, different system error logs.

On Windows there's Event Viewer to some extent, and on Linux I think it's typically /var/log (and some distros may have a GUI System Log Viewer?). Not sure of MacOS.

Thanks in advance for any replies with pointers to resources!

I watch an episode of a series, and then it randomly starts to heat up my CPU. The most reproducible case is when the episode ended while I'm not looking at it, then the PC get locked and the screen gets turned off, and VLC then, on a pause, starts to use 20%+ percents of my CPU and get completely unresponsive before I kill the process of it. If it was in fullscreen before, it'd show just a dark screen before I alt+f4 out from it. It doesn't use as much resources when it plays videos, so I guess it's VLC not reacting right to some system conditions? I'm a noob so it's just a guess.

As a side note, what do you use for watching shows? I still can't find a player that I'm 100% comfortable with. MPC-HC is what I used on Windows for years and I'm too used to how it works it seems, but I'm open to try something lightweight with simple controls to choose languages on the go.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/8936481

I would like to get to the bottom of what I am doing wrong that leads to black and white documents having a bigger filesize than color.

My process for a color TIFF is like this:

① tiff2pdf ② ocrmypdf ③ pdf2djvu

Resulting color DjVu file is ~56k. When pdfimages -all runs on the intermediate PDF file, it shows CCITT (fax) is inside.

My process for a black and white TIFF is the same:

① tiff2pdf ② ocrmypdf ③ pdf2djvu

Resulting black and white DjVu file is ~145k (almost 3× the color size). When pdfimages -all runs on the intermediate PDF file, it shows a PNG file is inside. If I replace step ① with ImageMagick’s convert, the first PDF is 10mb, but in the end the resulting djvu file is still ~145k. And PNG is still inside the intermediate PDF.

I can get the bitonal (bilevel) image smaller by using cjb2 -clean, which goes straight from TIFF to DjVu, but then I can’t OCR it due to the lack of PDF intermediate version. And the size is still bigger than the color doc (~68k).

#askFedi

update

I think I found the problem, which would not be evident from what I posted. I was passing the --force-ocr option to ocrmypdf. I did that just to push through errors like “this doc is already OCRd”. But that option does much more than you would expect: it transcodes the doc. Looks like my fix is to pass --redo-ocr instead. It’s not yet obvious to me why --force-ocr impacted bilevel images more.

I've had this thing for about a year and everything was fine until a few months ago. It has a night light on the base part that also has a wireless charger. Lately if I wake up in the middle of the night or early morning and just glance at the time, the nigh light will flash on for about 2 seconds and then fade back off. I've googled and found nothing exactly like this issue. The night light feature is turned off as well as the microphone and I have no alarms set. It's like it can tell when I wake up and then flashes the light. This morning I just disconnected the base because I'm so annoyed by it. I rarely use the wireless charger so I think I'm just going to leave it without the base unless anybody here has any insight. Idk maybe it's ghosts. Lol

My Windows 10 guest running on Debian 12 using VirtualBox is creating metadata for every file that is moved or created in a shared folder. They are not seen by Windows, but they are fully visible on Linux. Also, a "System Volume Information" empty folder is created on each boot (shared folder is set to mount automatically) and is write protected, and cannot be deleted from KDE Plasma and only via terminal due to its protection.

How do I stop Windows from polluting my system?

My laptop has 8gb of ram and when idle, uses around 4.7-5gb (or60%) of it. Is this normal? If it isn't, how do I get it down to the 'normal' levels? This is a new laptop as well, so I don't have much installed on it.

disclaimer: this is just a test post/example post