Sterile_Technique

Grew up watching things like Freeman's Mind, and Red vs Blue (their channel is locked behind some kind of 'join' thing... wtf...), WoW Machinimas... More recently I saw Neeb's Subnautica series and it's a pretty solid step up in quality compared to what I'm otherwise familiar with. I've burned through their content, and am seeking more! ...and the Subnautica stuff looks like Neeb's only content that follows this format - the rest of their channel is 'let's play' videos. Boo.

Anyway, nursing student here! ...it's melting my brain. I don't trust my time-management skills to actually fire up any games right now - the addiction is real, and I'll fuck up my grades; but the 'itch' is also real, so I'm trying to find something to give that gaming fix, but in little short bursts so I don't one-more-level my way out of the program.

Study up, give my brain a nice 10-20 min break, then get back to it.

Not really picky on the game or genre, just looking for something in-character. YouTube is absolutely STUFFED with videos of people just playing games, but hardly any focused on delivering an actual story. Or rather, I'm sure it's there, it's just lost in a sea of low quality slop. Could also be that I just don't know the right key search term ("machinima" doesn't seem to really be a thing anymore, and I'm not sure what else to call it).

Any recommendations on picking out the gems?

There's a type of an item I'm looking into buying - I have no idea which brands/models are better than others, and I distrust reviews on websites like Amazon more and more since 99% of them are likely bots/AI slop.

Looking a community where I can make a post for "I'm in the market for ____" and get some insight from folks here who might have used or know of something that fits the bill.

When I boot up my comp (windows 10, Home Edition), I'm getting pop-ups for my Brother printer. Ive had the printer for 2 or 3 years, and have used their "Brother iPrint&Scan" to run it since day one, but the pop-ups have only been happening for a few weeks.

They always have this text:

...and I always click "Don't show this again", but then I boot my computer up and it's back.

Any way to kill it for good, without also killing the printer?

Experimenting with Audacity in preparation for the upcoming school semester to find ways to clean up lecture recordings. The OceanGate Implosion sound (original) seemed like a good sound bite to practice on.

Turns out it's pretty easy, ~~and I now have my new notification tone!~~ (sounded great with headphones; barely audible through the phone speakers. Amplifying it just makes the upper ranges staticky... so... scratch the notification tone idea, it's shit for that)

This has nothing to do with our boy Luigi, but I have a hunch y'all will enjoy this just the same; and I'm not sure where else to post it.

Saved as a .wav and uploaded to filebin for easy sharing. I can't upload it directly to Lemmy, and I'm not really sure how else to share it with the internet, but if there's a better option than filebin let me know and I can throw it there too.

Link expires in 6 days, so if you see this post after that point, just give me shout and I'll reupload it.

Feel free to pass the file around, reupload it wherever, or edit it further.

Next semester is starting up soon, and one of the most useful things I've taken to doing is recording lectures. I doubt I'll ever be able to get the quality anywhere that would be considered 'good', but I have no idea what I'm doing outside of some trial and error, so I imagine I can probably get it quite a bit better with some optimizations.

Set up... recording with a laptop, and a Ugreen 15728 to capture both video and audio. Everything's done on OBS Studio. I sit at the front of the class with the webcam mounted to a little tripod and aimed at the projector screen with the end goal of basically having narrated powerpoint presentations.

The field of view of the webcam is way higher than I need it to be, so I zoom it in by fitting just the presentation to frame in OBS... which works, but probably 75% of its resolution potential is lost to just cropping it out. I don't think anything can be done about that, since the webcam doesn't have a physical zoom and I can't position it anywhere closer to the screen than I have previously. ...and the resolution as-is comes out... okay. They're powerpoints, and with the exception of the odd bit of unusually fine font, the final product is readable, in a 1995 jpeg kinda way.

I think the real room for improvement is managing the lighting settings - the issue is that the camera is still recording the bits that aren't actually being saved, so if the room lights are on and the ppt has a dark background, it gets 'corrected' to where the light font on the page also get kinda blacked out, I think because it's compensating for the bright surfaces beyond the edges of the presentation. Room lights off with a light background ppt, it all gets white-washed. Tweaking the gamma and... backlight? whitelight? in the device-specific settings I can usually get it to where the text is readable, but again, it kinda looks like shit.

Audio... I used to have some of those interview mics for the prof to wear, which were great quality for the... like two or three? times they actually decided to wear it. They were for some reason opposed to doing that, so they'd just set it on the podium and let it record from there... and then walk all over the front of the classroom, making audio quality all over the place. Tried using the mic on my gaming headset, with the entire headset perched next to the webcam, but it captured me breathing and typing more clearly than the prof; admitted defeat on audio quality and have since used the ones built into the webcam, and they do okay, but with that same kind of barely passable quality as the video.

I've seen some optimization guides, but pretty much all of them are geared toward streaming or web conferences, not lecture halls, and their tips only yielded slight improvements.

I don't really understand what any of the settings actually do, so I just fuck with the sliders or check the toggles and if it makes it better I keep it, if it doesn't I put it back... but I'm probably doing something in a stupid order or overlooking a whole category of settings. Literally just figuring this all out as I go - no prior experience with this or similar software.

...I know my recording conditions and equipment are all far from ideal, but I do share these recordings with my classmates, so if any of know any optimizations I can make with the tools on hand, please let me know!

Thanks all!

Coworker is building one of the fancier surround sound setups, and mentioned we wished he could find the THX Deepnote in full surround sound. Seemed like a simple enough request, so I did some searching myself, and am only seeing YouTube videos like this one, or .mp3 files, both of which (afaik) only support two audio channels.

Even THX's own website just links to more YouTube videos.

I don't actually know jack about surround sound or audio formats - taking his word and the web articles I've stumbled across all at face value... am I just being stupid about this? Is there somewhere to download the full-quality thing?

Short version:

☝title, something that can be clipped onto scrubs or worn around the neck. Also easy to clean - hard surfaces that can be wiped down with alcohol, no cloth coverings or anything.

Long version:

Nursing student here. Basically I'm trying to build a stethoscope that doesn't need to be inserted into my ears.

I have some hearing loss, and currently use hearing aids, which has posed a frequent annoyance / hazard at my clinical rotations when it comes time to listen to my patient's heart and lung sounds. I can't use a normal stethoscope with the hearing aids in, cuz it shoves them way too deep into my ear canal (doesn't feel great); so I've just been popping the fuckers out and using the stethoscope normally when needed. ...but I hate doing that, cuz hospitals are disgusting - there's literal and metaphorical shit on everything, so screwing with the hearing aids mid shift is 100% introducing pathogens into my ears.

At my last clinical site, one of the nurses had a bluetooth stethoscope that seemed like the miracle solution I needed - it's basically a stethoscope bell with no tubing, and it pairs with bluetooth headphones. She let me try it out, so I paired it with my hearing aids, and... heart beats sounded like two pieces of metal clanking against eachother. Total flop, clinically useless. Fuck.

So I whine to my audiologist, and eventually we figure out that the issue is that heart and lung sounds range from 20-100 hz; and my hearing aids are designed to amplify human speech, which is about 300-3000 hz. The speakers in my hearing aids are not physically capable of playing heart and lung sounds (that clanky metal sound was just the tiny bit that overlapped with the hearing aid's range). More fuck.

So, I don't think my hearing aids are going to be part of the solution here, but I'm still seeing potential in the bluetooth stethoscopes: but instead of pairing it with bluetooth headphones, since again the ear canals are already occupied, instead pair it with a bluetooth speaker that I can clip onto my scrubs or use the kind that hangs around the neck.

Poking around the internet, there are tons of those types of bluetooth speakers, but they never seem to advertise the hertz range and I'm worried about getting a whole setup built, then running into the same issue with the new speaker not playing the sounds I need to do an actual nursing assessment. And those bluetooth stethoscopes are expensive as fuck, so if I'm going to dive in to this, I want to make sure I don't screw it up.

What do you all think? Any brands or specific products you'd lean to?

Also, bonus question: putting yourself in the patient's shoes: how would you feel if your nurse dropped in rocking a setup like this? If it's playing through normal speakers, YOU the patient would be able to hear your own heart and lung sounds during my assessment - my thought was it'd be great for patient education: "That clicking sound when you exhale is called crackles, which means there's fluid in your lungs, so..." Would that make for a decent patient experience, or be offputting or intimidating? I've been a surgical tech for like a decade, so my perspective is pretty skewed in terms of how much info is too much info.'

Thanks all!

"Weird" to be interpreted at the reader's discretion.

Looking for some cool new tunes.

I'll get the ball rolling with one of mine: Scaretale by Nightwish. That song is all over the place... it's like haunted fantasy carnival jingle metal. Love it.

Please go into lots of detail - some of us are taking notes!

AFAIK, there's no fine print that says "...except when that enemy is the president."

Stop harassing protesters and do your job, troops.

https://www.army.mil/values/oath.html

Heresy, right? I've had a mechanical for the last couple of years, and while it's served me well enough, I still don't like the feel or clickety-clack compared to a membrane switch - and my current one is the Razer Blackwidow Stealth w/ rubber o-rings added to the base of each key, which I think is as non-clackety as a mechanical gets.

Anyway, the Blackwidow is starting to have issues - F5 key died months ago, and lately it's been doing this annoying thing where I press a key and it registers the downstroke, but not the release, of the Tab and D keys until I pull it from its USB port and reinsert. It's time.

...but the initial search for a replacement all I'm seeing are either mechanical or mimicking mechanical (like a membrane switch but with the big blocky keys that mechanicals use).

My favorite keyboard 'feel' 100% is an oldschool laptop style keyboard. Like the IBM T60 - flat, light to the touch, and no dead space in between the keys like you see in a lot of today's laptops (the 'island' style... not a fan).

I don't think my entire wish-list exists in a single product, but what I'm after is:

• That T60 style described above

• Programmable keys (remap / macros)

• Corded... unless cordless options have really improved in the last decade or so: I recall a noticeable delay, and constantly running out of battery.

• Extra keys specifically for binding macros like the Blackwidow

• Backlight. Low priority, and I don't give a shit about RGB (or aesthetics in general), but it is nice to be able to be able to see which key is which when the room is dark.

...is anything even kind-of like that on the market, or should I just shut up and get another mechanical?

Inspired by this thread.

I could have sworn when I was in highschool (y’know, like 25 thousand years ago) you could order a bag of like 50 3.5mm audio jack plugs but with no wire or connection after the plug. I'm searching for these now, but the closest I'm seeing are legit components designed to be an adaptor or connect to a wire.

It was just a 3.5mm audio plug with matte black plastic cap on the end, so you’d plug it into a TV’s headphone jack and some models of TVs would be permanently silenced until someone unplugged the cap, because it was sending its audio to the ‘speakers’ that were just plugged in. And once plugged in, it just looked like a screw cover cap - nothing protruding. But also didn’t damage anything, so you couldn’t get in any real trouble for doing it.

Shoddy photoshop to illustrate the gist:

…am I just imagining shit? If anyone knows what I’m talking about and figure out the magic search terms to actually pull it up, please drop a link to a product that can be ordered.

Anyway, the TV in my work's breakroom is one of the culprits, so I'd love to hit it with one of these and see how long it takes for them to figure out why it won't vomit out the misinformation they're addicted to.

Audio jack sabotage aside, any suggestions on how to otherwise fuck with it would also be golden.

Thanks all!