I was struggling with a problem in my laptop where videos would take lot of time to play. Whether it is a video file or video embedded in a site like Twitter (X), all videos would take at least 10 to 15 seconds before it plays. It also happened with youtube.
Any number of searches did not give a solution. I was thinking of factory resetting my device but didn't want to go through installing all patches again.
Finally I found the solution, What a relief.
The solution can be found in the following thread.
Looks like it is a defect in Dell laptop and this happens whenever you connect to wireless display this problem manifests. Even if you have disconnected with that display this will happen. The only solution to this is to remove the device from the Settings->Bluetooth & Devices list.
Once I removed all the devices listed there the videos started playing normally.
What a weird problem to face.
I was thinking the problem would be with the graphics driver or something.
I was playing using and all of a sudden the phone stopped detecting the music stored within the microsd card. Upon checking further the phone totally stopped recognizing the sd card altogether. The main problem in such situations is we do not know what we had stored in that card and what we are going to miss. This has happened a lot with portable hard disks and this was my first with a sd card.
I switched the card to another phone and even there the card was recognized. I tried another card in my phone and it got detected. When I tried the card using an adaptor in a PC it got detected.
Now without knowing what is causing the issue, I was confused about buying a new card. What if that card is also not detected?
Still I thought since it is anyway recognizing the other card, I went ahead and enquired the cost of a new microSD card with higher storage capacity. I noticed there is atleast 100 to 150 rs difference between what is shown online and a shop, that too the shop was considered to sell for cheap prices.
I came back and then did some search and since it was getting detected in PC, thought of formatting the card as suggested by few.
I unchecked the quick format option and it took almost 30 mins for a 64GB card to be formatted. I backed up the content before formatting.
After formatting inserted the card into mobile and "Voila ! It worked !!"
I still do not know what caused the problem but formatting fixed it.
I recently installed Audacity and tried it. While the recording worked playback always happened through laptop speakers even while I had the headphones plugged in. It was bugging me and finally found a solution. You need to go to Edit->Preferences->Devices and change the playback device as the headphones instead of the inbuilt speakers.
Recently my Samsung TV which I bought in 2012 went bust. The panel started cracking and showed patches. It was a 3D TV and the service person said the panel had to be changed and it will cot 40 K and it is better to go for a new TV. The sad thing is we don't have 3D TVs in the market any more. All my bluray 3Ds will go waste.
When I started to research for new TV I could see there was no one place where we can get genuine information. Amazon and Flipkart many times specifications are incorrect for ex they mention 2 HDMI ports while the brand website might mention 3 HDMI ports. Many times they don't mention if the HDMI is 2.1 or 1.0 or 2.0. Again only if we know so many variations exists we can buy the right thing. No single place provides this information.
If you take visuals there are Dolby Vision, HDR, HDR 10+, HLG etc and in audio you have Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS, Dolby Atmos, DTS - X etc. From operating system point of view we have Android with its 9.0, 10.0, 11.0, Tizen, WebOS etc. From ports point of view we have ARC, eARC, Optical digitial out etc.
I agree it is good to have choice but as a consumer it is difficult to make the choice.
My old Samsung TV was good in all front but it costed me a lot and at the time of buying I was not aware of the features it had. Having used to that I didn't want to miss out on the vital features.
I noticed there were so many reviewers available in youtube even in Tamil but they focus on some fancy stuffs rather than on essentials. Also these guys are biased while a group says Mi is the best there is another one who says Sony is the best and Mi is worst. Even there are reviews where they call Samsung and LG as subpar.
The retailers are in different mode Vasanth & co supports Samsung while Croma store supports Sony. To buy a Sony you have to pay lot of premium. Again having owned Sony products it will cost you more but will not offer some critical feature.
For a novice buyer everything will look similar but only when you try to use each feature we will learn what is not supported and what is.
I found Mi 5X series having Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, it had eARC support and 2.1 HDMI support. It also supported DTS - HD. This was the only TV which had all these features and cost at least 30 K lesser compared to branded ones.
Yes it doesn't have two way bluetooth support or ambient mode. Also the "nits" may not be as good as a TV which costs as bomb but nowdays lifetime of a TV is 3 to 4 years. I feel it is not worth to shell out a lot unless you have lot of surplus.
I am happy with the purchase and you do research your stuff before you buy yours.
It's been a long time since I did some serious coding. The last one I did was to do some manipulation within AWS S3 buckets. It was some 4 or 5 years ago.
Time is one major reason I couldn't keep myself up-to-date. Whenever I try to scan the new trends I could feel that how old I have become.
Even Java which is my foundation now seems like a totally distant language. There have been so many changes.
I am from ant world and the maven world is kind of scary.
Just to refresh my rusty brain I wanted to try something out in AWS and lambda seemed to be harmless. I wanted to try Hello World in Lambda. I didn't realize what I was getting into.
The first step was to download latest java and Oracle said it is Java 15. I downloaded Java 15 and latest Eclipse 2021-03. I noticed Eclipse stopped naming their releases, guess they ran out of names.
Followed the steps in AWS tutorial and encountered "Unable to export Project to Jar file" error. When I searched on this I found that Java 15 is not the right version and Lambda recently support Java 11. But most articles said Lambda functions works only with Java 8.
Now latest eclipse doesn't work with Java 8. I was confused whether to go with 8 or 11. Tried my luck with 11 by downloading Java 11 and Eclipse which works with 11.
It didn't work I installed JRE 8 and used Eclipse version which worked with 11. I changed configuration to use JRE 8 but Eclipse was still using Java 11 and now I encountered "NoClassDefFoundError JAXBException".
Upon further checking it seems JAXB is not part of standard Java post version 10. So I had to go for an Eclipse which worked with Java 8. I downloaded Eclipse 2019-03 and then everything worked as expected.
Once you have a big 3D HD TV, the next obvious purchase should be a blu-ray player. After breaking my head for over a month I zeroed in on Samsung BD-D6700. The point here is that this model is available only in the US. Somehow got the blu-ray player in hand today.
Features I like about the player - Slot loading mechanism, the buttons are all touch screen type and dynamic (by dynamic I mean you wont see an eject button unless you have a disc inside), ultra fast blu ray disc loading speed, Dual HDMI output, Optical output, 1GB built in memory for BD Live and Smart TV features
Are there any negatives - Since this is a US model I need a step down transformer to convert 220 V to 110 V, which occpies more space and adds more wires to an already cluttered system. Apart from that I also feel the system is heating up a lot. Not sure whether the system dislikes India weather condition.
Picture quality is excellent but I can't test the real Dolby HD or DTS HD as I dont have the right receiver for the same.
Been using Android phone for quite sometime and I came across this new app for android called Launcher pro through rediff. When I started digging deep came to know this app is quite famous in android market. I realised i have not even explored even 1% of the things out there.
So coming back to Launcher Pro, this actually changes the look and feel of the home screen and the app drawer. But I couldnt explore further because many of the features are reserved for Launcher Pro Plus for which you need to pay.
Regarding Transcend, I bought a Transcend 1 TB external hard disk some time back. The disk started giving problems right from day 1. But still I was able to use it for sometime but after sometime the problem occured very frequently. Feeling weary of Indian service center I hesitated contacting them. But when I felt I cant take it anymore, I went to their service center. Was surprised to see such a big service center and there were minimum 25 people waiting.
The disk had lot of data I had collected over few months. I was unsure if they would help me in recovering the data. When I handed it to them they just gave me a receipt and sent me home. I consoled myself data or no data atleast I need a working disk. After waiting for around 40 days, they have provided me with a new disk without any quesitons. I didnt expect that. Though the data was lost, I was given a new disk. The new one is working without any issues. So anyone out there who is having issues with Transcend disks and still within warranty period run to the service center. They offer excellent service, but no gurantee on data.
Being a ardent DVD collector the concept of this new technology does worry me. What will happen to all the DVDs I have collected?
They do say Blu-Ray players are backward compatible and can play DVDs as well but if you are using a DVD player you should play a DVD in that similarly if you have a BD player you should play Blu-Ray.
Looks like they will also have regions but just 3 regions.
Currently the price of all BD players are very high as always they will come crashing if the technology catches up.
Is Blu-Ray going to be around for sometime or will vanish to give way to another technology? We have to wait and see.
