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building as we “speak”…

I’ve read about Bill’s attempt to install and run DaVinci Resolve 18.5 beta on his Mint Linux machine which failed for the moment (not yet clear why). And although I’m not that much into video, I had also tried to install OBS Studio on my latest Arch partition, which also didn’t run (it had been complaining about some missing qt6 stuff or so, forgot). But I was curious – this Arch partition is kind of a testbed for me, and also a gaming environment for Zuleikha (using Steam), so I thought “Why not?” and found a script in Arch’s AUR (user repository) to install DaVinci Resolve 18.5 beta. Looks like this when it’s ready like on Bill’s MacBook Pro 13″:

So at the moment my installation with yay is building the package, 19% at the time I write this. Curious if this will run, I also have an AMD processor with built-in graphics, so let’s see… although this might be overkill for me, I’m still interested in that stuff. I’ll let you all know more…

Edit:

Didn’t run as well. I think some URLs might have changed since this was scripted, so the program wasn’t found on Blackmagic’s site… I might try again later, but like I wrote, I’m not that much into video… for the moment, kdenlive and OBS Studio work very well for me (after installing qt6-wayland manually for the latter)…

Update 2:

After downloading DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic’s site and installing it, I first got the same error message which Bill had. See here:

So I was about to give up, but the remembered that I had read something about the program and needed proprietary OpenCL and OpenGL drivers in the Arch Wiki. So using yay I installed both https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/amdgpu-pro-oglp and also https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/opencl-amd like this:

[wjl@handa-6-arch ~]$ yay -S amdgpu-pro-oglp opencl-amd

This downloaded a lot of .deb packages (funny that Debian has them), and installed them without errors. And bingo:

DaVinci Resolve 18.5 beta5 running on my system. Success!

Update 3: still didn’t have pictures, only the sound from the videos worked, and only the one directly from the camera, no m4v or mp4 or whatever other containers. So I deinstalled the whole shebang again, this *is* way too complex for me and my primitive needs. I’m no film maker, so using kdenlive and/or handbrake I have more than I need…

But like always, thanks for reading.

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Qotd, from Bill Beebe

He wrote it yesterday according to his blog post entry date, but I’ve found it today. And because it’s just four lines in my browser, instead of citing him here, I’ll give you Bill’s link to what I consider the quote of the day for today…

Beautiful. Thanks Bill.

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Cookie = Samson

Went to the neighbours today and found out who the real family of “Cookie” is – the poor guy has problems with his left eye and should probably see a vet. So I took this photo of him and asked around:

Cookie aka Samson on our couch…

Turns out that his real given name is “Samson”, and that the family is the same where Wilma and the small grey/white guy (we call him “Crunchy” so far) also live. Plus at least one dog.

Nice to meet them.

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Some security and privacy related links

A musician friend recently mentioned the German-speaking site of Mike Kuketz, and indeed that is a good one, if you speak German you could have a look at/into his “Empfehlungsecke“, which I really recommend.

And a photographer friend recently mentioned that he had switched his old mobile phone to DivestOS, and they also have a great list of applications and services which they recommend. In fact, Mike Kuketz also recommended DivestOS, although with the slight caveat that this is a one-man show. And that man (from DivestOS) recommends for new phones to get GrapheneOS if it can be installed on them (currently only available for Google Pixel devices).

And like GrapheneOS is the most secure operating system for mobile phones at the moment, Qubes OS is the one for desktop PCs.

But who am I, don’t believe just me – go and visit Privacy Guides, and have a look around. Their overviews of Android, Linux, and Qubes should tell you more, and their recommendations for Android or Linux are also worth a look, same as the ones for all kinds of programs/applications. Even if I prefer Debian and they prefer Arch, we still both agree to the fact that the latter is probably not the best for beginners (but better than its derivates, even if these are way easier to install).

Anyway, here you’ve got some links with very good info, so go and read – and I hope that these will be helpful. Like always, thanks for reading.

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My favourite cameras and lenses…

Today I took Mitchie’s camera – an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark 2 which had her Panasonic Lumix 20mm f/1.7 lens mounted – to photograph my own E-M10 Mark 2 which has the Zuiko Digital 50mm 1:2 macro lens (from the Olympus 4/3rds system) mounted. Converted it to black & white, and cropped it into a 3:2 format:

My favourite cameras and lenses, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023

The above image is stored on cupoftea.social which is a smaller server connected to Mastodon. And like always, thanks for viewing.

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Some tips for musicians working with Windows

I haven’t done much on Windows the last 20 years or so, but through a thread post on recording.de I stumbled upon Pete Brown’s “Unofficial Windows 10 Audio Workstation build and tweak guide” which I found nice, and which could be helpful for those who make music and try to record themselves using machines with Windows 10 or 11.

I knew for instance that the Cubase support staff recommends to switch off the so-called “E” (for “efficiency”) cores on newer (12th gen and up) Intel processors, but that’s true only for Windows 10, not 11, as the commenter on the thread also wrote:

“Steinberg empfiehlt an anderer Stelle auch, die E-Cores zu deaktivieren, mit dem Argument, der Audio-Thread würde als “Hintergrund-Thread” sonst am Ende dort landen. Für Windows 10, dessen Task-Scheduler noch nichts von der P-/E-Core-Architektur von Intel weiß, mag das sogar einen gewissen Sinn haben. Bei Windows 11 ist das aber auch auch Bullshit, denn der Audio-Thread ist eben KEIN Hintergrund-Thread und als Vordergrund Task mit hoher Priority landet der IMMER auf einem P-Core. Unter Windows 11 die E-Cores zu deaktivieren bringt nur Einbußen, weil man einen großen Teil der CPU-Ressourcen schlicht lahmlegt.”

Pete from Microsoft explains that in more detail, so have a look at his 3-part guide which started on my birthday in 2021 and was finished in December. Pete’s history, of which he spoke a bit in the first embedded video there, ran parallel to my own one for a while – like him, I also started with a Commodore C64, and later had an Intel 286 processor in my first “real” PC, first with DOS, and later with Windows 286, a predecessor of Windows 3 (and the better known 3.11). But I gave up on all that while he joined Microsoft to work on their audio-related components, which is much more than the “pro audio” stuff we musicians care and think about.

Interesting guy, and I hope that these links are helpful for some of you.

And like always, thanks for reading.

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Good one, “SpikeWatchdog”

I’ll just cite:

“You better write “IBM are you dumb?” . IBM … when Idiots Become Managers is between my favorite ones (ex IBMer here).”

found in Jeff Geerling’s “Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?”, which in turn I found via arsTechnica’s “Red Hat’s new source code policy and the intense pushback, explained”

And yes, as I stated before: the recommendation for us “normal people” is to stay away as far as you can from everything “Enterprise”. I learnt it more than 20 years ago, even then Red Hat was nothing about freedom, and everything about making money. Take Debian instead, which is a true free software project – and if you want to support it financially, look for “Software in the public interest“.

And yes, ex IBMer here as well 😉