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August 18

Small Blue-Ray player

Where can I get a Blue-Ray player which (1) plugs into an HDMI port on a desktop PC, (2) is small enough to be placed on top of said desktop PC's tower unit without any problems, and (3) does not require deliberately circumventing DRM in order to watch Blue-Ray disks? I've just now bought a compact Blue-Ray player which plugs into a USB port, but discovered that it won't work unless I install AnyDVD (which I don't want to do, for obvious reasons!) Just to be clear, the issue is not cost, but size -- my computer is so old that it can only read DVDs and not Blue-Rays, so I need an external Blue-Ray player, but at the same time the space for its installation is severely limited, so I need one small enough to place on top of my PC or else I don't have any room left for it. As possible alternatives, would it be possible to (B) use a USB to HDMI adapter (is that even an actual thing?), or (C) when it comes time for my computer's next overhaul (which I wanted to do this winter, but didn't), replace its internal optical drive with one which can read Blue-Rays while remaining backwards compatible with DVD's and CDs? 2601:646:8082:BA0:F993:EB64:4176:5F31 (talk) 03:12, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

So how big is the top of your PC? For instance, this Blu-ray player from Sony is 320 x 45 x 212 (mm). I think that will fit fairly neatly on top of a typical full or mid size tower case, overhanging by only half a centimeter left and right. You might clarify point (3). Why would your newly bought hardware refuse to work at all without third-party software to defeat digital restrictions? Is this to do with region locking, in fact? Is that Sony player likely to have the same problem? (I'm not fussy about resolution, so I've only ever owned regular DVDs, excuse me if I'm ignorant of any well-known facts.) I also wonder what software you're playing the media with, and whether, say, VLC media player or mpv (media player) is the actual solution here. Actually I just read in the mpv faq "It is a fact that playing DVDs/BDs gives a much better user experience when ripped to files", so perhaps the page Blu-ray ripper is helpful. Card Zero (talk) 07:00, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Region locking is most emphatically not an issue here, because the player was set for region 1 and all my Blue-Ray disks are also region 1 (except for one or two which are all-region), and I tested it with a region-1 disk -- plus, after it refused to play, I used the Cyber-Link advisor tool for diagnostics, and it said specifically that the problem was HDCP, or more specifically it said that a USB port won't do for a Blue-Ray player and I have to use an HDMI port or similar! (And yes, I didn't know about this either until it came up just the other day -- in fact, I had to look up what HDCP is and what it requires for compliance!) So, if the Sony player plugs into the HDMI port (my computer has a spare one), then there should be no problems of that sort! As for dimensions, they should be acceptable -- it would hang off by 3-4 inches on either side, but that's not a big deal! Thanks for the info! 2601:646:8082:BA0:F993:EB64:4176:5F31 (talk) 11:02, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I mixed up width with depth, my apologies. It would fit even better if turned sideways ...

The HDCP article has this quote: "the main practical effect of HDCP has been to create one more way in which your electronics could fail to work properly with your TV." I wonder whether you might have better results connecting the player directly to the monitor, I don't see that involving the PC will bring much joy to the experience in this restrictive climate. Card Zero (talk) 11:15, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Did you actually buy a USB (standalone) Bluray player? I'm not convinced such things exist, since I'm not sure what the USB would be for. Some Bluray players may accept USB sticks but I don't see the purpose of connecting to a computer via USB. Cyberlink definitely would not be involved. It seems much more likely that you bought a USB Bluray reader or reader+writer i.e. an external optical drive with a USB interface. This is what you need to play Blurays on your computer and USB should not be a problem. The connection interface of the reader is largely irrelevant since the content is being decrypted on the computer not on the Bluray reader. However any commercial authorised software will require HDCP. This means your monitor needs to be connected to your computer with HDCP enabled (and sufficient version). HDMI is the best solution here since it's sort of designed for that sort of thing, so connecting your monitor to your computer via HDMI is the best solution. Failing that DisplayPort and DVI might work. You should check settings on both your monitor and GPU and ensure HDCP is enabled and if you can choose version, chose the highest version that works. Again, 4k is far more likely to be a problem. If for some reason your connecting your monitor to your computer via VGA, there's no way to have HDCP so it won't work. If it's an AIO or laptop, it might still need HDCP to be enabled internally to work. If you're using USB to connect your monitor to your computer, it will depend on how it's connected and possibly other stuff. I'm fairly sure it can work but it can be complicated. [1] IMO if at all possible try to just connect your monitor to your computer directly with HDMI. I suspect, but don't know, that this is what the Cyberlink advisor was suggesting. Connect your computer to your monitor via HDMI not via USB or DisplayPort. Of course if your monitor doesn't support HDCP, or doesn't support sufficient version, then unfortunately you're probably SoL if you want to use a simple authorised solution. Again unfortunately your only real option there is to get a monitor which supports HDCP of sufficient version. As said, 4k will be far more of a problem than traditional Blurays. But it's also possible that Cyberlink has been forced to require HDCP higher than a standalone Bluray player needs so it's possible you could use a standalone Bluray player even if you can't get playback working on your computer. Nil Einne (talk) 15:31, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, be aware that even if you get it working, it might not work for newer titles without updates, and note this applies whether you use a computer solution or standalone player. See e.g. [2] Nil Einne (talk) 15:38, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I should also clarify that besides HDCP, I think there also needs to be internal protections on the computer probably TPM of some variety since they're also supposed to stop the decrypted stream from being intercepted on the computer rather than just after it is outputed. Nil Einne (talk) 15:49, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Unless your computer happens to have a HDMI capture card or capture device, I fairly doubt a Bluray player exists that can connect to your computers HDMI port. The HDMI port on your GPU (including any iGPU) is almost definitely only capable of acting as an output device, it cannot accept any input. (I mean most GPUs can't even do HDMI-CEC.) Even if you did happen to have a HDMI capture device like an Elgato or whatever, fair chance it still won't simply work. The Bluray player will almost definitely need HDCP enabled when it's playing a Bluray (perhaps you can disable it or it's not enabled for DVDs, not sure), and the capture device is unlikely to support HDCP. You could potentially add a HDCP stripper or HDMI splitter but that's adding a lot of work and you might need more than that. This seems way too complicated for what you want to do. Instead of trying to send the Bluray output to your computer, you should concentrate on sending it to your monitor. If your monitor has a HDMI port and it supports whatever version HDCP your Bluray player requires which I think for traditional Bluray's this isn't very high so it probably does, then you can likely just plug the Bluray player into your monitor and it will work. If you're already using the sole HDMI port on the monitor for your computer, the easiest solution would be just to unplug the HDMI from your computer and plug it into the Bluray player when you want to watch something. Alternatively you can get cheap and small HDMI switches from AliExpress and the like. Some fancy Bluray players may let you plug in a HDMI from a source device and act as a switch itself, like an audio system etc, but these are likely to be expensive and I expect on the bulky side. (Not because they really need the space.) If you don't have a HDMI input on your monitor, you could try looking for one with DisplayPort output assuming this is what your monitor is using but frankly I'm not sure they exist. You could try using some sort of active HDMI to DisplayPort converter, but especially with HDCP, I'm not sure how well this will work. Frankly, you might be better of just getting a monitor with HDMI input. If you don't have a standalone monitor but instead an AIO or laptop frankly you're IMO better of just getting a small HDMI capable monitor. The alternative is to get playback on the computer working. Trying to capture the HDMI output from Bluray computer is to be blunt a very daft solution however you spin it. Nil Einne (talk) 15:06, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

August 22

stop cursor blink on all apps in windows 11, especially Geany

Hi, I want to know how to stop the cursor blinking across all of Windows 11. I have disabled blink in Settings, but some apps still blink, and I can't fix it. The worst case is Geany, my otherwise excellent text editor. Any suggestions? IBE (talk) 00:12, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh hey that's based on Scintilla, I use SciTE myself.

Geany sets its own blink rate. There is some confusing discussion about how Scintilla GTK (which is what Geany is?) respects a setting for GTK blink rate "if available". On Windows, I guess it isn't.

There's a cursor width setting in the Geany manual, which in theory will turn the cursor off entirely if set to 0. You might be satisfied with that, if it works. Card Zero (talk) 14:31, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is hard, from a programmer's point of view.

The blink setting in Windows affects the text inputs rendered by Windows' toolkit. All applications that have outsourced their text inputs to Windows' toolkit automatically follow this setting. But Windows' toolkit is only available on Windows, so if you want to create a cross-platform application (like Geany), you can (A) maintain two versions, one with Windows' toolkit, one without; (B) use a cross-platform toolkit; (C) build your own text inputs. (A) is a lot of work, as you have to maintain two versions of every graphical input/output function. Geany uses (B), in the form of the GTK toolkit. I suppose GTK's developers may try to read Windows' settings, but the interface to Windows' settings is a poorly documented moving target.

There may be a tool on Windows to configure GTK. I haven't used Windows in ages, so I never tried this myself. That may help for the GTK-based applications, but not everything else. Some applications could have hard-coded blinking, so no way to change it. PiusImpavidus (talk) 08:25, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well, in this case, poorly documented moving target is undue. It's GetCaretBlinkTime(), and that was true in 1996, which is the age of my copy of WIN32.HLP, and it's still true today. I just tried, it returned 530 milliseconds. Microsoft's online (web) help closely follows WIN32.HLP, if you can find your way into the right parts of it. (Reading an actual .hlp file in 2024 is not so simple, I must admit, since they removed the reader years ago.) I'd imagine that every Windows GTK-based application ships with its own copy of GTK, rather than attempting to use or install system-wide shared libraries. For instance I see my GIMP has a libgtk-win32-2.0-0.dll, hidden among a million other dlls, in its \bin alongside the application binary. So a system configuration for GTK on Windows is probably not an option. Card Zero (talk) 11:03, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for those replies. Looks like I'll have to keep searching to see if there's a way around it. Sad because when I had it on Windows 10, it was all good for some reason, easy to disable the blink (I'm pretty sure there was a setting under Edit->Preferences). IBE (talk) 00:08, 24 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

August 23

Lower half of Dos Code pages

Code page 850 cites both IBM^[1]^[2] and the International Components for Unicode^[3] in the header of the table describing the layout of the code page. IBM^[1] and the article provide a table where the characters at positions 0x00–0x7F match Code page 437, but International Components for Unicode provides a mapping^[3] that instead agrees with ASCII including ASCII control codes. The IBM mapping^[2] agrees with the IBM table not the Unicode mapping. Is the situation here something like the whole ISO 8859-1 vs Windows-1252 thing, or is one of the sources just wrong?

Other Wikipedia articles on Dos codepages have similar issues, but some only provide a table for the upper half and state that the lower half is the same as Code page 437. What should the articles say? McYeee (talk) 20:08, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ ^a ^b Code Page CPGID 00850 (pdf), IBM, 1986
^ ^a ^b Code Page (CPGID) 00850 (txt), IBM, 1998
^ ^a ^b "International Components for Unicode (ICU), ibm-850_P100-1995.ucm". GitHub. 2002-12-03. Archived from the original on 2022-01-28. Retrieved 2022-01-28.

August 24

What means java

What java means 2409:4042:EBB:FC77:69FA:EA09:283C:C31A (talk) 15:18, 24 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Your question is unclear. What it means will depend on the context. Is it the country or some other place? Perhaps the programming language. Or one of the many things listed at Java_(disambiguation)? RudolfRed (talk) 18:57, 24 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

August 27

Javascript for kids

I'm pondering and thinking about buying a Javascript or coding for kids book to teach myself coding (Javascript would be particularly useful), after I learn TI Basic 83/84 Plus. However the books I see on Javascript for kids, namely JavaScript for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming or JavaScript For Kids For Dummies (For Dummies (Computers)) are both approaching 10 years old. How screwed would I be trying to learn Javascript from 10 year old books? What really beginner books do people recommend for Javascript? Thanks. Therapyisgood (talk) 01:36, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think you'll be fine. Any enhancements that came out in the last ten years are not likely to impact a beginner. The basic core is still the same. 41.23.55.195 (talk) 05:01, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Finding a new book will be difficult because the popular beginner language changes over time. When I was a child, it was basic. That was eventually overtaken by Pascal and I thought all the kids learning Pascal were weird. It keeps changing. Right now, it is Python. If you look for Python Programming for Kids, you will find hundreds of books published this year alone. My opinion is that the language doesn't matter. The concepts matter. Learn what a variable is. Learn what control structures are. Learn what functions are. When you view programming as pushing values in and out of memory with functions, it doesn't matter what language you use. They all do the same thing. 12.116.29.106 (talk) 12:06, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What exactly are control structures, and, functions...? Are those terms used in web-programming languages? I'm familiar with terms like variabes, and while loops/for loops. Classes and objects. I feel like when you said function, Java and C++ have the same idea but as another word. 66.99.15.162 (talk) 18:00, 29 August 2024 (UTC).[reply]

According to programming books we have: Control structures manage the program counter, affecting the flow of the program. If-else, while, for, etc... Anything that controls the program counter to do something other than flow from one line to the next is a control structure. Functions are very similar to a control structure. They are named locations in memory where you store code so you can use that name to execute the code, along with parameters and return values. It is not "web programming." It is "programming." If you are using a langage that doesn't have control structures, you are stuck writing a program that always goes from line 1 to line 2 to line 3, etc... If you don't have functions, you cannot repeat an algorithm multiple times with different parameters. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 10:49, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

August 28

Treeified and linked-list hash bucket equivalence

A maximally-unbalanced binary search tree is the same as a sorted singly-linked list except that it has an extra null pointer per node. In hash table implementations such as OpenJDK's HashMap, where hash buckets are linked list by default but hash flooding# attacks are resisted by "treeifying" overcrowded buckets whose keys are at least partially ordered, could this equivalence be exploited to decrease the number of branch instructions further than has so far been achieved? Neon Merlin 23:35, 28 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

August 31

Why Did Windows 11 Computer Restart Itself?

I was working at my Dell desktop computer, running Windows 11, and stepped away for a little less than an hour. When I came back, I saw that Outlook was opening all of the windows that had been open when I took my dinner break. I then observed that Word and Access had been restarted, and Word had restored two documents from Autorecovery. This wasn't in the time window that I have specified for automatic restarts. Is there a log that records why the computer was restarted? Why did the computer restart itself? Robert McClenon (talk) 02:07, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There's a chance your computer had a BSOD while you were away. You can verify it by checking for any BugCheck events in the event viewer. Ian P. Tetriss (talk) 15:29, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, User:Ian P. Tetriss - There was a RestartManager event logged just about at the time that I went back to my computer, that said that Windows Explorer could not be shut down. I haven't gotten any more information at this time, but this confirms that there was some sort of event. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:12, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A cat could have pressed the power button even. Luhanopi (talk) 20:00, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Controlling printed page in HTML

I am developing a web application whose front end is done in plain HTML and CSS. One of the pages shows a printable page with rows of pretty much identical <div> elements that look like rectangular text boxes of identical width and height, only the text contents of the elements vary.

Now there is a new requirement that the number of these elements that end up on each individual sheet of paper when physically printing the document should be configurable. Is there any other way to do this than fine-tuning the CSS layout of the page to get the height of these elements and the space surrounding them to match the height of the paper? JIP | Talk 11:16, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You can specify different CSS for different media types. For instance you can enforce page breaks in appropriate places. Ruslik_Zero 14:42, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, the section "Page breaks" seems to be exactly what I need to do. JIP | Talk 19:19, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

[IBM_CPGID850_PDF-1] Code Page CPGID 00850 (pdf), IBM, 1986

[IBM_CPGID850_TXT-2] Code Page (CPGID) 00850 (txt), IBM, 1998

[ICU_1995-3] "International Components for Unicode (ICU), ibm-850_P100-1995.ucm". GitHub. 2002-12-03. Archived from the original on 2022-01-28. Retrieved 2022-01-28.

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