Kraven_the_Hunter

I just bought a used mirrorless camera - Sony A7C if it matters, and and am wanting some advice on a zoom lens.

I want a lens for use in a dark arena - there are dozens of performers with spotlights, so a lot of dark and light. I want to go between shots of the full arena and zooms onto individual acts or performers. I think that my best choice is between the Sony FE 24-240 f/ 3.5-6.3 and the Tamron 28-200 f/2.8-5.6.

Will there be a significant difference in low light performance between these lenses? I like the wider specs of the Sony lens but am not sure how much of a tradeoff I would be making with the smaller aperture.

I have 4 old hard drives that I pulled from an old Drobo that needs to be trashed. I bought a Mediasonic 4-bay RAID enclosure that I thought would be a good upgrade, but knew going into that the drives may not work because the manual for the new enclosure specifically says to use new drives to avoid problems. The exact product is this Mediasonic one.

I don't care about the existing data on these drives, and that was originally what I thought was meant by "avoiding problems". So I tried just putting the drives in to no avail. They don't show up as drives in the file explorer. They don't show up in "Disks".

I also have an external hard drive dock - the 15 year old version of this one which does let me mount the drives and see them in Disks.

I have tried running "wipefs -a" and I've tried formatting them in Disks with no filesystem specified. I've also run parted on them, but anything I try in parted gives me the error "unrecognised disk label".

If I can't reuse these old drives then the enclosure is of less use to me than I had hoped as I don't intend to buy new drives any time soon.

Is there anything else I can try to reset these drives to a state where they'll act like new drives that have never been used before?

Update: The "tricks" haven't worked so I'm doing the full disk write using dd. It'll be a while before I have 2 disks prepped to try.

Most of the way through bag #3 and I just noticed they're not calling these "tortilla chips" anymore..

I'll preface this by saying that these issues are on a Surface Tablet that I've been using to play around with, so I haven't been too diligent in documenting what changes were made when.

I've got a Surface Go 2 tablet with the LTE modem that I installed Linux Mint onto several months ago. When I first made the switch, cellular connectivity seemed very "touch and go" but Wi-Fi had been solid.

At some point in time (roughly 6 months ago), I switched my home network to using Control D for DNS resolution for about 2 months until I decided it wasn't what I wanted and went back to my default setup which is a Unifi UCG Max gateway using the AdGuard public DNS servers coupled with the built-in ad blocking of the Unifi gateway. This feeds to a separate Wi-Fi mesh network in my home.

About a month ago I noticed that I could no longer reach internet locations on my tablet when connected to my home Wi-Fi network, but I could still access other computers on my LAN just fine, so Wi-Fi was working. Cellular connectivity seemed to have stopped working entirely even though I ran the "lte_modem_fix" that is on github and was seeing several bars of connectivity in the status bar.

Even though websites were inaccessible (Firefox gave me an error saying there was no network connection), in my attempt to try anything I found that I could visit the Control D website even though I stopped subscribing months ago.

On a lark I pulled up my Mullvad VPN app which I have an active subscription to and it let me connect to a server. As soon as I did this, ALL internet sites became available.

Next I took the tablet with me away from home, disabled Wi-Fi and activated the cellular network. Again the bars appeared but I couldn't access any sites. I loaded up Mullvad and was able to connect, after which I could reliably connect to all internet sites. Again, cellular connectivity was never 100% but Wi-Fi was.

How do I even begin troubleshooting and fixing this? Needing a VPN isn't the end of the world, but when at home it gets in the way of accessing local computers so I'd like to get to where the tablet works on Wi-Fi or cellular, with and without a VPN active.

I sometimes listen to music from Amazon Music through Firefox while I play Rocket League. My keyboard has audio controls, and in Windows adjusting the volume or hitting pause would briefly show an overlay with the current song info and album art.

In Linux the default behavior is to show nothing. Is there a setting or tool to add similar functionality to the Windows behavior?

I have a Surface Go tablet that I switched over to Linux a while back, and just came across a problem that I don't know how to approach. I use an iDataLink Maestro module in my car to make an aftermarket stereo do what I want it to do. I want to check for a firmware update on it, but the management software tool is windows or mac only.

So I installed WINE and the PlayonLinux front end. I successfully installed the tool (Weblink) but the keyboard doesn't work so I can't log into it. The trackpad works though, and this is a directly connected keyboard/trackpad, so for one to work but not the other seems weird. I can find threads about non-functional keyboards with some games, but I honestly don't understand the guidance being dished out.

How can I troubleshoot and fix this keyboard issue?

I have a couple of Surface tablets that I'd like to put Linux on if possible. The one I want to try first is a 5th gen Surface Pro. If all goes well I would then try it on a Surface Go 2 and hopefully could keep the cellular access.

What resources are available for doing this? The little I've read so far makes me think that it is a buggy process and maybe not worth the effort involved.