Episode 11: Computer Stories 1

May 7, 2025

I tell some computer stories regarding data recovery from old hardware, getting subtitle generation working on my GPU, and messing with an old home synthesizer / keyboard.

Notes:

A couple of the segements of audio got a little garbled. I’m not sure why, but I ended up having to dub over them, which is more noticeable than I would have liked it to be. Apologies.
I said ONX Runtime. It’s ONNX Runtime. Sorry about that.

Epilogue notes:

I ended up wiping the drives with scrub - https://linux.die.net/man/1/scrub
She did get all her data off, YAY!
Max was able to further increase his Minecraft + FNAF Management Wanted framerates by disabling some shader modpacks.
I couldn’t get Audiocraft WebUI to work consistently. I very rapidly descended into dependency hell and gave up. I probably should try again relying just on CPU acceleration.
The reason that the sound generation is limited to 30 seconds is because, after 30 seconds, it goes crazy and just generates noise. This is likely because it was trained on 30 second samples.
The way they generate longer audio is to take the last 10 seconds of a sample and generate 30 more seconds like it, then stitch it together.
MusicGen failed to produce consistent results when run on the video card on transformers. Not sure why. It would work the first time after reboot, then produce garbage. Gave up, because it’s still too slow for me to care. I’ll just tell it to make a pile of audio on the CPU and come back some time later.

Mentioned in this video:

SATA dock: https://www.orico.cc/usmobile/product/detail/id/3540

Universal hard drive adapter: This is so old, I can’t find information on it. But, search for “usb ide sata adapter” to get ones of this type.

PATA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA

SATA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA

M.2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2

SSHD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive

Memtest86: https://www.memtest86.com/

Edubuntu: https://www.edubuntu.org/

Minecraft: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us

Prism Launcher: https://prismlauncher.org/

FNAF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Nights_at_Freddy's

Five Nights at Freddy’s Management Wanted: https://fnafmw.com/

Homefront: The Revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homefront:_The_Revolution

OBS Studio: https://obsproject.com/

Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org/

FLAC: https://xiph.org/flac/

Audacity: https://www.audacityteam.org/

LUFS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUFS

Auto Subtitle: https://github.com/m1guelpf/auto-subtitle

Ryzen 3700X: https://www.amd.com/en/support/downloads/drivers.html/processors/ryzen/ryzen-3000-series/amd-ryzen-7-3700x.html

WhisperX: https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX

My install docs: https://github.com/mattcaron/misc_notes/blob/master/install.xubuntu.24.04.md

CTranslate2: https://github.com/OpenNMT/CTranslate2

CTranslate2-rocm: https://github.com/arlo-phoenix/CTranslate2-rocm

RAID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

LVM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Volume_Manager_(Linux)

Linux Metadisk: https://linux.die.net/man/4/md

GRUB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_GRUB

Stable Diffusion: https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui

Radeon 6900XT: https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/desktops/radeon/6000-series/amd-radeon-rx-6900-xt.html

ASRock OC 6900XT: https://www.asrock.com/Graphics-Card/AMD/Radeon%20RX%206900%20XT%20OC%20Formula%2016GB/index.asp

AMD Driver Feature Flag: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU (scroll down to section 5.3)

Whisper Model Comparison: https://medium.com/axinc-ai/whisper-large-v3-turbo-high-accuracy-and-fast-speech-recognition-model-be2f6af77bdc

MusicGPT: https://github.com/gabotechs/MusicGPT

ONNXRuntime: https://onnxruntime.ai/

ONNXRuntime using ROCm: https://onnxruntime.ai/docs/execution-providers/ROCm-ExecutionProvider.html

Audiocraft: https://github.com/facebookresearch/audiocraft

Audicraft WebUI: https://github.com/CoffeeVampir3/audiocraft-webui

HF Transformers: https://github.com/huggingface/transformers

Yamaha PortaSound PS-400: https://pianoandsynth.com/yamaha-pss-portasound-models-1980-1997/

Odyssey of the Mind: https://odysseyofthemind.com/

Homefront: The Revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homefront:_The_Revolution

Cheap Mic to USB in: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B097H7HB5J?th=1

Battlestar Galactica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(1978_TV_series)

Recommendation: The A-Team: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_A-Team

Boxed set: https://www.amazon.com/Team-Complete-Blu-ray-George-Peppard/dp/B0B14GCXZ2

AI
Computers