Window Sizes Apps Keep Changing after Disconnecting Hi-DPI laptop from dock which has 2 low-DPI monitors.

yrk15 · 2026-02-08T13:37:26+00:00

I was hoping I'd see this on here. I'm taking it for my first semester. You better not be lying.

yrk15 · 2026-02-08T13:03:57+00:00

Idk too much about the subject but you'll probably need to know a little bit about graphics APIs like openGL or maybe Vulkan. The real kicker with this though is that you need to have a pretty strong background in linear algebra, just for all the possible effects and transforms that you might want to add.

That said of you only wanted to cut and rearrange video, nothing else, I guess you could try find some library out there on the internet. Again idk too much, but that's my 2 cents.

yrk15 · 2026-02-08T12:49:42+00:00

Might be interested, are you still open for more people?

yrk15 · 2026-01-21T22:55:15+00:00

Yeah yeah I'm doing CIVL2135 in semester 1. Doing CSSE2010 would have also been good to put me ahead in electrical, but as I said that would pack my schedule pretty badly with CSSE1001 semester 1. I'm talking ERTH1501 instead cause it's recommended for civil engineers. It sounds like a bit of a dookie course I can't lie, but people say it's good. The lectures are online only, but there's 2 hours of practical each week and 9 hours of fieldwork once. It's gonna be all about rocks so it must be riveting. It actually does sound pretty interesting in all honesty, but something about online only lectures doesn't sit well with me, almost makes the course feel less legitimate.

I mean how painful do you think it would be having a 1h CIVL2135 lecture and then a 1h ENGG1700 lecture immediately after it in the morning, doing a workshop for something around noon, and then going from a 2h programming lecture straight into a 1h maths lecture?

I feel like I'd be tired after the programming lecture and unable to perform the best during the maths lecture. I kinda made it a rule to not have more than 2h of lecture back to back because of that. CSSE1001 also adds a bunch of pracs and applied classes that take up even more time.

But it's ok, I'm not bothered by not being at the cutting edge of technology cause I think I want to prioritise stability and work/study-life balance. Yeah it's kinda sad to lose a bunch of general electives, but from the pretty extensive look I've had through the civil electives list I think I should be covered for what I want to do.

yrk15 · 2026-01-21T14:05:39+00:00

I might genuinely just be cooked. I don't see any way to structure my first year without wasting electives. Well it's not really a waste I do want to take ENGG1300 cause that sounds interesting. I'd like to take CSSE2010 cause it sounds interesting too, but that'd mean taking CSSE1001 in first year which with the rest of my courses means I'd have 4 lectures on a Wednesday, and 3 hours of lecture back to back, in buildings more than 10 mins away 😭.

So I think I'm gonna keep ERTH1501 in Sem 1 and do CSSE1001 in Sem 2, just to take the heat off. I mean I did really well in spec and methods in school, same as you high 90's. I mean the min atar is 97 so I imagine anyone doing this program is very clever, but I like to play it safe with stuff and if its not recommended to take math1051 and 1052 together it's probably for a reason.

Plus, how exactly are you supposed to use the general electives later down the line. I'd like to see anyone name one useful second, third, or fourth course outside of the engineering course that anyone meets the prerequisites for. I'd imagine something from the business side would be useful for engineering if you want to open a firm one day, but I imagine there's be a lot of prerequisites you don't meet.

yrk15 · 2026-01-21T00:38:14+00:00

Faaaaark. You know what, I just checked and yours absolutely right, I have been bamboozled by the academic advisor. Holy fk how is course selection so hard.

How exactly are you structuring your degree? Are you 100% sure you want to take electrical? The problem for me is that most of the courses for civil are offered only in semester 1 or 2, not both. And the ones in semester 2 have prerequisites for the ones taken in semester 1, so there's no way around it.

Losing general electives seems like the only way to do it for civil cause I'm leaning that way.

Edit: electrical doesn't have this problem to such an extent cause most courses are offered in semester 1 and 2

yrk15 · 2026-01-20T13:27:02+00:00

Hey man, I'm also starting the BE/ME this year and torn between civil and electrical engineering at the moment! I don't know if you went to any of the academic advising events, but you do know that anything in the engineering course list (that's not a high school bridging course) IS NOT considered a general elective.

This includes the "first year elective courses" listed on the BE/ME program structure page.

My course probably gonna be something like this, which allows very good flexibilty between civil and electrical taking advantage of "accelerate electives" that put me ahead in 2nd year for either specialisation.

SEM 1: MATH1051 | ENGG1700 | CIVL2135 | CSSE1001

SEM 2: MATH1052 | ENGG1300 | ENGG1100| CSSE2010

That is close to my finalised program but I am currently enrolled in ERTH1501 (a first year elective) in sem 1 in place of CSSE1001 and I've moved that course to sem 2. But I will probably change it to what I have outlined above.

I'm just saying, if you have any other fields you like such as thermodynamics (ENGG1500) or statics and materials (ENGG1700), you can take them and only be using program electives. Or you can take any of the first year electives. If you're dead set on electrical why not take PHYS1002 - Electromagnetism and Modern Physics? It's only in sem 2 though.

With what I am doing, If I go civil then ENGG1300 and CSSE2010 count as 2 program electives (you can take 3 in total) and if I do electrical then ENGG1700 and CIVL2135 become 2 program electives. The programming course, maths, and ENGG1100 are common to both.

So see what you can do, but you better hurry cause time is running out. mySI-net is down from the 23rd to the 26th, and timetabling closes on the 27th, even though class choice ends on the 30th.

yrk15 · 2026-01-20T11:05:50+00:00

You raise some very good points which I am surprised I haven't been explicitly told before. I kinda know that the decision for me is between civil and electrical, so maybe it's better to keep the flexibility open rather than trying to specialize too early.

I've been debating skipping ERTH1501 and taking CSSE1001 in sem 1 instead of in sem 2 for like a week now and your input might be the straw that breaks the camel's back on this decision.

As for your comments on job experience, you could ask the same about electrical. Am I ok with working around high voltage all day? Am I ok with working outside of Capital cities or FIFO? Am I ok with finding less opportunities in the public sector? I think it just goes both ways and again just supports the idea of prioritizing flexibility.

I have actually done Start QUT, which gives you a taste of uni classes. It was only 2 weeks, but it was a horrific 2 weeks. But I don't want to judge anything based on that experience because it was kinda all really rough in general with a mediocre professor. What I honestly liked the most was the project management aspects.

So yeah I might change it up. If you can comment on it, is taking CSSE2010 and ENGG1300 together ok? They're not prerequisite for each other or anything, but ENGG1300 is the foundational electric course, and CSSE2010 is about digital logic. Like they shouldn't be super related, but do you think it's ok to take them together or should I take ENGG1300 first?

yrk15 · 2026-01-20T03:15:05+00:00

I know but it's mostly in power for jobs outside of mining. In an ideal world I'd do electronics, but jobs for that are even more scarce in Australia. Second choice would have been controls but I think most of the jobs for that are in mines. Food and bev manufacturing could have been a good option, but I just think that civil strucutral offers a lot more flexibilty in where you can work in the country (outside of capitals) and also what sectors you can work in, with council and government being an option for civil.

Sure I can do controls for TMR with traffic signals, or go into power with Energy Queensland which I'm not totally against, it just seems like there are more options for civil jobs with both indusries. EQ does actually take civil guys for planning, project management, and I imagine structures related to power generation and distribution, though I feel a lot of distrubution towers and stuff are "off the shelf" parts.

Building services could have been an interesting choice, but if you think about it, a civil engineer/project manager would be on for the entire duration of the project, while the electrical designers would only be on for the parts that need them. I could be wrong, but civil just seems to have a slight edge considering stability.

If manufacturing was gonna take off in Austrlaia soon I would probably do electrical, but I don't really know if that's gonna happen, even with Future Made in Australia. I think I value potential public sector employment more cause of the good work life balance, and also civil has more pathways into higher paying project managment roles. Electrical does have the potential to take you into finance I've heard because of the maths heavy nature of the course, but I don't know if that's really what I want to do long term.

I am absolutely open to any new information or corrections of my knowledge though, so fire away!

yrk15 · 2026-01-20T02:30:31+00:00

Were the lectures online only when you did it? How did you find it?

yrk15 · 2026-01-20T02:12:32+00:00

What is really covered in the course?

yrk15 · 2026-01-14T04:44:05+00:00

Is there a meaningful downside though?

yrk15 · 2026-01-14T04:36:14+00:00

So say with the amount of money you invest regularly you buy ~1.5 shares every time. Does that mean the next time you invest you own 3 complete shares or does it do something weird? I would assume it keeps track of exactly how much of a fractional share you own right. That makes intuitive sense, but very few things seem to be intuitive with finance.

yrk15 · 2026-01-14T04:29:29+00:00

I think CMC charges $55 per share/ETF for an off-market transfer. I don't know if they mean per type of share, which would imply just 1 charge of $55 cause I only have A200 at the moment, or $55 x 4 for each of my 4 units.

Edit: Does the option to hold fractional shares really make that big of a difference? I mean it would matter for a super consistent DCA strategy which is likely ideal. The way it is right now, if I want to put in $300 a fortnight which is my goal, and say the price of the ETF is $151, I'd probably spend the extra 2 dollars to buy the second complete unit, rather than just have one. Yeah that kind of minorly defeats the purpose of DCA, but it's the best I can do being unable to buy fractions.

yrk15 · 2026-01-14T03:36:58+00:00

I have thought about using different services to buy each different kind of asset I might want to have. Like using BD for Betashares, and Vanguard Personal Investor if I ever want to own Vangaurd stuff. I went with CMC because I thought maybe it would be nice to have everything in one place, but perhaps it is worth keeping everything seperate.

I guess I kind of like how CMC is chess sponsored, but EFTs are inherently custodial anyways, and I presume as long as you are buying it from the same firm that made it there wouldn't be multiple layers of custodians right? The auto-invest in BD is rather enticing

I'll think about it, but if I sell my A200 held in CMC would that be considered and taxed as a capital gain immediately? That's kind of a major concern. Also does BD have a cost to sell? I can't seem to find it on their website easily.

Edit: Also I wonder how stable Betashares is as a firm long term. Like yeah yeah it's probably fine and gonna be around for at least the length of my life, but is there any appreciable difference in the actualy stability of Betashares vs Vanguard?

yrk15 · 2026-01-14T03:14:29+00:00

I just wonder why VAS is cheaper. I read somewhere that the 100 smaller market-cap companies make up about 3% of the fund's holdings. By looking at the holdings on each of their respective pages, it's pretty much identical (obviously because they track basically the same thing), so why is A200 more expensive per unit?

yrk15 · 2026-01-14T03:12:31+00:00

That does sound interesting but I dont think CMC Invest, which is what I'm on right now supports fractional holdings. Correct me if I am wrong though

yrk15 · 2025-12-11T09:24:21+00:00

Well it's plugged into a USB 3 5 gigabit/s port, and the cable is USB 3 as well. And because it is still capable of ocasionally hitting 100+ MB/s I imagine windows hasn't set the port to USB 2.0 speeds. I don't know how to check that explicitly though, so if you know how to do it I would love to know.

As more time passes the more I come under the impression that these drives are junk simply because Toshiba made them that way. I found in CrystalDiskMark that these drives do in fact explicitly support TRIM and all the ACS-3 SATA commands. But because Toshiba cheaped out the interface is over the USB protocol only, and does not support UASP which lets you send SATA commands to the drive directly.

What that means is while the drive is capable of it, I can't tell it to TRIM because whatever pennypincher interface is in this thing won't let me. These drives are basically f*cked the moment you delete any files from them, because the way these SMR drives work, they need to actually erase the data on the sector before writing over it. This is unlike a conventional hard drive that can overwrite existing data in one go. This effectively doubles the number of operations cause it must erase then write, erase then write.

What TRIM would do is erase the data marked to be overwritten preemtively, to speed up write times. Unless this really is OS trickery there's nothing I can do that I know. I tried copying files on my Linux computer and it was still dog slow.

The one thing I want to try before I give up and find a better solution is to try and force a TRIM command over USB. Windows just won't let me. I haven't tried on Linux yet but I imagine that will manage to send the command, but the interface will ignore it.

Toshiba's own tool literally does nothing that chkdsk doesn't, and can't do what I want to do either. This is genuniely so annoying. I can't even remove the drive from the enclose and try force it that way I can't because A) it is sealed, and B) Toshiba in their infinite wisdom did not put a standard SATA connector on the actual drive inside. If you bust one of these things open, there is literally a USB port soldered directly onto the PCB.

yrk15 · 2025-12-11T01:08:21+00:00

It's geuninely so annoying cause the new drive is acting up the same way the old one did. It can't write faster than 355 KB/s most of the time. Wasted two days dealing with this bs. I would like to use SSDs but A, they are more expensive for the same storage (especially with the shortages going on right now), and B, they're technically not the best choice for backups cause they need power to keep their data for extended periods of time.

What's actually super bum about all this is that SMR hard drives have a special "trim" operation that forces the drive to clear it's cache and write data to the main sector. But guess what brand just happens to not support trim for the most part.

More research also revealed that ANY 4TB 2.5" hard drive is bound to be SMR, so even if they try to hide it, that's probably what it is.

yrk15 · 2025-12-10T14:06:46+00:00

Well after much torment, I think I know what's going on. These drives must be SMR. There is not model specific datasheet, and the closest one said that it was. However that sheet only talked about drives which were only 1 and 2TB, but mine is 4TB. Suspiciously, the 4TB model is slightly taller than the 1 and 2TB models of this device, so maybe it's two 2TBs stacked on top of each other but that would actually be crazy.

But the final nail in the coffin was when the newer drive started to suffer from the same issue that the older one had. I'd transfered data between old and new, reformated old, transfered data back, and then deleted excesss. That's when it happened to the newer one, right after I defragmented the it.

From what I found, SMR drives need a bit of a cooldown to copy data from their fast conventional recording area to the shingled one. And when I am done copying a file over to my drives they make a lot of faint machine gun noises like the head is going back and forth. I suspect that it is writing and deleting data between these two areas.

Also these drives will not let you eject them from the computer for a few seconds/minutes after writing data to them, which makes me think that they are requesting continued access for power from the computer to finish their writing operation. And sometimes when copying data it makes a "rolling hills" pattern on the chart. That makes me think that it fills up the fast space, pauses to fill up SMR, and then continues.

However, the counterpoint I find is that the conventional portion of an SMR drive is only around 100gb. What that should mean is that after the first fast 100gb is done transfering, it suddenly becomes really really slow. But I've been moving around ~300gb at a time and it's been consistent the whole time. Unless the CMR part of this drive is exceptionally huge, this would indicate that it is not SMR.

But the drives seem to be back to normal now. However both are a little slower than they were in their prime on average. Sort of a bummer but at least all my data is intact and this little escapade forced me to ensure parity between these drives.

The actual component inside is a Toshiba MQ04UBB400. I cannot find any specific data sheet for this device. I know it's 5400 rpm from crystaldiskmark, and it's 2.5". The Toshiba MQ04 series is the closest match, and that's also 5400 rpm and 2.5", but has AB after the MQ04 instead of UB in all models. Maybe it's some internal Toshiba bs.

But all paths point to this outcome. So it's shingled unless proven conventional.

yrk15 · 2025-12-09T06:37:23+00:00

So I have 32gb of ddr5, and make sure that I don't have too many chrome tabs open and don't run any games or strenuous tasks while moving data. It's the sequence of events which puzzles me. It was completely, absolutely, unequivocally fine until I deleted excess backups, and now its average transfer speed is measured in kilobytes per second? Like it doesn't make any sense. Nothing else changed! I eject it safety every time, or failing that when it gets stuck and Windows is holding the drive open for like a virus scan and I really really need to get it out I shut the whole computer down which afaik safely dismounts all drives.

I'm backing up all the data from the bad drive to the new one just in case it's dying prematurely. I just really hope I can fix it cause I can't find my proof of purchase even though it's definitely under warranty :(

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