Hardware

Diminishing returns after 6 cores, but not for all media Handbrake is a video transcoder. It’s normally used to convert and compress video from a format into a more compressed format. Handbrake comes in a command line version, handbrake-cli, and a graphical version, handbrake. I’ve seen it mentioned several times that Handbrake is best at 6 cores or less, after that the encoding returns are diminishing. I thought this was the case with some of my experimentation, but it seems the answer is more complicated – it depends. ...

About the script I wrote the hardware.sh BASH script to make it a bit simpler for volunteers at The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project to figure out what hardware was in a computer. For more than a dozen years we’ve been asking volunteers to gather information from the BIOS, or using phoronix-test-suite under our PXE booted Debian Live environment. Volunteers would write the information on quarter page-sized sheets we would attach to each computer. While this was a useful function to help volunteers get to know hardware in a computer, there were a few problems with this method: ...