• 2 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Consoles are just a consistent standard… Everything is standardized, everything works.

    Well, with Steam Deck and supposedly upcoming new Steam Machine, that’s a perfectly decent target without restrictive software limitations and closed ecosystems. Plus, PCs are pretty standardized these days in general. Nobody needs to target the high end, and Valve does a hardware survey that’s publicly available to know exactly what hardware range is in use (and it’s generally the lower end, despite enthusiasts).

    That’s ignoring the console support for exclusives

    And I’ll keep ignoring them because there’s no reason for them to exist now, there aren’t architectural differences and unique capabilities that make sense for games to be exclusive anymore. That’s more of the artificial software restrictions I mentioned. Console exclusives can die in a fire. Even Sony has realized they’re leaving money on the table with that crap and releasing to PC.








  • Actually, I’m gonna add another really simple option: Lyrion (Formerly Logitech Media Server). My wife swears by this one, supports local library, integrates with LastFM, and if you use Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, or Spotify, you can integrate your streaming service with your local library for radio mixes.

    Can install it right on a laptop or PC and connect to wherever your music is (local on the machine, on a NAS, etc.). After you install it, you can access it directly via a web browser or webapp, which will make it accessible from desktop or phone.


  • Not necessarily overkill, you can run Plex on almost anything. I used to run it on an old NUC6 I had laying around, then upgraded to a NUC8, and more recently I setup it up as a VM on Proxmox on a Ryzen 5700u mini-PC and just reimported the DB.

    Virtualizing it has been good for my purposes since now it’s running alongside AssetUPnP, AudioBookshelf, and a dockerized squeezelite setup, and I’ve another VM on the host running Home Assistant with still plenty of resources to spare. Crazy we can do that now with a “server” that literally fits in my palm.

    But virtualizing it makes hardware acceleration for video transcode be I more complicated, just a heads up. I play everything native so don’t use it, but YMMV.

    ———

    Edit - Plexamp is an awesome radio/DJ player, though I generally send to a Wiim Mini, as AirPlay quality with Plexamp can be kind of ass compared to direct DLNA.








  • You can use ntfsfix on the drive to do a check and remove dirty bit. This isn’t a full check though, and could mask or hide actual issues with the drive if it’s failing.

    There’s also chkntfs which is more robust but I’m not sure if that’s open source and I’m not familiar with it.

    Using ntfsfix is a good quick fix in my experience, but at the end of the day, NTFS is a Microsoft exclusive format and shared disks should be mounted in a format that both OSes can use, like exFAT, or Btrfs with the WinBtrfs driver (the latter I’m not familiar with, I’ve always used exFAT for shared disks, but I don’t use Windows anymore).


  • The other person said to never connect to wifi, but I’d say either put it on an isolated wifi (guest network) and lock it down to LAN-only access in your router, if at all possible.

    The reason being that these devices are aggressive about getting a wifi signal, and even if they can’t connect to yours, they’ll apparently search for unprotected wifi networks and connect to those to send data and phone home. Locking it down to LAN only prevents this, and isolating to a guest network means no information about other devices on your network.

    It’s utterly insane we have to do this stuff. If you’re willing to spend more, there are commercial signage displays you can buy that are essentially dumb TVs, and that is pretty much the only way to get a dumb TV today (and obviously, don’t expect smart features from it).


  • It depends. I’m not saying I never pirate books. I’m not going to just support a publisher milking a book that should belong to the commons.

    Also, some publishers have taken to raising ebook prices to as high or higher than hardback costs. For those I might buy one book by an author and pirate another. I won’t justify it other than to say I only ever bought paperbacks anyway and still remember those being like $3.99 to $6.99, so I’m not paying $18+ for an ebook novel because of publisher greed.

    But if it’s an author I like, I buy their books, and support them in other ways (like with Sanderson’s Kickstarter for example).