brimble

Yeah, I'd probably do something else "in production" but since it hasn't caused a problem in ~3 years of use, and the cost of it breaking is effectively zero because it's only for our own use, I'm just letting Docker figure it out. If it ever breaks I'll write some Systemd unit files or whatever they call them, but until then, one less thing to worry about, to back up and reconfigure on restoration, et c.

My main operation pain is ZFS. Every time I have to touch it, I'm terrified I'll destroy all my data. It's like Git. "I want to do [extremely common thing], how can I do that?" "Great, just do [list of arcane commands, zero of which obviously relate to the thing you want to do] but don't mess up the order or typo anything or your system is hosed". Yeah, super cool. Love the features, hate the UI (again, much like git)

I've not used Plex, so I'm not sure. You'd need to find a way to expose it to the Internet (mine's only on my local network) but that shouldn't be too hard. Just forward the correct ports on your router.

It does have an account system, including the ability to restrict which "libraries" an account can access, which is great if you have kids. For adults, it lets you track your viewing progress/status separately, just like having multiple Netflix profiles.

One thing to account for is that it has to transcode and/or remux videos for clients that can't handle a file's native codecs, audio or video, which can put a pretty heavy load on the server. A Raspberry Pi or weaker x86 machine won't be able to do this without frequent pauses and frame-dropping, for any but very low-resolution media. Solutions to this include: 1) ensuring that your clients can all handle a huge range of codecs, so it never has to transcode (IME audio is, these days, trickier than video, especially ensuring things like Dolby Atmos are supported), 2) getting a really powerful server, in particular with a video card that Jellyfin can use for transcoding, and 3) falling back on just downloading the file and throwing it in VLC (the web interface makes it really easy to download the raw video files in a pinch, though if you have big high-quality 4K rips they'll come down at full size, which can be inconvenient on devices with limited storage, like, say, iPads).

However, I think Plex or anything else will have similar limitations, since they all have to do something like that to accommodate players & devices with limited codec support.

Jellyfin's been very stable for me, which is part of why I'm still on it. I also find the UI in most of their clients much, much more to my liking than something like Kodi. But IDK about Plex.

[EDIT] Oh, I guess you could also batch-job transcode all the files to something very widely-supported, outside of JellyFin, though likely at some cost in quality and maybe also file size. Plus it'd probably take at least an hour or two to hack together a script to do it, for a wide range of input codecs.

I got an ecc-ready used workstation on Ebay. After adding a smallish SSD for the system drive and upgrading the memory to 16GB I think my total cost was in the neighborhood of $200. Cost about as much as two top-end fully-equipped (case, heat sinks, disk) Pi4s, but is much more powerful, and, conveniently, includes space & ports for my SATA spinning-rust bulk storage disks.

It is a (fairly small) desktop tower, so it takes up quite a bit more space than a couple of Pis, though, again, it also encloses some internal hard drives, which is nice. I'm not sure about power use but I'd just gut-instinct guess it's equivalent to four or five Raspberries Pi, even if you take out the power to run the hard drives, so it is (probably) worse on that front.

Pihole. DNS-level ad-blocking for my network.

Jellyfin. Movies/TV/Music server with a variety of clients, including a built-in web client, but also AndroidTV/Shield, Roku, Kodi, and more. It's like having a personal Netflix.

Minecraft. The old Java kind. May be leaving for something open-source soon because MS has fucked up the account transitions so badly, and also make buying new copies bizarrely painful, error-prone, and time-consuming—like, I don't know how someone who's not a computer nerd can actually manage to buy and use it, now. It's really bad.

All in Docker on a used workstation, running... IDK, Debian, I think? It hardly matters, because Docker. I don't even mess with Systemd or whatever, I just let Docker figure out what should be started when based on what I set each container to do (restart-unless-stopped, I think? It seems to start them at boot and if they crash, which is all I need).

I hosted PHPNuke and PHPBB on Apache2 out of my basement for years so they'd be contenders for some kind of lifetime total-hours-running-the-service, but that was a long time ago.

There are ways around it (as there are with Covid vaccine requirements), but most folks are subject to vaccine mandates for school attendance (though, sure, those are state-level rules). IIRC I had to provide vaccination records for college, too. Plenty of states require vaccination to teach in a school (so, to hold a job).

What's different about this isn't the presence of mandates, but that it was a novel virus so mandates were applied to (a small set of) adults rather than mainly to kids.

In fact, the set of people to whom Covid vaccine mandates apply is surely way smaller than the set to whom a variety of others do. I'm pretty sure most states aren't requiring Covid vaccination for school attendance, for instance.

You could grab one or two from a thrift store and see how you like it, then upgrade if it seems like something you want to keep doing. Nice and cheap way to try it out. Difficulty: a nice light linen jacket's probably gonna be a little hard to find at a thrift store, so it may be best to start this attempt in the Fall.

> vaccine mandates

We've had those for decades.

> vaccine passports

These must not be a federal thing, because I still don't really know what people mean by this. Is it a state thing?

> and CDC surveillance

Private surveillance that the CDC and anyone else can buy. I agree that collecting this info in the first place, let alone selling it, should be very, very illegal.

Approaching age 40. Most of my favorite songs are probably from the 60s and 70s (5-20 years before I was born), but I only heard most of them (the ones that are my favorites) after age 35. I like plenty of newer music, too. I discover great new-to-me stuff from many decades, including the current one, all the time. This seems pretty normal in my social circle, though few of us are super into music.

There aren't a ton of albums that I liked between the ages of 14 and 20 that I'd still defend as "good", though a handful are still nostalgia-listens for me. I had pretty shit taste in music then, really.

> Fanny packs are sweet, except the part where you're wearing a fanny pack.

Hear me out:

Sport coats. (edit: and blazers)

Very light linen ones for hot days, which keep sun off your skin without really making you hotter. Cooler days, break out the wool.

All those extra pockets are wonderful. Grab some thin old mass-market genre paperbacks and discover why they made them that size :-)

They're like purses for men, that you can wear instead of carry, and that make you look better. Similar storage capacity to a fanny pack, I'd say. Maybe a little more.

Yeah, Spec Ops: The Line was really good. Really good like some movies I've seen where I was like "that was great—I wish I hadn't seen it", but still, really good.

I don't think I even saw anyone bother with the euphemism "r-word" until like 2012. It was common in media throughout the '00s and somewhat beyond.

F----t and derivatives, yes, that was on its way out even in my nowhere-near-the-coasts purple-county-in-a-red-state by the early '00s.

> And you can't just let your child not eat.

You can, most of us just don't because people think you're neglecting the kid if the kid chooses not to eat a meal you provide them. Same reason we send way more food for lunches than my kids ever eat—because the amount they will eat looks "too small" and my wife's worried what people will think.

I hate this stuff, but get the reasoning. IMO they'll eat if they're hungry. Meanwhile, we have an obesity crisis.

Maybe, but it was kind of a problem when I was already like "is there a way to progress the game but have this guy not accomplish what he wants?" on like mission 1 (past the prologue)—there was no build-up to it, I thought he was wrong and should fail immediately. And they might have gone for some kind of turn-around on that when the girl comes into the story, so that I start wanting him to succeed, but then, I also didn't like her and didn't care if anything involved with that worked out, either.

I think I quit right after the game had me murder a couple soldiers for bad reasons. I already have several GTA games I can play, which, thanks to tone and expectations, aren't frustrating when they ask me to do that kind of thing. My head-canon is that the soldiers instead shot everyone there and that was the good ending for the story.

I feel empowered when I don't have to worry as much about how to safely operate my car, and it's just automatically safer. And when I don't have to worry as much about other drivers on public roads because their cars are automatically safer. The amount I'd be happy to pay to make that functionality configurable in order to accommodate people with different preferences, is $0.00.

So much so that it felt like someone involved's... uh, particular interests were coming through in the game, in a way that was kinda off-putting.

IMO 2 and 4 are easily the best Uncharted games. I wouldn't recommend 1 or 3 at all, despite 3 having a plot that should have really appealed to me. The first one mostly suffers from unrefined mechanics making it a slog, but they fixed that in 2.

But, 2 and 4 are very different. 2 is a solid 3d action-platformer, while my favorite parts of 4 were when it basically just became a "walking simulator"-type game for long stretches, with most of the action and platforming just feeling tacked-on and superfluous.

> (I haven't played The Last of Us though. I hear it's incredible, but I can't deal with the subject matter.)

I should have loved it, but bounced off hard. The prologue had me, but a little while into the game proper I just wanted all the main characters to die, including the one you're really, really not supposed to want to die. They're all horrible and I didn't like or care about them a single bit, to the point that I wanted them to fail. The protagonist in particular, I had to root for him to fail because clearly this humanity-on-the-brink would be better off with one fewer self-interested mass-murders around making things even worse. That's... not a great way to motivate the player.

I've long been skeptical of this explanation. Later school ages (junior high and high school) were probably the most monotonous and regimented part of my life, period—I've certainly never experienced that much concentrated, intense boredom without any way to do anything about it—yet subjective time had only barely sped up from elementary school. It should then have slowed way down in college, but it didn't. It should have slowed down again a ton when I had kids, but it didn't. The change has been consistently in one direction, as has the acceleration of the effect.

As I approach 40, a year feels about as long as a month did when I was elementary-school aged. I worry that if the current rate-of-increase continues, my last decade will feel weeks long.

Food waste is mostly just a sign that food is very cheap. Cheap enough that it's not worth trying to save or find another use for what's wasted.

On the flip side, last time I wrote some in an editor with decent HTML-authoring autocomplete, it was so fast I wondered why we bother with weird compile-to-HTML templating languages anymore. It wasn't really any slower than writing Pug or whatever, and the result IMO was more readable.

Good old m4 can get you pretty far, as a template system for generating html.

Ah, OK, sorry, I misunderstood the context.

That's... still a firing, no? What it's not, is a lay-off.

I don't think anyone is considering doing this to race cars.

I have wireless headphones. They were cheaper than AirPods (they're Jabra) and have pretty good sound. They're full-size, not earbuds.

The battery lasts for a couple days of fairly heavy use, and they degrade to... wired headphones, essentially, since I can use them while they're charging. Also they have a 3.5mm jack if I want to use that. And they've got a microphone, so I can walk around while on calls.

Best of both worlds.

You can just get up and go and not even think about power. You can even take an overnight trip and not bother to bring the power brick. It's very nice.

... plus, crazy, excessive-seeming battery life at purchase means you still have "all-day" battery when the device is 5 years old and the battery has significantly degraded.

I didn't take incompetent as an insult, but in its straightforward, descriptive sense: the people were not competent at the jobs they were assigned to (and, presumably, weren't given sufficient help in becoming competent)

Same. I also once had a woman say the exact same thing I'd said earlier, in a meeting, and get credit for the idea (which the company adopted).

Not a big deal, I just thought it was funny to have such a stereotypical sexism-in-the-workplace thing happen to me, as a guy.

> Use whatever typographic rules you like, as long as it communicates the ideas you like to tell...?!

Following conventions & rules is exactly how you communicate those ideas. Failing to do so tends to cause confusion and distraction. It's not about what's right and what's wrong—it's about compassion for one's readers.

I really, really wish Apple would release an official way to run arbitrary older versions of their OS in VMs. They have a hypervisor and have for a long time, but using it to run an older OSX/macOS version is very much a DIY thing. It'd be hugely helpful for people supporting software, who need to test on older versions and maybe even to occasionally compile an important bug fix for something that's now "ancient".