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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s the tech business model. Slowly building up a sustainable business has been replaced with coasting on investment money while attempting to capture an entire global market. Because these products can scale so easily. Now they’re entering the “oh shit we need to make money now” phase of the business model.

    It’s not evil capitalists. It’s people acting rationally. The incentive structure leads to this behaviour. Eventually these services will consolidate into 2 or 3 major ones, like they do in every global tech market. Everyone will complain about it. But they’ll keep paying for it, because what other (legal) choice is there?







  • I love my HA dashboard but it took seemingly far too much effort to get it sensible. I had to know how to ssh in and edit a locked YAML file and create new template sensors just so I could have some temperature sensors show as “50” instead of “50.0028472” or some shit.

    I think they fixed that in an update though. But there’s always something that requires multiple extra layers of digging around.




  • The fun way to watch movies is to have a NAS with a Plex/Jellyfin server and browse them on your TV with a nice UI in the comfort of your living room.

    Want to watch this movie in 4K Dolby Vision with atmos? Just browse or search for it and click on the poster art. Want to stop that half way through and watch a tv series instead? Go for it. It’ll take all of 5 seconds to navigate to it and have it playing.

    After going through the effort to set that up, I can’t go back to anything else.

    If a drive fails or other issue occurs with my NAS, it will send me an email and then shut itself down. Replace a dead drive and off I go again. No data loss due to RAID. (insert obligatory comment that RAID is not a backup solution and that you should have a separate backup for important files)


  • The Android market sort of split into cheap streaming sticks vs more expensive but niche boxes (like the Zidoo or Dune players). The former are meant for streaming but lack power. The latter are more capable players but often can’t stream from legit services due to DRM.

    The Shield sits in this weird middle ground where it’s actually good for a variety of use cases….but unlikely to get an update due to small market demand.

    Although I’d argue that unless you need atmos audio passthrough for Bluray rips…the AppleTV 4K is the best option these days. Super fast processor, no ads or bullshit in the OS, reliable frame rate matching, good track record of software updates and vendor support, and apps like Infuse which is a superb Plex and Jellyfin client. It’ll do 4K REMUX playback with lossless 7.1 audio, and the UI never lags…ever. Just a shame about no audio passthrough which prevents it from being an enthusiast player.