they absolutely have an internal search engine, it’s code named pegasus, and it powers some parts of siri, spotlight, store, etc. they’ve had a web crawler for over a decade

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/luigi-mangione-judge-married-to-former

It’s theoretically possible but it requires a justice system that is actually blind. A justice system that didn’t just assign him a judge who’s married to a dude that was a former executive at a pfizer and still holds hundreds of thousands of dollars in healthcare companies, which apparently is something that she feels doesn’t require her to recuse herself even given the stature of this case

The jury selection process will be rigorous and will ensure that the people sitting on the panel are sympathetic to capitalists

I will try this out, thanks!

Any idea if playlists can directly work in external but non Jellyfin apps like finamp or kodi with Jellyfin for kodi? If not can playlists be saved/exported for use in those contexts?

Theoretically possible but someone would have to reverse engineer the protocol and write a new service that works based on that

There are some projects but all that I’ve seen are open source head units that either: are terrible and aren’t android auto/carplay (eg they only have the most basic of integration, can show notifications and play music via Bluetooth) or they emulate android auto/carplay without the necessary licensing/hardware (so you still ultimately rely on google/apple)

When I was in high school (like 2001 or so) I started doing electronics stuff, hobby projects, console mods, etc. simple stuff at first like installing mod chips and building rgb mods for older rf consoles but then building pic and embedded stuff which was somewhat impressive in the pre arduino days (even though it was functionally the same thing, just slightly more difficult because there wasn’t a dev board or ide)

That led to learning enough to fix stuff, which I did through college to earn some cash. I kept doing it, and kept doing it.

At one point I was actually earning quite a bit of money. The early smartphone days were great. Lasted a decent clip too. Each iphone generation I would buy a 50 pack of screens and batteries from chinese wholesalers that sold very good quality ones. Would easily burn through those. I didn’t really like doing this but it was lucrative. I simply charged less then anyone else in town and still made a decent amount per hour because it was ultimately stupid easy to do and all the repair shops (including apple) grossly overcharged. I would do it for $50 and the parts were like $17. Took me like 12 minutes. I was just doing it after work and making an extra 15k a year at the peak just off phones

Then the oled phones came out and all of a sudden parts were like $200, so that sucked, so that dropped drastically

Then the iphone xs came out and if you changed the parts the phone would give a nag screen saying “these parts may not be authentic” and disable features, even if I pulled the parts from another iphone. This also caused another drop although eventually I found programmers from china that could defeat it (for $$$ but at that point it was about the principle)

Then Samsung started doing it too (though they later walked it back, but then unwalked it back maybe? I don’t pay it much mind these days. For that matter apple also finally allows you to program new parts as of ios 18 but they have to be genuine apple parts that aren’t locked and buying them from apple is $$$$$. Plus last I checked they won’t even sell you parts unless you give them the device imei/serial so you can’t buy in bulk, get discounts, and doing what I did is completely impractical)

Then I gave up on that. I still do some of what I always did: buy broken stuff, fix it, sell it online. This is more fun to do because it’s interesting, like solving a puzzle, but less lucrative because it’s far more time consuming. I also no longer have to directly deal with customers which is nice (aside from the occasional person on ebay who wants a refund without returning the item because I didn’t make it clear the item was refurbished even though it was listed as refurbished, the description says it’s refurbished with a description of how it was refurbished, and an image saying “refurbished item” as the primary picture on the auction).

I also sometimes do hdmi and usb c replacements on consoles and phones because they don’t serialize those (yet, probably)

And every once in a while I still pursue an actual hobby project. My current one is making a proper portable Dreamcast but instead of doing it based on a raspberry pi or whatever I’m using the leaked schematics to rebuild the board with only the necessities in a much smaller footprint and trying to integrate some modern niceties (replace the disk drive with either sd card or cf, modern efficient power supply, built in VMU, etc). But it would sacrifice an actual Dreamcast and reuse the cpu, gpu, ram, Yamaha sound chip, etc so it wouldn’t emulate anything and be 100% accurate. About 80% to a prototype but progress is slow (been doing it for years) because I do have an actual job that takes up much of my time. Also I lost some enthusiasm because someone in china beat me to it years ago; you can buy it on AliExpress for like $500 if you really want one (but theirs is ugly and doesn’t have a lot of the feature set I plan. It does exist though, so it beats mine quite handily)

It was about a year ago and I’ve found general prices have gone up on basically everything, even stuff for parts, in the past few years, but more importantly it was also a local sale in person with a vendor I know. I find that’s the only way to actually get deals anymore. If you buy stuff like this and are stuffing a network rack at home it makes sense to befriend a local electronics recycler or two if you live in an area where that’s a thing.

I actually moved about two years ago to a less developed area but I will still drive to where I used to live (which is like 90-120 minute drive) 1-2x a year for stuff like this. It’s worth it bc these guys still know me and they’ll cut me deals on stuff like this where ebay sellers will list it for 2-3x as much. but if you watch 8x out of 10 their auctions never sell at those prices, at best they sometimes sell for an undisclosed “best offer” if they even have that option. It’s crazy how many ebay sellers will let shit sit on the market for inflated prices for weeks, months, or longer rather than drop their prices to promote an artificial economy in the hopes that eventually a clueless buyer with fat pockets will come along. They get that and they don’t want to waste the space storing shit for ages

Full disclosure: when I lived in the area I ran a refurbishing business on the side and would buy tons of stuff from them to fix and resell, that probably helped get me on their good side. From like 2013-2019 I would buy tons of broken phones, consoles, weird industrial shit, etc, fix it, and resell it. They loved it because it was a guaranteed cash sale with no ebay/paypal fees, no risk of negative feedback for their ebay store, no risk of a buyer doing a chargeback or demanding to return, etc. I wanted their broken shit and if I couldn’t fix it I accepted the loss, would bring it back to them to recycle and admit defeat in shame

I’m old so things were easier but I remember in my middle school days I figured out you could bypass the schools content filter by using babelfish to translate the page from English to English in like 1998. Somehow accidentally stumbled across the concept of a proxy

Voice assistants have been great in my experience for smart home stuff. Dunno about ai bullshit

Few examples:

Come home in the evening with a bunch of groceries: “turn on the lights” is handy. I don’t see great and yet I’m irresponsible and will walk into a dark house with way too many bags in my hands

Cooking: again, hands busy. Change lighting, set timers, play music, etc

General laziness: sitting on the couch and decide to watch a movie, set a scene for optimal lighting. Granted this one is easily handled by using phone or just standing up, but voice is easier

Solid mic choice and placement avoids the repeat myself issue, for the most part. Can be an issue mainly during cooking tasks where there can be a lot of environmental noise and loud music playing. But worth the occasional snag, imo

It’s to fill dead air. I would bet the overwhelming majority of cable subscriptions are people who just watch sports. That’s why it’s such a nightmare to pay to watch sports online, it’s the last draw to actually purchase a cable package and for a lot of people it actually is worth the insane $120 a month or whatever bullshit they charge.

An ever shrinking minority are extremely tech illiterate people who actually watch that content and refuse to adapt from the system they learned in 1996 but those people are literally dying out.

But the channels realize the majority of cable subscribers don’t actually give a shit about watching cable. So they don’t bother with the expense of churning out content, instead going with endlessly regurgitating syndicated shit.

I haven’t had access to cable since like 2003 when I lived with my parents. I, like many others here, pirate a bunch of stuff (plus some physical media for independent media and stuff I want to support)

That said I recently got an iptv subscription bc my partner got into sports and the available options are either stupid, prohibitively expensive, or both. NBA streaming package is not crazy at $10/mo but it has a blackout for your local team, so you can’t watch games of your team, forcing you to a cable provider if you follow them. Anything for local sports is minimum like $60 a month and often double that. absurd. Iptv is super piracy but it’s like $70/yr for all the games of all the teams of all the sports plus all the channels of all the countries plus a huge library of content.

I watched tv for like a day with it and it was insane how terrible it was. Most networks just marathon random episodes of mid shows with obnoxious ad breaks. So it’s like comedy central- 6 hours of family guy, 3 hours of american dad, 4 hours of south park, 3 bad movies, 6 more hours of family guy, 4 hours of infomercials, repeat. Maybe there’s like one episode of new content every few days, and it’s something low effort like the daily show. Or another network like hln that literally just shows forensic files and informercials 24/7.

The news is toxic bullshit. Hyper focus on rage bait and propping up anything that gets ratings (which is basically trump and elon nonsense).

It’s insane. It’s just streaming networks where you can’t pick what you watch. They realized people like binge watching and leaned into that, hard. The advantage they had is creating new content but there’s none of that the overwhelming majority of the time. They’ve given up and are propped up solely by sports

I will say some of the other countries have decent programming at least. Tbs from Japan has some good shit (although you have to speak Japanese of course). They tend to have better news too

I have an ibm qualstar lto8 drive. I got it because I gambled, it was cheap because it was throwing an error (I forget what the number was) but it was one that indicates an issue in the tape path. I was able to get the price to $150 because I was buying some other stuff and because ultimately if the head was toast it was basically useless. But I got lucky and cleaning the head and tape path brought it back to life. Dunno how long it will last. I’ll live with it though because buying one that’s confirmed working can be thousands

You’re right that lto8 tapes are pricey but they’re quite a bit cheaper than building an equivalent array for backup that is significantly more reliable long term. A tape is about 12tb and $40-50, although sometimes they pop up cheaper. I generally don’t back up stuff continually with this method, I back up newer files that haven’t been synced to tape once every six weeks or so. It’s also something that you can buy a bit at a time to soften the financial blow of course. Maybe if you get a fancy carousel drive you’d want to fill it up but frankly that just seems like it would break much easier

More modern tapes have support for ltfs and I can basically use it like an external hard drive that way. So it’s pretty much I pop a tape in, once a week or so I sync new files to said tape, then as it gets full I swap it for a new tape. Towards the end I print a directory of what’s on it because admittedly doing it this way is messy. But my intention with this is to back up my “medium critical” files. Stuff that if I lost I would be frustrated over, but not heartbroken. Movies and TV shows that I did custom muxes of to have my ideal subtitles, audio tracks, etc. all my dockers so stuff like my Jellyfin watch status and komga library stay intact, stuff like that. That takes up the bulk of my nas and my primary concerns are either the array fully failing or significant bit rot, and if either of those occur I would rebuild from scratch and just copy all the tapes back over anyway so the messy filing isn’t really a huge issue.

I also do sometimes make it a point to copy harder to find files onto at least 2 tapes on the outside chance a tape goes bad. It’s unlikely given I only buy new tapes and store them properly (I even go to the effort to store them offsite just in case my house burns down) but you never know I suppose

The advertised values of tape capacity is crap for this use. You’ll see like lto 8 has a native capacity of 12tb but a compressed capacity of 30tb per disk! And the disks will frequently just say 30tb on them. That’s nonsense here. Maybe for a more typical server environment where they’re storing databases and text files and shit but compressed movies and music? Not so much. I get some advantage because I keep most of my stuff in archival quality (remux/flac/etc) but even then I still usually dont get anywhere near 30tb

It’s pretty slow. Not the end of the world but just something to keep in mind. Lto8 is supposed to be 360MBps for uncompressed and 750MBps for compressed data but I don’t seem to hit those speeds at all. I’m not really in a rush though and everything verifies fine and works after copying back over so I’m not too worried. But it can take like 10-14 hours to fill a tape. If I ever do have to rebuild the array it will take AGES

For my “absolutely priceless” data I have other more robust backup solutions that are basically the same as yours (literally down to using backblaze, ha).

Never used goharddrive but can def endorse spd

Serverpartdeals has done me well, drives often come new enough that they still have a decent amount of manufacturers warranty remaining (exos is 5yr) and depending on the drive you buy from them spd will rma a drive for 5 years from purchase (but not always, depends on the listing, read the fine print).

I have gotten 2 bad drives from them out of 18 over 5 years or so. Both bad drives were found almost immediately with basic maintenance steps prior to adding to the array (zeroing out the drives, badblocks) and both were rma’d by seagate within 3-5 days because they were still within the mfr warranty.

If you’re running a gigantic raid array like me (288tb and counting!) it would be wise to recognize that rotational hard drives are doomed and you need a robust backup solution that can handle gigantic amounts of data long term. I have a tape drive for that because I got it cheap at an electronics recycler sold as not working (thankfully it was an easy fix) but this is typically a super expensive route. If you only have like 20tb then you can look into stuff like cloud services, bluray, redundant hard drive, etc. or do like I did in the beginning and just accept that your pirated anime collection might go poof one day lol

Exactly, my nas is currently made up of decommissioned 18tb exos. Great deal and I can usually still get them rma’d the handful of times they fail

You can just get a cap that will fit on any bottle and attach to a traditional c02 tank. Added benefit that if you use this with any regularity it will cost you much less over time.

You can also get corny kegs like the other person posted but those can be pricey. You can get them cheap at restaurant auctions sometimes (I basically got mine for free but they were gross). These take up a decent amount of space but you can make a lot of stuff at once

just get a clamp one?

This will depend wildly on what you are planning to put onto it

That said I have a 2 cyber power 825va (I think that’s the model, not sure). It’s like 450watts each iirc. I got them 2 for 1 for about $120 new. One has my server/nas, for which it’s grossly underpowered (maybe 7-10 minutes of runtime, at best), and one powers basically everything else critical in my rack (modem, switch, poe switch, etc) and powers that longer but still not as long (my primary switch is a business switch that was pulled from an ewaste place for nothing, like $15, but it’s got 48 gigabit ports and 5 10gb ports! But it also uses a shocking amount of power).

They work great for my use case. I live in a rural area with a horrendous power grid so I lose power about once every 6 weeks. As a result I have a (very pricey, can’t recommend unless you lose power a lot like me) whole house generator with automatic transfer switch. When power drops out the generator kicks on and switches the house over to generator power which takes about 45-90 seconds, so I really only need these to keep my gear on for that period. Beyond that it’s generator monitoring and if the fuel supply for that is running low network gear is shutdown to conserve power

In a perfect world where I was financially independent I would probably upgrade the server one to at least a 1500va to ensure my storage pool could fully stop and everything could shut down even if power was lost

But most ups will work with monitoring in one way or another. APC and cyberpower work with the apc daemon (probably others) which can easily be implemented into all kinds of software and has support in mac, Linux, windows

Determining battery life depends greatly on load. Rough calculation with power supplies of gear connected, better calculation with something like a kill-a-watt or multimeter and taking a reading for a little while under load, add it all together and add 20-30% to be safe. APC, cyberpower, etc have calculators for this

Buying used can be okay but you do have to be comfortable changing the battery. Additionally there is the risk of something being wrong with it of course, they’re not bulletproof. They’re usually pretty decent though, the bigger thing is that they’re just really expensive to ship, even without batteries

I have a similar experience with the am6b+ and a similar sized library. Even on the stock android browsing my iptv provider which has 23,000+ channels has no issue

But you mention cec - does the x4q+ power off and on with the original display remote? That’s my one nag about the am6b+. Ugoos locked the boot loader and refuses to unlock so cec power on doesn’t work, every other cec command does though.

I just have it wake on lan by having homeassistant send it a packet when it notices my avr turns out as a workaround but this isn’t the most elegant solution and like 1:20 times it hiccups

How is the x4q plus? I frankly dont care about av1 (I’m a store everything in remux/flac person) but the x4q, theoretically, should have a faster processor than my aging am6b+

One suggestion I would make is to copy your install of coreelec onto the emmc directly. In my experience that makes everything a bit “snappier”, it’s easy enough to do, and only takes a few minutes.

“SSH into you device; then run ceemmc -x; type in Y; then type in 1. Once the process is complete, remove your external media and enjoy. To speed up CoreELEC installed on the eMMC on Ugoos devices, go to Settings-> CoreELEC → Hardware → eMMC Speed Mode and change it to HS200/HS400”