Also because several ballot drop boxes in liberal areas have been set on fire.

You don’t need to run it on a pi. In fact, I’d actually argue against it; A pi will be underpowered if you’re ever needing to transcode anything. Transcoding is what Plex/Jellyfin does if your watching device can’t natively play the video. Maybe you have a 4k video, but you’re playing it on a 1080p screen. That video will need to be transcoded from 4k into 1080p for the screen to be able to display it. Or maybe the file is encoded using ACC (a fairly recent encoding method) which isn’t widely supported by older devices. This often happens with things like smart TVs (which often don’t support modern encoding and need to be transcoded even if the resolution is correct.)

Basically, if you’re 100% positive that every device you’re watching it on will never need transcoding, then a pi is acceptable. But for anything else, I’d recommend a small PC instead. You can even use an old PC if you have one laying around.

Or if you want to use a new machine, maybe something like an HP Elitedesk. They’re basically what you see in every single cubicle in every single office building. They’re extremely popular in corporate settings, which means there are a ton of used/refurbished systems available for cheap, because IT destroys the drives and sends the rest to refurb when they upgrade their fleet of PCs. So for the refurb you’re basically just paying the cost of an SSD they added in (to replace the one IT pulled out), plus whatever labor is associated with dusting it out and checking the connections to make sure they all work. You can pick up a modern one for like $250 on Amazon (or your preferred electronics store).

Worth noting that the elitedesk generations are marked by a G-number, so google the model (like an EliteDesk G9, G7, etc) to see what kind of processor it has; Avoid anything with an intel 13th or 14th generation CPU, (they have major reliability issues) and check with Plex/Jellyfin’s CPU requirements list to see if it supports hardware accelerated transcoding. For Intel chips, look for QuickSync support.

For storage, I’d recommend running a NAS with however many hard drives you can afford, and one that has extra ports for future expandability. Some NAS systems support Plex and/or Jellyfin directly, but the requirements for full support are tricky and you’ll almost always have better luck just running a dedicated PC for Plex. Then for playing, one of two things will happen. Either the device is capable of directly playing the file, or it will need to be transcoded. If it’s directly playing, the plex server basically just points the player to the NAS, and the player handles the rest. If it’s transcoding, the PC will access the NAS, then stream it to the player.

As for deciding on Plex vs Jellyfin, that’s really a matter of personal preference. If you’re using Plex, I’d highly suggest a PlexPass sub/lifetime purchase; Wait until Black Friday, because they historically do a (~25% off) discount on their lifetime pass. Plex is definitely easier to set up, especially if you plan on streaming outside of your LAN.

Jellyfin currently struggles from a lack of native app support; Lots of smart TVs don’t have a native Jellyfin app, for instance. But some people have issues and complaints (many of them justified!) with Plex, so if the FOSS sounds appealing, then consider Jellyfin instead. Jellyfin is also rapidly being developed, and many people expect it to have feature parity with Plex within a few years.

And if you’re having trouble deciding, you can actually set up both (they can run in tandem on the same machine) and then see which one you prefer.

And the nice part about using a mini PC is that you can also use it for more than just Plex/Jellyfin. I have the *arr suite running on mine, alongside a Factorio server, a Palworld server, and a few other things.

Most of the episodes aired before at-home VHS was common, and TV stations weren’t in the habit of archiving their old footage for nightly broadcasts; The show was viewed as transient since it dealt with current events, and nobody expected people to want to re-watch old episodes. It’s likely that a lot of them aren’t available simply because nobody (including the tv station) has recordings.

If you already have a NAS, (since SMB was mentioned, I’m assuming there’s some sort of NAS setup going) then you may even be able to host Plex directly on the NAS. It likely won’t be powerful enough for things like video transcoding, but just audio should be fine.

Yeah, captchas have gotten worse recently. I had one asking me to choose “the largest animal” and it had an example picture of what was meant to be a lion. There was a rhino in one of the other pics.

It wanted me to click on lions, but then gave me something larger than a lion.

Edit: I just got this… Clicking on the flowers fails. Clicking on Skip fails. It wouldn’t let me try a third time to try clicking the cows, giraffe, or moose. But it clearly believes at least one of the three is smaller than a cat.

Not gonna lie, I was worried your second paragraph was going to turn into Mankind throwing Undertaker off of Hell in a Cell

I had a similar issue. I had probably two million comment karma spread across about a dozen accounts. My first account was quickly auto-banned from several subreddits as soon as I started editing old comments. Those pro-spez mods had seen what people were doing during the exodus, and set the automod to ban those who tried.

Then I did the same with my second, third, fourth, etc accounts. All of those were immediately site banned for ban evasion, because I was interacting with subs my first account had just been banned in. So none of the edits on those later accounts were pushed through.

Reddit later un-banned those accounts, and all of my old comments were visible again. Likely to make the old comments show up.

Yes, USB-A is only spec’ed for 5v 2.4a, so it will end up throttling the USB-C end which has higher power delivery specs.

The joke is that USB-A shouldn’t be paired with another USB-A. It should be using a USB-B on the other end. USB-A to USB-A could potentially be damaging, as both devices will expect to be providing power. USB-B denotes that a device is “receiving” USB, not “sending” it.

Sure, but that feels a little bit like saying “We don’t need guards inside the prison, because we already have them patrolling around the perimeter.”

It’s important because it allows them to directly modify the CPU’s microcode. Basically, the CPU has its own set of instructions, called microcode, which controls how the chip functions on a physical level. If they manage to change your microcode, even a full system reformat won’t kill the virus; You’ll need to either re-flash the CPU (which is not something the standard user or even power user will know how to do) or replace the entire CPU.

This is the same line of reasoning that created the “Allies actually didn’t try very hard to assassinate Hitler, because they realized he was a really bad tactician” conspiracy theories. Basically, the reasoning is that while Hitler was charismatic and had a massive cult following, he wasn’t actually that good at making tactical decisions in war. So the allied powers didn’t really try very hard to assassinate him, because they feared an actual competent ruler who would potentially take his place.

Basically, “never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake.”

114 officers reported injuries as a direct result of their attempted coup. 5 later died from injuries they had sustained.

, , , . , . . , , , , , .

I think you dropped these.

At one point I was playing so much Factorio that I started seeing conveyor belts and assembly machines in my sleep

Factorio and RimWorld immediately come to mind. Even with the base unmodified game, you’ll likely get several weeks of gameplay out of Factorio. Then if you dive into modding, you’ll never put it down. Multiplayer is really nice too. And their big DLC just got announced, and is planned to drop in a few months. So now would actually be a great time to dive in, because you’ll get access to the DLC about the same time that you’ve burned through the content on the base game.

Just an FYI, it’s best practice to actually type out the words the first time, then initialize them afterwards. If you never type them out, many people will have no idea what you’re talking about.

It just reads like every military dudebro’s deployment story.
“Ah yeah we had to FTP the RBO to the HEP, but before we could do that the ASO had to POI the BBU. And of course, that means we had to help the ASO set up their LKI before they could start the POI. All while EMGs were bearing down on us with their TGT-30’s. But once we got the LKI set up and the ASO was able to POI, the BBU went pretty quickly. So we got the RBO FTP’ed to the HEP in record time, and were back at the FOB by EOD.

I mean, cars can be demystified the same way computers can: By building and maintaining it yourself. Everyone is afraid to build their first computer, because it seems way too complicated and delicate. Then you actually build your first one, and go “oh hey this actually isn’t so bad after all.”

Yes, cars (especially modern cars) have a lot more difficult-to-build parts. But modern cars are also a lot like computers in the sense that you don’t need to know every single component on an GPU to be able to install one. You don’t need to be able to build a car part from scratch. The same way you can slot a GPU into a motherboard, you can just buy the entire car part preassembled and bolt it into place. The important part is learning what the different components do, so you can troubleshoot them.

Oh I agree. But there are a lot of systems that don’t even recognize TLDs outside of .com, .org, and .net.

This is exactly what I do. When I start getting a bunch of spam addressed to Walmart@[my domain] I can blanket filter that straight into spam because I know Walmart sold my info.