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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.



  • If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

    I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

    There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

    Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.


  • A note about surge protectors: Make sure they are actually surge protectors and not just “power strips” that Amazon has mixed into the search results. Power strips are easy to find in many varieties, made by any number of fly-by-night companies; they’ll do nothing to help protect your stuff from power surges. Legitimate surge protectors from reputable companies are much less common. Also, they don’t last forever. An older surge protector may still work as a power strip, but over time they may become much less effective as surge protectors.


  • The point is that those are 2 separate and distinct units. I’m not saying it’s not a valid representation of time. I’m say the units in this case are actually hours and minutes, not only hours. It is compounded by the fact that the title is talking about time in a way that is ultimately also a ratio (something a colon is also used to represent), the ratio of hours on the device to the hours in a day. There were many other ways to represent this data that would have been less ambiguous, more clearly showing real differences at a glance, and paying attention to using more appropriate significant digits.

    This place should be called mapshitposting for how often actual map enthusiasts get voted down for pointing out amateur mapping and statistical blunders here.


  • Are these ratios of hours online in a day (3:11 implies 3 out of 11 hours) online per day? That seems unlikely given how difficult comparisons like that would be to make.

    That leaves the other option that these “hours” are actually hours and minutes (hours:minutes). But, that option is almost as bad simply because then the map subtitle has lied to us through omission in not mentioning minutes.

    This map should have either just shown the number of total minutes or shown the hours in decimal rounded to a sane number of significant digits. Making a distinction of a minute or three amongst such broadly general averages of almost certainly guesstimated numbers self reported in a survey seems a poor choice.







  • Plexamp has gotten better lately. It can save your progress on audiobooks now. It’s a per library feature, so I have one library of music (that does not save progress) and one for audiobooks (that does save progress). I used to have trouble with some audiobook formats (M4Bs needed to be converted (really just renamed) to mp4s, but that wasn’t necessary for the last few I loaded. Plex still has a little trouble with standards around multiple authors and different productions (and different readers) of a single book, but that’s more of an ID3 tag problem and is resolved if you’re consistent in normalizing the tags on your library. I’ve also used the syncing features a bunch for offline time (like on a plane or on long trips). For a large library, I see syncing offline files as a necessary feature.

    And before the Jellyfin fanboys chime in, if Jellyfin could match these audio and syncing features (and be easier to setup for access outside my LAN and sharing with family), I jump ship in a heartbeat.






  • You’re comparing archeology today with the field’s rather sorted past rooted in imperialism. They point out this issue in several, if not all, of the movies. This issue also comes up multiple times in the latest game. Nobody is denying that Dr. Jones is an outlier and a rogue amongst his peers. That conflict is like that core of the character’s motivation throughout. He’s a hero of western imperialism fighting fascist imperialism. We tend to view ALL imperialism in a negative light today (as it should be), but that certainly wasn’t the case when we were fighting literal Nazis.