I remember him being gifted a golden pager and I’m still holding out hope that he gets the call.

I picked up my bag, I went lookin’ for a place to hide. Then I saw …

Now that is an ambition to strive for! Easily one of the most significant communal projects of our time which, despite still remaining almost unheard of to countless people who unknowingly rely upon it, would be such a remarkable honor to take part in.

Unfortunately I can’t help in that regard. I keep everything local/unexposed so my solution for them was just running Jellyfin at their place. I was already rsyncing some stuff to a NAS I set up for them (and vice versa), as off-site backup. Since the files were already there it made the most sense to just give them their own instance.

Same boat except my Arduino and Pi devices are still gathering dust (but I do want to eventually get a general, foundational knowledge of electronics). My own ideas most often devolve into timesinks that leave me questioning how I even convinced myself to start down that road. I like doing dev stuff more if it happens when an update breaks something, like a service or a plugin to some app I host. “Hey, that’s a goddamn puzzle! I fucking love puzzles!” And there’s the underlying fact that, if I manage to solve it, I might be helping somebody else out. Some psychological compulsion to help others that I can identify but still not deny.

Anyway, I might never end up a “contributor” to anything else but one of my biggest highs was singlehandedly debugging, submitting, and having a fix merged to a Jellyfin plugin I use. From first reporting it and thinking out loud about it in the app’s Discord, to poking through the source on GitHub (in a language I’ve never touched), I worked it out in a few hours and even compiled a replacement .dll for my own use until the merge was accepted. To the reception of some compliments and pats on the back from regulars on the server that, at the risk of over sharing, did more for my emotional well being than my last lay. The problem ended up being a simple order-of-operations issue but the experience was the sort of the thing that makes a guy, who hasn’t worked so much as a help desk position, briefly think “Maybe I could hack it.”

Conversely, my biggest low was wasting 45 minutes on an Advent of Code problem because I forgot to switch from the sample data to my actual puzzle data in the second half. It was a first-week problem, probably child’s play for any pro, but I had a working solution fast enough to have landed on that day’s leaderboard. It would’ve been entirely self serving and good for nothing but bragging rights. Instead I wasted nearly an hour to reach the “duh” moment and subsequent self loathing. I wanted those bragging rights!

The TLDR is Programming turns bipolar disorder into a speed run session too easily for it to be more than an on-again off-again hobby or the occasional necessity for me. I can’t fathom how the actual pros, especially those in prestigious and lucrative positions, keep from crashing out or falling into imposter syndrome any time they let themselves get caught up in an off-by-one or some other nonsense.

I don’t have the link(s) on hand but there’s a Tizen build of Jellyfin for Samsung TVs. It runs rather slow on my old tube so I wouldn’t recommend it outside of a last resort. It’s actually smoother for me to just open the app on the TV and then remote control it from a browser/app on another device (my Steam Deck is my homelab universal remote). But you can use the Tizen dev tools or a simpler docker container to push it to the TV.

For my folks I got a cheap Walmart brand Android box (Onn 4k Plus). I installed Jellyfin from the app store then black hole’d the thing because I’m wary of cheap Android apps and their history of supply chain attacks. It’s much more responsive and also leaves me with the option of installing additional stuff like Smart Tubes, Retro Arch and whatnot.

Sierra’s “Red Baron II” (1998) might not be my favorite but it had some of the most memorable music for me. Repetitive military marches with the main theme being rather jaunty. It didn’t hurt that it was my first flight sim and the first PC game I’d ever played online. I was around twelve at the time so it’s hard not to remember how cool it all was to me.

Ever read Euripides? We should probably go do something other than read Euripides.

I’m a fucking dolt that dabbles and picks up the gist of things pretty quick, but I’m not authority on anything, so “grain of salt”:

You’re already familiar with OCR so my naive approach (assuming consistent fields on the documents where you can nab name, case no., form type, blah blah) would be to populate a simple sqlite db with that data and the full paths to the files. But I can write very basic SQL queries, so for your pops you might then need to cobble together some sort of search form. Something for people that don’t learn SELECT filepath FROM casedata WHERE name LIKE "%Luigi%"; because they had to manually repair their Jellyfin DB one time when a plugin made a bunch of erroneous entries >:|

The 2A crowd opposed to the current regime isn’t declaring war for the same reasons the people bold enough to cry out loud “please, now is the time to shoot these people” don’t find the stones to do it themselves. Nobody wants to be the first. Nobody wants to risk winding up in a sting trying to recruit/join others. Nobody wants to go it alone and end up a crazed, lone gunman that maybe clips one head off the hydra before their own brains are splattered by a sniper team and their family is left with a closed casket and the shame of whatever propaganda gets cooked up to explain their actions. “He was a bad dude. A real bad guy. It has been said he had terabytes of transvestite furotica and a pet cat named Karl. He once took a picture of a rainbow. A disgusting man.” Then, two weeks and two fresh heads later, the media cycle has moved on and the world is just a little worse than before.

It’s not worth it if they’re still comfortable. It’s not even worth it if there’s a sliver of hope to continue eking out a tolerably miserable existence - “at least I’m not dead.” They’ll carry on until there’s a knock at their door then either go out in a hail of gunfire or hand over their arms and freedom because “False, indefinite imprisonment? At least I’m not dead.”

That was mostly directed at OP, who is welcome to show us how it’s done. To your own point - Years ago, and probably still, “tanks and drones” was a routine troll over on /k/ and the answer to it is always “Asymmetric Warfare.” You don’t go toe-to-toe and fist fight the wrecking ball swinging toward you. You blast the tracks off the crane. You hydrolock the engine. You make people too scared to sit in the operator’s seat. Guerilla tactics, sabotage, etc.

You also don’t police with military drones. You surveil and exact precision strikes. The second the American military launches missiles at Americans in America, we’ll have that civil war that nobody with a brain actually wants. In our current political climate I genuinely believe that would kick things off. Point of no return, war were declared, hope you stockpiled canned goods and water because the supply chain is getting disrupted.

As for tanks, you can ruin the streets with them to stick them on the corners but it’ll only be a show of force - an intimidation tactic. Tanks are rolling shields for infantry and other equipment, with a few bullet hoses and a big gun to blast encampments and other tanks. They also need those same foot soldiers, willing to kill their fellow citizens, to defend them from folks flinging molotovs or dropping DIY explosives down the barrel.

If you’ve got a water jug of pre-1982 pennies, that you haven’t been bothered turning into pizza and beer or selling for the slightly higher scrap value, and you never stared at it and thought “I could smelt these down into cones because… I just really like the shape of cones,” you’re not trying hard enough to break the illusion that you’re already defeated.

Neat, navigable UI. Pulls posters, metadata, etc. Can generate “trickplay” images so you’ve thumbnails when scrolling the progress bar. You can sync playback across connected clients (I mostly use that feature for multi-room music playback). Restrictions by account and/or tags so the little ones don’t end up watching Ichi the Killer, Saló, your complete Cronenberg collection, or that library you created populated by a script routinely checking the e621 API for the latest animation uploads.

Runs in browser and on clients for Windows, Linux, Android, probably iOS too but homie don’t Apple. Took every bit of space but I even sideloaded it onto my old Samsung Tizen TV (wouldn’t actually recommend, little slow, build an HTPC or just nab an Nvidia Shield).

If you can get by without any/all of that, nothing wrong just browsing directories and playing media with your local player on a single device. In my case I’d need to set up overly complicated network shares and then configure every single device I want to have access. I’d need to change how I organize my libraries, then probably spend a little time writing an ansible playbook (that’d only really be worth it when adding new devices in the future) but… no thanks.

I wish I could care but I haven’t had any respect for Blizzard in years. They’ve become a manifestation of avarice and anti-consumer practices. They clearly hate their fans and love only their customers’ wallets. I still remember when it was confirmed SCII would not have LAN and would essentially require a bnet connection for any gameplay. There are threads still up on the SCII forums where customer support was talking people through disabling their goddamned network adapter just to get into their “offline mode.” The absurdity. Complete with reminders you must still log in every 30 days to continue playing offline, of course.

One of the funniest things I’ve seen to date was when battlenet went down during what I’m pretty sure was supposed to be a huge pre-release tournament. They were featuring some well-known pros, trying to drum up more hype for the game, and then bnet just shat the bed. What a fustercluck! Even after the launch battlenet instability continued to impact some major SCII tournaments.

“SC3 in the works?” Whatever, I’m not buying.