Jellyfin. Movies/TV/Music server with a variety of clients, including a built-in web client, but also AndroidTV/Shield, Roku, Kodi, and more. It's like having a personal Netflix.
Minecraft. The old Java kind. May be leaving for something open-source soon because MS has fucked up the account transitions so badly, and also make buying new copies bizarrely painful, error-prone, and time-consuming—like, I don't know how someone who's not a computer nerd can actually manage to buy and use it, now. It's really bad.
All in Docker on a used workstation, running... IDK, Debian, I think? It hardly matters, because Docker. I don't even mess with Systemd or whatever, I just let Docker figure out what should be started when based on what I set each container to do (restart-unless-stopped, I think? It seems to start them at boot and if they crash, which is all I need).
I hosted PHPNuke and PHPBB on Apache2 out of my basement for years so they'd be contenders for some kind of lifetime total-hours-running-the-service, but that was a long time ago.
110% agree on microsoft's straight fucking of the minecraft experience. Being the designated household minecraft sysadmin is an intensely miserable experience. Just for example, we decided to pay for their bedrock edition realms hosting thing. Getting that account nonsense sorted was a saga on all its own, but at least they reliably ding our checking account. Oh but wait, every now and then it just loses license auth or something and throws prompts at my kids about "buy this now!" when we've already bought the fucking thing, leading to confused whining that I can do nothing about. Whoever wrote this fucking system should be slapped.
I'd just assumed they've decided to make the experience of using and/or buying the Java edition suck on purpose to drive people toward their subscription-based hosting solutions with the Bedrock version, but if that also sucks more than it should, maybe whoever's in charge of it just doesn't know WTF they're doing in general. Seems weird that they'd so badly screw up something that was a cash cow and practically on auto-pilot when they got it.
Everything in Minecraft Java and Bedrock worked fine until we logged into Microsoft's account thing. Now everything is always screwed up. MS cloud stuff is just awful on every level.
Buying the game now requires navigating a couple sites, back and forth, in the correct order, and getting past MS attempts to block seemingly any new account for non-existent "suspicious activity". If you're buying for a kid and make the mistake of not lying about their age, you'll also experience the hell of MS' family account management interface, including having to track down an obscure and not-obviously-related setting to let the new copy connect to any multiplayer server, including local ones. There are, of course, multiple game-related settings screens, because why would it make sense? And only one of them has what you need. Plus you need to visit it in the correct fashion to have it apply to the child account, or else it won't work.
And you'll need to juggle logins to both accounts—the parent account, and the child account—and bounce between them a couple times to get it all working. There's no way normal users are managing to do it successfully.
As for the account transitions, it took me a couple tries to get mine working, and my wife's tried several times and they keep telling her on her MS account(s) that she doesn't own Minecraft and needs to buy it. I haven't looked into it, but I imagine she's missing some non-obvious step. Her experience is likely pretty common.
[EDIT] Oh, another thing I haven't looked into yet: as of a few days ago its started telling my kid they don't own it, and we need to buy it. They fucking definitely do own a copy. No idea what's up with that, and I'm dreading having to figure it out.
@MSFT employees: how do you feel about the rest of the company sabotaging every effort you do to try to get rid of your old reputation and build a new one as a reliable, sane alternative to Google?
Seriously! Between hamfistedly pushing Edge to us Firefox users, raising Office 365 cost a double digit percentage the other year (yes, we moved to GSuite a couple of months later) and all the other stuff, how do you find motivation?
I should probably just stand up a Minetest server alongside Minecraft and try it out. I've been on Minecraft since the really early days, so I hate to move away from it, but it's becoming such a damn chore, entirely due to how they've handled the account transition and how purchasing works.
Minetest might be that thing for you -- the whole game is a collection of mods, meaning that it's essentially designed to be as easily extensible as possible through its Lua interface.
Just make sure your host workstation has automatic security updates turned on, but otherwise yeah letting docker manage all the services is totally fine.
Yeah, I'd probably do something else "in production" but since it hasn't caused a problem in ~3 years of use, and the cost of it breaking is effectively zero because it's only for our own use, I'm just letting Docker figure it out. If it ever breaks I'll write some Systemd unit files or whatever they call them, but until then, one less thing to worry about, to back up and reconfigure on restoration, et c.
My main operation pain is ZFS. Every time I have to touch it, I'm terrified I'll destroy all my data. It's like Git. "I want to do [extremely common thing], how can I do that?" "Great, just do [list of arcane commands, zero of which obviously relate to the thing you want to do] but don't mess up the order or typo anything or your system is hosed". Yeah, super cool. Love the features, hate the UI (again, much like git)
Using container features to limit access of a program to the broader machine (disk, network, other processes) seems like it would tend to be more secure than... not doing that. Right? It's not as if I'm exposing any docker remote-control-related stuff to the network.
I'd try jellyfin first to see if it fits your needs.
I went with plex years ago, because they had good app support on the various devices in my house. (Mostly roku now)
The problem with Plex is:
1. during a recent half day internet outage (during prime-time) I was unable to use plex because the app didn't have access to the internet. The network was all up and running, devices could see each other, but plex decided that even though the media was on the local network it wasn't good enough and refused to finish playing the video we were watching. (The internet went out 20 minutes in)
2. Plex the company has gone fully into adding all kinds of streaming services in order to make a buck. While you can remove these things from your menu, it is just annoying.
3. Plex doesn't always fix known issues. Over the years I've run across several issues in plex that after trying to troubleshoot find that it is a known issue Plex refuses to address. For example, I've recently had some issues with some videos dropping half or more of the frames while the audio is fine. Turns out, plex doesn't like something in the files metadata and this is the result. Plex is the only one that has the issue with the file. It plays fine locally with VLC and streams fine with other programs.
I was reluctant to switch from Emby to Plex for this same reason but it turns out you can run plex self-hosted without any account. I have Plex running on a server and streaming from the Plex app on an LG TV without requiring an account.
I'll warn you that Plex will do everything possible to get you to add an account. One update (several years back) locked me out of making any changes to my server until I created an account.
I've not used Plex, so I'm not sure. You'd need to find a way to expose it to the Internet (mine's only on my local network) but that shouldn't be too hard. Just forward the correct ports on your router.
It does have an account system, including the ability to restrict which "libraries" an account can access, which is great if you have kids. For adults, it lets you track your viewing progress/status separately, just like having multiple Netflix profiles.
One thing to account for is that it has to transcode and/or remux videos for clients that can't handle a file's native codecs, audio or video, which can put a pretty heavy load on the server. A Raspberry Pi or weaker x86 machine won't be able to do this without frequent pauses and frame-dropping, for any but very low-resolution media. Solutions to this include: 1) ensuring that your clients can all handle a huge range of codecs, so it never has to transcode (IME audio is, these days, trickier than video, especially ensuring things like Dolby Atmos are supported), 2) getting a really powerful server, in particular with a video card that Jellyfin can use for transcoding, and 3) falling back on just downloading the file and throwing it in VLC (the web interface makes it really easy to download the raw video files in a pinch, though if you have big high-quality 4K rips they'll come down at full size, which can be inconvenient on devices with limited storage, like, say, iPads).
However, I think Plex or anything else will have similar limitations, since they all have to do something like that to accommodate players & devices with limited codec support.
Jellyfin's been very stable for me, which is part of why I'm still on it. I also find the UI in most of their clients much, much more to my liking than something like Kodi. But IDK about Plex.
[EDIT] Oh, I guess you could also batch-job transcode all the files to something very widely-supported, outside of JellyFin, though likely at some cost in quality and maybe also file size. Plus it'd probably take at least an hour or two to hack together a script to do it, for a wide range of input codecs.
I have primarily used Plex and pretty much everything you said is accurate for Plex as well. Limited transcoding based on the machine it is running on. As disc has become cheaper, I have pretty much stopped doing batch transcodes, which is great for the most part. But there are definitely negatives when you want to watch something offline, or remotely. Biggest pain point is subtitles though. Since they aren't ripped as text and then sent to a client, they have to be burned in to the video itself and transcoded on the fly. Which means losing out on 'forced' ones if it can't transcode fast enough.
Plex has definitely started to try and commercialize itself more and offer other stuff, when all I want is access to my own media. So I may look into Jellyfin more soon.
As for batch transcode jobs, I had a system that I was able to set up as essentially a black box. Drop a rip into a folder and out the other side comes a smaller one at a reasonable quality. With forced subs burned right into the actual video. Mostly based on https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding
I currently use and host both, plex while non free is more friendly to less advanced users and has native iOS and apple tv apps (which jellyfin does not (the jellyfin ios app is a webview and dosen't always behave well for me))
There are 3rd party apps for jellyfin on apple tv, but it's just not as smooth of an experience as plex.
I'm hoping that jellyfin will push plex to get better, as some of the most requested features for plex have gone unanswered for years, which is quite frustrating for software that is paid.
Have a look at Infuse, it works with Plex, Emby/Jellyfin, and possibly SMB. It’s one of the best and high quality apps I’ve encountered on the Apple TV, and one of the best video players period. For me it completely eliminates the need for transcoding, it plays everything.
There’s also a bare bones native Jellyfin app for tv/iOS called SwiftFin, but it’s currently only (publicly) available in TestFlight.
I had the same issue. Just bought a HDMI thumb drive Roku (powered by USB port) and install the Jellyfin app. Another benefit is Roku supports more apps like the NBA app.
Previously tried rooting my LG TV which worked but too many random issues like full restart of your TV puts the root in a bad state.
These must not be a federal thing, because I still don't really know what people mean by this. Is it a state thing?
> and CDC surveillance
Private surveillance that the CDC and anyone else can buy. I agree that collecting this info in the first place, let alone selling it, should be very, very illegal.
There are ways around it (as there are with Covid vaccine requirements), but most folks are subject to vaccine mandates for school attendance (though, sure, those are state-level rules). IIRC I had to provide vaccination records for college, too. Plenty of states require vaccination to teach in a school (so, to hold a job).
What's different about this isn't the presence of mandates, but that it was a novel virus so mandates were applied to (a small set of) adults rather than mainly to kids.
In fact, the set of people to whom Covid vaccine mandates apply is surely way smaller than the set to whom a variety of others do. I'm pretty sure most states aren't requiring Covid vaccination for school attendance, for instance.
Approaching age 40. Most of my favorite songs are probably from the 60s and 70s (5-20 years before I was born), but I only heard most of them (the ones that are my favorites) after age 35. I like plenty of newer music, too. I discover great new-to-me stuff from many decades, including the current one, all the time. This seems pretty normal in my social circle, though few of us are super into music.
There aren't a ton of albums that I liked between the ages of 14 and 20 that I'd still defend as "good", though a handful are still nostalgia-listens for me. I had pretty shit taste in music then, really.
> Fanny packs are sweet, except the part where you're wearing a fanny pack.
Hear me out:
Sport coats. (edit: and blazers)
Very light linen ones for hot days, which keep sun off your skin without really making you hotter. Cooler days, break out the wool.
All those extra pockets are wonderful. Grab some thin old mass-market genre paperbacks and discover why they made them that size :-)
They're like purses for men, that you can wear instead of carry, and that make you look better. Similar storage capacity to a fanny pack, I'd say. Maybe a little more.
You could grab one or two from a thrift store and see how you like it, then upgrade if it seems like something you want to keep doing. Nice and cheap way to try it out. Difficulty: a nice light linen jacket's probably gonna be a little hard to find at a thrift store, so it may be best to start this attempt in the Fall.
You can trace use of pre "r-word" euphemisms at least back to the mid aughts and Carlos Mencia.
There are some interesting trends here. Spikes in searches seem to coincide with Mind of Mencia going on the air, Rosa's Law and a tweet from Ann Coulter directed at Obama.
I vaguely recall "retarded" sticking around a little longer than one might expect in the Northeast. It fits the local accent perfectly (got that ar in the middle to enthusiastically butcher). Of course I 100% agree with getting it out of the language nowadays, it is quite hurtful.
You can, most of us just don't because people think you're neglecting the kid if the kid chooses not to eat a meal you provide them. Same reason we send way more food for lunches than my kids ever eat—because the amount they will eat looks "too small" and my wife's worried what people will think.
I hate this stuff, but get the reasoning. IMO they'll eat if they're hungry. Meanwhile, we have an obesity crisis.
IMO 2 and 4 are easily the best Uncharted games. I wouldn't recommend 1 or 3 at all, despite 3 having a plot that should have really appealed to me. The first one mostly suffers from unrefined mechanics making it a slog, but they fixed that in 2.
But, 2 and 4 are very different. 2 is a solid 3d action-platformer, while my favorite parts of 4 were when it basically just became a "walking simulator"-type game for long stretches, with most of the action and platforming just feeling tacked-on and superfluous.
> (I haven't played The Last of Us though. I hear it's incredible, but I can't deal with the subject matter.)
I should have loved it, but bounced off hard. The prologue had me, but a little while into the game proper I just wanted all the main characters to die, including the one you're really, really not supposed to want to die. They're all horrible and I didn't like or care about them a single bit, to the point that I wanted them to fail. The protagonist in particular, I had to root for him to fail because clearly this humanity-on-the-brink would be better off with one fewer self-interested mass-murders around making things even worse. That's... not a great way to motivate the player.
> I had to root for him to fail because clearly this humanity-on-the-brink would be better off with one fewer self-interested mass-murders around making things even worse. That's... not a great way to motivate the player.
Isn't the question of the players morality vs the "enemies" core to the entire concept of the game though? I think the lesson the game is trying to teach is exactly that: by what standard is the protagonist actually any "better" than those he regards as enemies? By the end of the game, I think doubting the main character is hopefully exactly the point - he isn't a good person either. In a completely lawless world such as that inhabited by the characters, I think this makes sense to explore.
Make the central character a likable, non-mass murdering fellow and this huge central theme of the game disappears - The Last of Us is harrowing by design, I'd argue, and its commitment to being harrowing is what sets it apart as a game in a sea of relatively emotionally shallow "AAA" titles of the same era.
Maybe, but it was kind of a problem when I was already like "is there a way to progress the game but have this guy not accomplish what he wants?" on like mission 1 (past the prologue)—there was no build-up to it, I thought he was wrong and should fail immediately. And they might have gone for some kind of turn-around on that when the girl comes into the story, so that I start wanting him to succeed, but then, I also didn't like her and didn't care if anything involved with that worked out, either.
I think I quit right after the game had me murder a couple soldiers for bad reasons. I already have several GTA games I can play, which, thanks to tone and expectations, aren't frustrating when they ask me to do that kind of thing. My head-canon is that the soldiers instead shot everyone there and that was the good ending for the story.
...if you haven't already heard of it, I feel like you'd enjoy Spec Ops: The Line. Go in completely blind if at all possible, and don't be turned off by the fact that it seems like a generic dudebro war shooter. It does start out that way.
Yeah, Spec Ops: The Line was really good. Really good like some movies I've seen where I was like "that was great—I wish I hadn't seen it", but still, really good.
Dunno about this recommendation, it feels like the parent poster would have the same issues with Spec Ops as with TLoU. But still they can forge their own opinions about it.
Without spoiling too much, the difference to me is that Spec Ops is aware of and addresses people's actions, and even more critically lets the player make different choices.
As I approach 40, a year feels about as long as a month did when I was elementary-school aged. I worry that if the current rate-of-increase continues, my last decade will feel weeks long.
I think the answer to this is to do more interesting things on a regular basis. If every weekend you do something different, then the month feels longer than when you stay home every weekend.
I've long been skeptical of this explanation. Later school ages (junior high and high school) were probably the most monotonous and regimented part of my life, period—I've certainly never experienced that much concentrated, intense boredom without any way to do anything about it—yet subjective time had only barely sped up from elementary school. It should then have slowed way down in college, but it didn't. It should have slowed down again a ton when I had kids, but it didn't. The change has been consistently in one direction, as has the acceleration of the effect.
I’m less interested in how long it feels in my memories, and more in how long it feels while I’m living it. If it makes any sense, the question is how to cram as much—consciousness, I guess?—as possible, into however many decades I get.
That’s the rub, isn’t it? So many people are focused on every other moment besides “now”. Memories build from our past, and they’re constantly appearing in our minds based on various stimuli. Moreover, society is structured in such a way that people are constantly focused on the future. It’s very difficult to actively live “in the now” and focus on the actual experience of simply existing.
That’s really the biggest tragedy of modern human existence, many people never get to see the true beauty of living in the now, they only get to see it from the “bad” perspective, when their negative emotions become overwhelming and time seems to slow down to a standstill.
Normalize living in the now. Normalize the idea that our “purpose” on this Earth is simply to exist, and that “purpose” can be the most important of all possible purposes.
To quote the ever-wise Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
I've had a pretty opposite experience. The busier I am, the more I have to process, and time feels to pass more slowly. I feel like the first 6 months of my kids life took at least twice that.
Great advise! I wanted to add a bit more to it. As you age the number of novel experiences and "space" for those experiences in your brain decreases. So the first 20 years of your life you accumulated a lot of new experiences while your brain was growing an expanding. For this reason it feels like you lived in regular time. Your final 20 years will mostly be nothing new and what is new will largely include a base that is shared based on past experiences. This is why as you get older time moves faster.
I feel the same way about my time in elementary school. My theory is that it was boredom that made school time feel so slow. Summer vacation always seemed to fly by.
Jellyfin. Movies/TV/Music server with a variety of clients, including a built-in web client, but also AndroidTV/Shield, Roku, Kodi, and more. It's like having a personal Netflix.
Minecraft. The old Java kind. May be leaving for something open-source soon because MS has fucked up the account transitions so badly, and also make buying new copies bizarrely painful, error-prone, and time-consuming—like, I don't know how someone who's not a computer nerd can actually manage to buy and use it, now. It's really bad.
All in Docker on a used workstation, running... IDK, Debian, I think? It hardly matters, because Docker. I don't even mess with Systemd or whatever, I just let Docker figure out what should be started when based on what I set each container to do (restart-unless-stopped, I think? It seems to start them at boot and if they crash, which is all I need).
I hosted PHPNuke and PHPBB on Apache2 out of my basement for years so they'd be contenders for some kind of lifetime total-hours-running-the-service, but that was a long time ago.