I can't speak to the others, but I have a couple 8bitdo controllers and they're fantastic. If the aliexpress listing is legit, I'd go with that one, no question.

I've never heard of the other two brands, but cursory googling doesn't sound promising for them.

Twenty years later, I still sing this.

And I still wonder what happened to fhqwhgads.

I think my big irritation is that it's super distracting to keep hitting block on the seemingly infinite supply of communities on lemmynsfw ;D

But it's also annoying that none of the apps (lemmy pwa included) actively clear the feed of your newly blocked user/community.

I enjoy scrolling All to find new and interesting things, and that's how I built my sub list on the oldsite. It's just frustratingly difficult to filter signal from noise at the moment.

You sound a lot like me, and probably get annoyed with a lot of grindy mechanics. Especially when you have limited time to play games.

Sea of Stars and Chained Echoes will really scratch that Chronotrigger itch.

Outer Wilds is also incredible (don't read spoilers, just go in blind). It's mini space exploration with cartoon-arcadey newtonian physics.

Sword & Sworcery is also great, and a good point-and-click adventure with an amazing soundtrack. I'd almost argue it's better on a tablet or largeish phone through. It's very touch input focused, which is OK with a mouse, but I think is better with a finger (as intended)

Others I enjoy :

• Kentucky Route Zero (point and click with a wild vibe)
• Firewatch (walking Sim with pretty low poly art)
• Dishonored 1 & 2 (gritty fps with stealth and magic)
• Inside (short puzzle platformer)
• Abzu (undersea exploration, relatively chill, but I never completed it)
• The Invincible (more recent than the rest, a very pretty walking sim in a retro-future sci-fi setting (Stanislaw Lem) that kept me pretty engrossed and occasionally worried)
• Horizon: Zero Dawn. (Absolutely adored this world and story. Story mode combat was good, but I just used cheats for a lot of the basic pickup/crafting stuff. Yes, I can take 30 minutes to run around and gather basic materials, but I don't have that kind of time irl.)

The new mantle I've been working on is finally ready to install! So, we'll be mounting it this weekend, along with the TV (yes, "tv too high" but we don't have an option). So excited to finally have this done!

if it can upscale 1080 ti 4k, does that mean I don’t need my 4k collection anymore? It sounds too good to be true.

Because it is. While it does do a decent job upscaling, it's not some magical thing. Keep the 4k, and be pleasantly surprised when older content looks nice on the larger display.

This is more or less exactly what we did with our kiddo. We had time limits and strict control when she was little. Then moved into similar time limits and a looser "over-the-shoulder" monitoring plus a monitoring app that we'd sort of look at monthly. Now she's a teen with her own phone (13 when she got it, and it was my old device), an iPad, and a gaming pc. Time limits are sort of out the window now, and the monitoring app is more or less useless. But we do still have a tech curfew for everything except Spotify and offline creative endeavors.

She was 100% a part of the decision-making and understood the role of the "nanny" software. It's always been a major point to discuss these things with her, and explain "why" at every step of the process. She's also pretty sharp when it comes to identifying harmful things, and even comes to us when she stumbles across a potentially questionable video or something.

Open two-way communication has always been important and a focus in all of these issues. I grew up with conservative totalitarian parents, and learned how to lie and be sneaky just to be myself. I don't want that for her, and while I know we've screwed up along the way (who doesn't?), she seems a lot healthier than I was at her age.

Seconding this. Frigate is great, and I've been running it on an ancient Debian box with a coral tpu for a few years. The only dedicated camera I've had has been at the front door, but cams I've used for testing and "goofing off" have been great at motion detection and object recognition.

Maaan I got so excited by this and grabbed Connect. It was great until I saw it completely blocking comments in threads by users from those instances. :(

I love Slothrust. Not only do they have my absolute favorite lyric ("I like cats, do you like cats....) but their most recent album, Parallel Timeline, is fantastic. It helped me survive 2022.

And it's nice seeing someone else mention them for once!

Yeah, those little micro units are what I had seen recommended. $300-400 is definitely pushing it for me. Especially when I would also want a bigger switch to accompany it.

Guess I need to stop eating avocado toast.

Edit: how is the stability/uptime for those little machines? Historically, I've always had problems with my routers needing to be rebooted at least once a month after they've been in service for 18-24 months. Even my current "business class" cisco router is crapping out on me every month.

Yeah, they're a skip to endgame content. But they're not any kind of "instant win."

The couple types of pvp aren't tied to your character level, and the most difficult raid content is best run with a group that you practice with. If you've never played, simply grabbing the game and one of those packages isn't going to give you an immediate edge.

XIV is sort of a single player game with a bunch of coop boss fights.

And, not to be cliche, but you can play through the entire first two arcs (A Realm Reborn and Heavensward) completely free, with no real limitations. The only things locked out of the free tier are the more social aspects, and any content above level 60. A handful of jobs are locked, but there is a ridiculous amount of content available for free.

I've played a few other mmos and hated them all. XIV is something weirdly different. And the overwhelming majority of the community is chill and friendly.

I feel like it's just me, but all of my devices with Open/DDWRT crap out after a couple years. Even well-reviewed prosumer-grade gear ends up becoming wildly unreliable in an unacceptably short amount of time. I had to double-check, and my order history puts me at a new router every 2-3 years. This "business class" RV260 will be hitting 2 years in the fall, and I'm already experiencing wonky behavior where it needs to be rebooted regularly. Maybe it's just an unspoken truth that anything below true "enterprise tier" kit requires a weekly reboot. I should just put it on an outlet to cycle the power every Sunday at 2am or something....

That said, I do love DDWRT!

I've been using nodered with homeassistant for a few years, and have also used it to add minor integrations for some external apps to send push notifications through HA.

On the surface, nodered looks like "programming for non-programmers", and I've seen it get knocked for that. It's really not that at all. Yes, it's a node-based system and you're not "writing code" but it's very robust and can do a heck of a lot. I highly recommend folks check it out, it's a pretty powerful little system, and I've been running it on my ancient amd fx-6300 server (along side a bunch of other docker containers) without any noticeable system slowdown.

Sonarr (and the other 'arrs) is just a management tool. From the servarr wiki:

Sonarr is a PVR for Usenet and BitTorrent users. It can monitor multiple RSS feeds for new episodes of your favorite shows and will grab, sort and rename them. It can also be configured to automatically upgrade the quality of files already downloaded when a better quality format becomes available.

At a high level, you tell it where your current tv show episodes are saved, and add new shows as you want. It then automates the process of searching and downloading. But you still need to have an indexer and download client. If you're not able to find shows searching your current tracker/indexer, Sonarr won't have any better luck.

Finding a good source of the media you want is the most important part. If you're not comfortable with installing and managing your own server applications, the *arr stack could be overwhelming at first. The wiki I linked has a lot of good information to get you started.

Honestly, I had to google it, too :D

As far as I know, they mean "Personal Video Recorder" in a fashion similar to "DVR"/"Digital Video Recorder" like the one your cable company provides. It's a little misleading, imo, because it doesn't do any recording, but I didn't come up with the name, so who knows.

Fair. I did stray from the "rpg" theme on... Most of my responses.

Will look up Spirit of the North though! It sounds right up my alley

For real. Its high time I replay it, too. Been long enough that I just remember general themes.

Interesting. Thanks for the extra effort to help out an internet stranger!

I'll dig some more into these little buggers!

It's not easy, that's for sure. Communication is always important, but what works for one kid may not work for another. Hopefully it continues well as she enters high school!

Good luck with your own in the future!

Good to know!

The android tv app is why I switched to Emby. I mostly liked jellyfin everywhere except the one place I would use it the most.

A few of the fixes for things that strongly turned me off were added as feature requests, but the devs seemed to blow them off as unnecessary or "impossible" (even though the "impossible" is done in every other android tv app, including Emby). Their perceived attitude really turned me off of it.

I'm already using my own modem, none of that locked-down rental nonsense from my isp.

What hardware do you use for pf/opnSense? All of the recommended stuff I've seen is almost prohibitively expensive for my home networking budget.

This little thing looks very interesting. What is the battery life like? Is the handwriting-to-text stuff only viable in specific apps, or can it be used in place of keyboard input?

I would probably use it just like my Kindle, keeping it in airplane mode until I actually need to download something (or in this case, upload notes).

I have my old Athlon fx lying around. Needs a case, psu, and the nic... Hmmmm

This is actually a great theory. I've fixed several monitors and TVs that were just bad capacitors. It's a logical conclusion with these, too.

honestly it’s baffling that I’ve spent 30 years on the internet and can understand so little of it

100% agree.

This is a pretty apt analogy, I think.

We've been using copilot at work, and it's really surprised me with some slick suggestions that "mostly work". But I don't think it could have written anything beyond the boilerplate my team has done.

(I also spend way too much time watching Copilot and Intellisense fight, and it pisses me off to no end.)

Awesome, thanks!

I'm considering just making a script to get a list of communities from an instance and submit them to my block list automatically. Heavily rate limited, of course.

I've been subscribed for a while. I don't think I could ever go back to another launcher.

Combined with Tapet for subtle geometric wallpapers, my home screen is a dream.

100%. I have some function nodes to do things in JS, especially for date checking. And I think you can even get it to call shell scripts? I'm sure there's an add-on that would do it.

Agreed that it really is a pleasant experience.

I'm intending to upgrade to a pfSense router and some other switch in the future. This is just supposed to be a temporary-ish investigation into the potential fuckery coming from my ISP.

Worked for me, too. Thanks friendly stranger :)

Ah. Good to know! I'm starting to dive down this rabbit hole, and we'll see where it takes me. Thanks :)