Meh. I was really hoping they'd go back to the sci-fi aesthetic of 2016 but instead they've doubled down on the weird high fantasy with guns thing.

It's like they actually wanted to reboot Heretic/Hexen but they couldn't get the license for it so they've just shoehorned it into Doom instead.

This reminds me of working for a UK developer back in the PS2 days. From what I remember, one of the coders there wrote a tool that enabled the comparatively cheap QA test kits that would only boot from a CD/DVD to appear to dev PCs as full blown dev kits (that cost 4 or 5 times the price) and boot code pushed to them over the network.

They didn't have as much memory or processing grunt so there was still need for a few proper dev kits, but it saved them a fortune in hardware costs. Pretty sure it was an open secret that Sony reluctantly allowed, and most of the UK dev studios were using it at one point.

I was of the same mindset for a long time; SmartThings, Hue and Google Home all worked well enough together to do what I wanted. But holy shit, Home Assistant is on another level and I only wish I'd installed it sooner.

The only real downside is that it makes home automation somewhat addictive and, by extension, expensive. I spend quite a lot of my time thinking about how to automate more of the things, and have a never ending list of stuff that I want to add to my setup.

A non-Daily Hatemail link for anybody that wants it: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/natashaumer/dinosaur-animals

Unless you're hosting VHDs and need maximum throughput (in which case use NFS), SMB is going to be the easiest to setup and maintain across those 4 platforms.

The Linux SMB implementation is decent and supports the latest version of the protocol (or close to, at least) whereas NFS in Windows ain't so great and is a bit of a pig to get working in my experience.

"I am not good with computer"

Anything that takes away shitty chores. People take washing machines for granted these days, but a decent dishwasher is a godsend. Modern ones don't need anything more than a basic scrape of the dishes as "prep" and loading it before bed to then wake up to a load of sparkling clean dishes is amazing.

In a similar vein we've just got a robot vacuum cleaner that we've set to run every night. The amount of dog fur in its bin every morning is eye opening, and other than for the stairs there's almost no need to do vacuuming ourselves now.

Likewise trackballs. Took me all of a day to get used to using a thumb ball (Logitech MX Ergo), my wrist pain cleared right up and I haven't looked back.

Yeah, they're not great for twitch gaming, but on the flip side it's highly amusing to watch people's brains crash when they try to push it around like a mouse.

Hats. It used to be that people wouldn't be seen dead outside without a hat but these days, unless you're a big fan of baseball hats, your options are sorely limited.

The cost of a recharge should never be divisible by the number of gems you can buy in a pack. That way you always have some amount left over and will need to buy more in order to use them up completely and "get your money's worth".

OK that's genius, I will definitely look into that!

Yeah honestly Eternal should've been a Quake reboot using the new engine rather than a Doom sequel. Everything about it felt like Quake.

This is the correct answer. Due to wear levelling, a traditional drive wipe program isn't going to work reliably, whereas most (all?) SSDs have some sort of secure erase function.

It's been a while since I read up on it but I think it works due to the drive encrypting everything that's written to it, though you wouldn't know it's happening. When you call the secure erase function it just forgets the key and cycles in a new one, rendering everything previously written to it irrecoverable. The bonus is that it's an incredibly quick operation.

Failing that, smash it to bits.

So many Google products are either crippled or completely unavailable outside the US, it's honestly quite ridiculous. I'm still waiting for call recording to be made available in the UK.

This is great. Reminds me of a late night show that used to be on in the UK featuring minimalist techno played against a backdrop of stock 60s and 70s space race footage. It was called The Trip for those that remember it.

The thing with a manual is that they're great when the road is twisting away in front of you and you can really engage with the experience, but let's face it, most of the time you're stuck in traffic with an aching left foot. I've also driven many different kinds of autos, some great and some truly terrible. Even the best automatics are in no way comparable to driving an EV.

Sure, sometimes I do miss the feel and engagement of a manual when the conditions are but I stick the EV into sports mode, which gives a decent approximation of engine braking, and use the instant torque that you only get with electric to make my own fun through the corners.

The rest of the time, when I am stuck in traffic or just going from A to B, it's so relaxing and smooth and so much less stressful than anything else. I wouldn't go back.

The only issue I can foresee is that unless you want an SUV your choice of EVs is very limited. I certainly can't think of anything Mazda 2 sized.

I don't know if this counts but I was always disappointed that real life pea shooters and water pistols were nothing like their comic representations, that worked like machine guns and hoses respectively. I suppose the closest we ever got was the Super Soaker.

Oh, and I've never seen a catapult made from a Y shaped stick.

This is the best primer that I've found: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/10/what-passkey

The main advantage is that, like hardware security keys, they're immune to Man in the Middle phishing attacks, but are far simpler to use so should hopefully see much more widespread use.

Aw man, yeah, the ending of AC1 where Desmond uses the eagle vision and discovers the code on the wall, it gave me chills at the time. I was so hyped for where they were going to go with the story and for a modern day assassin arc.

But I guess they realised they had near infinite points of history they could stretch the franchise out to, and keeping the Desmond story going was only going to limit their cash cow's potential.

I checked out half way through the Ezio arc that seemed to go on forever and only went back because everyone was raving about Black Flag. By then the modern day story made zero sense to me and was just a slog.

What's the problem with Asterisk? FreePBX uses it and as far as I can tell, it's the only way to get Lenny working.

I've watched BB a few times but I can't say I recognise the reference. Still, if you're sure that's the line he says, try searching on yarn.co. It generates gifs from movie and TV quotes so it might help to narrow things down.

Short answer: figure out how much of that is actually irreplaceable and then find a friend or friends who'd be willing to set aside some of their storage space for your backups in exchange for you doing the same.

Tailscale makes the networking logistics incredibly simple and then you can do the actual backups however you see fit.

Also people with 0 legs bring the average down even further.

Wait, reddit premium is a thing? 😂

I like Niagara but it's insanely expensive, especially as a subscription. I don't know how people justify it.

Edit: The above was based on me getting duped by a Play Store sponsored search result and installing some crap that charges £70 for a lifetime licence. In comparison Niagara feels like much better value, but it's still expensive compared to most apps and I still don't like subscribing to software in general.

Reading the article and justification given I do actually get the idea of it. They want to levarage the parent company's clout and connections in order to convince other app makers into implementing a way for Sesame, the universal search app/plugin, to pull results directly from those apps. For the parent company it would give them a USP in the analytics market.

In short: Think of searching for a product from the launcher and rather than it opening Google, it returns results directly from the Amazon app, or eBay, or any other app that supports the functionality. Obviously there'll be an affiliate kickback for any click-through and you've got a decent revenue source.

It's a good idea, I get it. Would I feel comfortable using it? I don't know. On the one hand it just cuts out the middle-man of searching for and clicking through to products via Google etc. On the other hand, all of the concerns already raised in this thread!

I can quit any time, I swear!

I read somewhere that that was the whole point. Their label or manager complained that all of their songs were dull and depressing and why can't they make something that's chart friendly, so that's what they did. If you listen to the lyrics while knowing the back story you can pretty much hear the sarcasm oozing from every syllable.

Not that I can find any reference to it now, of course, but that's what I read/heard and it makes the song 10 times better.

Elliot, after the main character from Mr. Robot.

Thirded. It's helped me a lot with picking up the compose syntax, to the point that I'm now comfortable combining disparate services into their own stacks. And I can spin something up from an example compose in less than a minute.

You need to keep the floor clear and empty its bin, sure, but it's way less effort than actually vacuuming. We've only had it for a couple of weeks but have got into the habit of doing a quick run around picking up toys and other obstacles before we go to bed (though I did specifically buy a model that can avoid those things).

Are you my brain? This exactly the sort of thing I think about when I say I'm paranoid about self-hosting! Alas, as much as I'd like to be able to add an extra box just for that level of isolation it'd probably take more of a time commitment than I have available to get it properly setup.

The attraction of docker containers, of course, is that they're largely ready to go with sensible default settings out of the box, and maintenance is taken care of by somebody else.

Not in Utica, no.

Also same. Sometimes it decides typos are things that I want in my custom dictionary and will start replacing real words with gibberish, and then I have the same dilemma as OP, trying out a ton of different keyboards before eventually reverting to a clean install of SwiftKey.

Weird typo corrections and MS ownership aside, I really like how SwiftKey works and struggle to use anything else.

Do audiobooks count? I'm on chapter 27 of The Stand with about 38 hours to go. It's been quite the experience in this post-Covid world.

If it was just me, or if Tailscale wasn't such an insatiable battery leech then I'd absolutely do that but the wife (and kids) acceptance factor plays a big role, and they're never going to accept having to toggle a separate service on and off to get to their photos.

Maybe I'm being overly paranoid but I work in IT and see the daily, near constant barrage of port scans and login attempts to our VPN service and it has an effect!

This looks neat, will definitely give it a go, cheers!

I just recently put in an N100 mini PC to run as a Plex server. Cost me about £160, pulls all of 6W when idle, and it doesn't break a sweat when transcoding no matter what I throw at it. As a media server I can't recommend them highly enough.

I love it!

Very little. I have enough redundancy through regular snapshots and offsite backups that I'm confident enough to let Watchtower auto-update most of my containers once a week - the exceptions being pihole and Home Assistant. Pihole gets very few updates anyway, and I tend to skip the mid-month Home Assistant updates so that's just a once a month thing to check for breaking changes before pushing the button.

Meanwhile my servers' host OSes are stable LTS distros that require very little maintenance in and of themselves.

Ultimately I like to tinker, but once I'm done tinkering I want things to just work with very little input from me.