I’m glad we’re starting to talk about the prostate because I feel like for a long time. Men have been reluctant to talk about this more and more in society. I feel like women have their fair share problems as they get older, but men have equal amount of problems too we just don’t like to talk about it.
For those interested in the silver bullet to backup iCloud.
Get a Mac mini with enough space for your photo library and wire it into your network. Sign into iCloud.
For photos open the app and change the settings to store full res photos locally.
Enable iCloud desktop and documents sync.
Two options
1 - Sign up for Backblaze and ensure you map the folders from iCloud and photos that are being synced to the device. Let it run and do a full sync. I use this option.
2 - Buy an external drive with a lot of space and use Carbon Copy Cloner to mirror your drive. The caveat is your at the mercy of a local copy that a home fire or electrical incident can destroy.
I like Backblaze for the sheer constant syncing it does and they allow me to set up an encryption key so they don’t have access to my data.
I do that, and I'm also planning to use icloud photos downloader [0], a python script to download photos, so I can download those directly on another machine running Linux.
If you haven’t been keeping up with Plex, self-hosters like myself and others are up in arms over the client rewrite. It feels like the Sonos update for us. Broken features. Useful functionality removed. UI that’s more streaming focused than self-hosting like it used to be.
If you haven’t gone down the Plex path yet, don’t right now as the community and developers sort out their roadmap. Plex seems to be open to feedback, but a lot of us feel betrayed. They had open user testing for the new apps but they didn’t implement or fix any of the reported issues.
I moved away from Plex when they started shoving free B/C movies with lewd posters on my home page and made is very hard and confusing to remove (if removing it completely was even an option, I still don't know).
The whole reason I host plex is that I want an offline experience that I curate myself. The requirement for internet to authenticate and shoveling crapware in my face pushed me towards trying Jellyfin. The Jellyfin UI on TV and mobile is not as flashy and polished as Plex, but it is extremely functional and respects users choices.
Been a happy Jellyfin customer for years now though I only use it to organize and browse my library now. Actual playback is either MPV on PC or Kodi over NFS on TV. After trying many many players, these were the two I found best for respective platforms, nothing else even comes close.
I think this is the path. I like jellyfin but I find it has trouble with some files on some devices. Kodi handles pretty much everything. Not as nice for browsing though.
Totally. I had some issues where Jellyfin would transcode to remove HDR when trying to play on a HDR capable TV. Disabling transcoding completely means black screen for a lot of videos which kodi plays just find over NFS (so no chance of transcoding) on the same device.
I’ve been using Plex since it was a Mac only XBMC fork. While it’s drastically different than where it started, I haven’t noticed any recent changes. I do 99% of my viewing via the AppleTV app and it hasn’t changed. I removed all the shortcuts for their streaming stuff long ago.
I’m running the server in Docker and pretty lazy about updating it. Is that the side that changed? It looks like I’m running 1.27 and 1.41 is out now. Should I be sticking with what I have?
I really like Infuse Player on my AppleTV. It "just" reads from a network share that has a bunch of folders with movies and tv shows and just handles the rest. Occasionally I will have a codec issue but I just transcode for free using handbrake.
I used SMB before with Infuse, but switched to selfhosting Jellyfin as scanning takes too much time over the network (the files are on HDDs attached via USB). I still play with Infuse, but it uses Jellyfin's database.
I never really understood what is the point od running something locally and then registering on .com domain. Like if I will loose internet connection I cant listem my own music? Seemed radicoulous. But I guess it does nit require much knowledge and people keep using it.
I give all my services a proper subdomain so SSL works. But I keep all my services internal and run a pi.hole with DNS for my local services. (I use wireguard to vpn into my network to access everything).
If internet goes out, DNS to my local services still works fine since it is being served directly from my pi.hole.
What about their plexamp app for streaming music? It looks pretty nice and seems like a good deal if you purchase the lifetime plan for 50% off during Black Friday.
Might not be true for all setups, but I find that Plex is a resource hog. Navidrome and Jellyfin are a lot leaner. Plex was using quite a bit of CPU just browsing the library.
Plexamp sounds awful to me, trebly and thin. Googling around I found it was a common complaint.
It DOES handle multichannel audio well, though I don't think it can do Atmos natively.
I worked with the guy that created that. It wasn’t at TiVO but a gaming company. He said it was also how they updated the TiVO firmware. It’s been years but I recall him telling the story about how they updated the TiVO using channels that were encoded a specific way.
Before anyone asks, you can buy a TV that’s dumb. Look on Sony or Samsung or business kiosk TVs. I bought some Sony kiosk TVs for conference rooms when building out an office ones. They can be left on forever have the same great quality and cost a little bit more. But they’re dumb in the end and they turn on fast.
Iirc, in the earlier days of LCD tvs, the ones meant for digital signage sometimes had different color calibration, and also sometimes had weaker processors than their consumer bretheren because they weren't really meant to display high-framerate motion content, and were mainly used for static images. A friend's dad picked up a few for cheap when their employer was updating some of the ones they used for digital signage, and they struggled with some types of 1080P content, especially when the images were messy and rapidly changing (think close up tracking shot of a soccer game.)
Not sure how relevant that is today, but likely still something to watch out for especially if you're looking for a cheaper dumb TV. Also, if you're getting a used digital signage TV, if you can try to run through some basic color and motion video tests on it before you buy it; mostly to check for burn-in and backlight quality.
Also, are there decent OLED dumb TV options available yet? I rarely watch anything on my TV, so when I do it's generally something more 'special' and I rather like the gamut that OLEDs offer for those occasions.
Bet money on it being the garbage smooth frame stuff that pushed the TVs to fake 60 or 120fps by guessing frames. Even my newest 75" TV has this junk and makes the picture stutter enough that it drove me bonkers trying to turn it off - Google TV is awful for this but the TV also lets you fully turn it off on some ports.
I bought an LG a few years ago and connected it to WiFi. I have no idea what I need to program for special wash cycles, but it’s nice getting a notification on my watch when a load is done or having issues.
Almost every Shell station in San Francisco, remodeled and added hydrogen refueling stations about two or three years ago. Now they sit idle or turned off.
If green energy were a money making business, the oil companies would get into it tomorrow.
I still remember the story of an IMAP bug Apple mail had for years and years. I forgot exactly what the bug was that was open with Apple, but Apple’s way of addressing the bug was turning off the feature in an update and closing out the ticket.
ChatGPT has replaced Google searches for me. 15 years ago I could ask Google a question and get a pretty accurate to what I wanted. From there I would rabbit hole into my search.
ChatGPT gives me the answer I need now. From there I can ask more questions and it rabbit holes for me.
Granola. Best meeting app I’ve used. I have a notepad that takes markup I can add myself and it intelligently fills in the notes I wrote.
eg. I put bullet points with something like “updates from Steve?” And do that for everyone during our check in. When the meeting ends it takes all their conversation in the transcript and fills in my markup with the notes.
I’ve attended meetings where I had zero participation and focus on doing something else during the meeting. When it’s over it gives me a detailed summary of the meeting. It felt like I had an assistant taking detailed, ordered notes for me. It’s almost like that scene from the movie Old School. Rodney Dangerfield sent his secretary to stenograph the lecture time so he didn’t have to attend and she gets called out by the professor. Felt just like that kind of transcribing.
