Paywalled specifications sounds a lot like security through obscurity. It works well until it doesn’t.

It’s the same stuff on Amazon. Will it help with that too?

Is it a documentary or a game? Confusing trailer if it’s a game.

Media piracy cannot be stopped. Don’t forget there was media piracy before the internet too. But back then it was physical piracy, and somebody made money on another’s work. That kind of piracy will always be shut down, because it is actually stealing. The fat cats want their money.

But now we have a different kind. More like Robin Hood. Digital piracy takes something and copies it, giving it away for free. The biggest risk for piracy, is that the content holders offer their product at a price so low, it would be horribly inconvenient to pirate it. For example if Apple Music just had you pay a few pennies per song instead of monthly. You’d load up $20 and listen to a lot of music. If TV series offered ad-free streaming for like $0.25 per episode. If movies could be watched for $1. If academic journal articles could be accessed for $1.

But that will never happen. They’ve done the math. They make more money with subscriptions and pricing right at the edge of affordability for many. Why would they want to make less money?

Actually now that I’m thinking about it. The way for them to hurt piracy the most would be to give away low-bitrate copies of everything for free. Stream all the music you want at 96 kbps. Watch every TV series or movie at 480p. Download this ebook as a plain text file. Read this article with tiny thumbnail photos. Free version of game has low-res textures and 720p at 30fps. Even that wouldn’t end piracy, but it would be a lot less popular. It would be harder to find somebody to invest the time bypassing paywalls when you can read the text easily.

Anyway torrent cannot be stopped. It’s moving to onion and i2p, fully decentralized. There will be nobody to take down. Besides that there’s always independent nations who don’t care about digital piracy, who can host private trackers.

Non-tech. I decided to self host first to send media to my TV. I wanted an always-on solid state hard drive computer that didn’t have to do any transcoding. Tried DLNA but Emby just worked better. Jellyfin didn’t have an LG App at the time so I’m still using Emby. Eventually I also asked my poor ARM server with 2 GB of RAM to also run my wireless access points, but the Omada software is a resource hog. So I have a little Intel machine that can do Omada better and also transcoding for Emby on the go. And then I learned about HomeBridge and that’s been great too. I think together the two computers run about 15W of energy I could decommission the ARM one but it does a couple things I haven’t migrated yet. I’ve tried hosting other stuff but those are the main ones used every day.

I would pay if à la carte was remotely economical. For example a digital DRM movie rental should cost $1 in whatever resolution, on any device capable of playing it. A TV show should cost like $5 for a season or $0.5 per episode. To rent, not to own of course. I don’t care about ownership. With that model I would probably end up spending like $10-15/month on media, but I would feel better about it knowing the studio could pay more to those specific individuals who worked on the programs I am enjoying.

A subscription is a blank check to the studio to make whatever they think draws in subscribers, and to pay everyone involved as little as possible with no bonuses for blockbusters.

iOS 18 Beta 7 it crashes and reloads back to search so fast it looks like your query is just erased. Band-aid fix maybe.

Pretty much every hamburger has blood in it. It’s an important part of the flavor. Actually Impossible burgers had to make GMO yeast to make hemoglobin, so their pea protein burgers taste more like meat.

https://swamedia.com/releases/release-66ab759a702a76e0bcb37c45465c6a58-southwest-airlines-launches-enhancements-to-transform-customer-experience-and-improve-financial-performance

Yosemite needs to issue rain checks for Half Dome permits. They’re so hard to get, people don’t want to miss out on their Instagram moment. People will still make bad choices but at least you would know that’s not a factor.

NPS needs to issue rain checks so people can make better decisions.

Emby is a cousin of Jellyfin that supports DVR functionality. I have successfully recorded from IPTV streams, which shouldn’t be too different from a tuner card. The main thing is it needs to load the programming information from somewhere.

I’m no fan of exercise. But as I imminently approach 40, I’m feeling and seeing its value more and more. The purpose of fitness is not longevity - it is independence and quality of life. Just assume you’re going to live to age 90 either way. Look around at some 80 year olds. Breathing machines, walkers, bed ridden… how do you want to spend your years? Years! Your body will become a torture prison unless you tend to it. Dying is the least of my concerns.

I was just thinking about this. Love these videos. Cooling of a solar panel is a good application, as long as it gets cold enough for long enough to re-solidify at night.

An alcohol/NaCl solution with a stabilizer can make an ice pack that freezes colder than water. That could be used to keep ice cream frozen in an ice chest.

It would be cool to have recipes for a few different temperatures. There’s a German company Qool Products that sells PCM temperature elements (ice packs), at a variety of temperatures, to store ice cream up to red wine/cellar temp in their ice chest. With some trial and error I guess we could now make our own!

Thanks it looks like the Edgerouter X would meet my needs. I’m not sure I would need a switch though since it has 4 ports.

I’d really like if there was a high end router and switch without WiFi. I already have all my wireless handled by 3 access points. Is there a high end router/switch with 4 ports?

You mean xAI?

I am joking

I would probably do a one-time purchase but I don’t do subscriptions.

It’s possible to make a rasterized pdf - that would just be an image with specs for printing. I think teachers need to specify their expectations. Submit a plain text file? Submit a markdown document? Submit a Word doc? Is hand-written okay? What about a type-writer?

A pdf is just a digital version of paper, and since paper is obsolete, the pdf is probably a bit archaic for somebody who has no intention of printing it.