I was actually thinking about something similar today. We’ve already had an actor as president, then with Trump, we had a reality-TV star. Social media is the new “TV” for the younger generation, so it’s only a matter of time before we have an influencer or a YouTube creator as a candidate, right? Let’s see MrBeast go toe-to-toe with Trump.
In the US at least, most equipment (unless you get into high-and datacenter stuff) runs on 120V. We also use 240V power, but a 240V connection is actually two 120V phases 180-degrees out of sync. The main feed coming into your home is 240V, so your breaker panel splits the circuits evenly between the two phases. Running dual-phase power to a server rack is as simple as just running two 120V circuits from the panel.
My rack only receives a single 120V circuit, but it’s backed up by a dual-conversion UPS and a generator on a transfer switch. That was enough for me. For redundancy, though, dual phases, each with its own UPS, and dual-PSU servers are hard ro beat.
I probably should have specified I’m using libcurl, but I did try the equivalent of what you suggested. I even tried setting a list of user agents and having it cycle through. None of them work. A lot of anti-scraping methods use much more complex schemes than just validating the user agent. In some cases, even a headless browser will be blocked.
Speaking from experience, be careful you don’t become over-zealous in your anti-scraping efforts.
I often buy parts and equipment from a particular online supplier. I also use custom inventory software to catalog my parts. In the past, I could use cURL to pull from their website, and my software would parse the website and save part specifications to my local database.
They have since enacted intense anti-scraping measures, to the point that cURL no longer works. I’ve had to resort to having the software launch Firefox to load the web page, then the software extracts the HTML from Firefox.
I doubt that their goal was to block customers from accessing data for items they purchased, but that’s exactly what they did in my case. I’ve bought thousands of dollars of product from them in the past, but this was enough of a pain in the ass to make me consider switching to a supplier with a decent API or at least a less restrictive website.
Simple rate limiting may have been a better choice.
What is human connection, though? It’s your brain releasing dopamine because you spent time with another person. It matters to you because it makes you feel good. Other things can make you feel good, too. The difference is that hobbies and activities won’t let you down. They won’t stop being your hobby because they’d rather spend time with someone else. People are unreliable and ultimately selfish at heart.
Say you make a friend. 60 years from now, you and your friend are both dead, and what’s left behind? Nothing. I’m not old, but I’m certainly not young either. It took me a while to realize that other people just don’t matter. In the end, nothing matters at all; everything you and I do is ultimately going to fade into irrelevance when we’re dead. Might as well make the most of the time we have alive, then; do something that makes you happy. Don’t rely on another selfish human being for your happiness.
You don’t. People need fulfillment, not human interaction. Find something you are passionate about and pour your time and effort into it. Buy a classic car and restore it. Learn how to make your own furniture. Start learning photography. Write a book. Develop a program or app. Start a fitness routine. Brew your own beer. Learn a foreign language. The list is endless.
What matters is doing something that brings you satisfaction. A hobby that involves creating something or improving yourself is so much better than wasting time with other people. Spend a day hanging out with friends, and what do you have at the end of the day? Nothing. Spend a day planting a garden, and what do you have at the end of the day? You have a nice garden.
This seems like a weird and convoluted way to charge for content. Why not just make it a paid DLC?
Yes, a lot of my movies are 50GB or so. Not everything has a 4k repack available, though. I’d say the vast majority are around 20GB.
1080p would just not be acceptable for me. There’s a clear difference between 1080p and 4k on a 4k screen, especially if the screen is large.
If I’m in a situation where I don’t have connectivity to stream from my server, then I can always just start a Handbrake queue the night before and transcode a few videos to smaller size, or just dump a few onto an external drive. I have never been in a situation where I had to do this, though.
Any sort of media, including videos, I always go for the highest possible quality I can. I do have a number of 4k displays, so it makes sense to a certain extent, but a lot if it has to do with future-proofing.
Here’s a good example: When personal video cameras were first starting to support 1080, I purchased a 1080i video camera. At the time, it looked great on my 1920x1080 (maybe 1024x768, not sure) monitor. Fast forward over 15 years later, and it the video I recorded back then looks like absolute garbage on my 4k TV.
I remember watching a TV show when 1080p video first became available, and I was blown away at the quality of what was probably a less-than-1GB file. Now watching the same file even on my phone has a noticeable drop is quality. I’m not surprised you saw little difference between a 670MB and a 570MB file, especially if it was animation, which contains large chunks of solid colors and is thus more easily compressed. The difference between two resolutions, though, can be staggering. At this point, I don’t think you can easily find a 1080p TV; everything is 4k. 8k is still not widespread, but it will be one day. If you ever in your life think you’ll buy a new TV, computer monitor, or mobile device, eventually you’ll want higher quality video.
My recommendation would be to fill your media library with the highest-quality video you can possibly find. If you’re going to re-encode the media to a lower resolution or bitrate, keep a backup of the original. You may find, though, that if you’re re-encoding enough video, it makes more sense to save the time and storage space, and spend a bit of money on a dedicated video card for on-the-fly transcoding.
My solution was to install an RTX A1000 in my server and set it up with my Jellyfin instance. If I’m watching HDR content on a non-HDR screen, it will transcode and tone-map the video. If I’m taking a break at work and I want to watch a video from home, it will transcode it to a lower bitrate that I can stream over (slow) my home internet. Years from now, when I’m trying to stream 8k video over a 10Gb fiber link, I’ll still be able to use most of the media I saved back in 2024 rather than try to find a copy that meets modern standards, if a copy even exists.
Edit: I wanted to point out that I realize not everyone has the time or financial resources to set up huge NAS with enterprise-grade drives. An old motherboard and a stack of cheap consumer-grade drives can still give you a fair amount of backup storage and will be fairly robust as long as the drive array is set up with a sufficient level of redundancy.
I still enjoy the second-wave stuff from time to time, but you’re absolutely spot-on with what’s been coming out in recent years. I’m really into groups that have kept the original BM music style but embraced modern production. A few that come to mind are Faidra, Spectral Wound, Asarhaddon, and Funeral Winds; fantastic bands that play “true” BM but have good recording quality.
Like you mentioned, the big change is just how many “crossover” bands there are, and I’m all for it. You didn’t ask for suggestions, but I’m going to offer some of my favorites anyway:
People do this because they’re crackheads (or heroin addicts, or methheads, you get the idea). It’s not a poverty issue, it’s a drug issue. The person working a minimum wage job and sharing a studio apartment isn’t going to dispose of their old bicycle in the river. The person who steals a bike and realizes they can’t sell it to get their next fix probably isn’t going to have a problem dumping it in a lake or river. They’re already leaving needles on the playground, shitting on the sidewalk, and assaulting innocent people for not giving them a cigarette. Do you really think they give a damn about the environmental impact of dumping their stolen goods in a waterway?
I’d like to hope that by the time Win10 is no longer supported, we have Win12 that doesn’t suck. The way things are going, though, I doubt it. I’m expecting that Win10 will be the last version of Windows I use.
I still prefer Windows over Linux for gaming and software development, but everyone has their limit. I am strongly opposed to advertisements, and when I can no longer block ads from my operating system, it’s dead to me.
I use a mixture of Linux and Windows 10 LTSC on my PCs/servers/VMs. I will be the first to admit that Windows does sometimes make sense to use. My desktop PC and my dev environment are both Windows 10.
That being said, what is the advantage in using Windows 11 over 10? As far as I can tell, it’s worse in every way. Built-in ads, a crappier UI, forced obsolescence with TPM requirements, and “feature” bloat that nobody asked for.
10 was a clear improvement over 8, but 11 just seems all-around worse.
I think you could make an argument that even burning plastic in a firepit vs sending it to a landfill are roughly equal. Climate change and air pollution are both major issues, but so is plastic waste and microplastics working their way into everything. I have no idea of the overall harm of burning plastic is less than throwing it away; they both pollute the environment. I can see the the logic in thinking burning is a viable alternative.
Ideally, though, people would just stop using disposable plastic. Plastic is a fantastic material, but it was never supposed to be for “use once and discard” items. For creating durable objects with a decent lifetime, sure, use plastic. Don’t use it as wrapping over another plastic object.
I certainly don’t think it will be easier in a few years, but I also think that after 19 years of using gmail, a few more years aren’t going to make a huge difference. It’s really kind of sad to think about how far Google has fallen. I started with gmail in 2005. At the time, Google was starting to become the “go-to” search engine. They had better results than Yahoo or AltaVista; the “do no evil” slogan was also a great “feel-good” factor. I don’t think anyone at the time expected how different things would be in 2024.
I can host my own media on my own server. I use Nextcloud Talk for IMs (also hosted on my own server). Just about any online service can be self-hosted, except for email. I have certainly tried in the past, even hosting email on a VPS. You run into so many issues, though. Your server isn’t trusted, websites don’t recognize your domain, a whole litany of problems. Email is just one of those things that you really can’t self-host.
Sure, I could switch to a new email provider, forward gmail, and slowly over time update my email address for everyone who’s sending to my gmail account. What happens then when my new email provider decides to start harvesting my data for profit? Email is one of those things where you can’t live without it, but you’re forced to use a service that isn’t your own and could fuck you at any time.
I run uBlock origin on every device I can. I use PiHole on my home network. I’ve canceled every streaming service in favor of self-hosting, and IoT devices are blocked from the internet. Incoming connections are geoblocked. Meta is blocked at the DNS level. Suffice to say I have put a lot of effort into privacy and security.
I still can’t get rid of Google, though, solely because of Gmail. I’ve had the same address for so many years (ever since the invite-only days), it would be an absolute nightmare to try to change it.
I did some research on this, and it turns out you’re absolutely correct. I was under the impression that ECC was a requirement for a ZFS cache. It does seem like ECC is highly recommended for ZFS, though, due to the large amount of data it Storrs in memory. I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable using non-ECC memory for ZFS, but it is possible.
Anecdotally, I did have one of my memory modules fail in my TrueNAS server. It detected this, corrected itself, and sent me a warning. I don’t know if this would have worked had I been using non-ECC memory.
One thing to keep in mind if you go with an i5 or i7 is that you won’t have the option to use ECC memory. If you’re running TrueNAS, you’ll need ECC memory for the ZFS cache. A Xeon E5 v2 server is old, but still has a more than enough power for your use case, and they’re not particularly expensive.
If you need something more powerful, you can find some decent Xeon Gold systems on eBay, but they’ll be a bit more pricey. The new Xeon W chips are also an option, but at least for me, they’re prohibitively expensive.
Even when I’m by myself, I often get the feeling like I’m in a “bubble,” and everything I’m looking at outside of myself is some other reality different from my own. It’s not a positive or a negative feeling, just kind of weird.
So to answer your question: Yes.