I’m on the new HTPC version installed as a snap. I can see that it’s meant to work with passthrough, but I find that it… doesn’t.

I haven’t tried in a few versions. Maybe I should give it another crack.

I used MythTV for decades. I really loved the “raw” digital output of the music player. It would casually hop from 44/16/2.0 to 96/24/5.1 between songs and my amp would decode it. I even contributed a small patch to make the visualizer work with 24bit audio.

The live TV hardware accelerated deinterlacing was really good too. TV recording was super reliable.

The TVDb lookup was a tad glitchy. It turns out that it didn’t include the year in the lookup. I wrote a patch that did it (and improved my metadata lookups heaps) but never made a PR.

I jumped to Plex around 2020. Mostly for things like streaming to my phone so I can have my music on the train. I believe Myth was better for HTPC, but Plex isn’t too far off.

I’m not a fan of Plex audio. Every time I try to make it do AC3 passthrough or skip the OS mixers, the whole thing breaks.

Because it’s from 8 years ago and it never happened.

Printers are always horrible to administer. Brother are typically the best on Linux. I wrote a massive instructional blog a few weeks ago because it took so much work to get my HL-3150CDN working over USB. I had to repackage a Frankenstein’s monster of a driver because my printer never got 64-bit CUPS filters.

Even if they do get the VBR encoding perfect, you’ll still get people on bad connections that will only have a buffer underrun when a dude shows up in a sparkly suit.

This group’s activism is so tone-deaf that I’m starting to think this is actually the oil companies pretending to be terrible activists.

That’s like, a million people’s wages. Absurd.

The longest outage I’ve had in a decade is when my primary SSD died a 2 months ago and I had to reinstall using config backups. It was down for around a day.

I’ve thrown a UPS on it and flown overseas for a week or two. It’s basically just email for me and the kids.

I’ve had longer outages on hosted services, TBH.

I host my own mail. When it’s down, the mail just gets delivered after I get online again. Almost all mail servers are configured to retry over a period of several days before giving up.

Once my health insurer sent me mail by post to tell me that my mail server was down. That was kinda funny.

TightVNC. Use TightVNC.

My company has build scripts that practically pull half an OS from an update mirror every time someone commits a code change.

It’s maddening how inefficient CI/CD setups are.

I have two Surface Pros that are BIOS locked so I can’t install Linux. They also don’t support Win11.

I’m not sure what I can do with them.

I visited last year. The way they handle trash is just black magic. There are almost no bins on the street. Everything is in disposable packaging. Yet, there is absolutely no litter.

The craziest example was Asakusa. I was walking around for 30 mins.holding about 10 food wrappers in my hand. Eventually a nice merchant offered me a plastic bag to put it all in when I purchased a drink.

Don’t search for reviews. Search for forum posts where users are having issues. “[Product] + [not working/failed/broken]” gets you an idea of what the product is like to live with, and now quickly issues get resolved.

TL;DR: Baka gaijin.

This new thunderbolt feature hilariously does what I once did with RS-232.

I already do.

There is one. It’s called “AirGuard” and it has been around for a while now. I’m using it on GrapheneOS.

GSF is where most of Google’s invasive user tracking happens. It’s proprietary, closed source and is not part of AOSP (Android Open Source Project). It is, by definition, spyware.

Google did not put it in Android. They put it in Google Services Framework. Ironically, GSF is the first part you rip out to protect your privacy.