Ah yes, the modern day equivalent of recording radio broadcasts to magnetic tape. Made a few mixtapes that way myself. They were absolute garbage quality and I never listen to them anymore, but it was an interesting exercise and my only option for some stuff at the time.

Now I just buy as directly from the artist as I can for things that are rare enough that they are difficult to pirate.

Calling anything bad weird seems a little judgemental for my taste. I like bad weird. Good weird is boring.

Ya basic.

Getting weirder and weirder is the only viable direction a Master of the Universe movie can go for success. Don’t you remember the last movie?

Fair? What’s fair about how they hand out Oscars? Seriously. One example, I thought it has been pretty well established that awards are often handed out because of a person’s history of work and not only the current thing they are being awarded for this year. I’m sure this could be hotly debated, but I’ve never heard anyone accuse the Oscars of being fair.

Jokes on them. Batman is fighting crime in a failing empire. I might have fun writing a paper about how the comic series is actually about the fall of empires like the Roman empire. I’d footnote and meticulously cite the shit out of that paper just to code clues that I knew exactly what the Professor was trying to do.

Short simplified answer: nobody wants to pay for the infrastructure. Especially in the last mile. There’s probably a Planet Money episode about it. If not, there should be.

Why are you bickering with me about it? I don’t appreciate people asking questions in bad faith just so they can make a spicy comment. Think I like it?

There are choices, it’s just they all suck unless you’re willing to move. Nobody’s arguing that it is a local semi-monopoly.

There’s other options, but they’re all MUCH slower. If you want a different ISP with comparable or faster speeds, you need to move. In my case, internet is bundled with HOA fees. And there is no other fast option available at my address anyway.

It’s not a full monopoly. You can choose another ISP, but it’s just that in practice you’d need to physically move to a new location to make that change of vendor.

Yes, I’ve done almost exactly this while traveling. You can even carry around a couple variously configured sd cards for different use cases. I had one with jellyfin for sharing locally and also Kodi for direct HDMI connection to TVs. There is a in app on Android for jellyfin called findroid that allows offline copies from the media server, which allowed me to not need the thing powered the entire time I wanted to watch something on my phone, just long enough to download it. Adding samba shares adds a other layer of accessibility. I had another SD Card with video game ROMs for retro gaming, but this one got left at home because it requires controllers and I didn’t think I’d use it that much. I had another with “little backup box” installed for automatically backing up my photos and videos after a day out exploring with my camera.

I used a Raspberry pi 5 for all of this, running from a battery backup, because I didn’t really need a keyboard once I had remote connections to my phone sorted out. Pick a rugged case and you case just toss it in your bag of chargers. It took up about as much space as a pack of cigarettes. Another option would be the Raspberry Pi 400, built into a keyboard. A little bulkier, but maybe more resilient in the face of technical difficulties.

Give em The Harkness Test

Henry Crabgrass would like a word…

Setting up Sonarr and Radar with docker isn’t all that complex. If you set up Prowlarr as well then you can still get the instant search and download aspect you mention except you can search ALL the good websites at once and (most importantly for my stress level) avoid all the bullshit ads and malware you’ve got to worry about blocking while browsing those sites through the web. Sonarr is perfect for following any show, not just those you might binge watch. Topical shows like SNL and last week tonight get picked up automatically. Long term favorites with unpredictable release cycles (looking at you Doctor Who) get snapped up when they’re most popular and download super fast. Cleaning up old seasons to clear out space is as simple as navigating a web page. Both radarr and sonarr can connect to other services like that.tv so less tech savvy household members can add a show or movie to their watchlist and it will automatically get added, searched, downloaded, and hosted without any extra interaction from me. You can even set up profiles so that certain lists meet quality standards, so for example the kids cartoons aren’t downloaded at the same high a quality as the adult shows.

My point is this, make the switch to automating the searching and downloading, not so that you can hoarde everything, but so that you can’t stop spending as much time being the home video librarian and more time enjoying it. On more than one occasion I’ve been out with friends and somebody mentions a movie they liked, I’ve taken a minute to add it to my list, and the movie is ready and waiting on my Plex (and/or Jellyfin) before I get home.

Don’t blame Plex for that, they’re just aggregating streams from other sources.

There is a certain elegance to this kind of writing. I was surprised how easy it is to read. Maybe I have an advantage because I’ve always made it a little mental game to read mirrored text when I see it either in an actual mirror or from the wrong side of a clear pane of glass. The utility of the ox turn method seems to shine when the inscription is on a tablet that can be held and turned in one’s hands.

This is why I set up tasker to lockdown my phone under certain conditions, such as: getting disconnected from Bluetooth (like when my phone is separated from me and my watch, my headphones, or the car), getting disconnected from WiFi (like when it’s taken from where it’s supposed to be), getting a slight jolt from the accelerometer (like getting thrown to the ground or even just a swift tap). My phone may get locked down a bunch during day to day stuff, but at least I know it will lockdown automatically when it matters.

Yeah, they got the sudo placement inside out. You “sudo crontab -e” and put your commands there that need sudo, you don’t sudo the individual commands in the regular user’s crontab.

But it tastes so much worse than adding a ball of wasabi to the piece and dipping the soy sauce separately if at all. How can you possibly get enough wasabi to really bring out the flavor of the fish without absolutely drowning your sushi in soy sauce? Not every piece should get the same proportion of soy sauce and wasabi either.

And straws. My plastic straw isn’t the problem.

If your don’t recycle your aluminum and other cans though, you’re a bad person and you should feel bad about it.

Oh no! Another DE to choose from? How awful!