That’s not very helpful for connecting family, friends, and especially grandma.

Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.

So edgy.

If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.

Plexamp has gotten better lately. It can save your progress on audiobooks now. It’s a per library feature, so I have one library of music (that does not save progress) and one for audiobooks (that does save progress). I used to have trouble with some audiobook formats (M4Bs needed to be converted (really just renamed) to mp4s, but that wasn’t necessary for the last few I loaded. Plex still has a little trouble with standards around multiple authors and different productions (and different readers) of a single book, but that’s more of an ID3 tag problem and is resolved if you’re consistent in normalizing the tags on your library. I’ve also used the syncing features a bunch for offline time (like on a plane or on long trips). For a large library, I see syncing offline files as a necessary feature.

And before the Jellyfin fanboys chime in, if Jellyfin could match these audio and syncing features (and be easier to setup for access outside my LAN and sharing with family), I jump ship in a heartbeat.

“pretty easy” is a bit of a stretch

Once upon a time I got a CueCat to catalogue my book collection on a (probably now defunct) Web2.0 service. This was before smartphones and apps, and before I had even a laptop. At the time it felt retro-cool and really did help me speed things up in that task. At the time, I had to box up most of my books and CDs for storage, but I wanted an easy way to know in which box each thing was. I think I even had plans to use it with my CD collection next, but building the backend for turning barcodes back into a reference to a playable directory of ripped files turned out to be too much trouble. Could still be doable if you could query a Jellyfin or Plex database based on UPC codes. Now we all just yell into the void and hope the nearest “AI” hears us.

Why did the Thinkpad 701 become a cult legend in computer history?

It was the expanding butterfly keyboard that gave you an 11.5" wide keyboard from a 10" wide laptop. Super cool for its day, but not really a problem that needs solving anymore. Nobody seems to be clamoring for the nipple mouse anymore either.

In the US it must be Springfield because there’s so fucking many of them that they named made a TV show after it.

Stupid sexy autocorrect.

How do you pronounce the U? Do you pronounce mould like should, would, or could? Is your pronunciation of mould then closer to mud than old with an M in front?

Bet!

I’ve used it. But mostly by the time I had created a deck to study, I didn’t need it anymore.

Start using it yourself. Use it in awkward, wrong, uncool ways. They’ll drop that shit like, “What the sigma Dad!?!”

Sports photography is not a cheap hobby. Expect to spend 10 times your budget just to get started. You can save (some) money by shopping used on sites like adorama or B&H. Older models of DSLR can be had for a pretty good deal because all the kids these days are hyped about mirrorless. Expect to do a lot of research and wade through a lot of articles written by gear obsessed people with money to burn. I think you can still browse archives of dpreview.com for some in depth reviews and specs, especially if you’re shopping older models.

Pretty much any consumer camera with an interchangeable lens will do the job, it’s the lens that will really determine how good a picture you can get. There’s a reason you see a lot of HUGE (and expense) lens on the sidelines. Megapixels are much less important these days because pretty much everything has enough. The metrics you’ll be looking to maximize will be a fast autofocus system, a fast lens, and a long enough focal length to get your view in close to your subject from a distance. You might be able to find something that is “good enough” in a cheaper range with a camera with a built-in lens. If you get bit by the photography bug though, that might turn out to be a waste of money if you decide you want to upgrade.

I am actually currently binging old episodes of Critical Role, but it’s my first time through so I’m not sure if that counts.

Also, I’d re-listen to most every 99% Invisible and Planet Money episode.

Came here to say this show and Planet Money.

It’s not all that bad. Ever done body work on a car with bondo fill, grinding, drilling, and sanding? It smells, sounds, and vibrates just like that, but in your mouth. The drugs will work, unless you take drugs like weed recreationally. Go ahead and tell the dentist this because you will need more than normal. Follow all the dentist instructions, especially about icing afterwards and taking ibuprofen (not for the pain, but to reduce inflammation), even if you feel okay. The worst part for me was always how sore my jaw was just from holding it open so long. Don’t try to go to work afterwards, it’ll just interfere with your aftercare of ice to the jaw. Besides, you’ll just end up drooling on yourself. It’s not so bad really. You’ll be fine.

You said something that sounded false, so I looked it up. You’d boardly misinterpreted and sensationalized the regulations about traveling with a dog across states lines so much that what you said was not true the way you said it. That’s a fact check.

Fact check: You only need proof of a rabies vaccine and a recent vet checkup in practically every state to transport a dog across state lines. Most states specifically exempt tourist’s dog that are temporary and stay on leash outside. Hawaii, being an island with a delicate ecosystem, is the only state to require a quarantine.

Christopher Columbus (Squirrels & Onions remix) doesn’t technically have lyrics, but I always sing the title words along with the beat, at least in my head. Kinda of like how a lot of EDM just turns into Boots and Cats in my head.