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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • You know, I was really sick and tired when they updated the nvidia shield with the new android TV version that makes most of the screen show stuff that are basically ads. It didn’t even let me show only stuff I was interested in and this constant “oh you are hovering over this item for 0.000001s so you seem to be interested in this, let me start the video for you with audio” no god damnit I was reading something else or got a text.

    I had to install a different launcher so that I could only show on the screen what I actually wanted to see. I have basically removed or reduced all ads as much as I ca.

    Lately, I was at my parents place and they don’t have that stuff. Even the 1.5 minutes of ads for a free service is so disruptive to me watching something.

    What has this to do with PlayStation?

    Well, on the shield you are still able to install a custom launcher that is more to your liking, you could disable the internet access and completely stream your own local content. But on the PS, you don’t have that option and are completely at the mercy of what they think you should watch and see on your screen that you bought with a console that you also bought with your own money.


  • Short answer: Because their motivation is to win!

    I read something about this in the Book “Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development: From Concept to Playable Game With Unity and C#” by Jeremy Gibson a while ago, maybe that can explain this a bit.

    Basically, every Player has some Intention or the “Player Intent” which is described by the Personality Types of Richard Bartle. For example, you have:

    • The Achiever who seeks to get the highest score in the game and wants to dominate it
    • The Explorer who seeks to find all the hidden places in the game and wants to understand the game
    • The Socializer wants to play the game with friends and wants to understand other players
    • The Killer who wants to provoke other players and wants to dominate them

    And then you have two others that you will be encountering:

    • The Cheater who only cares about winning and does not care about the integrity of the Game and they will bend or break the rules to win
    • The Spoilsport who doesn’t care about winning or about the game but rather will break the game to ruin the other player’s experience

    So, the motivation to “cheat” could either be that this player doesn’t really care about the game, is able to get away with cheating and just wants to beat the game. According to Jeremy Gibson, a cheater might not cheat if they can win legitimately but I would argue that cheaters are usually not great players in the first place so the bar would be pretty low for them to “win legitimately”.

    As for the spoilsport, this is extremely hard to work against or prevent because the motivation isn’t about the game anymore but other players, to make their experience miserable so that the spoilsport can gain satisfaction from it. Hence also the use of “don’t feed the trolls”.

    With that being said, when you ask why someone would cheat, the question would rather be “What is their motivation” and the answer to that is “to win the game, at all costs”. And, most of the time, they will get away with this because they apparently cannot be caught as quickly as they can still continue doing it, if there is any action against them at all.


  • I totally agree. I had it a few times in which someone calls me, rips me out of my thoughs, we discuss something, hang up and I have nothing retained from what we talked about. Or, even better, someone says something on a call and I do that and then they never said anything about that.

    Even worse, I can’t listen to the conversation in 1-2 weeks because that is the time I could actually work on it and remember every detail that we talked about.

    Now I am strictly going with emails. Sure they can call me and we talk about the feasibility or discuss possible solutions but any request for implementation has to happen either over an email of which I then create a ticket/issue or they create one directly themselves.

    That way I can prove that what I implemented was based on what was requested and if that was wrong then the request wasn’t clear enough.


  • Mountain Man: 10 Books by Keith C. Blackmore. Basically, the Zombie Apocalypse happens and a Dude tries to survive alone, physically, mentally and emotionally while also trying to go on supply runs, running into Zombies and generally trying to stay alive while coping with everything. I think it would be good to have some other zombie-related Series that isn’t The Walking Dead.

    Expeditionary Force: 18 Books by Craig Alanson. Earth and Humanity are attacked by Hamster Aliens, another alien Race, Lizards, who attack the hamsters saving Earth in the process and then recruiting Humanity into a war on a galactic scale but the Hamsters aren’t the real enemy of Humanity. I’m only at the end of the 5th Audiobook but they are great and I would really wish Skippy is voiced by the Audiobook Narrator R.C. Bray in a TV adaption.

    Kyralia series: Been a while since I read it but a fantastic series related to magic By Trudi Canavan, I think there are just not enough good Magic-related Shows.

    Tales of the Otori: A 5-Book Series by Lian Hearn is set in a fictional feudal Japan. The Main story follows a Boy, Takeo, through his life to avenge his adoptive father and escape the legacy of his biological father. Probably the only series in which I had to put down the book at one point and just had to process what was happening.


  • I tried it but it doesn’t seem to work for me correctly or maybe I am doing something wrong. I patch the YouTube app and install it but as soon as I close and open it, all the changes made by the patch are apparently gone. Shorts that are hidden on the first start after the patch are visible again, ads seem to be reduced but still happen occasionally.

    I disabled the default YouTube app, gave the patched version a different name, disabled auto update, repatched it but nothing seems to stick after opening it again.

    And then the whole “I have to download the apk so that I can use it” because I don’t have rooted my phone is just inconvenient.

    I stick with my yt-dlp server and Plex instead.


  • It goes even beyond that.

    With a dedicated app, you go into the store and install it and then you have it in your apps that you then can place everywhere.

    With a website, you need to have the browser, navigate to that website each time. And yes, you could put a link to that website on your home screen as well but not many user are probably aware of that being an option.

    I know that but I still would prefer a dedicated app because it is easier to manage and use more features of my phone. For example, I just tried it on my android phone and the link to a website always opened a new tab in my Firefox.

    Then I can manage the notifications of that app depending on what I want it to notify me about.

    I can’t do that specifically for a single app or website in a browser.

    On the other hand, I also wouldn’t want to miss a website because I am not always on my phone and, in some cases, it is way more annoying to do something over the phone because I am just not used to it (like writing this comment). Doing that over a website version that I can access on my PC is much easier and convenient.


  • It’s a bit of an infuriating story that I had not so long ago.

    I have a Playstation account and I recently wanted to log into that account on the PlayStation website. The Password I had saved in my Bitwarden Password Manager was apparently wrong. Okay, then I will just reset it, that’s fine.

    I went through the Password reset process and generated a new Password, pasted it into the Password field and sent it and everything was fine. I tried to log in with that password and was told that the username or password was wrong. Okay, that is weird, since I reset the password just now the login name couldn’t be wrong because, well, I just used that for the reset.

    I tried that several times with the same result and gave up.

    A few months later, I wanted to try again and had the same problem. I wanted to sort that out so I went through the same process with the Support bot yet again which then told me that I should come back in the “office hours”. A company making 84 billion in revenue should be able to employ 24/7 customer service or at least tell me that when I request support and not let me go through the bot again.

    So, I waited for the customer service personnel to be available and told them my problem. There I was told that “everything was looking fine on their end” and they quickly ended the support. I mean, yes, I was angry but wasn’t abusive to that person because if you couldn’t help me what should I do with my account, it also definitely wasn’t their specific fault. But I would, at least, have expected more than “Well, works on our end, sucks for you, bye”.

    The next time I tried again and got a more competent Support dude and we ran through the same troubleshooting steps as before. Reset password (even though I just did that, again, through the bot), logged in again and failed again. This time they suggested that I could use a “normal” password that I don’t generate. THAT worked for some reason.

    All of my generated passwords in Bitwarden are up to 32 long with all possible characters, depending on what the website allows or expects. If a website, for example, doesn’t allow 32 characters, I adjust and shorten it to the maximum length they allow. That worked without issues so far.

    Well, turns out that the field that you use to reset your password has a character limit of 30 characters. But, this would be fine if the dialogue tells you that your password is too long, but it doesn’t. It just cuts off at 30 characters and happily saves that.

    However, the Password field that you use to log in doesn’t have that restriction.

    This means that you reset your password with a 32-character long generated password, which is saved in your vault, PlayStation saves a 30-long password and then you use the 32-long password to log in, which fails because it isn’t the same.

    And this isn’t even mentioned in the password guidelines. It only said “min 8 characters” but not the maximum.


  • The health check that Tdarr can do depend on what health check you select, the “quick” health check will only check the file headers. This probably won’t find any video corruption unless the file headers are corrupted or invalid.

    The thourough health check will basically do a transcode of the input file without an output. This is being used to run and check each single frame of the file and “process” it without actually producing an output. https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Null

    Would this screw with plexs own traditional transcoding?

    No, Plex and Tdarr are two completely different things.

    Transcoding is not some universal thing but rather a term to describe what is happening. In general “transcoding” means that you convert something from one format into another.

    When you use the processing pipeline through Tdarr, it would detect a file in your library and run it through your specified pipeline. Depending on what you want to do with the file and how the pipeline is configured, it might or might not do anything with that specific file. When you, for example, configure that you want any file that has a video stream that isn’t encoded with HEVC to be HEVC then a H.264 file would then be transcoded.

    This is on a “replacement” bases, so any file you run through this would replace the existing file in your library. Meaning: you have a H.264 file before tdarrs processing and after it is finished, you have the file with HEVC as video stream.

    With the health check, as explained above, this is a bit different since you don’t have an ouput file, there is also no replacement happening. It is just a “check” that the file can be transcoded in its entirety (with a thourough health check).

    When Plex transcodes something, this is done “on the fly”. This means that it only transcodes the current file in your library.

    Technically, tdarr could “screw” with the Plex transcoder when Tdarr processes a file while you yourself watch the same file that is then transcoded by plex. When Tdarr is finished, it would replace the file which then could throw off the Plex transcoder. But this is very rare or non existent and you could even configure tdarr to do those things only at a certain time and it wouldn’t happen with health checks. as someone who runs both, I have yet to come across something like this.

    Or does it attempt to repair a file by transcoding

    As the name suggests, health checks are only “checking” if the file is healthy, there is nothing being repaired here. While you might be able to repair the file header, a corrupted video or audio is not something you can repair because of missing information. But that is nothing that Tdarr will do anyway, it just verifies/checks if it is healthy or not.


  • From the very low amount of information, there isn’t much to go by so the usual would have to be checked.

    OP should definitely use the new agents, again, anything other than the official agents are unsupported and shouldn’t be used unless you use a specific metadata agent for a specific source. If that is tmdb, tvdb or imdb then the new agents will work just as fine if not better.

    Then the usual suspects would need to be checked. Naming convention being followed, content not being merged into other episodes etc.

    So if the new season is not appearing inside the show, it either wasn’t detected because of the file naming or merged with some other content (filter -> duplicates).

    Without any further information, there is very little to speculate further


  • A bit of clarification here because this is a mistake I have seen too many make.

    The first thing is that You should only use the Plex Series and Plex Movies Agent. They are the official and up-to-date Agents that you need. All other Metadata Agents like TheTVDB and TheMovieDB are outdated and unmaintained. The new Metadata Agents are also faster than the old ones, Unless you use some specific 3rd Party Agents, the Plex Series and plex Movies Agent are more than enough for you because they get their metadata from watch.plex.tv which aggregates them from TheMovieDB, TheTVDB and IMDB.

    When you use those agents, you only configure them through the Advanced Section in your library. The “Agents” Section in your Plex Server Settings is absolutely meaningless for those new and official Agents because the Agents listed there are based on the old Metadata Agent system written in Python (IIRC the new ones are written in C++ like the rest of Plex).

    Also, that Agent section is based on a Priority list, not on an “override” list. This means that the list is being processed from Top to bottom, each agent in that list will provide their own metadata and write that to the Library item but it will only add metadata that doesn’t already exist yet. This means that if the first metadata agent provides a Synopsis for the library item, the next Agent will not override it.

    So, with the new Metadata Agents, there is nothing to override and the Agent section can be completely ignored. Only when you use 3rd party metadata Agents, this section would be of interest to you.

    Source: I am the developer of the MyAnimeList Metadata Agent for Plex.


  • I think that it is healthy for a discussion or an argument to have both positive and negative points of view. I also will voice my opinion regardless of the standpoint of the initial question.

    However, this also depends on the context. I won’t go into each thread and post something negative just because I don’t like the post or thread. But if someone is asking for an opinion then they should expect that the opinion of others might not be positive or align with their own opinion at all.

    I always hate to see those “yes” posts in which every criticism is being downvoted or “banned” but I also hate to see those rants/vent posts just for the circlejerk of hate or negativity.


  • The problem with brushing on resin is actually not that great because resin for printers will need to be cured. Unless that material is letting the UV light through, only the outer parts will get cured and hold onto the models but when you open it up again the whole middle part would be liquid resin again which stinks and is toxic.

    I had this misunderstanding for quite a while myself and though that I can just weld resin party with resin together until I did that with a larger piece and it broke quite easily and seeing that the whole inside wasn’t even touched at all by the UV light.

    Hence also why you should shine some UV light into a hollowed model to fully cure it.

    CA/superglue should do fine if applied correctly.


  • I don’t know where I read it but IIRC religion is being used as a simple answer to very difficult and possibly uncomfortable questions: why are we here and what is our purpose?

    It is fairly easy to believe that something, a god, created us instead of that the existence of humanity was just a fluke, a stroke of luck enabling us to evolve were we are now because it is just easier to grasp even if it is proven. That we evolved from simple beings into more complex organisms instead of just “being created”. Evolution creates so many quite difficult questions that it is easier to understand and believe that someone just wanted us to exist.

    When someone is believing in a religion they also always have some form of " it won’t be over" scenario like when you die, there is nothing truly “the end”. You just won’t vanish and this can be terrifying for many because the following question could be, what sense does it make to live at all when our existence is just so insignificant in comparison to everything else?

    So, in short, it is an easy too to make sense of things that almost everyone can understand it.

    Unfortunately, things like this can and will be abused.