Something Random

Chewy509

Wotty wot wot.
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SR doesn't even HAVE forums any longer. I do think I like the new site better than the previous ownership though.
In fairness, a lot of sites have given up hosting their own forums and now rely on reddit, discord, fb, etc...
Haven't been to SR in a while, and noticed this on the bottom of the site:
Copyright © 1998-2023 Flying Pig Ventures, LLC Cincinnati, Ohio. All rights reserved.
Did they change hands again?
 

LunarMist

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Maybe they reorganized for legal/financial reasons but it's the same IT guys since Eugene sold the nearly abandoned site years ago.
The loss of the forums was about 2-3 years ago. The forums were nearly dead and did not reflect the enterprise focus of the new SR.
Basically the reviews consist of regugitated sales sheets and they rarely criticize anything unless it is terrible. The actual tests result in those crazy squiggly graphs with more than one y value for the same x value. 🤯
 

LunarMist

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I think he was a serious IT dude, so he's probably still in that if still alive.
 

LunarMist

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Of course he may also be wealthy enough for that; I have no idea. Application of IT to life covers a lot of areas or peple may just do other things. I know one guy retired in early 50s and decided to design landscapes or something like that.
 

sedrosken

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I use Spotify to find new artists and music, and then buy the lossless files to use over Jellyfin. I stopped using Plex because Jellyfin does 90% of the same things and i don't need a stupid pass for HW transcoding and such.

My account here has been around for over a third of my life.
 

Handruin

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I tried jellyfin a while ago and it wasn't as refined as Plex. No idea how much better it has become but I also got a lifetime membership from Plex during a Black Friday sale for cheap and never looked back.
 

Handruin

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Anyone here into specialty coffee at all? For most of my life I did not drink any but I started getting into just before pandemic lockdown and I just made it my hobby of sorts. I enjoy trying new roasters from all over the place and getting into tweaking and trying different brewing ways. I never knew coffee could taste so good compared to what I remembered in the past.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Anyone here into specialty coffee at all? For most of my life I did not drink any but I started getting into just before pandemic lockdown and I just made it my hobby of sorts. I enjoy trying new roasters from all over the place and getting into tweaking and trying different brewing ways. I never knew coffee could taste so good compared to what I remembered in the past.

There's a local roaster I visit every time I'm around. Their blends are amazing, but they're also so snobby about it that if you have them brew a cup, they'll tell you to leave if you ask for sweetener or any milk-like substance.

But i also brew a lot of Target store brand coffees, so I'm not going to pretend I have a sophisticated palette. I usually just use that stuff for cold brew though.
 

Handruin

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I'm not familiar with swiss coffee methods but here in the states it has gotten incredibly good. A simple Aeropress (immersion brew) is how I started brewing with great results. Now I use a simple Hario V60 pour-over device which is just a cone-shaped funnel.

A huge way to get something good is to get fresh roasted coffee from a roaster versus a supermarket or box store. Basically look for a roasted-on date versus a sell-by date.
 

sdbardwick

Storage is cool
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Unfortunately that's too much work for me nowadays.
Me too!
So I bought a Philips superautomatic machine for the house. Beans and water go in, press a button and better than decent (9/10) espresso/coffee comes out. My totally personal and subjective opinion of course...I've tried all the major pods (k-cup 6/10 -basically decent automatic drip coffee, Tassimo 7.5/10 - recognizable as espresso, Nespresso 8/10-8.5/10 - average cafe quality). And I don't need to fret about all the plastic/aluminum being wasted. Hopefully the machine will last longer than its two year warranty (4 years on the complicated brew assembly).
The machine has an iced coffee setting for brewing into a glass of ice (no idea what brew parameters it modifies), but it makes iced coffee that actually tastes good without milk or sweetener; it is drastically reducing my diet soda consumption.
 

ddrueding

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Never developed a taste for coffee. Before I left the states caffeine consumption was becoming a problem for me (consuming way too much to keep up with work), so when I came here I cut it out entirely. Brutal headache and sleeping issues for a couple months, but now much better. I think I'll leave the coffee alone ;)
 

LunarMist

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400mg is generally considered a safe daily consumption for a healthy person. I average below that. Were you over 400mg/day? The most I notice after stopping entirely is 1-2 days of being a bit sluggish. Serious, recurring headaches usually suggest a visit to the Dr. since they may be caused by something else.
 

LunarMist

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OMG! There are other ingredients some would argue are worse. 20-30 cans of any soft drink daily can't be good for you. I'd be in the toilet all day. :LOL:
 

sedrosken

Florida Man
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Call me a neanderthal, but I found a local instant coffee brand I like since I only have my electric kettle and never drink more than a cup so it's wasteful to brew a whole pot or buy a keurig.
 

Handruin

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I don't brew a pot either, I make only the amount I drink which is typically 44g beans to 730g of coffee, or about 3 cups.
 

fb

Storage is cool
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We use a moka pot, size 6 is perfect for one large mug.

Just fill with water + coffee and wait a couple of minutes. I also found a normal off-the-shelf coffee with a roast that works great with our local water quality, so I'm really happy with it.
It's not espresso, but it tastes like real italian everyday coffee.
 

sedrosken

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Let me elaborate -- I have no interest in obtaining anything else, because my counter space is limited and the electric kettle is multi-purpose. I don't drink enough coffee to care -- maybe a cup or two in an entire month. Usually I'm a tea drinker.
 

LunarMist

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I don't think there is evidence that Neanderthals drank coffee, but it is possible they discovered it and that was lost to history.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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There's a really fun book that I like to share with substance-using friends called "A Brief History of Vice" by Robert Evans (not that one, although that one probably knew a thing about substances as well), wherein the author discusses the things that ancient peoples did to get blasted and then attempts, as best he can, to replicate those ancient experiences. We don't think of things like caffeine or sugar as a high, exactly, but to the people who first had them, they most certainly were. His work to reproduce the experiences are usually a little bit disappointing to a guy who will freely admit he's tried just about everything that can get somebody fucked up, but his methodologies and notes are often pretty entertaining.

Robert Evans is an interesting guy. He used to work as a tech journalist but has since traveled and reported on international conflicts all over Asia. These days he has a small podcasting empire surrounding his work documenting the worst people in history and separately, with a group of mostly queer and/or trans anarchists who most often discuss world issues from that perspective. I'd particularly like to point to his longer mini-series "The War on Everyone", which discusses the unbelievably long history of white supremacy; and "Behind the Police", a long examination of law enforcement over time. I'd also point to the first ten episodes of "It Could Happen Here" in which Evans uses his own experiences as a war correspondent and consultation with experts across a number of fields to suggest what might happen if the current ideological divide in the US moved to open, armed conflict.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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I'm a huge Marvel comics fan but if anyone told me 15 years ago that I'd get a movie with genuine emotional depth about a raccoon with a machine gun, I would've said that's insane. But here we are. Guardians volume 3 hits all the high Cs.

Today is May the Fourth. In my house, we finished Andor, a show that is on its surface just the backstory to an ill-fated character who is himself just more backstory to Star Wars: A New Hope. Andor is so, so much more than that. It's an examination of the nature of fascism, of revolutionary movements, and how old men send the young out to die in their battles. It is a taut political thriller. I'd put it ahead of Empire Strikes Back, if only because it brings the pot to a boil over the tiniest moment. Not a kid dropping a bomb down a vent, but a town gathered to mourn and old woman. That's the breaking point.

The best storytellers are a rare joy in this world. Tony Gilroy somehow convinced the biggest entertainment company on Earth to produce his examination of reaction to oppression. James Gunn's writing brought characters even hardcore comic fans never saw to greater prominence than decades of cartoons, radio plays and TV shows could for some of DC Comics' most famous characters. Gunn has taken the role as a the creative lead over DC Comics movie properties. Hopefully, he'll have the same success there.

Not everything is high art but we are lucky to have so many great storytellers and wonderful stories.
 

LunarMist

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I'm a huge Marvel comics fan but if anyone told me 15 years ago that I'd get a movie with genuine emotional depth about a raccoon with a machine gun, I would've said that's insane. But here we are. Guardians volume 3 hits all the high Cs.
That doesn't surprise me in the least. Wasn't there a ficus or something plantlike with muscle cells? That's far more ridiculous. I saw part of the film on a plane, back when planes showed movies.
 

Handruin

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I'm a huge Marvel comics fan but if anyone told me 15 years ago that I'd get a movie with genuine emotional depth about a raccoon with a machine gun, I would've said that's insane. But here we are. Guardians volume 3 hits all the high Cs.

Today is May the Fourth. In my house, we finished Andor, a show that is on its surface just the backstory to an ill-fated character who is himself just more backstory to Star Wars: A New Hope. Andor is so, so much more than that. It's an examination of the nature of fascism, of revolutionary movements, and how old men send the young out to die in their battles. It is a taut political thriller. I'd put it ahead of Empire Strikes Back, if only because it brings the pot to a boil over the tiniest moment. Not a kid dropping a bomb down a vent, but a town gathered to mourn and old woman. That's the breaking point.

The best storytellers are a rare joy in this world. Tony Gilroy somehow convinced the biggest entertainment company on Earth to produce his examination of reaction to oppression. James Gunn's writing brought characters even hardcore comic fans never saw to greater prominence than decades of cartoons, radio plays and TV shows could for some of DC Comics' most famous characters. Gunn has taken the role as a the creative lead over DC Comics movie properties. Hopefully, he'll have the same success there.

Not everything is high art but we are lucky to have so many great storytellers and wonderful stories.

Andor was my favorite so far of any Disney+ series and probably my favorite in the Star wars universe. I thought it was really well done and more adult and grown up. I actually cared about the characters and like you said, it has real story. Loved it.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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That doesn't surprise me in the least. Wasn't there a ficus or something plantlike with muscle cells? That's far more ridiculous. I saw part of the film on a plane, back when planes showed movies.

Guardians has Rocket, a hyperintelligent raccoon who loves firearms; Groot, a walking, talking (and dancing) tree; Kosmo, a telepathic and telekinetic Russian Golden Retriever; and Howard the Duck, who is mostly shown drinking or gambling. Every one of these is a deeply silly character, but they are each (even Howard) given depth through the material.

I note with mild satisfaction that Howard the Duck has as many cinematic appearances as Wonder Woman.

Andor was my favorite so far of any Disney+ series and probably my favorite in the Star wars universe. I thought it was really well done and more adult and grown up. I actually cared about the characters and like you said, it has real story. Loved it.

I honestly figured it would be useless fluff and after the first episode, I had no idea where it was going. It's a slow burn that merits time and attention.
 

LunarMist

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From I read at the Wikipaedia, The Guardians is like fantasy, but classified as SuperHero.
I don't recall any authority of the SuperHeros in that film. It's very confusing who is in charge of what. :rolleyes:
 

sedrosken

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Newegg had a big sale (possibly still has?) on 8TB WD Blues, model 80EAZZ. Notably these are CMR. They don't have ERC, but it realistically hasn't been a big issue, and considering 4TB Reds are still like $120 each, I'll take the added potential headache of the occasional array rebuild if a drive gets kicked out when I can get literally double the storage for cheaper. Outside the first month or so, I haven't had a single instance of a drive getting kicked out of my array with the 3x2TB old WD Blacks I have, so I'm not particularly concerned. I bought 3 for a 16TB software RAID5 in mdadm.

I also bought a 32GB kit of DDR4-3200 for, like, fifty bucks. RAM is cratering in price it seems. I may well buy another and max that board out at 64GB, at that price -- why not? It's not like it'll go unused.

Edit: I am horrible and impulsive and I absolutely just did buy another one. I'll steal its current 16GB kit for a build I'm going to do for my Dad.
 
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LunarMist

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I see the 80EAZZ for $100 if that is it. Performance, durability and error rate are low grade as expected from a BLUE.
It's not likely a He drive based on the power specs. What is ERC, something like the TLER?
 

sedrosken

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Yep, those are the ones.

Apparently ERC is the generic name and TLER is WD's particular implementation of it as I understand it. I'd be more hesitant but this array is for me and myself alone, I keep good backups, and I'm aware of the risks. I personally don't need enterprise-grade hardware because my data isn't enterprise-grade essential. I've got the data restoring to the new array right now.
 

LunarMist

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The Google identifies ERC as Employee Retentions Credit. :LOL:
I guess it is Error Recovery Control.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Does anyone else play piano? Because holy crap this whole thing is 16th notes and look at the mobility on his right pinky finger. And it's written that way.

 

sedrosken

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The funny part is the second kit of RAM I ordered just arrived -- the first one seems to have been lost in the mail so far. Amazon says if it doesn't get here by tomorrow I can get a refund the next day. I kind of hope that happens so I can turn around and get the other kit in the mail in a week or whenever it decides to appear so I can say I got 64GB of (mediocre) RAM for 60 bucks. I'm not bothering with installing either until I have both.

I finally got around to, some five months after getting this copy of Artix set up on my main, trying to actually implement the KVM setup I wanted for a Windows 10 VM so I could run a couple Rockstar games. Instead after three hours of fussing around getting nothing actually working I said "screw it", grew my partitions to eat the space I'd set aside for Windows, and abandoned the idea since the game in particular was 20 bucks on steam on sale and it runs absolutely fine under Proton. (I previously only owned the DVD version. It was a decision that solidly made sense at the time.) You can run outside programs with Proton if you set them up right, in fact I have a script to run BeamMP under the same Proton prefix as my normal copy of BeamNG is installed to through Steam for Steam Play, but it was just way too much work for a Rockstar title I only install because my friends want to dick around online.

That said I'm glad I have some actually decent backup habits now because I'm backing up all my little hack scripts and such so if I need to install a new distro, I can do that. I'm planning to probably move my main to Debian once bookworm releases. Kernel 6.1 is a little bit old for my Arc card, but I can pass a kernel parameter to force-enable the i915 driver for it, and I'm sure it won't take long before 6.2 and 6.3 are in the backports repo, and honestly the big deal is mesa and I'll likely have to build the dev branch for that from source anyway, I have to do it through the AUR here on Artix. (If you didn't know, it's an Arch derivative with focus on init freedom. I don't know why I even cared when I installed it.)

Same deal for Diablo II Resurrected. I'd like to play it but it's too much work to set up for the three hours I'll get out of it before I'm bored. It takes me ten minutes to install it from scratch on one of my older machines and on there, you get EAX and an uncapped framerate and nostalgia.
 
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ddrueding

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Does anyone else play piano? Because holy crap this whole thing is 16th notes and look at the mobility on his right pinky finger. And it's written that way.
That is entirely absurd, and his performance is amazing. While I've managed to develop a taste for single-malt scotch and even the Danish rugbrød, classical music and coffee still elude me. I agree that I am unsophisticated. But I do enjoy the more playful side of piano with Hiromi Uehara probably on the top of that Lizt.

 

Newtun

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He got rhythm, too:


From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatum_(music): "A tatum is a feature of music that has been variously defined as: 'the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase', . . ."

Brilliant ¾-blind dude had a musical term named after him. The shortest distance between two notes.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Art Tatum and Bill Evans are both masters of form. Jazz piano is a whole different world. They're the guys doing what classical pianists do not know in all their world of technique.

classical music

The first thing to say is that you don't have to like all of it. I don't. I don't care for highly structured music from the Baroque or Classical-periods but I love what came after: Romantics, Nationalists, Impressionists, Modernists (Modern is an art style. It does not mean the same thing as "contemporary" at least when discussing art), post-moderns, minimalists and serialists.

As with all matters of taste, find something you like and then explore it. My mom was a piano teacher. Her Great Aunt was a concert pianist. I loved it when my mom would bust out these insane bits of Chopin or Tchaikovsky or Debussy. The first music I ever bought for myself were five $1 cassettes that were classical compilation albums. I got them at a truck stop. I didn't really know what I was buying, but I knew the names of the composers my mother played. I've been following the lines of my discoveries ever since. We're lucky enough to live in a time when massive amounts of music is available on demand. Maybe give some Debussy a go next time you need to concentrate.

It's also useful to understand that some art exists for public consumption and some art exists to challenge other artists. Others create because they feel that they have to. Not everything is meant for everyone (sometimes not ANYONE) to enjoy. No one is listening to Iannis Xenakis to have a good time, and the revelation of Steve Reich's Drumming isn't a breathtaking melody so much as a defiance of human nature. Any art can be up its own ass.

I will also say that classical music is not snooty. The composers and musicians certainly aren't. Audience members can be patrons of the arts and show up in couture, going to be seen because they wrote a six-figure check for the endowment fund. I go in blue jeans and a hoodie and hear the same performance they do.

Here's a playlist I've shared with a few people that includes a lot of music I really like.
 
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