tomkatt 11h ago • 100%
You should always have enough supplies for a short term emergency. That’s not doomsday prepping, it’s just common sense.
I’m not a prepper IMO, but I have rooftop solar with battery backup, a few smaller portable batteries and UPSes on my critical stuff, and some oil filled radiators since my heat pump isn’t connected to the solar setup.
At any given time we generally have a month or more worth of food in the house in frozen and dry/canned goods. Also, several gallons of bottled water.
I also keep some stuff under the back bed of my car’s hatch, first aid kit and emergency blanket, and battery jumper kit as well as a battery powered tire inflator.
I live in a semi-rural area, and in an emergency, getting out and/or getting food and necessities may not be possible. And if there’s a wildfire I may need to evacuate fast, so important to have what’s needed. This sort of thing is like… If you have the means, why wouldn’t you?
tomkatt 3d ago • 100%
No prob. Extra tip, the router has support for guest networks. If you want to be hardcore about it, put it on a guest network where it literally can't see any of your other devices (bear in mind, this will make the automation stuff I mentioned not viable, but I'm sure most people don't care about that).
tomkatt 4d ago • 100%
Can confirm, I no longer get network or ad pop ups on my LG C1.
tomkatt 4d ago • 100%
If you have a modern router you can block WAN connections while allowing LAN connections. This is what I do and it doesn’t give me crap (and bonus, I can interface with it still with home assistant for automations).
My router is an ASUS AX5700, if it matters.
tomkatt 4d ago • 100%
I just have my LG C1 locked down to LAN only connection, in my router settings put it on house arrest. 😂
That way it doesn’t whine about no connection and wardrive for open connections. No ads, no crap, and just works without being able to phone home.
Next “TV” Will definitely be a short throw projector or commercial display (which is the codeword for “dumb”) TV today.
tomkatt 5d ago • 100%
Not a specific song, but a band: Hail the Sun
tomkatt 5d ago • 100%
tomkatt 1w ago • 100%
You can use ntfsfix on the drive to do a check and remove dirty bit. This isn’t a full check though, and could mask or hide actual issues with the drive if it’s failing.
There’s also chkntfs which is more robust but I’m not sure if that’s open source and I’m not familiar with it.
Using ntfsfix is a good quick fix in my experience, but at the end of the day, NTFS is a Microsoft exclusive format and shared disks should be mounted in a format that both OSes can use, like exFAT, or Btrfs with the WinBtrfs driver (the latter I’m not familiar with, I’ve always used exFAT for shared disks, but I don’t use Windows anymore).
tomkatt 2w ago • 100%
The other person said to never connect to wifi, but I'd say either put it on an isolated wifi (guest network) and lock it down to LAN-only access in your router, if at all possible.
The reason being that these devices are aggressive about getting a wifi signal, and even if they can't connect to yours, they'll apparently search for unprotected wifi networks and connect to those to send data and phone home. Locking it down to LAN only prevents this, and isolating to a guest network means no information about other devices on your network.
It's utterly insane we have to do this stuff. If you're willing to spend more, there are commercial signage displays you can buy that are essentially dumb TVs, and that is pretty much the only way to get a dumb TV today (and obviously, don't expect smart features from it).
tomkatt 2w ago • 90%
McLarens are awesome cars, don't let this guy ruin that. Besides, did you see that paint job? He just put the car out of its misery.
Glad the cameraman was okay; this guy shouldn't be behind the wheel of anything.
tomkatt 2w ago • 100%
Well, yeah. For fucking emphasis. "Absolute" would have worked as well.
tomkatt 2w ago • 100%
I've ditched all of them except the Disney/Hulu bundle, and that's only because Amex gives me back $7 a month of the cost.
Amazon Prime used to be okay as a Prime customer, but now you can't watch a 24 minute show without seeing like five ads. I tried to watch an episode of Invincible and there were two ads before the show even started, two in the middle of the show, and one at the end. It's freaking insane.
I barely even watch video these days, I get way more mileage out of a good music service like Qobuz or Tidal.
tomkatt 2w ago • 100%
Context and tone matters.
"Hey, I figured out a way to cut our EC2 needs and scaled down, saving us a ton of money." "You genius!"
vs.
"Ummm.... I accidentally left half a dozen m8g.16xlarge nodes running... for the last four months." "You... fucking genius."
tomkatt 3w ago • 100%
And it’s not a dementia thing, it’s an adhd+generalized anxiety thing. Piece of mind is pretty valuable to me and mine.
That's a fair take. I dunno, the potential security vulnerabilities outweigh any possible gains for me with most IOT devices, and I feel smart appliances are just more complicated to fix and more easily break down. Plus, the last thing I need is my washer to brick or my fridge to stop working from a botched firmware update.
tomkatt 3w ago • 100%
With a wifi fridge for example I can know if it stops working and the temp starts rising before I have a fridge full of spoiled food.
You don't need a wifi fridge for this. My wife and I manage this via Home Assistant and cheap Switchbot sensors. Fully self contained on my network, nothing to phone home anywhere.
The rest of the things you listed are kind of silly. If you left the oven on, that sucks, but you're already gone. Also, who sets the oven on before leaving the house? That's just an odd... like, really odd thing to do. Like, senility/dementia level odd, at which point what difference is a notification? And the dryer thing... well, that's nothing a 15 minute wrinkle cycle doesn't already solve on a dumb dryer.
tomkatt 3w ago • 100%
It depends. I’m not saying I never pirate books. I’m not going to just support a publisher milking a book that should belong to the commons.
Also, some publishers have taken to raising ebook prices to as high or higher than hardback costs. For those I might buy one book by an author and pirate another. I won’t justify it other than to say I only ever bought paperbacks anyway and still remember those being like $3.99 to $6.99, so I’m not paying $18+ for an ebook novel because of publisher greed.
But if it’s an author I like, I buy their books, and support them in other ways (like with Sanderson’s Kickstarter for example).
tomkatt 3w ago • 97%
Nah, no need to be a shitheel. I'm cool with paying for books, authors gotta eat. I wouldn't refund a book I've read.
tomkatt 3w ago • 100%
MOBI has been deprecated for a long time. Standard formats now are AZW3 (KF8) and KFX. They're a bit more advanced than MOBI, and thank goodness, since it was a terrible format. AZW3 is essentially a MOBI/EPUB container, and I believe KFX is equivalent to EPUB2, possibly with some EPUB3 features.
tomkatt 3w ago • 100%
Takes a small effort to set up (install Calibre, install NoDRM plugin, apply Kindle serial to plugin), but once it's done, the rest is literally drag and drop, it removes DRM from your books automagically.
New house, was built/finished just under two years ago. I live in a dry climate, have been in my house for two years and only now discovered this. After some recent storms led to water in my window track I found my rear sliding windows have weep holes in the bottom, but they weren't draining. After a lot of testing (filling the track with water, shop vac'ing it out, blower testing with air gun, suction with vacuum, etc.) I realized the weep holes in the interior of the window track and the weep holes on the exterior have no connection whatsoever. No water goes from inside to outside, and air blowing through exterior hole is felt through other exterior, and likewise with the interior, but nothing is going from interior to exterior. Water in the inside track will drain until the portion underneath fills and then pools up, and likewise, if I spray water in the exterior weep holes, nothing gets to the inside track, but it eventually comes out the exterior weep hole on the other side. After some research, I found it's not uncommon for this to happen, it's a common defect with these sort of windows and I just drilled into the exterior weep hole with a 1/8 bit until it met the interior channel and sure enough, the water drains out as expected now. Put the window track back in, window back on, and tested pouring water in the track, it's draining perfectly now. ----- My only questions are, do I have anything to be concerned about with this DIY fix? Since the climate here is normally very dry (high desert, Colorado) and moisture evaporates quickly, I'm not worried about mold, but is there anything to keep bugs from getting in through the weep holes? They're not covered in any way. Also, will there be any winter concerns with the cold in sub-zero temperatures or snow/ice build up? Apologies if these are dumb questions, but I'd literally never heard of weep holes until this week, with discovering the issue. So not sure what potential issues they might have, and honestly no way to know if I fixed this as intended.
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Really interesting sh'mup and great soundtrack. I especially like the stage 1 and stage 6 themes. It's amazing what the PC-Engine was capable of with the CD add-on. Sadly, I'm terrible at it, and have never actually been able to play past stage 3, so good thing the first stage is such a banger. 😅
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Fantastic game. I love the high energy beat here.
The current build of Jelos updated the libSDL from v2600.5 to 2800.1 and it broke a few ports. In particular the ones I know of are Panzer Paladin and TMNT: Shredder's Revenge. Both are fixed with the instructions below. I saw in some threads people asking about it so here's the fix: ----- You'll need a copy of the 7/26 JELOS build or before from the github releases page and copy out the libSDL files from `/usr/lib`. To do this, you'll need to download the tar archive, then use something like 7zip to extract the `SYSTEM` file to a folder. Copy off all the the `libSDL2` related files that have a file size (ignore the ones that list as 0kb in size, those are symlinks). All told there are something like six files you need, the 2.0.so.02600.5 file, the ttf file, the image file, gfx file, and mixer. You need to rename the filesaccording to the SDL2-CD.dll.config set in the game folder at `/storage/roms/ports//dlls/` **If you prefer, I already have all the correct files and renamed as needed. You can download them in zipped format [here](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1075906301705601044/1134752874111455312/libs.zip).** ------ Once you have the correct files, correctly named, copy them into /storage/roms/ports//libs/ **Lastly, edit the game's .sh file in /storage/roms/ports/ to add the following lines:** # # # export path for local libSDL export LD_PRELOAD=$gamedir/libs/libSDL2.so.0 Add that to the script on its own line. I put it at line 29, after the `"Loading... Please Wait."` echo output line. Anywhere after the `get_controls` line should be fine. If you mess up the file, or run into problems, the full file should look like [this one](https://pastebin.com/VYYnGs60). From there, save it and run the game. And that should be it. If you gather the files yourself instead of using the ones from the ZIP I linked and the game loads sideways (in portrait), get the libSDL2-2.0.so.0.2600.5 from the SYSTEM folder in the `/usr/lib/SDL2-rotated` path instead of `/usr/lib`, and copy it to your game's lib directory on the handheld, and rename it to libSDL2-2.0.so.0 to fix.
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This is the Japanese version of *Simple & Clean*, the opening song for Kingdom Hearts. Great song, been a fan of Hikki's music for over two decades now.
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Sorry for double post the same song technically, but I love this version and Tiffany Mann's vocals are great.
I noticed that darker games on my x55 didn’t look good, like dark tones and blacks were almost inverted looking at stock settings. After a bit of tweaking, setting gamma from default (50%) to 67% got everything looking good. After checking out a few YouTube videos it seems the gamma level on the display varies between units. I’ve seen it look good on default in some and even up to 100% on one video. Play with the setting and dial it in to what looks best for you. If it helps I’m currently using: * brightness 68% * gamma 67% * contrast 52% * saturation 60%
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Great soundtrack. This one's the battle theme from Ikenfell. Also great game. The artwork is gorgeous (it was styled to look like a scaled up GBA game) and the combat system kind of feels like a mashup of Super Mario RPG and Mega Man Battle Network what with the tile system and timed attack bonuses.
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Technically not game music, but nerdcore based on a game. Does this count? 😅 Terrible game from what I've heard (I haven't played it), but inspired a great song IMO. Mods, feel free to remove if this doesn't fit the theme of the community.
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This is one of my favorite games of all time, and this song in particular always leaves me feeling interesting emotions. I love how it starts out sounding tense with the drums and staccato strings before bursting into the main melody, feels so uplifting. Soaring indeed.
e.g. - I tried to pull up https://lemmy.world/c/news, assuming searching communities for "news" would bring it up, but it doesn't show in the community list, even though other local communities like "sportsnews" do. Does the search not work as expected currently?
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This whole soundtrack is a banger, but I especially love this one. Those strings around the 1:20 mark.. just... 🤌 so good. Seriously too, if you haven't played this game, do it. It's basically Ace Combat but with much of the Ace Combat jank and anime removed.
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Probably not a popular game being a licensed title, but I've always enjoyed it, and the first stage track is a jam. This one's by Iku Mizutani; absolute legend who also composed for incredible NES titles like Shatterhand and Shadow of the Ninja (they're also ridiculously good).
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This whole OST is outstanding. Dale North is just fantastic. Shuu's Spire in particular is great, it's my favorite track on the album.
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On the Gweeen!!!
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One of the only tracks on this OST that I like much more than the Japanese version. The VRC6 chip was pretty cool, but this track was a bit overdone in the original game.