- 15 Posts
- 323 Comments
2·9 days agoGames are a luxury good that need to thread a fine needle.
With roughly fifty years of back catalog to draw from, free engines, and endless other distractors, a $250 game would need to be an epoch-defining masterpiece - or have true AGI baked in - to get my attention.
Then again, I’m not the target demographic: I built my own retro console from office e-waste and play retro games, older AAA and indies.
You’re not wrong… but “othering” people is no way to lift them out of the muck. Causes classic back fire effect. I say present the alternative case clearly and succinctly. If still finger in ears well, wish them luck and go separate ways.
some consumers… maybe even most. Certainly not all.
I’m actually grateful for the enshittification of the main stream. It’s an excellent incentive to carve your own path, in some small way. Hopefully that spills over to other aspects of people’s lives.
“Fuck you, I won’t do what you told me” is a wonderful fuel.
… For everyone one of “us” on this thread, there’s 10,000 that will shrug and conform.
You and I are not the target demographic. Clearly - look at where we’re having this conversation :)
Ipso facto we need to make sure that we support those that support us (Indie devs, FOSS etc). Let Sony do Sony things.
Seems like a bit of a leap, tbh.
As a follow up, I’m curious to hear from lurkers here or those who are thinking about self-hosting (but haven’t started yet); which approach appeals (using the “media at home” example in OP) and why? We’re all pretty much damned souls here but it might be interesting to hear from someone just starting out.
I can dig it…but surely the simple option is to have the PC wake up on power restoration, right?
Set the BIOS to “restore last state after AC loss” and let the UPS do its basic job. If power returns before the battery dies, the PC never shuts down. If the battery does die, the PC loses AC while running, then powers back up when AC returns.
Does that not achieve the same outcome?
I get the idea of Pi + NUT + WoL setup (especially if you want a clean shutdown). It just seems…a lot for a single machine.
(He said, conspicuously hiding the shopping cart of solar panels and marine batteries)
I’m not sure if there’s a fundamental misunderstanding but I felt a need to clarify that NUT works with a UPS. It isn’t either or. Whether you’ve got a homelab or a single desktop PC, you need some piece of software which can see when the UPS goes “Oh shit, power is gone” and instruct the machine(s) to shut down cleanly. NUT is that software.
Could be. In context, the respondent was discussing the use of a raspberry pi - between their UPS and their single Lenovo minipc - as a stand-alone home device. Why? Don’t know.
To my understanding, the sequence is (or should be)
Mains fails -> UPS supplies battery power -> UPS reports its battery state over USB -> software on the PC shuts the OS down.
Using a Pi as a dedicated NUT server makes sense when several machines need the same UPS…for one PC, it seems like an extra machine in the chain (for the sake of an extra machine in the chain).
That’s sort of what I meant: things get overbuilt. Maybe for fun.
always “exactly” the sane thing
Freudian slip? :)
ypu seemed to focus on media streaming in your post.
Only as an exemplar.
Exactly. Which made me wonder why someone would use this for a small machine sitting by their feet, that didn’t serve external anything. Horses for course and all that.
I’m more of the school of thought that sez “Get a sensible Toyota Corolla, maintain it until the heat death of the universe”. :)
My 1988 Corolla lasted until 2022.
1·13 days agoMy main bedroom pc is a stick pc (Intel compute stick; the M5 version). I can run Fallout 3 on it (though it currently runs Linux mint and isn’t set up for gaming)… I’m pretty sure it can handle JF.
I also had a gen 1 or 2 I donated recently - that struggled with basic, lightweight Debian 11 / YouTube playback; hard to say how it would handle JF.
The thing is tho, the compute sticks are x86…and outside of them or rolling your own (via a Pi zero 2W and HDMI case) most of the ready made compute sticks are 1) android 2) of dubious provenance (rebranded Xiaomi etc).
Compute sticks sit in an awkward middle ground - too much grunt for pure media streamer, not quite enough for serious computing. Though I suspect the m5 could actually act as a JF server (assuming no transcode)
But it depends. Which one were you thinking of getting? And are we talking client or server?
PS: my raspberry pi 4, 4B was my main JF server for several years. No transcoding… but quite capable of serving up to 6 or more simultaneous streams (720/1080. 4K it could barely do 1). Something older (like an old Wyse thinclient?) should be able to do same. Last I looked they went for around $40 USD
hat tip
A man of culture.
If Smarttube goes tits up, that was basically my plan.
Archiving wise: the “forbidden resolution” (540p) gets a lot of bang for buck. I think I scoped out something like 3-4yrs of continuous content (playing 3-4hrs a day) would fit in 1TB. It was something stupid like 8,000 x 20 min YouTube vids.
In theory, you could create a seed bank of (say) 500GB of higher quality content, with weekly or monthly scrapes of new stuff with expiry based on views… but that’s how we get into 4AM over a engineering. Again.
I actually wonder sometimes how it’s survived this long.
There are … alternative methods. Fiddly, you have to roll your own, added frustration… but it could be done. Though I hope I never have to.
OTOH, it’s a bit like hydra - cut one head off, three more appear. Until google fully locks down YouTube (and they might), there will always be wiggle room.
Honestly, I think they know that if they get too annoying, everyone will go elsewhere, so they are boiling the frog slowly. I’d bet Smarttube, Revanced, PipePipe etc are the Zion to YouTube’s Matrix - allowed to exist as a pressure release valves.
I work in the medical field. All my it IT skills are self taught, starting way back with coding in BASIC in C64 and taking apart RC cars.
With enough interest and persistence, you can learn what you need to. IT skills are pretty democratic.
Self hosting stuff is a great gateway drug because it introduces…complications. The path between A and B always seems to take detours, which is where the learning happens.
It’s interesting reading people talking about problem X, with everyone confidently advocating solution Y. I often find myself thinking “well, that’s not been my experience. I would just do A”.
It’s good to see how other people solve similar problems. Eventually you’ll arrive at that old homily “the way you do one thing is the way you do everything”, which is useful too.
Ultimately, just… start anywhere. Soon enough something will piss you off enough that you roll up your sleeves and work the problem - don’t look, but you’ll be learning those IT skills IRL without having to crack a textbook.
Well, the clear answer is Smart tube…but I think you might be talking about downloading and integrating into your media stack?
If so…doesn’t Jellyfin have a plugin for TubeArchivist?
Protip:
If you use real-debride, it’s basically a cloud cache. Meaning - after it fetches your stream / you finish watching it, it retains the download for you (30 days?) - or at least the index. So if you pop over to real-debride thereafter, you can download and store what you watched locally right quick.
There are tools that integrate the *arr stack to do just that…if you’re looking to have your cake and eat it.
Heh. That’s my gaming machine. Win 8.1, 2x4 GB sticks, i5-4785T, 2x Xbox 360 controllers, SSD.
I can play retro games, emulation (Wii, Gamecube, PS 2 era), indy’s and PC AAA upto about 2015ish. Boots in under 5 seconds, smooth 60fps @ 720p (which is good enough for me). For a $100 “piece of ewaste”, it goes hard AF.
Keep your GTA 6; Lego City Undercover local co-op is where it is at.