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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I’m all aboard Spotify alternatives, but this post is an echo chamber of people that are far more likely to know “the difference”. We aren’t representative of Spotify’s customer base.

    Most people listening to music probably wouldn’t be able tell the difference from cutting the quality down by double digit percentages. This is exemplified by the number of people using wireless headphones.

    Spotify certainly could offer service on par with Tidal and similar, but being beholden to shareholders that only look at the bottom line and never the quality of the service, that executive might not be right, but they’re not exactly wrong.




  • Ah I completely forgot streaming away from home. My travels tend to have limited internet access, and so my practice is to download things we might watch through Findroid.

    Given your friends have access to your library, what do you think would be required (ideally) for streaming to work without transcoding? As simple as a beefy internet connection, a 4k screen and them having a Shield or equivalent?

    I only ask because I know a number of my circle use Shields already and I think the ones in my neighbourhood are all on gigabit connections. Might be worth looking into so long as I’m not in for upgrading the machine. I’m more of a set and forget person myself.


  • Stepping aside from this particular thread for a moment. Could you share why you need hardware transcoding?

    Admittedly, I don’t quite understand what components would build a better machine as far as a media server goes, but I turned off hardware transcoding when I first set Jellyfin up on a NUC. The only issues I have are the startup speed of the app, and every now and then it crashes when loading the library and I just relaunch it and it’s fine.

    I’ve assumed it’s the Nvidia Shield doing the heavy lifting as far as playback goes, because I’ve never had a recurring problem with playing any particular file. I’m starting to think I don’t really appreciate the benefits of hardware transcoding.


  • Echoing @[email protected], I downloaded the first party app right from the Play Store on my Samsung. Though I prefer the third party, Findroid, the first party app is good for the dashboard management.

    When we launch Jellyfin, we are shown icons for what user, we select the user, and it opens the associated library. Similar to Netflix.

    I started using Jellyfin about two years ago now, and have only encountered a codec issue here and there, but I’ve found it can be worked around by setting playback to another player, like VLC.




  • JoshuaFalken@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world123
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    7 months ago

    Not sure why people are beating up on @[email protected] for saying his opinion. Different people value different things.

    I think I can answer your question though. Buying a console is a plug and play experience. Building a PC is not. Not everyone has the time, the patience, or the technical experience required to purchase compatible components, assemble the machine, and install the various software.

    Anyone that’s ever bought a prepared meal has overpaid in comparison to acquiring the ingredients, prepping them, and cooking the dish. It’s worth the price to do so because I sure as hell don’t want to spend time making a bowl of French onion soup.



  • As someone that tries to condense posts and comments, I have ‘Show action bar by default for comments’ disabled. Now, as score location has been altered, I’m not able to see comment score. More problematic is there’s no longer an indication of whether I have already voted on a comment or not.

    In order to get this information now, I either must enable the action bar for every comment which fills a lot of the screen with buttons that I don’t need, or press and hold the comment to expand the action bar manually. This is a reduction in displayed information that doesn’t seem proportional to the benefit of a ‘cleaner’ style.

    At the very least, I’d think the score should be put back next to the commenter’s name when the action bar is disabled.

    Comments with the action bar disabled:

    Comments with the action bar enabled:


  • I wrote elsewhere about the infrastructure problem, but I’ll sum up a couple things. There’s around 200,000 gas stations in the United States. If there were an equivalent number of chargers around, having a small battery would be fine. Eventually this will be the case, but you highlight an important factor: closed ecosystems. All these chargers should work for any make of EV car.

    As it stands with now, the need for a subscription or specific car or unique payment method is ludicrous. All these chargers should be required to have card readers the same way you can pay at the pump in a gas station. Beyond this, they’d all need to adopt the same charging method so people don’t need a bunch of adapters in their trunk.

    That said, there could be regulations established to require newly built housing, apartment buildings included, to have electric vehicle charging infrastructure - and more than just a few plugs. Grants could be made available for retrofitting existing buildings. If these things came to fruition, we wouldn’t need two hundred thousand charging stations all over the place. It’s not out of the question to install an overnight charging spot for every person that has an electric car - it just costs money.

    Basically every argument I’ve seen against low range electric cars is founded in a charging infrastructure problem. Going to a bigger battery in a larger vehicle has significant and more costly ramifications on other infrastructure. It’s better to aim for smaller, lighter vehicles with infrastructure in mind.



  • The used market is different for EVs than a combustion vehicle. I looked for a BMW i3 a while back and was only finding them halfway across the continent. Maybe that’s because people keep them for longer? Not sure that market has developed enough to know one way or another.

    I understand what you mean about the average person getting it, and while that is important, I think the primary issue is the limited selection of small EVs on the market. As you point out, if foreign vehicles could be acquired without the steep cost, more people would drive them. As it stands, domestic automakers don’t want to make anything but twenty foot long SUVs because of the huge profit margins on them.

    As far as ebikes go, I am definitely on that boat. Don’t have one myself - call me a traditionalist - but I wish more people would consider them. I agree that in higher temperatures, or humidity which I find worse, it’s uncomfortable. Though the benefit of (maybe idealistically) not having a car payment and associated insurance go a long way to making that discomfort palatable.

    Personally, I’ve got a trailer for my bike that I’ve been using to ride 10-15 minutes to the grocery stores and do errands. A time or two I have even gotten some lumber with it from the hardware store. I thought about a specific cargo bike a while back but decided not to have an entire bicycle for that sort of thing. The trailer is smaller anyway.

    The safety factor of riding opposed to driving is the most important factor in my mind. It’s dangerous to ride along the side of a multi lane road. Paint doesn’t stop drivers from crossing into a ‘bike lane’. Even a curb or those plastic bollards are insufficient in my mind. I ride nearly primarily on trails or the type of streets that are small enough not to have any painted lines. For busier routes I use the sidewalk or even the boulevard if there is one.

    The more people getting on the ebike wagon could cause better riding options to be developed in the area. That’s political though. Even if it doesn’t, it’s one more person taking a trip not in a car, making it a tiny bit safer.


  • Don’t get me wrong, obviously people like yourself make these long ish trips regularly and you’d benefit either from more range or better infrastructure. If, like gas stations, there were two hundred thousand charging stations sprinkled through the country, less range in the car would be less of a concern.

    I know someone from my college days that hung a 100’ cord out her third story window to plug in her little EV. Nissan Leaf or something of that class. Worked like a charm for puttering around town.

    I’m sure the data isn’t perfect, but as far as the averages go, it’s accurate for my driving patterns. Those trips you’re taking nearly double your yearly mileage, so that would certainly change your average. Without them though, you wouldn’t be too far off based on what you’ve described. I’m fortunate that I live near a train line for my regular trips out of town. Not an option for the vast majority unfortunately.

    Another option a couple I know took was a hybrid. Most of the time they don’t use the engine, but when they go see family or what have you, they’ve got the range they need without having to find a charger. Pretty convenient if you ask me.

    Eventually we’ll have charging stations all over, or maybe light rail, and going hundreds of miles in a day without a thought to battery depletion, but I doubt I’ll be around to see it.