Hardware Jimmycrackcrack • 3 days ago • 86%

I recently bought an external PCIe enclosure so I could make use of a specific PCIe device in an editing setup. One of the nice things about this particular enclosure is that it also happens to come with an m.2 slot for NVME drives as well. Usually when I edit with my home set up, I'm provided with the storage by the client, and even if not, at the very least, video media, plus backups takes up a lot of room and NVME drives are expensive so I'd usually opt for something cheaper as the actual location for the footage and assets. I figured then that it might be take advantage of an NVME drive of a smaller, more affordable capacity and use it just as a location for video render cache that I just clear after every project wraps. The high speeds of these drives seems like it would be a good fit for this purpose. However I've heard that SSDs, including NVME are famously short lived and have particularly short life spans in terms of number of write operations. Is that still the case and would the constant writing and clearing of relatively small video files actually be kind of the worst use of one of these drives?

Hardware Jimmycrackcrack • 4 weeks ago • 91%

My understanding between TB4 and TB3 is that they're essentially the same, it's just that the standard of TB4 essentially mandates that the device *must* do all that TB3 maybe *could* do. Minimum bandwidth is increased and I think I read something about power delivery minimums as well. This eGPU chassis I bought came with it's own TB4 cable, which is actually the first Thunderbolt cable I've seen that specifically says "4" on it. I assume the reason they supplied this is because, given what it does, an eGPU chassis is going to need to support some pretty bandwidth for a GPU. In my case though, I'm actually using this chassis not for a balls to the wall kick ass Graphics card, but actually to allow me to attach an old and very humble i/o card from Blackmagic. It's currently working just fine for that purpose. Thing is, the supplied TB4 cable is pretty short and the chassis along with the ATX power supply mounted on it makes for a pretty hefty desk-space consuming setup. I'd like to move the whole setup somewhere fairly far off from the laptop to save me some precious desk space. I looked up 2m thunderbolt 4 cables which I understand is the longest distance you can get for TB4 and still maintain bandwidth and while it's not too bad, the prices are high for a cable. It occurs to me though that since I'm barely using a fraction of the available bandwidth anyway, could I use other, cheaper, long cables. USB4 comes up a lot in my search for 2m TB4 cables for example. (although they are mostly from AliExpress so don't know how good an idea it is to buy from them). If the chassis has TB4 controllers in it, as does the laptop to which it's attached, can one just put a USB4 cable between them? Are they physically different? For that matter, since my bandwidth needs are so tiny, could I just find cheaper, longer TB3 cables?

Hardware Jimmycrackcrack • 4 weeks ago • 100%

I don't know my terminology very well. I just bought this eGPU enclosure. It also comes with an m.2 slot I suspect that's probably what this 4 pin power slot is for. I have a spare ATX PSU to power this thing with and it's not modular, the cables come out of the PSU box in a big messy bundle and there's no where to detach or attach cables. There's lots of different connectors that come out of this bundle but alas no square arrangement of 2 rows of 2 pins as needed by this chassis. There are however 2 such connectors that are kind of joined together through a little plastic catch, but in a manner where you can slide them apart. It's clearly intended that you can be *able* to separate these if you want to, but them being attached to each other in the first place has me a little worried. The cable from which they each branch has TKG written on it and each of the connectors has L and R printed on it respectively. If I separate them, I can definitely fit one in to the slot, but is there any reason one shouldn't do this? UPDATE: It works!! Initially the chassis wouldn't power on but I discovered that if I simply don't plug in the 4 pin slot at all then it does. I'm pretty sure that slot is for powering an m.2 drive if you have one and that was one of the things that made me decide to buy this particular chassis so it doesn't look great but I'm hoping that if I actually had an m.2 drive to test it with, that plugging in that PSU connector to the 4 pin slot would work, but at the moment, when there is no such drive connected, the entire chassis doesn't power on. Even better still, the blackmagic card works!! This is great because the manufacturer actually responded to my email asking if it would work too late and I had already ordered it and they said it wouldn't work so the fact that it does is a big relief. Word of advice for anyone testing this with standard computer monitors instead of proper reference monitors like me, it might say "out of range" or similar on your monitor for a lot of standard video frame rates, but for testing purposes, I was able to get it to work at 60p. No good for a real project, but hopefully with a real reference monitor that wouldn't be an issue.

EV Community Jimmycrackcrack • 4 weeks ago • 100%

Asking on another's behalf. I don't want to give too many details including the car make and model. This person's new car has the ability for you to 'start' it and also 'turn off' when you finish the journey. It's confusing what the turn off really means. It keeps lights on for some time after you disembark the vehicle whether you want it to or not, and if you open a door it turns on the instrument cluster screen to display a diagram of the car with a door being opened. You can also turn on the infotainment screen and access some but not all options. The manual has some warning about not plugging things in when the car is off as it could drain the battery. Is there some physical state the high voltage battery is in when the car is 'started' that's different to the state it's in when it's 'off'? Does it have some effect on wear when the battery cycles between those states too often? This issue came up when they were thinking of buying a dash cam. The dashcam was designed mainly for ICE vehicles and has a feature called 'park mode' where the camera can be in a kind of standby off state while a vehicle is parked and the car engine is off, but can switch itself on if it detects some kind of movement or impact like if someone drives into your parked car. The dashcam website has some warning saying that for EVs, you should buy a separate battery pack for it because this 'parked mode' doesn't work if the dashcam is installed hard wired in to an EV. This is confusing because the 12v battery should always be accessible regardless of the car's "on/off" state and I would have thought worked just like it does in an ICE car, whereby the camera continues to draw some small amount of power to power the standby mode and allows the maximum power draw the camera could need if the camera is triggered by an impact. In ICE cars, this usually only works when something is hardwired because somehow the cigarette lighter outlet doesn't work without the engine running, (I guess by design so you don't drain the battery with accessories and can't start?) but it sounds like from the manual in this EV it continues to work whether the battery is considered "on" or "off" but *conversely* somehow if you hardwire an accessory to it *doesn't*?? It's unclear as well whether that means the dashcam's park mode would work if you plug it in to the cigarette lighter outlet of the EV rather than hardwiring, or if it just doesn't work in EVs no matter what you do and requires its own battery, which seems unlikely but is not spelled out anywhere.

Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System Jimmycrackcrack • 4 weeks ago • 84%

I have sequential downloads enabled on my torrent client, I have a download speed that is fast enough that the ETA for the full download of the media is shorter than the duration of the media itself, and I can watch it in IINA or VLC, but, unfortunately Jellyfin doesn't recognise any new media in my designated library folders until a decent amount of time AFTER the entire file is downloaded and has it's correct extension. Is there some way to watch as one downloads using Jellyfin?

Hardware Jimmycrackcrack • 4 weeks ago • 91%

I occasionally do some paid editing work in my home suite. I use a MBP and I just use whatever storage I have left on external drives or buy new ones as the project budget permits. Most of the time, my work is done on-site using a production company's facilities so it's not a big time operation here at home. I also like to download and watch video over my wifi to to TV or my phone in other rooms of the house (don't typically move the laptop much). I tend to use the laptop's internal drive for that. I'm beginning to outgrow my storage for both purposes, but only just. I could continue as I am for quite some time, deleting media at home after I watch it, and buying physically fairly small drives to put away in cupboards for work. However, I'm thinking I could fix both storage needs for a very long time by spending a bit bigger (but not *MUCH*), and getting a proper RAID. My mind immediately went to NAS, but it occurs to me that, that mightn't necessarily be the most cost effective or efficient way to go given the limited scope of my needs. My home network is very slow consumer equipment, and I have no ethernet infrastructure at all. I thought I could maybe just hook the NAS up to the laptop via ethernet but then at that point, isn't that just DAS with the extra complications of networking? Would I need a switch between the 2? My home streaming is just done over wifi, since everything is compressed media anyway. If I buy a decent thunderbolt DAS RAID and expose it to the wifi network via the laptop, would the costs stack up in terms of power consumption and wear and tear of the expensive lappy (given it'd be powered on nearly constantly)? Are there NAS devices that I can directly attach to the lappy for editing, but leave on and connected to wifi for home streaming? Would it need any additional networking equipment in that use case? Can I run jellyfin on it? I feel like a NAS doesn't make sense but would like help puzzling this out.

Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System Jimmycrackcrack • 1 month ago • 100%

Excuse the basic questions but I'm not having much luck web searching for answers. I have the server running on my laptop which is also where the content itself if and I have an android phone with the mobile client installed via f-droid. I can't seem to cast to chromecast with Jellyfin from either the laptop itself, or the android client app. The client app lists streaming to chromecast specifically as one of it's features in the description on f-droid.

Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System Jimmycrackcrack • 1 month ago • 100%

Just trying out Jellyfin for the first time. I'm also just trying out media server software for the first time, having downloaded Emby 2 weeks ago so forgive if I'm misunderstanding some fundamental concepts. I have a series on my hard drive that has been incorrectly identified as something else, the Title is wrong, the posters are wrong, the casting information is wrong and I'd hazard a guess the subs are probably wrong too. That's fine, Emby actually got this particular series wrong as well. The difference here though, is I can't figure out what to do about it. I've seen lots of forum posts saying you can enter an imdb ID number but this is a problem because that only seems to be possible for individual episodes, not the whole series, and in any case, it doesn't appear to DO anything when I apply to any one given episode. More frustrating still, each episode in the series has somehow taken the name of the series as its episode name so they all have the same name and you can't tell which episode is which. How do I remove the incorrect identificaiton and replace it with a manually selected correct ID? Also, importantly, will supplying a correct IMDB number or whatever else it is I need to do to correct this misidentification, cause the correct subs to be downloaded?

I've often thought it would helpful if the thing I was cooking on was close to as wide as the oven itself. In Australia ovens are usually 60x90cm. I often see and use American recipes because they're so common on the English speaking web and they quite often refer to sheet pans or baking sheets, which seem not to be a very common thing here. They look bigger than the types of things I can commonly buy here, which tend to be cookie pans that are really small. I used to think those American baking sheets were literally as big as the oven and slid in as racks but on further research it seems they're not actually *that* big and also need to sit on racks themselves and aren't as wide as the typical American home ovens. I guess my theoretical baking rack would need it's rims to be less wide than the distance between rack grooves otherwise the food would touch the oven walls and baked goods that rise would might rise up to those grooves which would be no good either, but still that should only be a few cm. I actually *sort of* already have what I want as it came with the oven. It's a rack, that's not a wire and is a solid continuous sheet of metal that slides in to rack positions. The problem is, it always produced weird results when baking and seems to burn the bottoms of cookies and also has a large shallow ramp at the front that messes up what you can put on it. I read my oven instructions and discovered you're not actually supposed to cook on this thing and it's for catching drips. That's super weird to me since on occasion it's been used for this purpose accidentally and it's singularly unsuited to the task as any drips immediately bake right on to it and are impossible to remove and produce lots of smoke on the next use of the oven. I guess it's sort of better than nothing since I can theoretically clean that off when I take the rack out to clean it as opposed to the oven floor, but it's only marginally better since the effect of the baked on drippings is so thorough that it's near impossible to scrub off. Anyway, point is, while it's for whatever reason unsuited to the task presumably because of whatever it's made of and it's slightly odd shape, it's proof in my mind that the concept makes sense and can be done, and yet I can't find anything designed for this. You can buy additional wire style racks, but seemingly not continuous metals sheets of appropriate size to fit in to the rack grooves.

I have been trying in vain to do this in both automator and shortcuts. The trouble seems to be happening right at the very start. I can't seem to figure out how to get selected files from finder to be passed as input to a shell script running exiftool. I actually thought this might be a good thing for me to test using chatGPT for as it's meant to be good at this type of thing and while I assume the shell scripts it was generating were probably good, it couldn't seem to get me passed this basic first step. I've tried making the shortcut a quick action, which by default adds the 'receive' action to the shortcut, but somehow it seems to be impossible to get the output from that to be the input for the shell script, nothing works. This was tested with a few debugging steps to log the output and it definitely looks like that first step is where things are going wrong. I really don't get it. This was way harder than I expected.

Hardware Jimmycrackcrack • 1 month ago • 100%

I wouldn't want to find out the hard way. I have a BMD decklink 4k mini monitor PCIe card. I used to use it in a PC, but I upgraded to a laptop. To replace with an external input device is too expensive unless I downgrade capability significantly. PCIe chassis are more expensive than expected but I've noticed ones that specifically call themselves 'eGPU enclosures'. For some reason when they're marketed to that specific purpose, they cost a lot less, probably because they often don't come with power supplies (which I actually have spare). I'm looking at 2 such eGPU enclosures and they are a decent price and I think they should work, but I'm a little scared by them specifically saying "eGPU". Would I likely have any problems buying one of those for my PCIe device rather than for a graphics card? Or is PCIe, PCIe regardless?

I'm trying to avoid having to throw away my decklink mini monitor 4k that I used in my old PC build. It's a PCIe gen 2 4-lane card. To replace this card with something new of similar function that uses external ports, I have to either buy something quite a bit worse in terms of function for a little bit more than my current PCIe version currently costs, or something equivalent in function for way, way more than the 4k decklink costs. I figured best bet would be to just get a PCIe enclosure to keep using my old card with the new laptop but the costs of those enclosures are STAGGERING, just unbelievably high. The cheapest I could find is 2nd hand and so old it uses TB2 ports. I thought that *might* be okay with thunderbolt adaptors for modern connectors but it occurs to me that Apple Silicon driver support could be an issue. Any idea if it would even work?

EV Community Jimmycrackcrack • 2 months ago • 66%

Trying to wrap my head around OCPP and what it would mean to me personally if I had an EV and bought a wall charger for it. My understanding is that it would be mostly irrelevant for my needs. It could theoretically be helpful if trying to integrate it in to a Solar Energy system but otherwise for a home consumer I don't totally understand what the benefit might be. One mentioned benefit is that if you use software with your charger to control certain functions and that software provider goes bust, you won't be left high and dry. Initially I interpreted 'software' to mean the app for a smartphone for controlling the charger for things like scheduled charging, or setting a maximum charge or maybe setting different power levels of charge. If the company that sold me the inverter and by extension provided the app, went out of business, that would be bad in terms of the app eventually becoming obsolete and that seemingly would make the idea of OCPP compliant wallboxes attractive, however I've never heard of generic *charging* apps for consumers that will use OCPP to control a wallbox for basic functions like I describe. It sounds like the 'software' being referred to is for more advanced use cases like for example, integrating with a solar energy system or maybe a business running multiple charger points and wanting automated billing from various chargers of various brands. Would the charger being OCPP compliant actually help an average person in the event that the charger company goes out of business and the app becomes obsolete or unobtainable from mainstream app stores?

Android Jimmycrackcrack • 4 months ago • 97%

When I want to find an app I haven't pinned to the home screen I swipe up from the bottom of the home screen to bring up a search bar where I can search for an app by name or scroll through list of all apps on the phone. Thing is the search bar on my new pixel phone is actually a Google search bar that will search apps locally at the same time as providing web results, especially if it can't find the app by name. It's a nice idea in theory but in practice I find it annoying, especially if I've just made a typo. Also, I'm just never going to use this search bar for web searching anyway because for that I would want my chosen browser so the web results are of no use to me. I actually remember my old phone used to do what I wanted it to do, then one day it switched to what my new phone currently does and after a long time I found the solution to return it back to it's previous behaviour except now I've forgotten what I did. I only want to search my phone's local storage for apps matching my keyword when I access the app drawer. How do I get rid of this Google search bar? (I'd love to get rid of the Google search bar from the home screen itself as well but I understand I can't do that without root on stock android.

Ask Lemmy Jimmycrackcrack • 4 months ago • 94%

It's strange but listening again to music from about 20 years ago, during a time when I was mostly sad and depressed, and where the musical choices reflected that, gives me a weird sense of nostalgia and longing for that time. I know it's not unusual for music to do that, that's just run of the mill, it's just odd that, it has me longing for a time and associated mood that, on the whole, I kind of didn't really enjoy very much. The angsty tracks were what I listened to because I was so bummed out and dissatisfied.

I guess it shouldn't bother me, after all I try my best to avoid watching anything on youtube that I didn't go there to watch in the first place but nevertheless, it's hard not to see the clickbaity thumbnails for suggested videos to the right of the one I'm watching, and also, when I'm researching something it's undeniable that sometimes it genuinely was actually useful to have another video on the topic suggested that was relevant. But this has really started to freak me out, Youtube has gone bananas recently. I'm constantly getting suggestions decrying woke this or woke that, in particular a lot of videos of compilations of police bodycam footage with titles about various people being 'idiots' or 'entitled' or various other terms suggesting a strong pro-authority angle. Those suggestions were annoying but it's starting to get disturbing now because they're veering strongly towards incel themes. Today I've seen suggestions for: a video about catching a woman faking a rape accusation *'caught on camera'*, another about a 'high value' man winning in court against a woman wanting him to pay reparations because she refused a DNA test, another about why men don't approach women anymore, and on and on. They stick in my mind because I can see exactly the the world view this constellation of fucking garbage is catering to. On the one hand, I guess I could take some comfort in the fact that if the algorithms have gotten it this far wrong then maybe Google really didn't manage to snag so much data about me as I assumed but on the other, it's definitely used something it reckons it knows about me to make these assumptions. I can't for the life of me figure out where the fuck it got the idea I would like this or why it's so persistent despite the lack of positive reinforcement. I am not signed in, so I can't even attempt to manually give negative feedback and as far as I can tell people who do that say it doesn't work anyway. This all seems to have coincided with a dramatic change in recent viewing habits, so I'm guessing that's what has triggered this, but it's still weird as fuck that there's apparently some overlap here. I've been in the market for a new phone and so have been watching a lot of videos about various phones and I was also considering a pixel as one of the options because if I went with that, I could use GrapheneOS. This has meant watching a lot of content content on GrapheneOS as well. This does seem to have had the expected effect of a lot of suggestions along those lines but it's definitely coincided with the fucking alt-right starter kit. This is certainly a counterintuitive link. Shit makes me want to puke. Normally when I see these kinds of surveillance economy mechanisms at work I just look at them with a detached kind of wry amusement at the shitty state of things but this actually really did offend me, I mean yuck, makes my fucking skin crawl.

Android Jimmycrackcrack • 4 months ago • 95%

Back in 2007-ish I told my Mum all about how you could jailbreak iphones and unlock them to make the phone with other carriers. I helped alleviate any concerns by convincing her and myself that if there are any problems after the procedure, nothing physically has been changed on the phone and as long as I made a backup first, we could always switch back. I jailbroke the iphone 3g she had and it didn't take long before she began to notice a lot of problems, it got hot all the time, the battery drained way fast and animations were juddery and slow and sometimes apps crashed. I restored the backedup image of the phone from before thinking I'd fix everything, but although it improved the situation somewhat, the heat and battery dissipation remained permanent and the phone became useless. Ever since then I've been pretty scared of doing anything of that nature to any phone. I really want to install Graphene OS on a pixel phone but... well, I also want to be sure I can go back if I change my mind, especially as the phone is expensive. Any risks associated with doing this? Is there any way to screw it up so bad that you permanently brick the phone? If the USB cable breaks or gets yanked in the middle of it or something like that can I always get back to square 1? Is there any known way for things done in the installation of Graphene OS to somehow survive having stock android flashed on to it?

Matrix Jimmycrackcrack • 4 months ago • 84%

I haven't really used any kind of messenger service since probably MSN Messenger and IRC back in the day so I'm a bit behind on a lot of the basics. Part of what's quite different now than the experience then is what modern messenger protocols seem to be used *for*, as in they have public channels dedicated to topics that function like communities, whereas I only really had experience using them for talking to people I personally knew IRL and manually adding some kind of username to establish talking. I just got a matrix client and joined a community on a specific interest because I had a question I wanted to ask. I did something similar about a year ago on Discord. This worked.... sorta but the problem I had doing this on Discord is kind of what I think I'm going to run in to on Matrix. If the community is open to the public, there's going to be a lot of people some of whom will log on at different times. If I post a message asking a question hoping someone will have an answer for me, I feel like it's going to be hard to see anybody replying to me specifically because presumably there's going to be lots of people talking to each other on various topics including those with their own questions. The messages just come in a stream, much like you'd expect of something designed around chat but like, if I get up to make coffee and miss someone's reply to me, how would I ever find it. Or conversely if my question is not immediately answered but someone joins the room later that could have answered it, how would they see it? If I make a post here on Lemmy, it's open and around for anyone to answer it for some time. Theoretically it's around forever but in reality it's more like however long it shows up on people's feeds but either way it'll be longer than a few minutes or seconds.

Android Jimmycrackcrack • 5 months ago • 90%

You'd think this would be easier than it seems to be in reality. I am interested in getting a Sony Xperia 5V or Xperia 1V. Where I live, phones can't make calls unless they support VoLTE. The phones in question support basically all the bands I need them to support and I've found several encouraging Reddit posts from people saying they got the Xperia 1V to work here (haven't found any for the 5V). Some confirm VoLTE, others simply say they were able to make calls. The VoLTE requirement for phones is very recent with different carriers killing off their 3G networks at slightly different times the latest being about a month away so it's hard to judge how much I can trust those posts. I've also seen a video from what seems to be an Indian person showing you how to enable VoLTE on a 1V. The thing is though, these are encouraging *signs* but Sony themselves have kept decidedly shtoom on the matter not mentioning the capability in their marketing *or* their web manuals for either phone, it is also not mentioned on GSM arena, however I noticed that this is not mentioned in the information about my current phone on GSM arena either, even though it definitely does support it because I've been using since even before it was a hard requirement. Is there any way to figure this out definitively? I've tried contacting Sony and maybe at some point they'll reply but frankly I'm not holding my breath and I suspect if they do reply they'll say something about the phones not being for sale in this country (which is true), or mentioning some of the other things the phone *can* do without answering whether it will do this one *particular* thing, which is what some websites selling the phone did as well. That type of evasive behaviour would normally lead me to conclude the answer was the feature isn't supported but those Reddit posts and that video, while not definitive enough in their own right seem to strongly indicate that it is supported.

Android Jimmycrackcrack • 5 months ago • 100%

I'm trying to make sure that if I import a phone to my country, it will likely work pretty much wherever I may go here. Most phones I'm looking at support every 4G band operated here, but I've noticed that on the GSM arena website, they will often give a list of supported bands for a given phone followed by a dash and a region name like 'Asia' or 'international' or 'USA'. One of the supported bands I'm looking at is operated in my country, but seems to be pretty rare, if I use that as a criterion the list of devices shrinks considerably as does the number of brands to choose from. One particular phone I looked at only lists support for the specific band I'm looking at in it's "-USA" list of supported bands. I'm confused by what this means for me, if that band is used in my country and I import a phone that only lists the band as supported in the US does that mean the phone wouldn't work here if I'm in an area where the only available tower operated on such a frequency? Why not? It sounds like it's physically capable. The other question is, how do you assess the likelihood of this being a problem? The relative rarity of support for this band and the fact that it's only *officially* supported here, but seems only to have recently been licensed for people to build infrastructure operating on that band makes me think that there are likely very few towers actually using it here, but presumably more will eventually start to do so. My current phone has lasted me 6 years, almost 7 so I'll want to future-proof in this regard. In the time since I bought my last phone, carriers have abandoned any non VoLTE support so if the phone I bough then, hadn't had this compatibility it would have become a brick well ahead of its time so I'm weary of something like that happening. EDIT: Something has occurred to me that didn't before and might answer my question, but then I guess it'd be good if anyone knew because this is only a guess on my part. Maybe the dash followed by region name is referring to model variants, as in, if you buy the US variant of the phone, then it supports these bands, and if you buy the international variant, it supports these bands etc etc. In that case, it would presumably mean that if I bought a variant model of a phone that lists support for a particular frequency band it should work anywhere in the world where those frequency bands are used not just the region mentioned after the list. I guess the trouble is that usually the sites I can find selling these phones to consumers in my market don't go in to anywhere near that level of detail so I'd have no way of knowing which model variant it was other than simply the manufacturer's marketing terms for their product lineup.

I have already been offered and officially accepted a gig which represents a continuation of a move towards work in a new sub-field for me that I really want to move in to, but it's just a short term contract like the many I've been doing over the years and afterwards I'll have to return to scrounging for the next gig after that with no guarantee of further success in that area (except hopefully doing well and getting more offers but nothing concrete). This gig won't start for a long time so I need to start filling the intervening time. I recently interviewed for another gig, which would be full time indefinitely, no more scrounging. It's a pretty great opportunity too, lots to like, but would likely represent an entrenching of my existing career path thus far rather than the move to the new one I've been embracing. Had this opportunity come up maybe a year ago I'd have grabbed it with both hands as I hadn't considered this other path but now I've begun on that new path I want to see where it can go. I think I did well in the interview and have a feeling I may be offered this full time job (not counting my chickens yet but it looks promising). That would be tricky though, the short duration, later-in-the-year gig will stretch just over 2 calendar months and I can't imagine getting that much time off from a brand new full time job in order to do the other one. It's a small town with a small industry, and it's a damn shame the timing couldn't have been reversed. If I were to accept the full time gig until shortly before the 2nd gig later this year and then leave to go do this short term but arguably more interesting contract job, is it likely to go over so badly that I'd get a bad rep locally for this? I could cancel the short term job but deep down I'm pretty sure it's the work I'd like to start doing going forward. I could decline an offer for the full time gig if presented with it, but I have nothing else going and should really take on some work. It's unfortunate that I likely wouldn't be able to just walk back in to the first gig any time soon if I left and I'd probably appear pretty unreliable to them anyway having done so.

Plex Jimmycrackcrack • 6 months ago • 90%

This is something I've been trying to do reliably for years. I can stream anything I want easily with VLC or even just Chrome itself but I can't get subs to work. I was able to make it work for a long time using a Chrome app called "videostream" but it now no longer works correctly on my system. It's a bit confusing to me but it kind of looks from what I have read that Plex can apparently handle this? Most references to the idea seem to be for later chromecast versions but mine's a 1st gen I bought in 2014. Could I use Plex to stream local media with separate or embedded srt files to my chromecast ?

Android Jimmycrackcrack • 6 months ago • 87%

This used to just be how it worked, I don't know what changed. I have for a long time used VLC to navigate to files on my computer in the other room so I can stream video to my phone that are stored on the computer. Occasionally I'll also use VLC to browse local media on my phone. I can still do this through the browse tab but I have to navigate my phone's internal memory folder structure that way, which is cumbersome and irritating. Previously I would just go to the video tab because any video that showed up there would be local to the phone. Now, all the video on my computer's storage is displayed there and seemingly NONE of the phone's own local video material. I tried going to settings and Media Library Folders and noticed that interestingly the network location for my computer was ticked and the internal storage was unticked. I have no idea how that happened but I thought I had the problem solved then. I unticked all potential Media Library Folders except internal storage which I ticked and then navigated to the video tab in hopes of seeing only local video and no network video. The situation was completely unchanged. There was a notification at the top of the screen from VLC indicating it was scanning so I thought perhaps it was going to have to complete this scan first before anything could change so I left the phone to it to it with the VLC app open. Some time later I returned and the notification was gone, but the video tab was the same. I navigated away from and then back to the video tab and still it was the same. While writing this post I checked the Media Library Folders setting again and the changes I had made were reversed, only the network location for my PC was checked and all other items including the internal storage were unchecked. WTF!?

I'm trying not to just resist everything new in mac OS right away, but this whole focus concept and do not disturb mode turning on without me asking it to and not having any option to disable it is just too much. I can imagine maybe using this in some exceptional circumstances where it actually occurred to me to do so, but I definitely want it to be a conscious decision. In the preferences I could find no off switch. I tried setting it to only turn on when I'm in Antarctica and off when I'm not but it didn't seem to actually work as the little moon icon remained there even after this. I also tried to scheduling it to operate in a one minute window but even after that window elapsed it continued to be in 'do not disturb mode'. I don't tend to get a whole lot of notifications nor rely on them much but frankly the idea that they're being suppressed not under direction from me is infuriating and I don't want that to happen.

Asklemmy Jimmycrackcrack • 8 months ago • 91%

So I've seen passing ironic references to DARE in American media representing it as a bit of a joke. That media was intended for American audiences so didn't really elaborate on what the program entailed but I somehow already knew without any need of such context that it was an anti-drugs public outreach campaign and was able to laugh along having had various similar laughable campaigns aimed at youth in my Australian childhood. But then on reflection I realised that the whole DARE thing specifically, was familiar to me, like I'd personally experienced it too, but what I remembered was a TV commercial and also seeing it as late as the 2000s. From what I've now read about the campaign it seems to have been US-centric and maybe a bit in the UK and based entirely around talks at schools. I went through my fair share of shitty talks at school, but not DARE specifically, but I can't shake a memory of an ad I swear I remember seeing, in Australia, specifically about use of marijuana, implying that the effects of smoking it aren't fun or enjoyable and then at the end of the ad having a logo or graphic referring to DARE. But I can't seem to find any evidence that this, or even any DARE commercials ever existed. It doesn't help research that we have a brand of bottled Ice Coffee in Australia called Dare who have had lots of high profile ad campaigns so that's almost entirely what comes up from search results. I found Flinders university (An Australian university) paper about the role of schools in Alcohol education which talks about DARE and its utter inefficacy but seems to be referring to the American context and specifically about alcohol. So doesn't really prove anything. From what little I remember about the ad it was focussing on the fact that marijuana can give you an increased heartbeat and feelings of paranoia and trying to imply that this was somehow something that always happens and is the only effect of smoking it. Had some sort of tagline like 'there's nothing fun about marijuana' or some similar idiocy.

Firefox Jimmycrackcrack • 8 months ago • 100%

I can't seem to find any rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes the casting button just doesn't appear as an option. I first noticed when I tried to watch something that was a youtube video that's in 4:3 so my best guess was maybe that somehow had something to do with it but I tried various videos at different aspect ratios, frame rates, resolutions even different videos on the same youtube channel as where I has actually succesfully found the option presented. This is probably happening for all sorts of video but I noticed it with youtube and did my testing there because that's where this extension works the most reliably and where I can be confident some other weird factors about how the website is setup aren't responsible for a video not being able to cast.

Gaming Jimmycrackcrack • 9 months ago • 94%

[The game is here. ](https://terzalo.itch.io/escape-pod). Tremendous fun and despite it's lack of depth, I've had fun trying to beat my records but ultimately, it gets tired fast given there's only one "level" so to speak albeit a randomly generated one. I really like the mechanics of this one and managing them against fuel load. It's similar to a game called [Space Rescue by Ostrich Studio](https://ostrichstudio.itch.io/space-rescue) which I also liked but both these games seem to be kind of little prototypes so there's very little to them.

uBlockOrigin Jimmycrackcrack • 9 months ago • 100%

The weird thing is that I'm sure it didn't always do this. I thought it might be because I'm trying to cast with FX_Cast but even with Chrome this also happens. In the past this sometimes happened when you'd expect, if the internet was particularly slow that day for some reason, or if I try to play something with a high frame rate, but in general I could expect HD 1080p quality. While I can't know exactly what quality is casting, it looks more like 480 and sometimes 360. Don't know if its relevant, but it's a chromecast 1 I've been using since 2014.

uBlockOrigin Jimmycrackcrack • 9 months ago • 100%

So, it definitely doesn't work now, but it's just, I swear I used to able to avoid ads while casting to chromecast by using my computer with ublock origin installed in favour of the android youtube app.

On my MBP, if I'm streaming something to the chromecast for any appreciable length of time the display sleeps. That's not a bad thing, it's supposed to do that, but the trouble is, if I want to pause playback, it's not a matter of simply hitting the pause key to immediately pause. This is because pressing any key wakes up the display and presents the login prompt. To pause, I have correctly type in my password, and then in the appropriate app hit the pause button. This process takes several seconds and if I needed to pause because of wanting to freeze on something I'm viewing, or because something around me is happening that demands immediate halt to playback for me to attend to it, then this lag between the decision to pause and when I've finally paused is really just way too long. To make it worse, if I'm streaming youtube and this happens, the playback controls presented via the browser on the video page stop controlling the chromecast stream, the pause key does nothing. I can eventually pause (though not seek) via the player notification controls but it's not ideal.

Asklemmy Jimmycrackcrack • 11 months ago • 96%

Something I've always noticed and am going through now. Sometimes I'll drink too much the night before and be concerned about a hangover the next morning. Morning comes, and almost always my first thought is "gee I feel like shit but actually this is way less bad then I was expecting" this misplaced optimism gets washed away at an indeterminate length of time later when a wave of awful nausea crescendos to a peak of crappiness before gradually receding leading me to think "maybe that was the worst of it" only for the cycle to repeat. This happens even when the hangover is not one severe enough to have caused vomiting. Feeling sick from drinking too much I understand, but I wonder what's physically happening during the peak of these waves that's not happening during the troughs.

I'm trying to recall some of my earliest memories of world events. The further back I go, the more vague things get as you'd expect. I think I recall seeing on tv over the course of several days in the 90s a tragic and mostly unsuccessful rescue operation to try and dig out kids who were buried in rubble and mud from a giant landslide that occurred after an earthquake. I think it was in a part of the world you might have called 3rd world at the time and this featured in the media coverage in respect to the inadequacy of the rescue operation and the infrastructure allowing access to the site of the disaster. What sticks in my mind is footage, almost always from the same angle, a very wide shot from far away of the school on a very steep hillside just about completely buried in mud. I think the buildings nearby that still stood looked kind of tropical, I think I recall tin roofs but the memory is a bit too vague to say that for sure. I think the angle all the news coverage seemed to be using over the several days must have been one of the only cameras near the scene and in a fixed spot since it was hard to see much of what was going on and it was the same angle throughout the reporting. While researching this I came across photos of the [Aberfan disaster](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster) in Wales and thought that might have been it until I saw it was from the 60s, and also the hillside wasn't really tall enough and the obviously the location, UK doesn't match my memory. I also found stuff about the [same thing](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1054089/18-children-buried-landslide-hits-school) happening in Yunan Province in China. But that was in 2012. The photo in that article is basically exactly my memory in terms of hillside and type of region I'm thinking except that I recall it being a bit more cropped in and much more blurry SD-analogue TV-ish looking as it was actually footage not a photo.

The referendum result will do such lasting harm to an already checkered history, such a crying waste.

Connect for Lemmy App Jimmycrackcrack • 11 months ago • 81%

It doesn't actually _really_ work because if you later view your comment it doesn't reflect your extra vote. But it is possible to make the app give you the impression that you just earned an unearned imaginary internet point lol. If you downvote your own comment and then upvote it again, it doesn't return the net balance of this action, instead double counts your upvote. If you had 1 point like you do by default when making any comment, and then downvote that, it goes to 0 points and then if you upvote, it jumps to 2. Discovered by accident when accidentally hitting the downvote button and trying to correct it. Guess it's not really important since it didn't appear to actually _really_ manipulate the vote count just temporarily display it wrong for the specific app user but still.

Music Jimmycrackcrack • 1 year ago • 80%

Hope text posts are okay. Weird request I know but, I was just thinking of the song "Blow up the Pokies" and it kind of reminded me of a certain mood of depressing Australian music that I kind of like to wallow in sometimes, I feel like I heard this kind of thing a lot in the 90s but can't think of many examples. The specific constraint of Australian songs is really just because of my personal connection growing up in Australia which makes listening to that kind of thing hit different. Can anyone give some recommendations?

Tech Support Jimmycrackcrack • 1 year ago • 50%

I have some bluetooth earbuds, Jabra Elite 3's, that I use with my phone most of the time. I also share them as well so sometimes they're connected to someone else's phone. I also like to connect them to my macbook. The frustrating thing is though, I've succesfully paired them with all of these 3 devices before, but it's really frustrating to connect them to something *other* than the last device they connected to. If they most recently connected to my phone before and I decide to use them with my laptop, I remove them from their case, but they immediately connect to my phone. This is good, because that's usually what I want them to do, but I hoped I could, from my laptop select them from the list of nearby bluetooth devices and click 'connect' and thereby sever that connection between the headphones and my phone, in favour of the new connection between the laptop and the headphones *instead*. This doesn't work, the computer just says connecting for a long time, and then stops saying that (but doesn't say anything about having failed). Ok, I figured, that sort of makes sense, after all you wouldn't want people to be able to just break your connection at will if you're using the headphones (although it would require having previously paired them, but still, devil's advocate I suppose). So I reasoned, you must have to disconnect them from the phone first, on my headphones that's achievable by just pressing the button on each bud once. Doing this disconnects them from the phone, but doesn't them leave them available to other devices for connection, they remain only available to the phone if you press the button again. The only way to finally sever this connection to allow the laptop access is to fully switch off bluetooth on my phone. This pisses me off but it's not a huge big deal, but the trouble here is, that's only if they're connected to *my* phone. The headphones are shared. I would have thought the 'ownership' of the headphones (for lack of a better word) would give precedence to physical access to the headphones. Therefore, if you have the ability to press the disconnect button on the headphones, then you're most likely the person making the conscious decision to replace one connection with another. I can't control someone else's phone, I'm the one with the headphones, but I can't choose what device they connect to. Rant aside, this genuinely is a question because it just seems so illogical for it to work this way that I'm betting on there being something I'm missing that would allow common sense to prevail and let me replace one connection with another.

I only wonder because, while I know no one could _advise_ per se that people deliberately make bad security decisions, I don't feel as a layman that the nature of the risk is adequately explained. Specifically, if you use a really old OS or an old now unsupported phone. The explanations for why this is dangerous tend to focus on the mechanism by which it creates a security flaw (lack of patches, known hardware security flaws that can never be patched). If we use an analogy of physical security whereby the goal is to prevent physical intrusion by thieves or various malicious actors, there's a gradient of risk that's going to depend a bit on things like who and where you are. If you live in a remote cabin in the woods and left your door open, that's bad, but probably less bad than in a high crime area in a dense city. Similarly, if you're a person of note or your house conspicuously demonstrates wealth, security would be more important than if it you're not and it doesn't. I would think, where human beings are making conscious choices about targets for cybercrime some parralells would exist. If then, you turn on an old device that's long obsolete for the first time in years and connect to the internet with it, while I know you are _theoretically_ at great risk because your doors and windows are essentially wide open, _how_ risky is that exactly? If you just connect, at home on your wifi and don't do anything? Is someone inevitably going to immediately find and connect to this device and exploit it's vulnerabilities? Or does there have to be a degree of bad luck involved? I've brought up the idea of malicious actors who are human beings making conscious decisions, (hackers), but I was once told the concern is more to do with automated means of finding such devices when they're exposed to the internet. This makes more sense since a theoretical hacker doesn't have to sit around all day just hoping someone in the world will use an outdated device and that they'll somehow see this activity and be able to exploit the situation, but I guess, it seems hard for me to imagine that such bots or automated means of scanning, even if running all day will somehow become aware the minute anyone, anywhere with an insecure device connects to the internet. Surely there has to be some degree coincidental happenstance where a bot is directed to scan for connections to a particular server, like a fake website posing as a bank or something? It just doesn't seem it could be practical otherwise. If I'm at all accurate in my assumptions, it sounds then like there's a degree to which a random person, not well known enough to be a specific target, not running a website or online presence connecting an insecure device to the internet, while engaging in some risk for sure, isn't immediately going to suffer consequences without some sort of inciting incident. Like falling for a phishing scam, or a person specifically aware of them with mal intent trying to target them in particular. Is that right?

Asklemmy Jimmycrackcrack • 1 year ago • 97%

I have an iPad 1. I barely used it when it was given to me and then it more or less sat unused apart from the occasional booting to see if it still works every few years. I'm fairly sure it would still work today though I haven't tried for about 3 years. Trouble is, it never got much use because when I got it from my Mum in 2012 it was already becoming obsolete and after about a year I couldn't do basic web browsing because almost every site just crashed whatever browser I ran, none of the apps in the app store would work anymore and the bookshelf app (think that's what it was called. Came with the tablet) I tried to use to make it basically an e-reader device stopped working. There were many similar issue I forget the specifics about but basically amounted to the hardware working fine but being mostly unusable even for old software. I wondered if there were any good ways to make use of or generally rehabilitate this device. I had hoped there'd be a lot Linux options for something like this but it looks like the earliest model anyone made.any progress with was iPad 2. Any suggestions besides picture frame?

I was sent an email to someone as part of an ongoing thread of emails in a conversation. I drafted a reply, but felt a bit unsure so I sent it to someone I trust for them to look at first. Initially, the draft had been made by hitting the reply button to the original sender, but I removed them from the to: field and very thoroughly checked they were indeed removed before sending my potential response to this third party. The 3rd party replied to me and for a second my heart stopped because their reply was in the same conversation thread and it looked a lot like the whole exchange between them and myself was now broadcast to the very person I was trying to carefully word my reply to. Making it look even more like that was the case, was that the signature of the person who sent *me* the original I wanted to reply to was at the bottom of the third party's response to me along with their comments. What seems to have happened is that because I pressed the 'reply' button, despite changing the sender, it still included the whole thread of emails until that point. Which makes sense but was very much not what I was expecting since I don't recall seeing that there in the email before sending it to the 3rd party. I suppose it must have been. Anyway, it seems to have been alright, there's no trace I can find that the exchange between myself and the third party has made its way back to the person that sent me the messages in the first place. But it's very messy and scary that this, to my mind, separate, conversation thread is now all wrapped in to the same one. It seems like begging for trouble even if I dodged it this time. It's my fault for making it a reply instead of a separately composed message to the 3rd party, but can I manually move those messages out of the thread in mail so I don't see them there in future?