Storage is at an all-time premium nowadays, with even the price of SSDs and HDDs being affected by AI craze. As much as I would love to say ‘rip the discs raw’, there is bound to be a real world limit on how much storage I can secure for a self-hosted media server. My search for encoding these raws led me to looking for configurations used by others, and for what it’s worth, their activity could easily translate into online piracy. Claude shut down the conversation immediately, citing my query as equivalent to looking for a black-market arms dealer.
By Rian
Gray, a writer.
Google Announced “Honey” Dipped in AI
Just last year, browser extension Honey suffered an infamous scandal. Now owned by PayPal, the extension promised to find the best deal, including finding the best coupon codes. The exposé revealed Honey’s business model focused more on being a man in the middle in both security and transaction. And it also reveals a gap, a bias between what buyers think they do and what they actually do.
How to Set Complex Repeating Pattern on iOS Reminders
It was always possible to set more complex repeating pattern using Shortcuts. However, at least from my experience, Shortcuts automation do fail horrendously, when it needs to run in the background. These are some edge cases that I have the latest Reminders could not handle on its own:
How to Run Python Script from iOS Home Screen
On iOS, Pythonista is likely the go-to Python environment runtime for many script writers. I, for one, recommend using Pythonista for any projects that need some horsepower. As I have shared many times, one such problem was generating passwords. It is completely doable on Shortcuts, only that it would be so cumbersome to make it happen.
Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred Spiel Pt. 2
As a long running series, there wasn’t much I could say about gameplay aspect in Lord of Hatred in the previous piece. And now that we have discussed the parts that are on the surface without going into spoiler territory, I thought to touch on the areas that it is plot critical. Much of the heavy lifting the expansion does for the franchise, I believe it has to do with the plot element.
The Case of the ‘Indulgent’ Subscription
Bit of context before I get into the whole fiasco. The choke point of physical ownership is real estate. Everyone who has ever tried owning every contents would know this. At some point, medium takes up more space than the media: books, movies, musics, video games, just about all of them. Movies, especially, would hit close at home for most of us. VHS, Betamax, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray, the list of mediums are keep growing for the same movie. And some of the mediums haven’t even survived its own era. Streaming has solved this, albeit at a price.
Raspberry Pi, RAM, and Home Labs
Most of my Raspberry Pis have been decommissioned. I had used Docker and Docker only on Pis, so much of the effort was on focused compatibility and reliability of single machine (Synology NAS) doing all the work. For the record, Synology couldn’t do everything off the shelves. I had to upgrade the RAM from default 4 GB to 20 GB. And I am running most of the DBs on m.2 drives to ensure faster read and write. The question I have now is simple. What will I do with Pi boards?
Closed Captioning is a Must
For the life of me, I do not know why YouTube still doesn’t officially support closed captioning on PiP. As much as I appreciate overall better audio qualities even from a beginner YouTuber, the problem stands. Unless I am watching a podcast video uploaded onto YouTube, a video of people talking in perfectly sterilized studio, there is bound to be some background noises, some other audios mixing in. It’s only natural, even big time Hollywood movies and TV shows suffer from it. The difference I am pointing out is how these platforms handle the problem. Of which, YouTube is slowly…
App to Automatically Sync Subtitles to Videos
As I was going through my media library, there was one thing I noticed consistently — I am more or less after the fan-made subs than the rips themselves. The official subtitles tend to miss out on the clever wordplays, crude jokes, pretty much anything that is not broadcast-friendly in both literal and financial sense. But at the same time, I also consistently notice fan-made subtitles are out of sync by 1/4 seconds or so.
Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred Spiel
Vessel of Hatred, the previous expansion, left quite a lot to be desired. It only introduced a new class to the game; it added a new region; it unfolded some of Mephisto’s plans. But ultimately, aside from some powerful cinematic in and out of the game, it was a filler between the stories. Lord of Hatred is the conflict Diablo IV needed, all the way to the resolution.
Olympus Air, Caira, and Photography
Before some may assume I must be talking of photography in commercial or professional sense, I am not. Just recently, I was searching for a better way to scan my old books, only to find the “real” solution used in archiving was DSLR or Mirrorless cameras on tripods with professional softwares. It is a solution, but it is not the solution for home or for the hobbyists. Though it is far from photography, my interest in telescopes almost always comes back to bite in a same way — the most pro models and pro conventions are not always the answer.
How to Auto-Switch Proxies on iOS using PAC
This one is mostly for documentation and proof of concept. I was able to get it to work, but it was never reliable enough. The iOS feature itself does work. But even at the basic home lab level, it doesn’t have any interface to speak of. For instance, I want to know if traffic is actually going through the designated proxy, but there is no notification of any kind. For day-to-day operation, I don’t think it fits the bill.
How to Load Lazy-Load Images in Background
I have an assumption about average internet speed — it’s fast enough for most parts of the world to have streaming services. But somehow, some websites still do use lazy loaders on their images and assets. Mad Tea Party is one of them, due to server’s resource issues. But for websites that have larger traffic, for the life of me, I don’t understand why they would want to have users wait for each image to load in-between the reading session.
Resurrecting Abandoned Projects with Vibe Coding
Open source projects always had a huge caveat in its system. If it’s too rigid and far too common, it is less likely to be given enough attention for maintenance until it breaks. If it’s too early in the development and quite niche, it is also less likely to be given enough attention. The projects I usually encounter and enjoy reading are usually in the later category. Coming from that very same niche, — that’s how I ended up googling for it — I understand the desire to come up with an algorithm. These abandoned projects never come to fruition,…
How to Pass Brackets in URL Query for Komga
One of the reasons why I am still in the process of writing a piece on Komga is its weird quirks like this. As a comics and graphic novels manager, Komga has what I would consider Calibre has for graphical publications: lots of metadata managements, different lists that handle series and books, and more. But Komga has its own limits. One such limit, I have seen so many times, is that the web UI uses brackets in the URL for query. It often confuses browsers beyond limit.