Paywalled specifications sounds a lot like security through obscurity. It works well until it doesn’t.

Media piracy cannot be stopped. Don’t forget there was media piracy before the internet too. But back then it was physical piracy, and somebody made money on another’s work. That kind of piracy will always be shut down, because it is actually stealing. The fat cats want their money.

But now we have a different kind. More like Robin Hood. Digital piracy takes something and copies it, giving it away for free. The biggest risk for piracy, is that the content holders offer their product at a price so low, it would be horribly inconvenient to pirate it. For example if Apple Music just had you pay a few pennies per song instead of monthly. You’d load up $20 and listen to a lot of music. If TV series offered ad-free streaming for like $0.25 per episode. If movies could be watched for $1. If academic journal articles could be accessed for $1.

But that will never happen. They’ve done the math. They make more money with subscriptions and pricing right at the edge of affordability for many. Why would they want to make less money?

Actually now that I’m thinking about it. The way for them to hurt piracy the most would be to give away low-bitrate copies of everything for free. Stream all the music you want at 96 kbps. Watch every TV series or movie at 480p. Download this ebook as a plain text file. Read this article with tiny thumbnail photos. Free version of game has low-res textures and 720p at 30fps. Even that wouldn’t end piracy, but it would be a lot less popular. It would be harder to find somebody to invest the time bypassing paywalls when you can read the text easily.

Anyway torrent cannot be stopped. It’s moving to onion and i2p, fully decentralized. There will be nobody to take down. Besides that there’s always independent nations who don’t care about digital piracy, who can host private trackers.

Non-tech. I decided to self host first to send media to my TV. I wanted an always-on solid state hard drive computer that didn’t have to do any transcoding. Tried DLNA but Emby just worked better. Jellyfin didn’t have an LG App at the time so I’m still using Emby. Eventually I also asked my poor ARM server with 2 GB of RAM to also run my wireless access points, but the Omada software is a resource hog. So I have a little Intel machine that can do Omada better and also transcoding for Emby on the go. And then I learned about HomeBridge and that’s been great too. I think together the two computers run about 15W of energy I could decommission the ARM one but it does a couple things I haven’t migrated yet. I’ve tried hosting other stuff but those are the main ones used every day.

I would pay if à la carte was remotely economical. For example a digital DRM movie rental should cost $1 in whatever resolution, on any device capable of playing it. A TV show should cost like $5 for a season or $0.5 per episode. To rent, not to own of course. I don’t care about ownership. With that model I would probably end up spending like $10-15/month on media, but I would feel better about it knowing the studio could pay more to those specific individuals who worked on the programs I am enjoying.

A subscription is a blank check to the studio to make whatever they think draws in subscribers, and to pay everyone involved as little as possible with no bonuses for blockbusters.

Cut the tape, not the box.

Emby is a cousin of Jellyfin that supports DVR functionality. I have successfully recorded from IPTV streams, which shouldn’t be too different from a tuner card. The main thing is it needs to load the programming information from somewhere.

Maybe it can be safely burned?

I was just thinking about this. Love these videos. Cooling of a solar panel is a good application, as long as it gets cold enough for long enough to re-solidify at night.

An alcohol/NaCl solution with a stabilizer can make an ice pack that freezes colder than water. That could be used to keep ice cream frozen in an ice chest.

It would be cool to have recipes for a few different temperatures. There’s a German company Qool Products that sells PCM temperature elements (ice packs), at a variety of temperatures, to store ice cream up to red wine/cellar temp in their ice chest. With some trial and error I guess we could now make our own!

There are plenty of protected lanes in my city, but they just hide bicycles behind parked cars, making it less safe at every intersection.

The only way I can think that might work better would be to convert a 3-lane road (with suicide/turn lane in center), into a 2-lane road. The center lane gets converted into a two-way bicycle road - raised up like a sidewalk with curved curb. No left turns allowed for cars, only right turns. This way bicycles are visible and protected.

Yeah it’s typically not used for dosages, rather it’s for concentrations in solution. However strictly speaking the grams cancel in the units of ng/kg and you are left with ppt. I think of ppm and ppt as very small percentages anyway. As per cent means part per one hundred. Can’t use “permille” because it means part per thousand but sounds like part per million.

In the case of a lethal dose, I think it would be fine to say, “it’s lethal at a rate of 2 trillionths of body mass”.

I would probably do a one-time purchase but I don’t do subscriptions.

Piwigo is more like a shared gallery. Users create album/folders and upload individual photos, which other users can access. Piwigo has poor support for videos and no support for Live Photos.

Photoprism has only a single user for the free tier. It supports Live Photos and videos, and individual photo uploads. It does facial recognition tagging.

Immich supports video/Live Photos, facial recognition, and has multiple users, but it expects a full backup/synchronization (not individual photos). Sharing between users is manual, not automatic or permissions-based like Piwigo. Each user has access only to their own backups or shared albums.

In summary, I think Piwigo is the simplest to set up and use, but it doesn’t do much beyond photos - it’s a simple shared gallery. Photoprism is good and stable, but you have to pay a subscription for multiple user accounts. Immich is rapidly developing, which means things will break, but also it has the most features. My only issue with Immich is that I don’t want to use it as a backup - only as a “best of” shared gallery. While it’s possible with Immich, I would have to maintain an Immich album on my phone, and sync only that, and I would have to set up shares with other users manually.

2.1 ppt (parts per trillion)

It’s explained pretty well in Optical Physics for Babies. Take a peek in the kids books section next time you’re at a book store. It also explains double rainbows, and why the second one has the colors in reverse order and is always more faint. This is a detail they got wrong in my favorite episode of Bluey: Rain.

Somebody has to make the call. There was this dinosaur book for kids in a little free library. It didn’t even have an author or publisher, because it was AI garbage. Full of misspellings, etc. I contemplated throwing it in the trash because I don’t think it should exist. But for some reason I had trouble deciding that for others.

Digitize and delete? Scan straight to OCR and dump the books. One hard drive can store a lot of books.

Try it. For me it works better than Google Maps. Another option to consider is Organic Maps.

Imagine if you played Suika, how you’d look at fruits.

In California we have a project called Flood-MAR, which stands for Managed Aquifer Recharge. Farmers who have land that wont be damaged by floods volunteer to pump lots of water onto their lands during floods. This reduces the downstream flooding slightly, and the water soaks deep into the ground for safe keeping until it needs to be pumped up during a drought.

Canoo if they every exist IRL.

Here is the full transcript of Hancock’s (@DaveHan06) post on X/Twitter:

Is anyone surprised that Kyle’s far-right political handlers ensured this particular detail didn’t make it into his book? (Referring to photo of email detailing how Rittenhouse was banned from ever applying to the Marine Corp again due to failing the entrance exam so terribly)

Regarding his online high school diploma, we had to force him to complete the four years of credits in just ten months, which he did using the “Google machine.”

We invested significant effort to craft the image you witnessed during the trial. We outfitted him in new suits, arranged for his haircut every weekend during the trial, and dedicated over 200 hours to prepare him for direct and cross-examination. We employed the world’s leading jury consultant and conducted extensive research through three mock trials to identify the ideal jurors and the most effective approach for his testimony.

Transforming a middle school dropout who was “angry at the world” with a history of violence and an unhealthy obsession with guns and killing into a respectable young man with a desire for higher education and a promising future was no easy feat.

It was a meticulously crafted facade, which we sincerely hoped he would grow into. Instead, he squandered a full scholarship to study any subject at any university in the country to become a divisive douchebag and antagonize black Americans on college campuses. Kyle failed to learn a single thing. He remains the same uneducated, arrogant, and antagonistic individual, incapable of telling the truth.

Now, he genuinely believes he is the show pony we created and has surrounded himself with sycophants who fuel his inflated ego because they prioritize their political agenda and Christian Nationalist worldview over his well-being.

Despite my efforts to guide him toward a better path in life, the allure of notoriety triumphed over the prospect of putting in the hard work of pursuing an education. Kyle is ill-equipped to offer advice to young people. I regret my role in shaping him into whatever he has become. If I had known what I know now about Kyle’s history, I wouldn’t have been involved.