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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • I haven’t even tried it yet, but just from the video you can tell it’s going to be insanely good. I’m so impressed.

    It’s the first bit of software I’ve seen in a long time where I took one look and immediately thought “Fuck me, I need that!”

    I use Unraid for my NAS server and just on the off-chance I checked the Unraid community ‘app store’ and someone’s already created a Docker definition for it, published just today! The hype is real

    I’ll be giving this a shot



  • Hehe, you might think that!

    In actuality though, I’ve always been the one who had to sort the tech stuff. We got our first family PC when I was 10, and I was the one who knew the most about it. We got the Internet when I was 13, and I was the one who had the passwords, and had to set it all up. Then when we got broadband, the router was actually in my room lol.

    So yeah, I’ve always been the Admin, and Dad has always been the one who needed a limited account to protect him from himself.



  • It’s like people learn how to make a phone app in React Native or whatever, but then come to the shocking and unpleasant realisation that a data-driven service isn’t just a shiny user interface - it needs a backend too.

    But they don’t know anything about backend, and don’t want to, because as far as they are concerned all those pesky considerations like data architecture, availability, security, integrity etc are all just unwanted roadblocks on the path to launching their shiny app.

    And so, when a service seemingly provides a way to build an app without needing to care about any of those things, of course they take it.

    And I get it, I really do. The backend usually is the genuine hard part in any project, because it’s the part with all the risk. The part with all the problems. The place where everything can come crashing down or leak all your data if you make bad decisions. That’s the bothersome nature of data-driven services.

    But that’s exactly why the backend is important, and especially the part you can’t build anything decent without thinking about.


  • I switched my Dad to Linux recently, and set his account up without any superuser access. Updates have to wait until I visit once a week, but it restricts his ability to get himself stuck in any update-related tangles.

    Linux has problems, but I’m so glad I don’t have to support my Dad on Windows anymore, because that was far less predictable for me. Like the time it decided to upload all his files to onedrive (despite him having no knolwledge of this, or what it was doing or whether he’d consented or not) and made the Internet unusably slow for 8 hours by totally saturating his meagre connection.

    He didn’t even know about onedrive, just phoned me like “The Internet isn’t working, what’s wrong?” and of course onedrive is the last thing I’d have suspected for causing that symptom, which made it so annoying to diagnose.

    Much nicer now his OS doesn’t do sneaky things behind his back, or mine.










  • Swiftfin is what I’m using for Plex on my Apple TV

    It’s perfect for me because it supports direct stream and decoding of the file for playback on the Apple TV - because the Apple TV is capable enough to do that.

    This is ideal because my NAS server is a venerable but now very long in the tooth HP Gen 8 microserver from 2014, so it doesn’t have the chops for reencoded streaming anymore.


  • The reality is, it varies.

    I just opened the language picker on the first site I had in my browser tabs (happened to be Epic games) and they display the language list using native names for the target language, rather than current language (screenshot attached)

    I agree it’s much better to do it this way.

    As a developer, why it doesn’t happen sometimes could just be by accident. If you intentionally set out to localise a site and put all text and menu elements into localisation files to be translated, then the language names are going to end up getting translated too. It takes conscious thought and UX design to realise that it’s better for accessibility if that single part of the site is actually just static text, regardless of what language is selected.

    And before anyone suggests using country flags in your language picker as a cool solution - please don’t, because that sucks too. There isn’t a 1:1 relationship between countries and languages and so the flag approach is a flawed compromise at best, and actually insulting at worst.


  • I don’t personally like Nintendo’s actions, but I’m not sure why this article is trying to imply Nintendo miscalculated and don’t know what they’re doing - as if bricking consoles will somehow lose them money.

    From Nintendo’s perspective, turning the used market into a minefield of bricked consoles can only be a good thing, because it encourages people to buy new, and buying new is money in Nintendo’s pocket.

    And the conclusion that people won’t buy the console for their kids because of this? “Sorry kids, but Nintendo are bad so we cant play your favourite Mario - you’re getting a steam deck instead!” Like heck! A small minority maybe, but people will generally buy their kids what the kids ask for.

    Nintendo know what they are doing.


  • Yeah. When you buy a Logitech mouse that comes with a dongle in the same package, you don’t need to do anything, just plug it in.

    In my case though, I bought a replacement dongle for a mouse that was missing one, and was able to use Solarr to pair it up.

    Solaar does the other Logitech-specific stuff you need too, like macros, scroll wheel ratcheting, and all that.