I have time, it’s just that I can think of much better things to do with it. I spend my free time generally either reading, gaming solo and with my spouse, and exercising. TV is fine occasionally, but it’s such a passive activity.

Damn, I’ll have to keep not subscribing!

Same. I loved the PS1 and PS2.

It’s been easy enough to set up a gaming PC in the living room for both desk and couch gaming (my gaming rig automatically switches to the TV if the TV and receiver inputs are on). Sony exclusives just aren’t what they used to be, and I haven’t really cared much since the PS2/PS3 era. I sold my consoles in 2012 and haven’t looked back, still more games than I’ll ever have time to play.

In the early 00s I made a fair bit of money as a side hustle fixing stuff that the Geek Squad had messed up.

I did this for a bit in the late 90’s and early 2000s. Didn’t really do many jobs (I had two jobs and college to deal with already). Eventually quit altogether after a pastor gave me a computer to fix that was riddled with porn and malware. I cleaned it up, gave it back in good shape, and a few days later he wanted his money back because it had viruses again and said I hadn’t fixed it.

I told him I’d give him his money back if I could look at it right then and there and confirm he didn’t download a bunch of porn again. He took the machine and left without another word. It was small change stuff that was more hassle than it was worth, and that was the end of it for me. I do not need to know this stuff about people.

There are too many acronyms in your response (NAS? UPS?), haha but I get the gist of it.

My bad, I work in IT and take the acronyms for granted.

UPS is uninterruptible power supply, NAS is network attached storage.

I work from home so I have everything with backups for power and internet.

My solar setup has a 1 second switch-over when grid power fails so my critical stuff has small UPS batteries. The network storage box also has one of the UPSes plugged into a USB port to communicate a power failure, so if only the UPS is on and no other power is detected after 15 or 20 minutes, it’s set to safely shutdown (battery lasts about 45 mins).

So that means if the NAS is still on when I get home, my solar battery never fully drained and kept powering the house.

Thanks, this gives me a pretty good checklist to work with. Also, didn’t consider pantry goods. Will canned items still be safe? (Edit - you covered this. I’ll have to talk to a specialist about this and the bedding. The house was as sealed as it could be and no fans or A/C on so 🤞).

Freezer goods might still be okay. I have solar with battery backup. Should still be running despite the smoke since I didn’t get to shut it off before evac, and my central air is off. It’s literally only running the fridge and some mini-PCs right now. My NAS is configured via USB UPS to properly shut down if power is cut, and doesn’t auto-restart on power available. So if it’s still running when this is over that’ll confirm power never went out to the fridge and freezer.

Yo, that’s awesome!

Pro tip for you, ASR (whisper - lyric detection/transcription) can be kind of bad, but if you have some spare resources, it takes very little to host a local LRCLIB database and clone lrclib.net (they have a GitHub page). This massively speed up lyric analysis for me using the API against a local site instead of getting 429s against lrclib.net or relying on ASR.

Lyrics are the biggest longest part of the scans. My whole collection was like 3+ weeks with lyrics stuff on, but only 2 days with just MusiCNN and CLAP.

I love SG-1, but unless you’re a super fan (I am, but I feel the disclaimer is warranted) I’d say stop at the end of season 7. That’s it, main plot is wrapped up, it’s done, great finale.

I say this, because while the rest of the series is good, season 8 is in a weird place as they set up an entirely new arc that’s wholly unrelated to the original series, including some new characters on the team. There’s interesting episodes and it’s still great, but might be a bit hard to swallow for some because it’s so different.

That said, if you enjoy the first 7 seasons, at the least, also watch the Continuum film, it’s great and Cliff Simon always chews up any scene he’s in (in a good way), he definitely took charisma as his main stat.

I hope to be on that path. I’m in my 40s and tired of the grind. Nowhere close to retirement yet, but I am likely on track to pay off my house early in the next two years (maybe 7 years into a 30 year mortgage) which will go a long way.

I’m saving as much as I can and hoping I can retire lean in my mid or late 50s.

Right now though all I can think of is that I need a sabbatical after my current job ends (either layoffs or just quitting) because I really need a break.

It’s funny you blame competitive gamers who don’t understand what they’re doing, yet don’t seem to know how any of this works.

Higher refresh rates reduce frame timing, reducing both visual and input latency. It’s why a game at 30 fps often “feels” laggy compared to one at 60 or 120 fps. Even if you can’t see the increased frame rate you can certainly feel input latency. It’s also why “fake frames” from things like optiscaler or FSR/DLSS don’t help when already at low frame rates, they actually increase latency, which is already bad when your frame times are higher.

I’m not into competitive gaming at all, btw, just sensitive to (and annoyed by) input lag.

Yeah, wtf. I have a cheap (or was cheap at the time) LG 1440p ultrawide, nothing fancy, and it can do up to 165 Hz.

Even a 6600XT is so overkill

I game on a 1440p ultrawide monitor at my desk, and a 4k TV (though I don’t actually game at 4k). I upgraded from a 6700XT to a RX 9070 after Expedition 33 ran like shit and couldn’t run constant 60 fps on high settings even when dropped to 1080p with FSR. A 6600XT is hardly overkill.

Also, it’s hardly wasteful when my 9070 performs better, yet runs cooler and actually has a lower tdp / wattage than the 6700 XT did.

Maybe consider some of us just want to play with friends and/or spouses or partners.

Reintroduce LAN play and locally hosted multiplayer servers. IDGAF about playing with randos, I just want to play with my wife, and I’d prefer it to not be something that can shut down because the company went broke or didn’t care anymore.

I just use all my credit cards for the points/cashback rewards and to track spending (I have different cards for different things, like one for gas and groceries, one for revolving subscriptions, one for general spending online).

I pay them off in full weekly, and the rewards are essentially free money. Plus, this protects my bank account (actual money) and helps easily spot if there’s any fraud.

Not with that attitude they don’t.

Hey thanks for grabbing and posting all the pics, I didn’t even think to do that. No need to go to the site folks, it’s all here. 😂

Edit - oh wait, there’s actually more on the site page, including a guy with two right hands!

I do this with my Wiims already, no account needed. They support speaker linking and whole home playback, or just linking individual devices.

I used it for a bit, but after getting Navidrome up and running, Arpeggi replaced it as my download “away from home” client, and at home I use Lyrion or Music Assistant via Squeezelite since I have Wiims in every room of the house.

The only thing worth noting is private industry with publicly traded options will always need to show quarter over quarter profit (or best effort to do so) as a literal legal obligation to shareholders. They have a legal obligation to profit as much as possible within legal limits, and even skirting them where legislation is up for debate. That means in the long run, going private will never be the cheapest option.

The government has no such obligation, and no need to profit. Their only “shareholders” are the American people, and voting essentially makes us the board to remove them if we feel their choices are not to the public benefit.

The Xeon server would be a good bet. Your other machine would be potentially bottleneck for memory (though it meets min spec if the server isn’t doing anything else). There’s a NOAVX docker deployment available, would be slower but should work fine. Just be sure to disable anything associated with lyric detection, it’s an absolute performance nightmare.

I ran it on a Ryzen 5500u mini-PC with 32 GB RAM with the standard deployment with AVX2 support and scaled up to three worker threads. For a collection of 53k tracks it was processing about 100 per hour that way with lyrics/whisper translation enabled, but once I turned that off it was doing 1300-1400 tracks per hour.

——

Edit - the 6600T would work too. I found with lyrics disabled, each worker only used between 500MB and 2 GB of RAM. Long as the server isn’t under load while scanning I think that would work, and would be faster for having AVX2 support.