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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Ah yes, a classic tale…

    “We’re going to take this perfectly efficient and functional COBOL code base and rewrite it in Java! And we’ll do it in a few months!”

    So many more competent people and organizations than them have already tried this and spectacularly crashed and burned. There are literal case studies on these types of failed endeavors.

    I bet they’ll do it in Waterfall too.

    It’s interesting. If they use Grok, this could well be the deathknell for vibe programming (at least for now). It’s just fucking tragic that their hubris will cause grief and pain to so many Americans - and cost the lives of more than a few.

    Edit: Fixed some typos.




  • Screw it. I’ve been putting off moving over to Jellyfin for too long. Now it’s the time.

    I installed it this morning and have been setting things up. It’s nice. A few little UI features are missing, and the playlist functionality is kinda buggy (it doesn’t show playlists I’ve created). But just minor things.

    I’m really disappointed in Plex. They started out with one main goal: to share and play media. And they did that well. Then they jumped on the ‘complete system’ bandwagon and the enshitification ramped up. I don’t need yet another Netflix-type streaming service with rentals and shit! I just want a way to play my local media collection and share it with a few family members! You should have stayed in your lane instead of getting greedy and trying to copy everyone else, Plex!

    Edit: The playlist issue was resolved by restarting Jellyfin. It wasn’t showing them until I restarted, but it had found so the existing m3u playlists I already had and loaded them in. And so it was rooting out because a playlist with that name already existed. The home screen customization isn’t as good as Plex, and the music cataloging sucks at the same level as Plex. But in general so far I’m impressed with Jellyfin. So long Plex!



  • Sure. The device I use is an Onn streaming a Android TV box. I think I got the 2023 4k streaming version and it was about $20, from Walmart. You can probably get cheaper models, but I wanted one with an Ethernet port.

    Then I installed a couple of alternative launchers from the Play store on device. I also loaded F-Droid as well (though I had to do that directly through an apk). I can’t remember which launcher I went with in the end, but it was either FLauncher or Projectivity. They were both good.

    The wrinkle here is that the OS defaults back to the default launcher (which has ads and a lot of clutter on it). But I used a free command line tool called adb to switch the default launcher off.

    I’ve been very happy with the new setup. My kids (who use it all the time) occasionally complain that an app will crash while they are watching something, and take them back to the home screen/launcher. But I haven’t run into that, and it’s probably just them accidentally hitting a remote (which I know they accidentally do a lot).

    I documented the process and posted them here, in another thread a few months ago.

    Additional note: The default YouTube app isn’t very conducive to quick profile switching, which can be annoying. To switch profiles you basically have to go back to the OS level and do it there, then go back into the YouTube app. It’s an Android TV quirk. But I discovered that if you side-load the Amazon Fire version of the YouTube app onto the device, you can switch profiles within that version of the app, and it works just fine.