A Minecraft server is the classic.

Don’t discount just putting together a basic webpage that can be accessed at home too- something he could put together in a basic HTML editor (drag and drop) and put his favorite things on or whatever he may be focusing on (cars, animals, space, you name it).

Yup. Close to lossless 480 will always look infinitely better than a poorly encoded 720/1080/4k. Compression blocks ruin images INSTANTLY.

Its why NTSC analog tv was always just Enough.

The only file format that pretty much 100% guarantees support on most media hardware is h.264 in MP4 containers. With some encoder tuning you can make them decently small without loss of fidelity; people will notice bad encoding more than they will a slight loss in pixels. I would focus on making a really high quality 720p copy of the shows ans batch encoding them with handbrake (or finding good encoded copies on the usual places)

I hate to say it, but prebuilts are the absolute best bang for your buck that you can get now. At least for another month or two until the shortages start impacting OEM inventories.

Right now you can get decent high end ish machines like this: https://www.costco.com/p/-/ibuypower-element-gaming-pc-desktop-amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-nvidia-geforce-rtx-5070-12gb-windows-11-home-32gb-ram-2tb-ssd/4000384603?langId=-1 and like 35% of the total machine cost washes out to JUST the memory right now. You’ll need to replace the PSU and likely the water cooler for the long term, but the bones are relatively good.

There are many independent small indie games, many DRM free, for less than $20 on steam. What kind of games do you play if any?

1gb ram is crap. Hardware capabilities aside it’s just not enough to run anything usable for real hosting. Get an old office machine for 50-100 with 8gb or more of memory and it will do infinitely better.

They don’t really have to collaborate though. They’re proving right now that they can price out consumers by just buying all the hardware capacity up and letting the market take care of the little guys. Hardware manufacturers like Micron are obliging.

What I’m becoming worried about now is all these corporations now realizing that they can simply supply price the average consumer out of owning electronics or any kind of compute. And locking them into renting or leasing access to data center compute and keeping the power of information further consolidated in corporate interests.

You won’t ever see it in a commercial / OTS slicer implementation for a while, fucking Stratasys still has a patent on it and they love lawyers. This guy finally just said fuck it and wrote it himself.

Its more about it being a non-open standard that was unilaterally implemented by Google, and then just expected to immediately become the default because daddy Google said so.

cartel that has previously done cartel things continues to do more cartel things

more at 11

Not often, if you’re running non-fiber reinforced filaments. even standard brass nozzles can get 1000 hours on them before you start to get loss of print quality. And hardened nozzles have practically infinite life in normal plastic.

Better off getting multiple sizes though. A default 0.4mm nozzle is a nice middle ground. 0.2mm gains a ton of detail for small parts. 0.6 and 0.8mm nozzles can drasticall ly reduce print times for large parts and creates better overhang/bridge surfaces.

Google probably realizes literally nobody likes WEBP and avoids using it

May be more of an AuDHD spectrum thing rather than pure adhd…

Socializing requires executive focus. I have to listen and think about what the person is doing, then figure out how to respond, which needs active thought as I’m (probably) on spectrum. It interrupts my normal brain flow. That gets tiring very quickly when it is already a lot of mental work to maintain task focus while alone.

The only machine I have that ever runs cracked Windows Server is a dedicated box for a Space Engineers server, because it’s DS is packaged only for Windows and it doesn’t run correctly in wine or proton yet.

AV1

The real key is buried in the middle, where they say hardware decode capabilities are going to be restricted to models with discrete GPUs… Meaning they can make a $500 upsell mandatory for the most basic of capabilities.

Oh thank god. This solves my problem of no good integrated cam hardware on the market that isn’t cloudified or a huge security hole.

That was part of it for sure, but even on the machines we reserved specifically for experienced users and were personally maintained by myself just had myriad issues. Every first layer had to be watched like a hawk. And they were bedslingers so knocking over prints was a semi common occurence too.

When I was in college, often yes, as the “free” thing was typically a textbook I needed to actually pass a class.

Nowadays? Meh, I probably don’t need that random movie that bad. I have so little time for entertainment that if I can’t get it from a torrent site in a few minutes I just find something else.