Recent content by Mercutio

  1. Mercutio

    Here is a thread to talk about gaming

    Xbox Pass prices increased 50% yesterday, on top of having an extra $100 premium heaped on all the new current-gen consoles. They did add Ubisoft titles and Fortnite Battle Pass to the now-$30/month tier and that does at least have value for the Fortnite-playing console peasant in my life, but...
  2. Mercutio

    Home Media Streaming

    We don't really talk about set top boxes anywhere, but Amazon announced yesterday that its new, low-end FireTV devices won't be running Android/FireOS but rather Vega, an Amazon creation that is explicitly not an open system. Further, the new devices will offer less RAM for what I'm assuming...
  3. Mercutio

    Home Media Streaming

    The album art collection was definitely amusing. I have the cover art embedded in each music file and present in containing directories and it STILL went out and found thousands of vintage photos or paintings of composers or pictures of concert halls.
  4. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Saw this in the Register. We all probably have a story like this.
  5. Mercutio

    Home Media Streaming

    It turns out that Jellyfin actually DOES just natively handle multichannel audio-only files, so in that one extremely niche way, it is definitely better than Plex. Just like Plex, it still doesn't respect my well-organized and properly tagged music collection with embedded album art, but at...
  6. Mercutio

    Android phones: Tips, tricks?

    My phone got Android 16 overnight. I don't see a whole lot that's different from Android 15, but I also don't use any software provided by Samsung on my Samsung phone other than the camera app. So far the only big difference I've seen is in the Quick Share menu. There's also a new revision of...
  7. Mercutio

    Here is a thread to talk about gaming

    I just found out about Lutris. Lutris connects to basically every game service (Steam, Gog, EA, Epic et al) just like Playnite or Heroic Launcher but of greatest interest to me, it has tools and scripts for working with local Windows game installation files instead of downloads via storefronts...
  8. Mercutio

    Securing your phone against hacking?

    I have an aunt who tells me her ipad is broken every time she sees me. She's not dumb, but I do think the ipad actively does a lot to prevent her from understanding what she's doing. Anyway, there is a maximum number of open tabs in Safari and once her device hits that number it's "broken." The...
  9. Mercutio

    Hard Drive Recommendations

    I can't believe I'm shucking external drives again, but I already ran out of space on the little 4 bay N150 NAS box I have running Plex. 48TB was not enough TBs. I was able to get 4x 26TB external drives for $1200 by buying Seagate external drives that are by all indication the same damn thing...
  10. Mercutio

    .PDF software that doesn't cost 20.00 a month?

    A neat trick for dealing with protected PDFs is to print them out to a Microsoft XPS document. This strips any protection they have. It's then straightforward to write them back to a PDF if you want or need them in that format instead.
  11. Mercutio

    Merc's Useful Tools of the day

    Google has made a desktop search app for Windows that adds a lot of Spotlight-like elements. You can get to the same place with a combination of Everything and ueli, but the Google app is aware of Gdrive as well, which I find handy for my day to day needs. It does not work with Google Photos and...
  12. Mercutio

    Windows 11

    On unless I'm using it on unsupported hardware. Older Intel iGPUs won't install their Windows 10 driver with memory integrity turned on. If I'm running Windows 11 on Sky Lake hardware, I'm probably not that worried about that particular level of security anyway.
  13. Mercutio

    .PDF software that doesn't cost 20.00 a month?

    I bought a Passware license a zillion years ago that handles PDFs and MS Office file formats. I think I paid $50 for the basic license.
  14. Mercutio

    Motion activated camera for safety?

    This is such a can of worms. Wyze has decent cameras that don't absolutely require an on-prem NVR. They can record to a local SD card with decent image quality and they can send video to a cloud host for you to view on your phone even if you're not home, albeit only in 10-second clips. Down...
  15. Mercutio

    Something Random

    This is a good kitty
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