Jimmycrackcrack

I occasionally do some paid editing work in my home suite. I use a MBP and I just use whatever storage I have left on external drives or buy new ones as the project budget permits. Most of the time, my work is done on-site using a production company's facilities so it's not a big time operation here at home.

I also like to download and watch video over my wifi to to TV or my phone in other rooms of the house (don't typically move the laptop much). I tend to use the laptop's internal drive for that.

I'm beginning to outgrow my storage for both purposes, but only just. I could continue as I am for quite some time, deleting media at home after I watch it, and buying physically fairly small drives to put away in cupboards for work. However, I'm thinking I could fix both storage needs for a very long time by spending a bit bigger (but not MUCH), and getting a proper RAID. My mind immediately went to NAS, but it occurs to me that, that mightn't necessarily be the most cost effective or efficient way to go given the limited scope of my needs.

My home network is very slow consumer equipment, and I have no ethernet infrastructure at all. I thought I could maybe just hook the NAS up to the laptop via ethernet but then at that point, isn't that just DAS with the extra complications of networking? Would I need a switch between the 2? My home streaming is just done over wifi, since everything is compressed media anyway.

If I buy a decent thunderbolt DAS RAID and expose it to the wifi network via the laptop, would the costs stack up in terms of power consumption and wear and tear of the expensive lappy (given it'd be powered on nearly constantly)? Are there NAS devices that I can directly attach to the lappy for editing, but leave on and connected to wifi for home streaming? Would it need any additional networking equipment in that use case? Can I run jellyfin on it? I feel like a NAS doesn't make sense but would like help puzzling this out.

Excuse the basic questions but I'm not having much luck web searching for answers. I have the server running on my laptop which is also where the content itself if and I have an android phone with the mobile client installed via f-droid.

I can't seem to cast to chromecast with Jellyfin from either the laptop itself, or the android client app. The client app lists streaming to chromecast specifically as one of it's features in the description on f-droid.

Just trying out Jellyfin for the first time. I'm also just trying out media server software for the first time, having downloaded Emby 2 weeks ago so forgive if I'm misunderstanding some fundamental concepts.

I have a series on my hard drive that has been incorrectly identified as something else, the Title is wrong, the posters are wrong, the casting information is wrong and I'd hazard a guess the subs are probably wrong too. That's fine, Emby actually got this particular series wrong as well. The difference here though, is I can't figure out what to do about it. I've seen lots of forum posts saying you can enter an imdb ID number but this is a problem because that only seems to be possible for individual episodes, not the whole series, and in any case, it doesn't appear to DO anything when I apply to any one given episode. More frustrating still, each episode in the series has somehow taken the name of the series as its episode name so they all have the same name and you can't tell which episode is which.

How do I remove the incorrect identificaiton and replace it with a manually selected correct ID? Also, importantly, will supplying a correct IMDB number or whatever else it is I need to do to correct this misidentification, cause the correct subs to be downloaded?

I wouldn't want to find out the hard way. I have a BMD decklink 4k mini monitor PCIe card. I used to use it in a PC, but I upgraded to a laptop. To replace with an external input device is too expensive unless I downgrade capability significantly.

PCIe chassis are more expensive than expected but I've noticed ones that specifically call themselves 'eGPU enclosures'. For some reason when they're marketed to that specific purpose, they cost a lot less, probably because they often don't come with power supplies (which I actually have spare).

I'm looking at 2 such eGPU enclosures and they are a decent price and I think they should work, but I'm a little scared by them specifically saying "eGPU". Would I likely have any problems buying one of those for my PCIe device rather than for a graphics card? Or is PCIe, PCIe regardless?

Trying to wrap my head around OCPP and what it would mean to me personally if I had an EV and bought a wall charger for it. My understanding is that it would be mostly irrelevant for my needs. It could theoretically be helpful if trying to integrate it in to a Solar Energy system but otherwise for a home consumer I don't totally understand what the benefit might be.

One mentioned benefit is that if you use software with your charger to control certain functions and that software provider goes bust, you won't be left high and dry. Initially I interpreted 'software' to mean the app for a smartphone for controlling the charger for things like scheduled charging, or setting a maximum charge or maybe setting different power levels of charge. If the company that sold me the inverter and by extension provided the app, went out of business, that would be bad in terms of the app eventually becoming obsolete and that seemingly would make the idea of OCPP compliant wallboxes attractive, however I've never heard of generic charging apps for consumers that will use OCPP to control a wallbox for basic functions like I describe. It sounds like the 'software' being referred to is for more advanced use cases like for example, integrating with a solar energy system or maybe a business running multiple charger points and wanting automated billing from various chargers of various brands.

Would the charger being OCPP compliant actually help an average person in the event that the charger company goes out of business and the app becomes obsolete or unobtainable from mainstream app stores?

When I want to find an app I haven't pinned to the home screen I swipe up from the bottom of the home screen to bring up a search bar where I can search for an app by name or scroll through list of all apps on the phone.

Thing is the search bar on my new pixel phone is actually a Google search bar that will search apps locally at the same time as providing web results, especially if it can't find the app by name.

It's a nice idea in theory but in practice I find it annoying, especially if I've just made a typo. Also, I'm just never going to use this search bar for web searching anyway because for that I would want my chosen browser so the web results are of no use to me.

I actually remember my old phone used to do what I wanted it to do, then one day it switched to what my new phone currently does and after a long time I found the solution to return it back to it's previous behaviour except now I've forgotten what I did.

I only want to search my phone's local storage for apps matching my keyword when I access the app drawer. How do I get rid of this Google search bar? (I'd love to get rid of the Google search bar from the home screen itself as well but I understand I can't do that without root on stock android.

It's strange but listening again to music from about 20 years ago, during a time when I was mostly sad and depressed, and where the musical choices reflected that, gives me a weird sense of nostalgia and longing for that time.

I know it's not unusual for music to do that, that's just run of the mill, it's just odd that, it has me longing for a time and associated mood that, on the whole, I kind of didn't really enjoy very much. The angsty tracks were what I listened to because I was so bummed out and dissatisfied.

This is something I've been trying to do reliably for years. I can stream anything I want easily with VLC or even just Chrome itself but I can't get subs to work. I was able to make it work for a long time using a Chrome app called "videostream" but it now no longer works correctly on my system. It's a bit confusing to me but it kind of looks from what I have read that Plex can apparently handle this? Most references to the idea seem to be for later chromecast versions but mine's a 1st gen I bought in 2014. Could I use Plex to stream local media with separate or embedded srt files to my chromecast ?

It doesn't actually really work because if you later view your comment it doesn't reflect your extra vote. But it is possible to make the app give you the impression that you just earned an unearned imaginary internet point lol.

If you downvote your own comment and then upvote it again, it doesn't return the net balance of this action, instead double counts your upvote. If you had 1 point like you do by default when making any comment, and then downvote that, it goes to 0 points and then if you upvote, it jumps to 2.

Discovered by accident when accidentally hitting the downvote button and trying to correct it. Guess it's not really important since it didn't appear to actually really manipulate the vote count just temporarily display it wrong for the specific app user but still.

I'm going to very carefully poke the hornet's nest here and ask this basic question that I never really explicitly formulated. It seems apt here on Lemmy in particular because people take as a given the superiority of Linux as the starting point of conversations involved computers generally.

I'm not here to refute this, but I am thinking I should interrogate it a bit more. I'll start with an "average" user, to which I'll have to give some sort of definition.

Imagine somebody with a low to moderate concern about privacy, more than none, but not much more and will happily trade it for useful or enjoyable services. Imagine the use case of a desktop computer for this type of person is productivity software they use at work/school, and occasionally for their own purposes too because they're familiar with it. They also like to watch movies, browse the web, and communicate with friends and family using popular free software packages. Security isn't much of a worry for them, but they do engage in private communication and also banking and will pour a lot of personal information in to the machine in exchange for a lot of useful abilities like paying bills and organising their life.

Now also picture this person is open minded, at least a little and willing to hear you out on the concept of operating systems and of Linux in particular. Is it automatically in such a person's interests to switch to Linux? And is it always a good idea to start with supposition that it is and that the only barrier is hesitancy and ignorance? Would any of their needs actually be better met should they switch? A lot of this discussion tends to devolve in to whether it is or isn't hard for such a person to use Linux should they make the switch and whether using Linux is inherently more difficult than for example Windows but I think what's missed here is, assuming it's super easy to switch for an "average" user and perfectly easy to operate thereafter, is it actually better in such a case? If the needs are so basic, what has been gained? Is it mostly an ideological preference for the philosophical concepts behind the open source movement? That could be enough in and of itself perhaps, you could pitch Linux as "better" within that framework at least for the ideals it promotes. I feel like I sense there's a desire to push Linux for this reason on the thinking that if just one more person joins the fold so to speak, then it generally pushes the world at large vaguely in the right direction in some small way. But is there anything more tangibly superior for an "average" user? It seems like nowadays hardware has long surpassed the needs of users like these such that things like "performance" don't seem all that relevant considering almost any available platform could fulfill these needs so thoroughly that theoretically superior performance from the software would seem not to play a role. There is the security and privacy aspect, certainly for me, that definitely puts me off Windows but if an "average" user says they don't care about this things, can you really say they're being foolhardy in a practical sense? In a wider view, arguably, in the way that it pushes the world in a generally worse direction, but for them directly in the near to medium or even long term, what's going to happen if they just don't even worry about it? People say Windows has poor security, but for the number of people using it, just how many will personally experience actual measurable harm from this? Despite pouring so much personal information in to their computer, I suspect they could likely go a lifetime without experiencing identity theft, or harrassment from authorities, or tangible/financial losses. I suspect they probably know that too. That seems to me again like it really only leaves more of a "digital veganism" approach to Linux's virtues. That's appealing to some, to me a bit even but it's a much narrower basis for proclaiming it "superior"

Now at the other end of the spectrum, the users that are not the least "average" who run Linux on their home systems and probably at work, use open source alternatives for every possible service and do not need conversion as they themselves are Linux preachers. What is it that they typically get out of Linux? I've heard many say they enjoy "tinkering". I get that, is that the main benefit though? It seems then that the appeal is that it's kind of "hard", like a puzzle, but I don't think any of this crowd would like that assessment. What do you want to tinker with though that closed systems would prevent you from doing? This probably goes to the heart of it because it's the point at which I think probably most diverge from say an IT professional or programmer that loves Linux, I am too ignorant here to know what I don't know and I just can't really conceive of a scenario where I might for example want to personally modify the kernel of an operating system. Most examples I see if that type of thing is people making hardware work, and it's ingenious and impressive but the hardware is usually that part of the setup that's not democratised and not open source, it's usually something off the shelf it seems to me that that hardware would have worked already on a more popular platform. Likewise when you eke out of last bit of performance out of a system, what are you actually doing with it? I mean I get that it's a crying shame for hardware to be hobbled by lousy software but if the use for the hardware, the need for computing to be done can be met with existing platforms, what is done with the savings from the better software?

I ran Mac for years but never actually considered using Page or Numbers. A long time ago I gave up on MS Office and switched to Libre Office which was... fine-ish. I also use Google Docs but wouldn't want to give up a local desktop office suite altogether.

Having just bought a new MBP I opened one of my old MS Word documents forgetting I'd not installed LibreOffice yet and of course it opened in Pages. I figured maybe I should give it a go instead of knee-jerk rejecting it. My first issue is that almost anything I ever work on will be something that was almost certainly made with Microsoft Word and it's very annoying to me that in Pages, I can't just cmd+s save a Word document as I edit it, having instead to save a .pages version for safety and periodically 'exporting' a .docx and overwriting the previous export to update it in order to maintain the document's compatibility with anyone else using it in Word.

I also tried recreating my invoice document that I first made many years ago in Word. Editing the original was a non-starter, just impossible to get it looking right but that's okay it wasn't designed for Pages and I was trying to keep an open mind. So I remade it from scratch figuring it was a good test bed as it has some just basic writing of words on a page but also more complicated formatting and tables to recreate in a specific way to make it indistinguishable from my original document. I got there in the end but it was horrendously painful. I haven't given up on it yet because I figure Word is actually probably one of the very first computer programs of any type that I ever used so to say it's just what I'm more used to is an understatement. Because of that, learning anything significantly departing from Word will naturally be hard, and unlike Google Docs and Libre Office Write, it doesn't try to emulate Word. The thing is though, maybe I could get used to it, but I'm kind of wondering, if it's worth the bother. My main reasoning for trying is that it's there already, so why install something else and I may as well get my money's worth and while over-hyped, often Apple software is really nicely polished and a joy to use so I feel like I want to like it and to use it. But with the learning curve plus the compatibility issues with Office, I think the bar for it being worth it raises to the point where it really has to actually be better than word in a meaningful way to justify it, not just as good. Is Pages better than Word? Certainly right now it doesn't look that way, but I'm still adjusting of course.

Does anyone else use it and do they like it? Is it something that once you get used to you'd never want to use anything else? My other problem is that for some reason most of the Apple Support articles and forum posts answering questions I have all seem to be from around Circa 2012 at the latest and very rarely any more recently than that. Often they refer to menu items that are slightly out of date and subtly different now, which is weird. What happened in 2012 that seemed to stop people using this software?