I’m currently replaying Horizon: Zero Dawn on my wife’s old GTX 1060 machine. Yeah, it’s kinda janky at times, but it’s still a great game.

Also, people are less able to afford the hardware to truly make the most of AAA games.

There are two wolves in me, and I’m glad I came to this furry convention.

Foot Tapper by The Shadows.

Barely a day has passed in the last 25 years where that hasn’t popped into my head for a while. Fortunately it’s delightful.

Everything is a conspiracy if you’re too stupid to understand how anything works.

And if they’re incompatible creatures, you could also end up with scratches.

My favourite geography fact is that when traveling along the Panama canal from the Caribbean sea to the Pacific, you’re further east when you exit than when you entered.

I tried gnome when I first tried Linux, because everyone said how much like macOS it is.

It is not, in fact, anything like macOS. I very quickly got pissed off with having to install extensions to match what I was used to, so gave up and left Linux alone for a few years. Now I use KDE on everything and I couldn’t be happier.

I might look into Lidarr. Currently, I have a folder in SymcThing that my server monitors, so any audio I drop in there automatically gets moved to my Navidrome folder. It works well enough, but is a little clunky.

Navidrome serving up my 200gb library from home, via Tailscale, and all it cost me was the music that I bought* over the years. Oh, and a fiver for Symfonium on my phone. But Feishin is free on my computers.

Then I worked out how to redirect it through the VPS I use for my website, and now I have my own streaming service. It’s pretty sweet.

_ *well, some of it…

iPods are still out there, and you can still buy parts to mod them. Mod a 6th gen iPod Classic with 500gb of flash storage and a new battery, and you need never worry about another music player. You can even wedge bluetooth into them now. And a USB-C connector.

She was only with him for his woollen underpants knitting pattern.

Judging by how the boomers of the UK go mad for war time ephemera, and the vague belief that thing were better back then, I suspect there’d be decent support for it from that area of society.

Gen-X down, however, wouldn’t be too pleased.

Or just use Tailscale.

Linux just seems to me, to be best geared for lightweight users at best.

A bold opinion in these towers, for sure.

Weekend at Bernie’s

I often found myself thinking of the Firefox’s dangling balls.

I’m a keen user of SyncThing, so there’s 20GB of my storage.

I’ve finally gotten around to setting up a Nextcloud server, so I should probably start using that for storing documents I need access to, which will free up a good chunk of space.

I jumped from iOS to Android last year, and wasn’t interested on spending much, so plumped for a 128gb Pixel 9 to replace the 128gb 13 mini I had. I never ran out of room on the iPhone, so figured I was golden.

What I failed to account for is just how much more you can do with an Android handset. And it turns out you need quite a lot more space for those activities.

So yeah, I don’t keep running out as such, but with hindsight I’d have gone for the next option up.

In the process of shifting my entire iCloud photo library over to Immich, I’ve discovered that a huge amount of the videos I’ve shot over the years with various iPhones are ridiculously huge x264 .MOVs. So I’ve been fiddling about with ffmpeg this morning, and have landed upon this script that re-encodes them to around 10% of their original size with no visible loss of quality, and retains EXIF metadata. One video I have is 90 seconds long, and is of bats filmed at twilight over a large pond in the New Forest. The original is 132mb, but because most of the clip is basically black, it’s been able to compress it to 2mb. Which is mad.

Anyway.

Navigate your terminal to a folder that contains a bunch of videos and paste this in, then sit back and let ffmpeg work its magic:

for i in *.MOV; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 -movflags use_metadata_tags "${i%.*}.mp4"; done

For just the odd one or two videos, here’s the basic ffmpeg command:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 -movflags use_metadata_tags ouput.mp4

God, I love ffmpeg.