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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • You know, I was really sick and tired when they updated the nvidia shield with the new android TV version that makes most of the screen show stuff that are basically ads. It didn’t even let me show only stuff I was interested in and this constant “oh you are hovering over this item for 0.000001s so you seem to be interested in this, let me start the video for you with audio” no god damnit I was reading something else or got a text.

    I had to install a different launcher so that I could only show on the screen what I actually wanted to see. I have basically removed or reduced all ads as much as I ca.

    Lately, I was at my parents place and they don’t have that stuff. Even the 1.5 minutes of ads for a free service is so disruptive to me watching something.

    What has this to do with PlayStation?

    Well, on the shield you are still able to install a custom launcher that is more to your liking, you could disable the internet access and completely stream your own local content. But on the PS, you don’t have that option and are completely at the mercy of what they think you should watch and see on your screen that you bought with a console that you also bought with your own money.


  • Mountain Man: 10 Books by Keith C. Blackmore. Basically, the Zombie Apocalypse happens and a Dude tries to survive alone, physically, mentally and emotionally while also trying to go on supply runs, running into Zombies and generally trying to stay alive while coping with everything. I think it would be good to have some other zombie-related Series that isn’t The Walking Dead.

    Expeditionary Force: 18 Books by Craig Alanson. Earth and Humanity are attacked by Hamster Aliens, another alien Race, Lizards, who attack the hamsters saving Earth in the process and then recruiting Humanity into a war on a galactic scale but the Hamsters aren’t the real enemy of Humanity. I’m only at the end of the 5th Audiobook but they are great and I would really wish Skippy is voiced by the Audiobook Narrator R.C. Bray in a TV adaption.

    Kyralia series: Been a while since I read it but a fantastic series related to magic By Trudi Canavan, I think there are just not enough good Magic-related Shows.

    Tales of the Otori: A 5-Book Series by Lian Hearn is set in a fictional feudal Japan. The Main story follows a Boy, Takeo, through his life to avenge his adoptive father and escape the legacy of his biological father. Probably the only series in which I had to put down the book at one point and just had to process what was happening.


  • I tried it but it doesn’t seem to work for me correctly or maybe I am doing something wrong. I patch the YouTube app and install it but as soon as I close and open it, all the changes made by the patch are apparently gone. Shorts that are hidden on the first start after the patch are visible again, ads seem to be reduced but still happen occasionally.

    I disabled the default YouTube app, gave the patched version a different name, disabled auto update, repatched it but nothing seems to stick after opening it again.

    And then the whole “I have to download the apk so that I can use it” because I don’t have rooted my phone is just inconvenient.

    I stick with my yt-dlp server and Plex instead.


  • It goes even beyond that.

    With a dedicated app, you go into the store and install it and then you have it in your apps that you then can place everywhere.

    With a website, you need to have the browser, navigate to that website each time. And yes, you could put a link to that website on your home screen as well but not many user are probably aware of that being an option.

    I know that but I still would prefer a dedicated app because it is easier to manage and use more features of my phone. For example, I just tried it on my android phone and the link to a website always opened a new tab in my Firefox.

    Then I can manage the notifications of that app depending on what I want it to notify me about.

    I can’t do that specifically for a single app or website in a browser.

    On the other hand, I also wouldn’t want to miss a website because I am not always on my phone and, in some cases, it is way more annoying to do something over the phone because I am just not used to it (like writing this comment). Doing that over a website version that I can access on my PC is much easier and convenient.


  • It’s a bit of an infuriating story that I had not so long ago.

    I have a Playstation account and I recently wanted to log into that account on the PlayStation website. The Password I had saved in my Bitwarden Password Manager was apparently wrong. Okay, then I will just reset it, that’s fine.

    I went through the Password reset process and generated a new Password, pasted it into the Password field and sent it and everything was fine. I tried to log in with that password and was told that the username or password was wrong. Okay, that is weird, since I reset the password just now the login name couldn’t be wrong because, well, I just used that for the reset.

    I tried that several times with the same result and gave up.

    A few months later, I wanted to try again and had the same problem. I wanted to sort that out so I went through the same process with the Support bot yet again which then told me that I should come back in the “office hours”. A company making 84 billion in revenue should be able to employ 24/7 customer service or at least tell me that when I request support and not let me go through the bot again.

    So, I waited for the customer service personnel to be available and told them my problem. There I was told that “everything was looking fine on their end” and they quickly ended the support. I mean, yes, I was angry but wasn’t abusive to that person because if you couldn’t help me what should I do with my account, it also definitely wasn’t their specific fault. But I would, at least, have expected more than “Well, works on our end, sucks for you, bye”.

    The next time I tried again and got a more competent Support dude and we ran through the same troubleshooting steps as before. Reset password (even though I just did that, again, through the bot), logged in again and failed again. This time they suggested that I could use a “normal” password that I don’t generate. THAT worked for some reason.

    All of my generated passwords in Bitwarden are up to 32 long with all possible characters, depending on what the website allows or expects. If a website, for example, doesn’t allow 32 characters, I adjust and shorten it to the maximum length they allow. That worked without issues so far.

    Well, turns out that the field that you use to reset your password has a character limit of 30 characters. But, this would be fine if the dialogue tells you that your password is too long, but it doesn’t. It just cuts off at 30 characters and happily saves that.

    However, the Password field that you use to log in doesn’t have that restriction.

    This means that you reset your password with a 32-character long generated password, which is saved in your vault, PlayStation saves a 30-long password and then you use the 32-long password to log in, which fails because it isn’t the same.

    And this isn’t even mentioned in the password guidelines. It only said “min 8 characters” but not the maximum.


  • I think that it is healthy for a discussion or an argument to have both positive and negative points of view. I also will voice my opinion regardless of the standpoint of the initial question.

    However, this also depends on the context. I won’t go into each thread and post something negative just because I don’t like the post or thread. But if someone is asking for an opinion then they should expect that the opinion of others might not be positive or align with their own opinion at all.

    I always hate to see those “yes” posts in which every criticism is being downvoted or “banned” but I also hate to see those rants/vent posts just for the circlejerk of hate or negativity.




  • A lot of anime are produced with a single season that can run for only 12 episodes with 25 minutes each including intro and outro.

    Some of those more popular ones do get further seasons but not on a yearly basis but there could be years between them. In case of konosuba the first season came out in 2016 with 10 episodes and second season in 2017 also with 10 episodes. Season 3 only released this year so quite a long gap between them.

    However, the really popular ones are fairly overshadowing the general amount of shows being released. Just this season we got 54 new anime releases and 29 “continuing” according to MAL.

    Some of those seasons are really strong like the spring season of this year in which a lot of very popular shows are released. Other seasons could then be fairly slow.

    And since they are all produced to promote the source material that source material has to differentiate itself from the rest and draw people in quickly through the title. So you get titles like

    • How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift?
    • God’s Blessing on This Wonderful World!
    • Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?
    • Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon

    Especially the isekai (transported to another world) genre relies heavily on that to quickly explain what you can expect.

    And then you shouldn’t forget that this is only that visible because more and more anime are actually making their way onto other platforms for the western audience.





  • I think the biggest problem that people have with NGE is that it just isn’t your typical shounen anime. All of the characters behave in a way because of their past experiences. Shinji being abandoned by his father, witnessing his mother’s death without actually understanding or realising it, asuka being neglected by her mother and Rei being a clone. And all of them in their teens, in a broken world getting told to fight and probably die or humanity is doomed.

    With how saturated anime are with flawed main characters that then use that flaw to their advantage to overcome their enemy, NGE just doesn’t do that.

    I think that viewers just expect this hero story when they watch it.

    I mean. I had a similar impression when I first watched it a long long time ago and thought that shinji was a wuss. But that was after I watched the typical shounen, DB, DBZ, Naruto and bleach. Not to mention that I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. Only later after watching it a second time and digging into the background a bit, shinjis Oedipus complex, asukas hedgehog dilemma and the general motivation of each of the characters it made a lot more sense. Including the context of their situation made me appreciate the storytelling a lot more because it put everything into perspective.





  • I had the pleasure recently to create an ffmpeg command to transcode a video into HEVC 10bit with quicksync.

    I had tha previously running completely fine on my Nvidia GPU. You would think that it would just be replacing the parameter which device or hardware acceleration to use.

    Yeah, turns out that there are like 4 ways to set the quality value of the transcoded output, CRF didn’t work for some reason with quick sync so you need to use global quality or something. I spend days on this trying to figure this out, DAYS.

    It is a very powerful tool but every time I have to use it, it is too complicated and I have to spend hours or days to get it working.