It could be harder…

Bothers me because I’m in process of divorcing my wife, and she pretty much does whatever the kids want so she can be the fun parent while I am the one who worries about this kind of stuff and ends up being the boring/antifun parent. So she has probably already done whatever, and if I stop them, I’m the bad guy…

Start?

I do, and I prefer 2560x1440

I still have a ~30 year old tube tv that has never needed anything, it still works… But I’ve been through at least 4 HDTVs.

And when that password manager gets cracked?

The linked article…

The weight of the motor is insignificant compared to that of the batteries.

Only time I ever ate at an a&w was in Bangkok 25 years ago…

the heat of the desert is way outside of their operating range.

I live in the Phoenix area, there are tons of solar installations here. In fact my house has solar, had it when we bought it 10 years ago, and it cuts the power bill in half.

I’m sure it depends on the implementation… I turned it off on my Kia Sorento after it tried to follow the seams in the concrete instead of the lane markings, I had to fight it quite hard.

DVD is better than Blu-ray in that regard - I’ve ripped DVDs that look like they fell off a truck and got run over multiple times and had no problem, meanwhile about 1 out of 5 Blu-rays I got from Netflix would have problems despite looking pristine. It has to do with the data density, Blu-ray packs so much more in the same amount of space, one microscopic scratch wipes out so much data…

Of course some DVDs suffer from bad materials. I was re-ripping my collection recently, and I have a few that have sat in a closet untouched for years, not a scratch on them, but the drive won’t even recognize there’s a disc. Probably oxidation of the reflective layer.

Way back when I used to copy movies to .avi files, my computer was in one room, my TV in another, I had a video card with TV out and a long set of cables, I’d preserve the copyright warning because it gave me time to start the movie then walk to the living room to watch it…

VHS was kind of 2.5 thanks to macrovision…

Yo ho!

That’s just single layer - dual layer is something like 8.4 if memory serves (which it often doesn’t…)

Wow, I don’t even remember that. I’ve been playing DVDs on a computer basically forever, which rarely obeyed such restrictions…

I’ve been doing this since 2008 - although I only recently setup Plex in 2017, before that I just ran a web server and played movies in a browser on various smart TVs, but around 2017 was when my main TV got an update that rendered its browser mostly useless… Fuck Sony by the way. And before smart TVs I just had a video card with TV out and long cables… Or burning VCDs, I still have my 5-disc DVD changer that could play VCDs as long as they were burned to CD-RW discs, though it’s just gathering dust now.

Tell that to my employer… We moved to a bigger office a little over a year ago. The old office was cramped, but it was reasonably quiet. Those of us who are on the phones were in a corner pretty well shielded from everything else. The new place is one huge continuous expanse, and we’re right in the middle of it. And it’s what I would call cheap and unfinished, but a commercial realtor would call it “modern industrial” meaning you can see all the wiring and ductwork and such- and bare concrete. Which makes sound carry throughout and echo. Just the other day my boss had to go hush a gaggle of developers that were congregating 20 feet away and laughing uproariously.

a more useless application of electrons

Microsoft is worse… Have a problem, google it, find a link that has a promising summary, click it- “try Windows 11!” Because that’s what dead links do.