d00phy

Waffle cut are a novelty. Crinkle cut are the best. Fight me.

Have to say I’m not impressed so far. I think the glass look has a retro vibe that just isn’t sitting well with me.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/40143092

BOTH CANDIDATES FOR Virginia attorney general in Tuesday’s Democratic primary have much in common. They’ve both promised, for instance, to fight against Donald Trump and DOGE, and to protect abortion rights.

When it comes to who is funding their campaigns, though, there’s one source of cash that marks a striking difference between the candidates: Dominion Energy, the Fortune 500 utility company that has long thrown around huge sums to shape politics in Virginia.

In the attorney general primary this year, local prosecutor Shannon Taylor has accepted $650,000 in donations from Dominion, while former state delegate Jay Jones has not taken any from the company.

And that cash has made a difference: Jones had a significant fundraising lead this year — until Dominion began sending checks to Taylor.

Current setup is PMS running on a Synology 5-bay, and another PMS running on a Shield Pro. The NAS server is primarily used for remote streaming, while the Shield serves to my home LAN (AppleTVs mainly).

I've been seeing stuttering on larger files, either using the Plex app or Infuse, and I'm fairly certain the Synology is the weak link. Network performance in the house has pretty solid, though admittedly I could stand to test it more thoroughly. I've been looking at moving my library to a standalone system. I've been looking at the Beelink ME Mini (which happens to be on sale!). What I don't know is the best way to build this out.

I don't want to have to buy all 6 SSDs (ar at least 6x4TB ones!) at once, so I'd be looking at either a stock Linux (Ubuntu or Rocky) install w/ I guess a BTRFS pool for the SSDs (I'm guessing I can use the eMMC for OS depending on how big the install is - that or use the SSD in slot 4). Alternatively, i could possibly set up TruNAS w/ the Plex pp to manage the storage.

As for populating the media, I plan to keep the Synology as the central repo of my data. I have it replicating to another NAS at my dad's house, with movies/music/tv replicating using Syncthing. I plan to also use Syncthing to populate the Beelink.

Anyway, please poke holes in this plan and/or suggest a better one. My main goals are to get the media I'm streaming off spinning disk w/ minimal power draw (didn't mention that above) in a way that I can expand storage as necessary to accommodate the media library. Nothing's purchased yet, so I'm not married to the hardware. I would ideally like to convert the library to h.265 or even AV1 if I can make it work.

ETA: For clarity: I'm not transcoding AFAIK. My Shield mounts the Synology over SMB and mostly works fine, until I try to play anything 4k - then I get stuttering. On the surface, this sounded like a network issue, but I can't find a problem w/ the LAN. My thought was to move the PMS to a single location w/ local storage, and use the Synology just as an archive.

ETA2: FWIW, I have not expanded the memory on the Synology or installed any cache drives.

There comes a point in the career of every contemporary Republican politician when they will be forced to do, say, or defend something that is broadly unconscionable. This mandatory inevitable heel turn is the price of conservative political ambition in the Donald Trump era. In exchange for the right to seek and attain national office in the party that he leads, Trump—in a curdled neofascist parody of the wedding scene from The Godfather—always eventually requires his supplicants to prove their loyalty to him by taking on his vendettas, bigotries, hatreds, and obsessions as their own. What’s more, he prefers that they do it with gusto.

Archive link

Watched it with my wife over the weekend, and had some thoughts. First, the acting is exceptional throughout. Seriously, I don’t think there was a weak performance from anyone. Second, the cinematography was clever, but I’m not sure it was anything more than that. Shooting each episode as a oner brings some limitations with what you can do plot-wise. This brings me to my third thought: I think they missed an episode. Each of the 4 episodes focuses on one person or small group of people, but there isn’t really an episode that focuses on the boy and the victim before the “incident.”

I got a P1S as a Christmas present for me and my wife. For now, my plan is to block its internet connection and stop using the Bambu app altogether. When/if it his stops working for me, what does the community recommend as a replacement for newbies like me, or future newbs who haven’t made this mistake?