I switched to buckwheat pillows a few years ago and I've been a fan. It's a really interesting texture that you can move and shape really easily, but then when you apply pressure to it, it firms up and holds its shape. So, you get a really supportive pillow that's molded to your head and neck (For reference, I'm a side sleeper). The only downside I've noticed is the filling degrades relatively quickly, and after about a year it loses a lot of its volume and doesn't hold its shape as well, so you'll need to replace it. The bright side is that it's fairly cheap, and entirely biodegradable.

Android has a similar feature. It's called "Lockdown mode" on the shutdown menu. Locks the phone and turns off any biometric unlocks.

Taking the opportunity to get on my soapbox and remind everyone that free software still requires someone's time and effort to maintain. If you've been using a free app for a while and you and you enjoy it (and you have the means to do so), consider sending a donation to the developers/maintainers! It's a good way to help ensure that the great, free app you enjoy stays great and free.

It's rough in the US. Most iPhone users will insist that iMessage is better and refuse to use anything else, and then whine when an android user is in a group chat and none of the features work.

Just wait until climate change kills the vast majority of coffee crops. That'll probably remind people that it's a luxury.

Funny you should mention that.

Right. Why do I have to submit a retinal scan and 3 forms of ID to watch porn because parents can't be bothered to learn basic computer skills and monitor their own children?

Ars Technica seems to really be embracing the fediverse. They have a very active official Mastodon account. https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica

One factor I haven't seen mentioned is that because of rising interest rates, tech companies have had to shift from being focused on growth to actually turning a profit. Because of this, companies are having to shed employees because they over hired in anticipation of that continued growth. People are expensive so that's an "easy" way to try to get the line closer to positive.

This is kind of a rough overview and I'm by no means an expert on economics. Just someone who works in tech and so has been following things closely.

+1 for Jellyfin. It's FOSS, doesn't pollute your media collection with terrible streaming offerings, and doesn't paywall hardware acceleration. Much better option than Plex these days imo.

This seems like a good time to mention that if you live in the US, there's currently a significant amount of federal money up for grabs to expand the rail network, with an emphasis on high speed rail. See if there are any projects being planned in your state, and make your voice heard so NIMBYs and airline industry cronies don't bully us out of a vastly superior mode of inter-city transit.

I find it useful in a lot of ways. I think people try to over apply it though. For example, as a software engineer, I would absolutely not trust AI to write an entire app. However, it's really good at generating "grunt work" code. API requests, unit tests, etc. Things that are well trodden, but change depending on the context.

I also find they're pretty good at explaining and summarizing information. The chat interface is especially useful in this regard because I can ask follow up questions to drill down into something I don't quite understand. Something that wouldn't be possible with a Wikipedia article, for example. For important information, you should obviously check other sources, but you should do that regardless of whether the writer is a human or machine.

Basically, it's good at that it's for: taking a massive compendium of existing information and applying it to the context you give it. It's not a problem solving engine or an artificial being.

It's funny to me that people have such a problem with YouTube Premium. There are a LOT of reasons to criticize YouTube/Google, but YouTube Premium is about as close as it gets to the platonic ideal of a video subscription service. It completely banishes any ads you'd get without paying, and it provides the creators you watch with more value than someone watching without premium. If showing ads is unacceptable, and paying to not see ads is unacceptable, then what's the alternative? People have to make a living, and servers don't run on magic.

Yeah, the notion that no one uses torrents anymore is hilarious. I use both frequently. Usenet is great and has a lot of benefits, but it doesn't hold a candle to torrents as far as breadth of available content.

Not as long as there are minorities to blame for everything.

Here's a list of all the official and third party Jellyfin apps

Taking the opportunity to get on my soapbox and remind everyone that free software still requires someone's time and effort to maintain. If you've been using a free app for a while and you and you enjoy it (and you have the means to do so), consider sending a donation to the developers/maintainers! It's a good way to help ensure that the great, free app you enjoy stays great and free.

I'm not super paranoid about security, but I do try to have a few good practices to make sure that it takes more than a bot scanning for /admin.php to find a way in.

• Anything with SSH access uses key-based auth with password auth disabled. First thing I do when spinning up a new machine
• Almost nothing is exposed directly to the Internet. I have wireguard set up on all my devices for remote access and also for extra security on public networks
• Anyone who comes to visit gets put on the "guest" network, which is a separate subnet that can't see or talk to anything on the main network
• For any service that supports creating multiple logins, I make sure I have a separate admin user with elevated permissions, and then create a non-privileged user that I sign in on other devices with
• Every web-based service is only accessible with a FQDN which auto-redirects to HTTPS and has an actual certificate signed by a trusted CA. This is probably the most "paranoid" thing I do, because of the aforementioned not being accessible on the Internet, but it makes me happy to see the little lock symbol on my browser without having to fiddle around with trusting a self-signed cert.

I mean, that goes both ways. As an American, and especially as a guy, I often get sideways looks when I mention I have a bidet. If you can't or won't try it out, fine, but people are really acting like it's strange to clean yourself off using water.

This doesn't directly answer your question, but highly recommend checking out https://trash-guides.info/

They have a ton of guides on how to configure and automate really detailed rules for sonarr/radarr. So, while it won't help you verify the download matches the labels, it'll make it more likely to get releases from reputable sources that are more likely to use accurate labels.