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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • 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.







  • 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.









  • I’ve worked a lot of different jobs over the years, some well in my skill set, some well outside, and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed, it’s that with very few exceptions, knowledge and skills matter very little, what matters most is sucking up to the boss, a skill I am exceedingly bad at. Interestingly enough, one of the jobs where skill mattered most was construction, even when I worked for my uncle, he barely cut me any breaks. He once said “you hammer like old people fuck”. Not to mention the number of times he yelled at me because I was shit with a tape measure. “Cut it 3 times and it’s still too short”. Yeah nepotism didn’t help me there.




  • Having worked in the financial industry for many years, I’m betting this has more to do with security than performance. Timeout before your screen locks is ridiculously short - you could be reading something, therefore not moving your mouse, then your screen locks, and you have to put in your password to unlock it. Then there’s the nature of call center work, if you’re not super busy, you might have a few minutes between calls, but when one comes in, you have to be immediately ready for it, not sitting there typing an overly complex password while an impatient customer is trying to give you all their information right away before you can take it down … so I totally get the usefulness of a mouse jiggler. I wrote my own in Java way back when- actually it didn’t jiggle the mouse, it was simpler to simulate a benign keypress, but same effect. I wrote it myself because I couldn’t download one, any reputable site that I might get one from was blocked- but who knows, if I hadn’t had the knowledge to write it, I might have been more motivated to find one, any one, any way, and that of course is a big nono- that’s how keyloggers and shit like that end up compromising systems and leaking millions of passwords and/or credit card numbers… So I get why the company is concerned, even though I don’t care.