Ok, so you said put together your own keyboard, that involves soldering. However it’s very likely you don’t need to.

Finding which switches you like is a good first step, as a general rule I think there’s only 3 types of switches you should worry about, let’s call them Red, Brown and Blue since that’s the colors Cherry MX uses for them so they’re sort of the standard. Red are fully linear, i.e. they feel the same from start to bottom. Browns have a small bump midway through (when the switch activates). Blues are like Browns but they also make a click sound. Only choose colicky switches if you have a room for yourself, they can be VERY annoying to other people, be considerate. That being said it’s personal preference, I personally like Browns although I have used Reds and honestly I don’t feel that much of a difference.

Next important is figuring out the size you want, do you plan on moving it a lot? If so a smaller form size might be better.

Then there are some ergonomics, personally I love Split ortholinear keyboards, you can buy premade ones but for me it was cheaper to build one for myself, but I’m okay with soldering. That being said if you’re going to solder, I STRONGLY recommend you get a nice modern USB-C pen style soldering iron, I bought a cheap one from Amazon and it was very difficult to use, didn’t heated up properly and had a very large tip (the small one never got hot enough to melt the solder).

I don’t want to give away too much, because some of the people I play with could find this (I don’t know if they use Lemmy but my nick is known and the details would be too unmistakable). But since they’re about to discover it anyways, the wonder does something, without charging the “proper” price for it, eventually they’ll start to lose control of it and it will start doing what it does to them. That should be subtle enough that even if my players find this they won’t know what’s coming but give you an idea. Hope that’s enough to satisfy your curiosity.

Who said I haven’t?

I started a campaign of Monster of the Week, one of the players created a paranoid character who thinks society is controlled by lizards and birds are spy robots for them. So of course I immediately switched my world around, to accommodate that, except it’s not lizard people, but actually Dragons that can take human form and control birds. The game only had a couple of sessions so the group never figured that one out.

And in my current Mage campaign with a different group, they were given this amazing powerful magical wonder, and they keep using it nilly-willy, which is exactly what I expect them to do. Little do they know that it has a price, the price is not part of the current campaign though, they’re worried about other stuff, namely an enemy who they already planned 4 things to happen together, each of which would be enough to defeat him, and to make that happen they used the wonder, over and over again.

I recently had a weird bug with Jellyfin, are you by chance using a domain name? Try accessing Jellyfin using direct IP, e.g. http://192.168.1.123:8096/

There are great apps that provides a way of organizing such libraries which you should do to have stuff organized regardless of problems with JF. They’re called Sonarr for tv shows and Radarr for movies, they also provide other features, but their media organization is great

First past the post, the winner take all voting system seen in most countries

And by most you mean a dozen or so. Of which the big names are USA, Canada, UK and India, so essentially the UK and their colonies.

For backups I don’t think full disk backups are ever needed or useful. Because if the system is running there’s always a chance of corruption. Besides 90% of what’s on your system is recoverable, so you should automate that part and backup what is not recoverable, i.e. personal documents. I use Borg, check out Pika or Vorta for some GUIs for it, and I use Borgbase for my remote, but you can also backup to some folder.

For the other two you need windows. Even if you managed to get vscode to compile and tested with wine, that’s not a guarantee that it will work on Windows. Same thing for excel, even if libre office had those features it’s not guaranteed that stuff that works there would work on excel.

If you need windows for work you need to find a way to have windows available, trying to circumvent this would be a source of pain.

I don’t hate it, I think it has its uses, just like text generation. They’re great for brainstorming ideas or quick unimportant stuff like RPG campaigns, so for example an in-game fake company logo or a poem to contain hints for the players.

However trying to use it for anything serious and final is stupid and dangerous. IMO any artist that had their art used to train a model should be able to claim royalties on anything created with that model, regardless of whether they can prove their art was used for the piece. And if the data used to train the model is not made public or can’t be verified, then ANY artist can. Maybe just 1% of the profits direct or indirect of that art, so for example you used AI to generate part of an invitation for a party, 100 artists could start a lawsuit and take every single cent you earned from the party. After all you indirectly hired them, it’s only fair they get paid, had you hired a single artist you could negotiate the price with them.

H is for High Performance, U is for Ultra-Low power usage. So if you want something for gaming choose an H if you want to have hours of battery life choose a U. Pretty simple and easy to st a glance see if s processor is what you’re looking for.

The 7 is not repeated on Ryzen 7 9700X, otherwise you wouldn’t have stuff like the Ryzen 5 1600X. The first 7 (or the 5 in my other example) is the segment, i.e. towards which market it’s directed, Ryzen 3 are entry levels that you should consider for your grandma, Ryzen 9 are high power CPUs. Then the first number of the 4 digits is the generation, the second one is the how it stacks up to others in it’s series, the third and fourth are extra differentiation if needed, then there’s some letters for feature flags. So for example your Ryzen 7 9700X is a high-end 9th generation high clock/performance CPU, just by that name alone I can guess that it outperforms a Ryzen 7 9500X and possibly matches a Ryzen 9 7700X. If you learn to read those it makes it very easy to figure out if an upgrade is worth it just by the model number.

USB naming convention is a mess, I’m not touching that.

Also not sure about the pro, none of my phone’s ever were pro or even had a pro version so not sure.

Sony is a bit weird, but WH-1000XM5 is a Wireless Headband (WH) 1000X is the model M5 is the generation, so those are newer than WH-1000XM4, and the next iteration of them will be called WH-1000XM6. The N is as you guessed noise canceling, the 1000X are top of the line so they have it too, no need to advertise it. I don’t know much about other products of them, but they do seem weird.

Monitor names can be very helpful, for example Dell uses [Series][Diagonal][Year][Ratio or Resolution][Features] so just by looking at a short code, for example I’m not even sure this monitor exists but a U3224QWC is an ultrawide QHD 32 inches IPS with anti-glare monitor released in 2024 with a USB-C input. That being said https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/j5pezf/computer_monitors/

Ook

I mean, yes, but there are ways around it. Windows could have a public key embebed somewhere and the private counterpart gives access, the command could depend on the time it’s received, so it’s never the same and without the private key it’s impossible to reproduce, and the Killswitch could be non-instantaneous, combine all of that and you have a Killswitch that:

• It’s very hard for you to realize something happened, because by the time it happens the trigger is lost in a sea of other requests
• Even if you were to fine comb through all of that and spot it, it’s encrypted
• Even if you were to resend it it would do nothing, because the time has changed
• Even if you managed to find the public key and decrypt it the actual content could be inocuos, like a random looking string
• As long as the private key is secure enough it would be impossible to crack
• Even if you somehow managed to crack it and send anything you want to the PC you don’t know the protocol to generate the random strings and you only have the one example of the message (which no longer works)
• Even if several people did this the content could truly be random (in the common sense of the word, i.e. pseudo-random), since Microsoft controls the RNG on Windows they can use that to ensure that random data gets generated equally

And I’m not even a cryptographer, people who come up with new encryption protocols can surely do a lot better than my naive example above which would make it almost impossible for someone to figure out.

I mean, he’s joking, but:

AMD Drivers: yeah, this one’s not a thing

Chrome: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/EWW.html

Gmail: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryMail

Office 360: https://orgmode.org/

I-Tunes: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/itunes.el (although this one probably doesn’t work)

JBL: I have no idea what it is

Muse score: https://github.com/piercegwang/staff-mode

Anti-virus: I don’t know of any, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone listed a plugin for checking files

PyCharm: This is the one he said to use Vim

Remote desktop: Emacs can natively open remote files or directories

Star citizen: obviously not

Steam: Obviously not, because it’s proprietary, I really wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a GOG plugin

VPN: https://github.com/anticomputer/ovpn-mode

There’s some truth to the joke that emacs is a very complete Operating system.

He said remote desktop to iOS not from iOS, that means he needs a client on his desktop to access the server on the phone. If it was android the answer is scrcpy but I’m not aware of any such tools for iOS (since I don’t own an iOS device).

AMD Drivers: if your GPU is new enough (which it probably is since you’re playing Star citizen) it should be just magic here since they come together with the kernel.

Chrome: it’s available for Linux, no need to switch. Although Firefox is very nice too.

Gmail: not sure what you mean, Gmail is a website, those are available on any platform. If you meant a desktop email client (which honestly I have never in my life used) there’s Thunderbird.

Office 360: Are you talking about Microsoft 365? Is that not a website too? In any case Libre office is a nice alternative to the classical Office desktop app too in case you want that.

I-Tunes: A quick search online reveals people use wine to run the Windows version of iTunes, although I would probably consider migrating. Spotify has a native client and there are some places where you can buy music and have it locally for playback.

JBL: not sure what this is other than a brand for speakers.

Anti-virus: You almost assuredly don’t need an anti-virus on Linux, as long as you install software through the proper channels (i.e. using the package manager) chances of virus are so small it’s not something to worry about. Most Linux anti-virus serve to check windows binaries in the system to avoid someone using the Linux machine to send virus to Windows users.

PyCharm: it’s available for Linux

Remote desktop to iOS: Not sure this is possible even on Windows, I use remmina for remote desktop, it supports several ways of connecting to the other device so maybe see if it works for you.

Star citizen: Never played it but it seems to be playable with Wine.

Steam: While steam is available not all games are compatible, check out https://www.protondb.com/ to see the status of any specific Steam game.

VPN: should be native on Linux, there’s a protocol caller OpenVPN which most VPN providers will give you a Config file for that you can use directly on the network applet on Linux.

PS: Next time share the list in text, it makes it easier to reply

No need to apologize, it’s a weird choice from Plex, I would have never guessed that this is how it works if I hadn’t suffered outages myself, and I’m amazed that not many people call them out on this, it seems completely against what most self-hosting people are looking for, but they seem to defend Plex with teeth and nails.

First of all I agree with most of your a, b and c points, just would like to point out that while it’s true that Docker containers provide an extra level of security they’re not as closed down as people sometimes believe, but as a general rule I agree with everything you said.

But you’re wrong about the way Plex works, this is a quote from their documentation:

So, your Plex Media Server basically “relays” the media stream through our server so that your app can access it since the app can’t connect with your server directly.

If that’s not clear enough:

Your security and privacy is important to us. When you have enabled secure connections on your Plex Media Server, then your streaming will continue to be secure and encrypted even when using our Relay feature. (When using secure connections, the content is encrypted end-to-end and tunneled through our Relay. The connection is not terminated on our servers and only your Plex Media Server has the certificate.)

So it’s very clear data is streaming through their relay server, which goes back to my original point of I expect that to be a paid feature, it’s using bandwidth from their relay servers.

As for the security again you’re wrong, authentication happens on the Plex remote server, not on your local one, which is why you can’t use Plex without internet (part of my dislike for them). So you connect to Plex remote server and authenticate there, you then get a client that’s talking to the remote server, even if someone was able to bypass that login they would be inside a Plex owned server, not yours, they would need to then exploit whatever API exists between your home server and that one to jump to your machine, so it’s an extra jump needed, again similarly to having Authelia/Authentik in front of Jellyfin.

You are, authentication on the VPS, you’re relying on Jellyfin authentication against the internet. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is your suggested setup: [home server] Jellyfin -> [remote server] Reverse Proxy -> [remote machine] users. Let’s imagine a scenario where Jellyfin has a bug that if you leave the password empty it logs you in (I know, it’s an exaggeration but just for the sake of argument, an SQL injection or other similar attacks would be more plausible but I’m trying to keep things simple), on your setup now anyone can log into your Jellyfin and from there it’s one jump to your home server. On Plex’s solution even if Plex authentication gets compromised the attacker only got access to the remote server, and would now need to find another vulnerability to jump to your Plex at home.

Putting something like Authelia/Authentik on a VPS in front of Jellyfin is a similar approach, but the Jellyfin client can’t handle third party authentication AFAIK

For remote streaming they do, here are their docs on it https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-server-through-relay/

From that documentation:

So, your Plex Media Server basically “relays” the media stream through our server so that your app can access it since the app can’t connect with your server directly.

No, the article only mentions the feature by name, the docs for the feature mentions the relay https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-server-through-relay/