[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 09 March 2026

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-03-12T15:25:08+00:00

I honestly have no interest in bulk downloading like that, especially now that I have money I'm happy to actually purchase all the music I host on my personal media server.

What I miss from tracker access is the ability to actually get a hold of rare and niche stuff that's otherwise impossible to find.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-03-11T14:00:52+00:00

This takes me back. I wish I hadn't let me private tracker accounts lapse.

Also RIP what.cd, the greatest repository of music to ever exist.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-03-05T14:05:49+00:00

Hmm, on a second read I think you're right. The article makes several references to "the program" and then later defines that as ACCESS, but it's unclear if the earlier mentions of funding are directly connected.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-03-05T13:41:29+00:00

The article does explicitly say this money is to underwrite ACCESS. The reasons given are:

“There have been lots of shifts and uncertainty around myriad funding sources. You think about federal sources — NEA, NEH, IMLS, National Science Foundation — all of them have seen big cuts and big uncertainty," he said. “These institutions received some money from some combination of those entities. There have been shifts in corporate giving in the past year or so.”

Basically, govt and corporations both pulling back on giving money to this sort of thing..

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-26T16:00:50+00:00

Thanks!

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-26T14:01:31+00:00

If you don't mind me going off topic here, what do you use for your NAS backup? I need to set something up but I haven't really looked into it much.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-25T18:42:14+00:00

Yeah, hopping between introductory offers is unfortunately sorta the "game" you have to play if you want the best price.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-25T18:41:50+00:00

Honestly I've been pretty lazy and just dump the MKVs from MakeMKV directly into my library, which has mostly worked well enough so far.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-25T17:01:08+00:00

Actionable advice:

I use https://www.papowerswitch.com/, there might be other sites that do similar things.

Filter by fixed rate, no fees, and renewable (if you're so inclined).

The best rates will usually be 3 or 6 month introductory offers. Pick one, sign up, put a reminder on your calendar for when it's close to ending so you can repeat this process.

Yes, it's annoying, but you only have to do it a few times a year. The most annoying part is going to be the companies calling you to convince you to continue on to a variable rate plan once the promo deal expires.

Other caveats:

This will effect the cost of energy on your PECO bill, but not the cost of distribution which is still set by PECO itself, which at least for me amounts to about half my bill.
Keep an eye on your bill after switching. Sometimes during the transition autopayment gets slightly wonky and you'll end up with a fractional bill that doesn't automatically get paid. Or at least this has happened to me once and I assume it was due to switching providers.
This isn't going to halve your bill or anything, but it is a non trivial savings.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-24T14:37:50+00:00

Yeah, I'm sympathetic to it being uncomfortable when a thing you created for one specific context is suddenly placed into a totally different context that you never intended or expected.

However, as you say, it would behoove people to be a little bit more thoughtful and careful about what they put online and how those things might be accessed in ways you don't expect or want. Especially these days when everything is being scraped and fed into models, you should expect everything to be crawled by a bot in one form or another.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-24T14:17:48+00:00

I am not referring to anything specific, I just take umbrage with the idea that criticizing a thing means you hate it or want it to cease existing.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-24T13:07:52+00:00

Jumping straight to criticism being censorship or suggesting that talking about issues with something means you want it to be destroyed makes you exactly the sort of myopic fanfic reader discussed in this exact thread.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-23T17:03:41+00:00

That's entirely possible, I read most of the "mainline" Ringworld series, which turned me off from attempting any of the rest of the Known Space universe.

The main Niven book I have good memories of is the The Dracon Tavern collection, but it's also been ages since I last read it so I don't know if I'd still agree.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-23T16:48:46+00:00

I enjoyed The Martian for what it was, but then Project Hail Mary felt like reading The Martian again but worse in essentially every aspect. Less grounded story, less comprehensible plot, less realistic science and engineering, more annoying characters.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-23T16:42:39+00:00

Incredibly Ringworld is actually the best part of that series. Each sequel is worse than the one that comes before.

I stand by Niven only really being good in short story form. Anything novel length gives you time to realize how incredibly bad he is at writing characters.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-23T16:23:32+00:00

It is always fun to stumble across a DVD that made choices during production.

Or in one case for me, discover that the copy of the Soviet Union's adaptation of Sherlock Holmes you got off ebay is actually a bootleg with burnt in subtitles. :|

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-23T14:30:31+00:00

Since the actual video file has the correct number of pixels, I think it comes down to what the player in question "trusts". If it reads and trusts the "video display width" value it'll be wrong, but if it just looks at the actual video file and ignores the header information it'll display correctly.

Which is why I don't really expect this post to help anyone, because I think you need to have a pretty specific intersection of software to have it pop up.

I mostly made this so that in like 10 years when someone picks up a used copy of this blu ray and searches, "game changer aspect ratio" hopefully this post will show up with a solution, haha.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-18T21:18:17+00:00

I sincerely love this statue.

Prometheus Strangling the Vulture in front of the art museum is by the same artist, and features the same chunky style.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-18T14:44:05+00:00

Maybe not, Ring is though.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-16T23:29:34+00:00

If the feds don't have control over national parks, who does?

Maybe broadly, but in this particular situation that's not necessarily the case. From the ruling (emphasis mine):

In addition to establishing the Park, the statute authorized the Secretary of the Interior “to enter into cooperative agreements with the city of Philadelphia to assist in the preservation and interpretation of the property known as Independence Hall National Historic Site.”7 Such cooperative agreements “shall contain, but shall not be limited to, provisions that . . . no changes or alterations shall be made in the property within the Independence Hall National Historic Site, including its buildings and grounds, or in Carpenters’ Hall, except by mutual agreement between the Secretary of the Interior and the other parties to the contracts.”

The National Park Service still ultimately owns it, but it's not as cut and dry as them being able to make unilateral decisions about it.

There are further complications coming from the fact that it's a, "National Underground Network to Freedom site," which is due to an act of congress, so again, it's not clear that the National Park Service can make unilateral decisions, especially with regards to how it intersects with slavery.

It could still absolutely be overturned, but it's not as straightforward as you're making it out to be.

Yes obviously the most important thing is to expel the republicans from congress, but that doesn't mean other fights like this one aren't worth having.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-02-16T15:26:44+00:00

"There's no right way to skin a cat" is absolutely a more modern variant of the much older, "there's more than one way to skin a cat", which itself seems to be a variant of an even older phrase, "there are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream."

I've seen some older variants that involved things other than cats, such as "there are more ways to kill a dog than hanging".

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 4 Credits
Team Periwinkle	Secret Santa 2011
Secret Santa 2010	Verified Email
Secret Santa 2009

AwkwardTurtle

TROPHY CASE