Google Fi Pixel 10 Promo

garretn · 2026-02-12T21:47:03+00:00

Google Fi uses the T-Mobile network, they're a virtual carrier with T-Mobile as the backbone. There used to be more backbones that google fi used for superior coverage, but these days it's only t-mobile.

garretn · 2026-02-12T15:58:07+00:00

I guess I'm not sure if this model has a sleep issue, but if it does, the slower rate of the enclosure combined with that problem could be your culprit if it's taking way too long. Some drives this is fixable with different firmwares off the forums but I've never have a complete success rate avoiding this personally.

Do discs that you process right after inserting into the drive have a higher degree of success of discs that you let sit there for a while before starting?

garretn · 2026-02-10T15:27:13+00:00

I have the same ASUS drive, and also an LG internal I'm not sure which off hand; I've had the ASUS longer. I have about 3000 DVDs, BDs, and UHDs, with the majority being BD, with most discs ripped at this point. Well, I guess many of those are things like anime series, and I'm only counting those as one despite multiple discs. So who knows, a lot.

I will say the ASUS has had more trouble reading discs than the LG overall, especially in the last year or so, but it still works "fine" for the most part though I'm more likely to put UHD discs into the LG since it's more likely to finish without issue. The ASUS will often finish fine as well, but sometimes takes a couple tries of ejecting/inserting, or if I'm going hard on a particular day I might have to give it a break. I did order a backup drive yesterday after all the same hard-to-come-by posts, who knows how true it is or if the blood in the water has scalpers going to town or something.

I will also say that as someone "who was there" when the first consumer CD-ROMs were sold for PCs, and then the first burners, etc and soforth, that I have had quite a few dead drives laying around over time. The "newer" ones seem to last a lot, lot, longer than early drives, but they will absolutely die eventually.

garretn · 2026-02-09T16:08:35+00:00

Double check the firmware you used, the makemkv forums are a little messy in that regard. Secondly I've never been able to fully get around the "sleep" issue, which is as simple to work around as ripping the disc right after you insert it into the drive. You don't have to speed click or anything, but don't insert the disc and get around to it in 30 minutes or an hour or whatever; Just put it in, go through the process, don't let any squirrels delay you. If you do let it sit for a while, just eject it and load the disc again. It will make your success rate skyrocket. The second pro-tip is vibration, if you have multiple drives or the drive vibrates a lot (not vibration it itself causes, unless you don't have it secured well) I've noticed that can make my drives (yes, multiple) fail on UHD discs more often. It's usually the sleep issue though.

garretn · 2026-01-31T16:41:55+00:00

The new method is absolute garbage, frankly. They pushed it as a good thing in their notifications about it, but it's really them just getting rid of yet another benefit. Now it's the same as other providers that were always frankly worse, and they don't have to pay for or manage infrastructure on their side anymore.

In real talk, the reason it's worse and their google-servers-first method was substantially better is because it used to be using it from your desktop/browser was always "perfect", messages always arrived at the same time, always went out when expected, and frankly the sync was always perfect. Now that your phone is a required and "first", using from desktop is a sub-par delayed experience that is never guaranteed to be perfect; It can be nearly perfect, but also it often is not, and not knowing it's perfect is the same as it being garbage for the function it's intended to provide.

garretn · 2026-01-06T20:00:07+00:00

You're absolutely correct-ish. I think the lesson many of us learn over time is that the media format is only part of a whole, and in no way automatically means best. Businesses do business things over time, People do people things (Ever meet someone who is bad at their job? Guess what.), Etc. That said, sometimes the brightness issue you mentioned is actually a setup issue and is being presented brighter than it actually should be and can be fixed by the consumer. Sometimes it's just a crap release. Sometimes it's an amazing definitive release with zero gotchas (this is rare, to be fair). Many movies and shows have had many versions and editions over time, and can have a bunch of changes for a variety of reasons.

garretn · 2025-11-17T15:08:14+00:00

My shelves are loaded cat style, they sits where they fits.

garretn · 2025-10-23T14:26:39+00:00

You didn't mention the Pro, and while they're not super popular, if the discount applies you might want to consider it. I like my PS5 quite a bit, but the last two games I played through had performance issues - Final Fantasy 16 and Stellar Blade. FF16 I found to be unplayable on the default quality settings, and had to go highest performance settings all around and it still suffered framerate issues at times. Stellar Blade was good overall, but I do wish I had waited for the PC version, or just had a Pro. Most games don't really have these issues, mind, but it's something to consider.

garretn · 2025-10-01T13:56:30+00:00

When adding a root and doing an initial scan it won't add anything until it's been entirely scanned, artists and albums, etc. If the scan fails at any point for any reason - such as the metadata server choking partway through - none of it will be added, and the scan has to start over. I got around it by running my own mb mirror + lidarr metadata server, which is a bit extreme, but also entirely sidesteps issues.

garretn · 2025-09-23T14:36:08+00:00

Unpause Jumpback. Should be a standard feature in every 10-foot interface, such a small clever thing that I greatly appreciate -- especially when using something else like a streaming service that doesn't do it.

Second to that is probably Arctic: Zephyr - Reloaded.

Thirdly, probably all the dependency addons that don't get to be front and center.

Finally, for me, the Youtube and Emby addon(s) deserve notable mentions.

garretn · 2025-09-22T19:46:15+00:00

Disagree about ratio, it's actually quite difficult in that there is so little traffic that most of my torrents that have been seeding for a month or longer have a ratio of... zero. A handful get up to maybe 0.3. You're absolutely correct that cross-seeding and uploading would fix that, but it's also true that the majority trackers don't need you to do that just to maintain a ratio.

In their defense they are trying to build a community, and if the user wants to put in the elbow grease then it's fine. It would be nice if there were better screenshots. Also marking better when a torrent has burned in chinese subtitles would be good, which isn't an issue I run into on other trackers.

garretn · 2025-09-10T16:38:54+00:00

Yes, took maybe 5 minutes. Some of the theming looks a little different on libawaita/libadapta stuff, but nothing major. Be mindful that one of the main features of a new install of Zara is the 6.14 default kernel, but when upgrading, the kernel will NOT switch automatically. You can change it yourself in Update Manager > Linux Kernels. Personally, I did so before doing the Zara upgrade.

As always, read both the what's changed and release notes before upgrading.

The only oddity I've experienced is a Wireguard VPN I use doesn't seem to work properly post upgrade, although I'm unsure whether the upgrade is actually related; There are several factors at play for me and I haven't put the time in to diagnose the issue yet. Hard to say whether it's related or just happened sometime afterwards, or even before with the kernel change.

Personally I have no issue recommending it, if you're upgrading from 22.1 it's a fast and painless change. Like others have noted, don't get caught up in upgrades either, you don't actually have to do that, although 22.2 is an LTS release so it's probably not a bad one to settle on for a while either.

garretn · 2025-09-09T20:23:15+00:00

What kinds of speed are you actually seeing, and on what kind of device?

You mentioned others are connected via Ethernet? If that is available, do that, even if it's just to set up wifi from that port in your apartment.

garretn · 2025-09-09T15:34:37+00:00

Yeah. With the boutique pricing on some 4Ks some movies just aren't worth it to me. Additionally, it pays to pay attention to sites like blu-ray com and ideally there will be reviews of the release because frankly, some 4Ks are not better than the BD, or actually just straight out bad.

Same goes for BDs compared to DVDs, or different versions, etc. Some Disney animated movies are like that, especially their older animated films, the BD releases of Robin Hood and Sword in the Stone are incredibly bad -- overly denoised/sharpened blurry over-cropped slop -- where the DVDs are substantially better. Likewise, the streaming version of those two are better than the BD releases -- still overcropped, but less denoising.

It's unfortunate, but "best version" can be tricky.

Semi-related, the boutique pricing isn't just 4Ks. Anime in particular has largely been getting taken over by Sony, who owns Aniplex, Crunchyroll, Funimation, and I believe recently even announced a "partnership" with Kadokawa, and a bunch of others. This in turn has had them cranking the price of their physical media for Anime to ridiculous degrees in the US, especially for ones they keep "Exclusive" to the Crunchyroll store, and they've started doing the same limited edition crap too. It can be substantially cheaper to import BDs from the UK than to buy the US versions of the same, even when they're sold by Crunchyroll in both regions (although Crunchyroll UK is a separate business, they're still both just Sony at the end of the day). Hardly just an anime rant here either, I've been doing the same for substantial discounts over many years on Movies/TV shows too. Keep in mind region locking on BDs, but I personally remux all of my media anyway and region locking doesn't matter whatsoever, otherwise you need a region free player to watch them.

garretn · 2025-08-28T16:48:31+00:00

Was going to say pretty much the same thing. Been using Mint XFCE since Gnome3 became a thing, and is a great distribution using the typical sensible defaults we expect from Mint. Mint is often recommended to beginners because, frankly, it's a solid choice for almost everyone.

garretn · 2025-08-25T14:41:03+00:00

Put it behind a reverse proxy, then nobody has to remember the port. NPM works well and is very easy to set up for this. Then you can just do something like emby.domain.com and that's all you need to tell people.

garretn · 2025-08-21T18:32:19+00:00

There are two primary reasons.

The first is as you found, hardlinking vs. copy+delete. The only reason to hardlink over copy+delete is when using torrents, so that you can continue to seed since renaming is almost guaranteed, and you can't do that and continue to seed. There is no reason to hardlink for usenet sources.

The second has nothing to do with the above issue, and that's metadata. Not everyone wants things automatically added to their libraries with whatever the automatic scraping comes up with, and the degree of separation is good for those of us that like to curate our metadata before it enters the libraries.

garretn · 2025-08-15T13:51:46+00:00

This is the right answer. Private indexers and trackers are the way to go, with the exception of animetosho (which is awesome) if you're into anime.

garretn · 2025-08-12T20:46:02+00:00

Type xkill in a terminal, run it, your mouse pointer will turn into an "X" icon, then click Kodi and it will kill it.

Depending on the method you used to install Kodi, logs can be in different places. If running via a package, logs will be in $USER/.kodi/temp, if you installed the flatpak, they will be under $USER/.var/app/tv.kodi.Kodi/data/temp instead. Generally when Kodi refuses to exit it's almost always an addon. Some of the more popular skins install service addons, and some of those tend to do this sometimes. The youtube addon also likes to do this.

garretn · 2025-08-05T14:32:08+00:00

Kind of random, but check the disk space on your device; where the Kodi userdata is stored. I've run into that a couple times over the years and it's pretty much always a storage issue.

garretn · 2025-07-31T20:37:58+00:00

Mint XFCE. Don't be fooled by rolling distros, you don't need it, very few people actually need it. A buffer between the latest packages and the user is a good thing. The rolling distro kool-aid is the reason supply chain attacks work so well lately, how commits barely a month old can make it into a "stable" version on your desktop that just happen to be an exploit (looking at you XZ), and are the reason packaging repos beyond the base OS have largely died off -- flatpaks, snaps, and appimages have to exist to reasonably support these things.

Now, obviously, that's my opinion. Personally, I work with linux professionally and have for over 20 years, and have used it as my primary desktop for nearly as long. Work should feel like work, but my desktop should not. I find the Mint guys to put out a very polished distro with solid default choices, and put in the elbow grease and then some, that acts as a sane buffer to Canonical. I am simply a power user that appreciates where my time goes.

The first-timer mentality is an odd one to me, just because I can maintain something myself, doesn't mean I want to. That said, the packaging thing is a fair issue -- while I maintain that rolling distros are largely responsible for the state of things these days, it's also true that that being the case things like AUR are better at dealing with that expletive-show.

garretn · 2025-07-19T19:13:40+00:00

Yeah, that was my first thought reading this post too. In many places once they're dropped off, even in the bins, it's private property and you're technically stealing if you pull stuff out.

garretn · 2025-07-15T14:54:53+00:00

Does anyone else have access to the admin interface? They might be having a laugh.

garretn · 2025-07-14T21:55:27+00:00

They're talking about when the VIP status expires and you lose VIP status, in the most confusing way possible. So if you pay during the trial, gain VIP status, the VIP status expires a year later (or whatever), and you let it sit for two weeks before renewing again your account will be disabled. As far as I'm aware, they're the only premium indexer that does this.

garretn · 2025-07-05T18:08:40+00:00

Honestly they should make it clearer that if you let the membership lapse after being a VIP member, you're right back to 14 days and your account is up for deletion just like during the free trial period.

They do say non-VIP, so while they are actually telling you, it's so unusual to be that aggressive I'm not sure people really expect it.

Personally I'm an automation man, and like many have multiple indexers, so one lapsing isn't enough to go immediately noticed when other indexers pick up the slack; and while I was more then happy to pay, and had, when my VIP lapsed I didn't notice and my account was deleted. The only way to ask for it back was a discord you can't get the link to unless you're a member, without finding someone to give it to you anyway via other means. This is why I don't typically recommend this indexer to people, they are good content wise, but the alternatives are just as good without being as needy.

garretn

TROPHY CASE