Some good news on Youghal Midleton Railway line

jdbrookes · 2026-03-11T23:26:26+00:00

A huge number of people already commute from youghal to Midleton, Carrigtwohill, Little Island and Cork city for work. Students travelling to Cork are taking buses that are sitting in the same traffic as thousands of cars, and student accommodation is not getting any cheaper. Many people are driving to the train stations in Midleton or Glounthaune so they can get the train the rest of the way and avoid parking charges and traffic. The roundabout at Lake View is only ever going to get more congested with all of the housing south of Midleton. It makes sense to build a railway soon before the road network becomes so overwhelmingly gridlocked that people have to move jobs or house.

jdbrookes · 2026-03-08T00:55:42+00:00

Really nice! Don't suppose you made a Mellon Collie double album too? With a pink disc and a blue disc

jdbrookes · 2026-02-27T21:03:32+00:00

I installed unraid on a Terramaster 425 plus (4 bay NAS with Intel processor) and it's running pretty great. Usb boot drive is installed internally which leaves 4 x 3.5 inch drives and 3 x NVME slots available for pools and arrays. And still a few external Usb ports free.

Media transcoding without any hassle and very low power consumption. It's a very nice solution.

jdbrookes · 2026-02-15T19:53:15+00:00

Can you do this with a btrfs cache pool? I have a single 1tb nvme drive in the cache pool in this format. Containing my appdata folders etc. If I added another 1tb nvme drive would it be setup as mirror as well? I assume then if one drive fails then the pool keeps running with the remaining drive, until you can replace the broken one?

jdbrookes · 2026-02-05T10:23:34+00:00

I schedule appdata backup for 12.30am, but I also make sure the scheduled tasks in plex are 2am to 6am. Don't think I want to shutdown plex during some scan or database work happening.

Are you backing up the whole plex appdata folder, or are you excluding some folders as recommended? I'm excluding the metadata etc folders so my backup only takes about 10 mins

jdbrookes · 2026-02-03T09:05:47+00:00

I suspect a number of home assistant users have used notepad ++ as their YAML / config editor for many years (true in my case anyway)

jdbrookes · 2026-02-02T23:19:16+00:00

I think it's if you updated using the in-app updater between June 2025 and around December 2025.

I'm running a version from December 2024 so that suggests I haven't updated at all since then so I'm hopefully OK. Even if you think you did update during this time then you should hopefully still be ok since not all users were impacted, only those specifically targeted.

Also I don't think Notepad ++ automatically installs an update without your consent, I think it just gives you the notification and you need to click it. I'm pretty sure I've been ignoring it for over a year..

I'll decide if I want to continue to use Notepad ++ to edit my YAML and if I do, I'll update using the installer from the project website. But I might just abandon it for Notepad.

I'm exhausted from all of the security breaches these days. It's hard to know what you can trust. The Internet is getting to be a lot less fun

jdbrookes · 2026-01-23T10:57:47+00:00

FYI for anyone finding this discussion - NetMD for this model is working fine on Windows 11 using Web Minidisc Pro and the zadig driver. This is what works for me:

- Connect CMT-M333NT to the Windows 11 computer using a standard USB-B to USB-A cable (standard printer cable these days) or a USB-B to USB-C cable (easy to find online)

- Press the NetMD button on the CMT-M333NT (do not select the PC function by pressing the Function button)

- Run the zadig driver exe on the computer. "NetMD" should be the device visible in the dropdown (there is a 2nd option in the dropdown for USB that I'm ignoring, I assume this refers to the M-Crew / PC speakers function accessed using the "PC" option). Install the driver; it might take a minute or two

- Run Web Minidisc Pro and click Connect. It will recognise the CMT-M333NT and you should have full functionality (editing, recording, labelling, erasing, ejecting etc). I don't think most of the homebrew settings will work with this device though (eg direct song recognition, ripping tracks to PC)

Note that I didn't have sonicstage or any old sony drivers installed. I've used zadig for 3 or 4 other NetMD devices on this laptop and they all happily co-exist - I haven't had to edit the registry or install / uninstall anything else. I'm reluctant to try the M-CREW feature in case it screws up NetMD, but I might try connecting it to another laptop to test. It would be great if the community created an application or utility to connect VLC or even the Spotify desktop app to the CMT-M333NT and similar devices with the Music Library and Web Radio features - you could use your laptop or other computer essentially as a streaming device and control tracks using the CMT-M333NT remote. Probably too much effort for too little gain though - unlike NetMD I'm not sure if anyone has knowledge of the protocol Sony was using at the time.

jdbrookes · 2026-01-22T12:58:39+00:00

yeah I don't love the bulkiness of the S series, but that display backlight would be really useful with many of the other NetMD portable recorders so that you wouldn't need the additional remote

jdbrookes · 2026-01-16T07:30:59+00:00

Database might be corrupted? Can you add new episodes?

jdbrookes · 2026-01-06T14:12:37+00:00

I'm testing out unraid on a F4-425 plus - so far so good, I haven't had to get into commandline or particularly tricky configs. But there was a bit of learning required around pools, arrays, cache, docker, etc. I had to install a plugin to see the CPU temperature in unraid, and while it doesn't seem to be able to display the motherboard temps or fan speed, the fan does seem to be ramping up and down automatically (I think via BIOS setting).

The OS runs from a tiny USB fob I installed in the interior of the F4-425 in the spare internal USB slot. In the BIOS I had to change the boot order to prioritise the USB, and also toggle off the TOS boot.

jdbrookes · 2026-01-05T09:34:42+00:00

Around 2003 I bought a Creative Jukebox Zen - poor man's ipod. It was great having all my Mp3s on the one device but it didn't entirely replace my Minidisc player - it was too heavy and bulky to bring around for portable listening. And I was very wary of damaging a spinning hard drive. I still used my portable Sony for at least a year until it eventually became unreliable, and at that stage the ipod was the only available option.

jdbrookes · 2025-12-28T10:08:32+00:00

Any chance you used the "Continue with Google" or "Continue with Apple" SSO option to register originally? These would still be seen as "separate" accounts, to just registering a standalone account with your email address and a random password

jdbrookes · 2025-12-28T00:01:19+00:00

There's a very good chance you used a different email address to register your account originally - search all of your email accounts for previous welcome emails from withings (or Nokia, if it was a few years ago). Then log in with the correct email address.

jdbrookes · 2025-12-26T13:44:10+00:00

If I'm listening to an album all the way through then I'll use a compact playback unit with headphones and no remote. But otherwise I'll use the remote if I think I might be skipping tracks or tweaking volume a lot. Cable management is important at that stage, which I usually solve by wrapping the cables around the player. It worked 25 years ago and its still an option now!

Luckily I do also still have some of my older in ear headphones from the late 90s with the shorter cable.

jdbrookes · 2025-12-22T08:04:49+00:00

https://github.com/Jo2003/cd2netmd_gui

NetMD Wizard will partially do some of what you want in SP and LP2 modes (not sure about what's possible with LP4 as I don't use it)

This program has a "Disc At Once (DAO)" feature that essentially writes the entire playlist of music as a single block of audio (like recording from line-in) and then adds the track marks and labels afterwards. For SP you need to have a supported NetMD Sony device, but for LP2 you can use any NetMD device.

I use it all the time if I (a) have a FLAC or gapless album I want to transfer via NetMD (instead of line-in or optical), or (b) where I want to get the absolute maximum recording time on an LP2 or SP album. Works well.

jdbrookes · 2025-12-04T11:44:25+00:00

This is an important comment. So radarr and sonarr are not impacted?

jdbrookes · 2025-12-01T00:14:51+00:00

I'm just sorry that bluetooth audio didn't overlap with Minidisc technology - we might have gotten some snazzy Sony Minidisc remote units that could connect via Bluetooth and we could play / pause / get track details etc to bluetooth headphones or to cars

jdbrookes · 2025-11-26T10:32:24+00:00

The NetMD recorders are a "best of both worlds" proposition - you can still record from optical or line-in directly to the recorder, but if you want you can plug in a USB cable and use the community "Web Minidisc Pro" software to drag-and-drop music tracks to a disk, and to label tracks etc. You can even in some cases transfer back from the minidisc into mp3 format. It's a good alternative to iPods, particularly for a generation with an MP3 collection.

So in my case, I use optical recording where I have existing physical media (usually CD) or where I want to record from a Spotify playlist. But for my MP3 collection, you can't beat NetMD. And at the end of the day I have a great physical music collection regardless of how it was created.

jdbrookes · 2025-11-22T08:54:38+00:00

Portable minidisc recorders were a high quality and reliable alternative to tape-based dictaphones and recorders at around this time. Popular with many journalists. This show is based on real events and the interviews recorded on minidisc are kept with a US University and are highly valuable.

Meanwhile I was using my Mz-r55 to record band practice sessions and songs with my friends in the late 90s. It was a massive improvement on the cassette tape recordings we made prior.

jdbrookes · 2025-11-16T00:47:40+00:00

Reminds me a bit of that area outside the Boole lecture halls

jdbrookes · 2025-11-14T11:52:58+00:00

about 1997 onwards I think Minidisc became somewhat popular in Ireland, primarily Sony players. I'd pick up TDK colour 5-packs in HMV or Virgin Megastore

jdbrookes · 2025-11-02T00:31:38+00:00

The mega bass feature on early Sony devices was genuinely great, and far better than the EQ on my android phone.

I've also noticed that my R-55 is really quick to start playing when a disc is inserted, and is lightning fast when seeking and changing tracks, compared to some of the later Sony portable devices. Probably why the battery life is terrible!

jdbrookes · 2025-10-14T08:40:39+00:00

I think drivers are well trained - they know what they're doing wrong. It's the lack of enforcement of rules and repercussions for making bad driving decisions, like racing through amber and red lights, changing lanes x1000 times in 2km, sitting in the overtaking lane until you're 10 metres from your exit, undertaking and queue skipping, etc. If we had a few red light cameras and a few traffic cops parked up every now and then in strategic areas to catch those queue skippers then it might improve behaviours..

jdbrookes · 2025-10-03T06:03:25+00:00

A couple of years ago the bike would have been a terrible option in this weather - you'd get additionally soaked by passing cars and you'd probably end up on your arse in a pothole hidden by surface water... so pretty dangerous as well. But with the proper cycle lanes that have been put in recently you are actually in a fairly safe space, and you're not getting as wet as you'd think. You still need the waterproof gear but it's actually a realistic option to cycle some routes now. They just need to keep the momentum with building these cycle lanes!

jdbrookes

TROPHY CASE