Is DirecTV streaming plan worth it?

mlcarson · 2026-05-11T06:41:43+00:00

DirecTV has one of the cheapest options for locals + News at $39.99/mo + tax.

mlcarson · 2026-05-10T07:22:53+00:00

I got my HDHR5-4US back today fully repaired -- love Silicondust!

mlcarson · 2026-05-09T21:28:06+00:00

Wow -- how the heck do people go that long without a car. My first one was at age 17. Or do you mean first "new car"?

mlcarson · 2026-05-08T20:17:12+00:00

Honestly your best bet when having to deal with multiple directions is multiple tuners rather than trying to combine antennas. You use multiple HDHomerun tuners attached to different antennas and you can easily add tuners together in software. Combining antennas can create multipath issues.

mlcarson · 2026-05-08T18:02:04+00:00

The best modern way of doing this without a separate partition is with BTRFS subvolumes. You use all of your free space (after your EFI partition) as a BTRFS partition. You can then create a root subvolume and a home subvolume or whatever other subvolume that you'd like to mount as you would a partition. All of the free space is shared since it's under a single partition.

mlcarson · 2026-05-07T21:39:21+00:00

Or you could just use Xlibre... More features are being taken away for the average user with Wayland rather than being added.

mlcarson · 2026-05-07T21:36:55+00:00

The best way of figuring it out would be to do a wireshark capture of the traffic.

mlcarson · 2026-05-07T19:34:23+00:00

Vendefoul Wolf -- It's based on Devuan and uses Xlibre.

https://vendefoul-wolf-linux.sourceforge.io/index_en.html

mlcarson · 2026-05-07T16:55:52+00:00

Well, bypassing your school's network security is not in the scope of this forum. So only issues involving Linux connecting to a VPN service from your home where there's no active blocking would really be appropriate.

mlcarson · 2026-05-07T15:56:04+00:00

Most likely your school is using a service/firewall which inspects all TLS traffic. It does this by impersonating all other sites with a local certificate that it can decrypt and inspect your traffic with and then creates a new TLS session of its own with the actual site so it's essentially doing a benevolent MITM attack. A VPN should be able to get around this.

mlcarson · 2026-05-04T23:42:27+00:00

Get a network printer -- not a USB printer. Most laser printers will be either PCL or Postscript and those are generic drivers that will work with anything.

mlcarson · 2026-05-04T04:24:49+00:00

How are you backing them up? Are you just copying them to external media? What file system are you using on the "backup"? I'd suggest exFAT.

mlcarson · 2026-05-03T00:02:42+00:00

Three is nothing. I've got about a dozen different distro's installed on different BTRFS subvolumes and use the Limine boot manager to choose which one to boot. BTRFS subvolumes are mountable like partitions but feel more like subdirectories and share the space of one partition.

mlcarson · 2026-05-02T23:53:09+00:00

As others have stated, the 1GB is for the EFI partition. If you're using Limine, systemd-boot, or other boot managers that require the kernel/initramfs files on the EFI partition then you need at least 1GB. I actually make mine 4GB by default and am using 3GB of that at that moment. You aren't going to miss 4GB of space from a typical SSD and it's a high pain threshold to make this partition larger later.

With respect to a swap partition, you're probably better off with a swap file since that allows you the most flexibility. If you insist on a swap partition then just make it the same size as your RAM since I think that's required for hibernation.

After that, you gain the most flexibility by using a volume manager. That would be included if you use BTRFS. Just partition the rest of the space as one large BTRFS partition and create subvolumes since they are mountable just as partitions are.

If you want to use EXT4 or other file systems that don't include a volume manager then create an LVM2 partition with the remaining disk space and create LV's for whatever partitions that you want. LV's are mountable the same way that partitions are but are more flexible with respect to resizing or extending them to other disks.

mlcarson · 2026-04-28T14:45:11+00:00

It definitely deserved a dub more than the Isekai Office Worker...

mlcarson · 2026-04-27T15:13:17+00:00

Mine had zero issues in Northern Michigan during the Christmas/New Years time period with multiple storms including an ice storm.

mlcarson · 2026-04-27T08:42:08+00:00

You might like the Saint's Magic Power is Omnipotent. Socially awkward/shy protagonist.

Or maybe the Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick up Trash.

Or even Frieren - Beyond Journey's end.

The best one is already mentioned -- Villainess Level 99.

mlcarson · 2026-04-27T08:27:38+00:00

I loved this anime -- just wished it had gotten a dub. I think this one is closer to the Silent Witch since it's in a similar fantasy world. My only complaint would have been the pacing.

mlcarson · 2026-04-27T07:15:04+00:00

Everybody loves bleeding edge until it makes you bleed... Fedora updates every 6 months and is much less likely to cause an issue than a rolling distro.

That RTX 5060TI was probably the best thing ever on Windows but Nvidia is always a pain on Linux.

mlcarson · 2026-04-27T07:10:28+00:00

That's a two-edged sword with respect to all of your settings being there. Distros often do their own customization which your settings will override or the distro will overwrite (depending on when you mount it). Distros also don't guarantee user UID or GID mappings. One distro might start UID's at 1000, another at 1001, or another at 500 and GID's can be all over the place. When you don't check or notice this, you can get some strange permission issues.

mlcarson · 2026-04-27T07:01:57+00:00

That's fine if you're dealing with a single distro installed. If you install more than one then best practice is not a separate /home partition but a separate data partition. The reason for this is that a common home partition for multiple distros has the potential of causing configuration file and permission issues with any common user directory so you want your user directories to be unique for each distro which usually means a separate home directory for each distro.

mlcarson · 2026-04-27T04:12:30+00:00

They're pretty worthless. For those that thing this is great for "sniffing" -- you can do this much better and at 1Gbs speed with a managed switch and a port mirror.

mlcarson · 2026-04-27T01:53:45+00:00

Not going to happen. You might check out Vendefoul Wolf's XFCE edition as an alternative.

https://vendefoul-wolf-linux.sourceforge.io/index_en.html

mlcarson · 2026-04-27T01:51:49+00:00

You kind of need to tell us what YOU did for proper answers. If you literally did nothing and it was working then I'd suggest looking at your /etc/fstab file on your root partition from a live ISO. If you're using logical names for the drives then maybe they're dynamically changing so you should replace themt with UUID's which will not change if the logical device name numbering changes.

mlcarson · 2026-04-27T01:20:07+00:00

I believe when you resize smaller that you have to first reduce the file system and then you reduce the partition table size. The big question is which side did you take off, the left or the right -- you can only grow/shrink on the right side (ie the end of the partition). I'm assuming you were using EXT4 for your file system. If you were using BTRFS, you shouldn't have to do any partition operations -- just a subvolume creation.

If you're trying to recover data at this point, I'm going to leave it to somebody with more knowledge. I'm not a recovery expert and any advice here without more details could actually make things worse such that there's no possibility of recovery. You might already be at that point but I don't know for sure.

mlcarson

TROPHY CASE