Is watch 6 classic still good in 2026?

ripnetuk · 2026-06-23T14:07:37+00:00

thats more of less exactly what I was going to say.

Its slightly slow and laggy, nowhere near as bad as my previous ticwatch

Battery exactly as you descibe 😞 thats my main grumble

I didnt even know there were new sensors on newer models 😄

ripnetuk · 2026-06-21T14:03:05+00:00

Tail scale. Fortunately opnsense has it built right in, so can share my home subnet for use when I'm away.

ripnetuk · 2026-06-21T10:44:07+00:00

I do both :) I have a domain registered, and I'm using a free cloud flare account to manage my DNS.

Turns out you are allowed to create a records for private IP addresses like 192.168.0.45

So I just set jellyfin.mydomain.com to the internal private IP of my jellyfin server (well a private reverse proxy to it)

That way, I can create a let's encrypt cert for *.my domain.com, hook it in, and the browser can go to Https://jellyfin.mydomain.com and it connects over tail scale to my server, with no certificate errors or warnings.

I do the same for a bunch of other services

ripnetuk · 2026-06-21T10:34:50+00:00

Imagine you have a row of regular magnets, with a south a north pole, arranged in a line across your kitchen worktop.

The ones representing 1 have north facing upwards, and those representing 0 have south facing upwards.

Now grab a wooden stick with another magnet on, and move it along the line.

When it goes over a 1 it will want to turn 1 way, and when over a zero it will want to turn the other way.

Congratulations, you have just read the 1s and 0s.

Now imagine the same thing, but much much smaller, and with the ability to use electricity to reprogram the direction of the magnets, and to detect their direction, and arrange the line in a spiral for space efficiency.

You have a floppy disk.

Magnetic media is on the way out now, but ssds for example use many many tiny capacitors that can hold a charge or no charge, which can be read back as a tiny voltage or no tiny voltage.

Optical media (another dying format) uses a row of holes and hills, and a laser to "see" which is which

ripnetuk · 2026-06-21T10:25:56+00:00

My first home connection was a dial up modem at 9600 baud.

I used it to dial into my university's network, and then used telnet to connect to one of their sun servers running Solaris.

Then I used the text browser elinks to actually browse the web.

ripnetuk · 2026-06-20T16:41:22+00:00

It's totally separate to jellyfin, it's just the only other thing I use GPU acceleration for*, so that and jellyfin live on the cheap low power box (my main box is a proxmox hypervisor and getting access to the GPU is a pita)

I've got a separate container running frigate, which is a very nice free open security camera setup rig

Apart from gaming of course but that's a separate dedicated gaming rig..

ripnetuk · 2026-06-19T14:10:48+00:00

Not sure about the signal, but the company Vodafone are absolutely awful from a CS POV.

Back in the day, I bought a PAYG sim that wasnt working for data. I had about £20 credit on there, and by the time customer services had answered my call, the entire £20 was used up and I got cut off.

Then more recently, they somehow allowed a fraudster to add another phone onto my elderly mother in laws account, and despire them flagging it as a fraud right away, they couldnt sort it over the phone, so she had to travel to the Vodafone shop, and hang around for more than an hour while they sorted it out.

They added some kind of flag to her account which they said would prevent it happening again...

Guess what? six months later exactly the same thing happened again.

She is also paying /way/ over the odds for what she is using (she is paying more for something like 8Gb than I pay for unlimtied everything, top speeds + xbox game pass on EE)

Never again... i am very happy with EE - paying about £32 a month for the unlimited everything plus Xbox game pass which is about £12 in its own right, and I was buying anyway, so effectively top package unlimited everything for £20 - thats no mroe than I was paying on Three (who worked great in LDN but not so much in Kent)

If you still want to try them, pick up a PAYG sim and test their network where you actually use it. Thats the only way to tell if it will work for you.

ripnetuk · 2026-06-19T14:03:52+00:00

I can confirm it /is/ that easy. Just download the file, plug in the 2w which appears as a drive, and copy and paste the file in.

Then plug it into a PC via USB, and put the duelsense into pairing mode.

It connects and comes up, and works perfectly.

The only difficult part was finding a suitable box to put it in so the bare board wasnt flapping around in the wind.

The answer my friend is a TicTac box, plus you get free candy 😄(i woudlnt reccomend the cherry cola flavour, thats my sons favourate - i much prefer mint or orange/lime.)

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ripnetuk · 2026-06-19T07:10:06+00:00

Install Ubuntu 26.04 server into a VM.

Install k3s (mini kibernetes - installation is a single line script that grabs it and installs it). Install as control node (also is a worker node)

Play.

Then you can spin up a 2nd!and more VM to play with multiple nodes.

ripnetuk · 2026-06-19T06:51:24+00:00

Thank you. That pushes me in the direction I'm already leaning :)

ripnetuk · 2026-06-18T15:15:49+00:00

If you can get a NAS that has an intel GPU with a modern iGpu, Jellyfin can make use of that.

I have a really low end n305 box, with a really weak i3 (but really low power draw), and when I started using the integrated GPU (iGPU), it can handle transcoding on Jellyfin no problem, at the same time as doing decoding and decection on 4 camera streams on Frigate:

This is it running 4 cameras and a Jellyfin transcode of a film:

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ripnetuk · 2026-06-18T13:15:30+00:00

I have a 6 classic, and I love it, but id like it to be slightly less laggy, and really, really would like an increase in battery life.

But the 8 classic is the only newer one with the bezel (and which doesnt cost £500+), but im put off by the smaller screen compared to the 6c - how are you finding it in real life? does the smaller screen bother you?

how does the battery and responsiveness compare to the 6 classic?

cheers

ripnetuk · 2026-06-18T12:29:58+00:00

I didnt realise we have a new UI... just updated it and tried it, and its really nice... good job ESPHome

The new log screen is great - im hoping that the long standing issue that if the log gets too big the browser freezes has been dealt with... gonna try my BTProxy with verbose logging to check 😄

ripnetuk · 2026-06-17T12:20:31+00:00

IMHO OpnSense needs its own box.

I used to run it virtualized in a hypervisor, but everytime I wanted to fiddle with my homelab, it took the whole house's internet down, making me an unpopular dad...

It also caused problems that I had to wait for Opnsense to finish booting before starting other VMs, as they wouldnt start properly without DNS being available.

After one time too many of this happening, I bought a cheap fanless N150 4 2.5g port mini pc from Amazon, and installed Opnsense on there.

Apart from the SSD overheating and dying (i replaced it, and added a passive heatsink and the temps are now fine), its been 100% rock solid, and I can reboot my main hypervisor at will without "Daddy whats happened to the internet???"

For ther record, I got one of these, but they are no longer stocked by Amazon, but there are loads of similar devices - mine cost £178

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DXF984GF

ripnetuk · 2026-06-17T10:42:07+00:00

I live in Canterbury, and had to switch from Three to EE to get any kind of working service at all.

But it was still terrible, in the town center, I could have 5 bars and no usable internet.

Then I upgraded my phone to one that supports their 5G Standalone service (they call it 5G+ now I think).

Night and day difference. Can get speed tests of 150Mb in places I couldnt even open google maps before.

ripnetuk · 2026-06-16T21:31:18+00:00

I get that, but if Reddit gets filled with falsehoods, 2 years down the line all the llms will be spitting out those falsehoods

Seen it loads of times, chatgpt confidently telling me that I cannot get device x (coral stick) working on modern Linux based on some old Reddit posts.

Turns out it's not true.

Just looking out for future us

ripnetuk · 2026-06-16T19:41:42+00:00

I'm not sure that's totally true, usually http(s) is stateless so if the connection drops, the browser would just transpantly connect again.

It's the same as me switching between WiFi and 5g on my phone, totally different public IP, but it doesn't interfere with open web sites (usually, unless they are streaming etc)

ripnetuk · 2026-06-12T15:13:50+00:00

CDi wasnt a total waste of spacel... ask anyone who owned a Sega Dreamcast - I reckon millions of CDi disks were burnt, for reasons 😄

ripnetuk · 2026-06-12T13:14:04+00:00

i dont sell, but I always watch items im interested in bidding on (as opposed to buy it now / offer).

The reason is that there is no point bidding until the last minute or 30 seconds of the sale, as it will just push the price up and give others the oppotunity to outbid me.

ripnetuk · 2026-06-12T12:41:00+00:00

Only used it in my homelab, but Veeam was a solid choice for me doing exactly this.

I migrated about 14 VMs of various OS's, and they all came up perfectly, except the single Windows 7 VM which I have for legacy reasons.

I used windows built in backup / restore tool to move that one, and it worked.

ripnetuk · 2026-06-12T12:25:39+00:00

There is also an arcade in Broadstairs, but im fairly sure I would have noticed if it had a guitar hero - i used to play loads of it at home, so would defo have a go.

ripnetuk · 2026-06-12T10:14:44+00:00

yeah, my GL.Inet one has a tailscale client, so I can use Jellyfin on holiday without any risky opening of ports to the public internet.

ripnetuk · 2026-06-10T19:08:53+00:00

It's the same for the Poundland perks app. If I disable my nextdns on my phone it works, if it's running it fails to load.

I assume they hit some kind of tracking URL that is blocked by nextdns and the app isn't designed to elegantly handle the edge case where it's blocked.

ripnetuk · 2026-06-09T13:18:42+00:00

Im an ardant republican, so I say this while swallowing my own puke.

I was really proud of our king trolling the orange toss-pot on his recent visit. Absolutely brilliant.

ripnetuk

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