I love that this is something that is feasible for someone to just do right now as a hobbyist or blogger. The prices involved here are very reasonable and well within reach of someone wanting to do some project, though not yet at "sequence your microbiome every day" levels.
I hope we see a lot more posts like this in the future.
Yea; Plasmidsaurus slaps. Especially if you live near one of the drop boxes. (e.g. a research university) $15/sample, and they email the results the next morning. This sort of service is enabled in part by nanopore sequencing.
I have just used them to dork around with my home lab to validate cloning results. Now I want to try something like this!
The Subsonic API is pretty fantastic and the apps that support it are full-featured. The Jellyfin app, while completely capable of streaming music, is far far less feature-ful.
Personally I use Gonic rather than Navidrome, because I don't care about a web UI, but if you go to the Navidrome website and look at the "Apps" page it lists every Subsonic API compatible app. There's a lot.
None of the alternatives seem
To have anything close to the radio/recommendation power of Spotify. I don’t know how they ever could - they don’t have the massive data Spotify has in listening history combined with playlists and their descriptions… on top of building world class ML audio analysis models.
I’d love have my own local mp3s get this super power. I just don’t see it happening. Plex has their own attempt but it’s no where close.
Seems redundant to get recommendations from your own mp3s. And "radio" would just be playlists on shuffle.
You can decouple discovery from offline music experience. Outside certain genres that I'm not deep into, there's almost nothing I get rec'd on Spotify that I didn't already know of from other sources.
I agree, I don’t need recommendations from my own library. I know when I am in the mood for a particular album, and if not, it’s much more pleasant to glance through my Artists list than to trust some jerk at Spotify to tell me what I want. Especially since they are now actively trying to replace the music on their mood playlists with royalty-free stock Muzak.
For discovery, there are plenty of (especially linear) streaming music sources that are dirt cheap or free, anyway.
To be honest, it may be my music taste, but the recommendations I get are extremely boring and are just rehashes of my liked songs..
But it may be that I hit a bug quite some times ago where each offline downloaded song got added to the liked songs playlist and even though I manually removed quite a few of those, it may have corrupted my user profile.
I also use gonic over navidrome (and formerly airsonic) because Navidrome doesn't support folder view (and apparently never will). As nice as Navidrome is, that's a dealbreaker for me. Gonic works great though.
I too prefer folder view (tags are a complete unwieldy mess, and there's far too many artists to merely list by artist). I will look into this. What do you run it on?
In the last three years, there have been two times when we traveled, rented a car, and were given a Volkswagon.
Both times, the touchscreen-only controls were such a pain in the butt that we vowed we would never purchase such a car. It was a timesaver, because in that period our family has gotten two new (to us) cars, and our experiences with the rental Volkswagons allowed us to exclude an entire manufacturer from consideration.
If they haven't re-broken their interiors by the next time we look for a new car, I guess we'll have to consider them again.
No, we wanted full EVs. Mazda doesn't make any, only hybrids. We wound up going with Chevrolet in both instances.
The Equinox EV is one of the better EVs to offer AWD out there right now, matching the range of a Model 3 at a decently better price and obviously massively better UI. Slower charging is the only real downside.
And a used pre-2020s Bolt is a really excellent value, because they are insanely cheap (under $15k) and due to the whole catching-on-fire thing they all had their batteries replaced in the last few years, which means you get a much newer battery than the mileage/age of the car would suggest. The Bolt is replacing a much older Leaf, so bumping the range up to ~200 miles from ~70 is a huge upgrade for us.
> Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.
As someone who grew up there, this isn't really true. It's more that buildings have been upgraded/replaced over time by choice, resulting in a sparse patchwork of old buildings rather than large old cities. Places like the Wayside Inn[0] predate the country by a century, and have been "preserved" only because they have more-or-less continuously operating as an in since 1686.
The New England climate isn't all that different than the original England. I think the cultural and legal climate around old buildings is more impactful here. I would be curious to know about the comparative longevity of 17th-century wooden buildings in Europe.
Some years back an aunt and uncle owned a cottage in Devon (near Exeter) with 1649 carved into the wall by the front door.
Cottages like that had a simple timber frame and cob walls, which is only a slight improvement on wattle and daub! Cob is mud and straw and a few binding agents and traditionally: horse piss to act as an accelerant to aid setting or something. Floors are joist and boards. The roof is thatched, often with a "cat slide" and foundations are laughable.
The thatch needs replacing something like every 25-50 years. Cob needs patching, especially if the roof leaks (not replaced on schedule) and it starts rotting. However all this stuff happens gradually and it can be repaired gradually too in most cases, as and when you like and within budget.
A concrete structure ... let's say Charles Cross multi-storey car park in Plymouth ... well hello concrete cancer! OK this is a bit different to the cottage but let's see how the "modern" world has progressed with a building material that was used by the old Romans and likely before.
A concrete beam on its own is "quite" good as a supporting material. Conc is superb in compression and quite good in tension. In a horizontal beam when you put a load on it, the top will be compressed and the bottom will be in tension. Think about a wide thin rectangle and imagine pushing down on it. Imagine it bending into a U shape - the top side will be compressed and the bottom will be stretched (tension). That's a fairly simplified model!
Now, cast your concrete beam around a long steel bar and put nuts and washers on both ends and tighten them so that the entire beam is in tension. There are other methods to do this but this is easier to envision.
Now you have locked in a lot of energy into the system. The upside of "pre-stressed" concrete is that a given beam ("member") cross section can carry a lot more weight than a non pre-stressed member. The down side is that deliberate demolition is really hard and non deliberate demolition is possible.
So, that concrete cancer thing. Conc cancer is caused when salty sea air and moisture (rather likely in Plymouth) permeates conc made from Portland cement. Its more complicated than that but the sea salts are key. The conc gradually degrades in a rather strange way - map cracking and a gel develops in the cracks (I think, I studied this stuff quite a while back). The usual conc matrix ends up with weak lines running through it.
Anyway - you have energy locked up in members and those members are failing. Boom!
There is a lot to be said for old school materials and practices.
I would suspect that the sort of person (like myself) that would rather run GrapheneOS over LineageOS would rather install themselves than buy preinstalled. Much easier to verify no one slipped you an altered image.
Verified boot and hardware attestation enable verifying a GrapheneOS install is genuine. It can't prevent all hardware tampering but it provides very strong protection against tampering with any firmware or software.
I actually think that a role playing game is exactly the soft of situation where this is in fact reasonable.
There is a lot of mythology about gods walking among men, hiding their true nature, etc. And more recent examples include the TV show Lucifer.
Someone wanting to roleplay that sort of being is entirely plausible. Without knowing the person's personality (which you presumably did) it's hard to say whether they would have genuinely wanted to do that or if it was an excuse.
Yeah, if you have a huge amount of trust between player and DM that can work. There are both in-game and out-of-game ways to manage issues if they arise: in-game a DM can always limit or restrict something after the fact, out-of-game a problem can spark a conversation and ultimately a D&D game is a set of people who voluntarily get together and play.
(That said, another approach is to have a conversation about "what are you trying to achieve", and find a way for everyone to have the fun they'd like to have without risking something game-breaking.)
As GM, I strongly disagree. Any player who wants a character with "I can overrule the GM but I will do that only occasionally" power is a very big red flag. A D&D game isn't a mythological story or TV show. It's a community told story where one character having an "OP" (over powered) character basically destroys the balance between player and GM as well as between player and player, both of which are extremely important.
To make it clearer, the players and the GM will be struggling against each - in a controlled way, yes, but also a meaningful way. I'm not a super deadly GM but players will be risking death in at least low-key way and so everyone will sooner or later be "using everything they have".
Edit: basically, saying "this rule/power/etc exists but won't have an impact" is more or less saying that the "rules aren't serious", in either the 'Chat Control' or the DM situation. But the very nature of rules is that we wouldn't have them if they weren't serious.
I of course agree that the player should not be able to overrule the GM. I don't think that was the situation here.
If you're playing an off-the-shelf campaign this is problematic. If the GM is creating the game as you go, then a good GM should be able work with the player to make this reasonable. The GM can always use GM-power to prevent a player from doing something, even if it involves a literal hand of God reaching down to stop them.
A conversation with the player beforehand to make sure you're on the same page about this sort of thing would go a long way. Let them know under what circumstances you're willing to allow them to use whatever the power is. Let them know the consequences if they don't follow those rules.
Unlike with ChatControl, a D&D game is a situation where the necessary trust is able to exist.
An example: agree the player character is some trickster djinn sent from another plane to learn to be a human and how to trick people. They have immense cosmic powers of life and death, but as part of being sent over, they can only use the power for immediate comedy. Violations result in the djinn getting yanked back to their plane and disincorporated.
Boom done. Now you have a massively OP character that can only use their power in humorous situations that don't affect the storyline, and if they try to abuse that then that's instant-death.
I personally, as GM, don't like to be the one that kills a character. I want to set up a situation where the situation-and/or-the-rules kills the character.
I've played in games with "the GM kills you" mechanics and it felt juvenile/arbitrary/abusive. Remember, this is a game where every players' character needs to "shine" and similarly needs to know they're being judged with fairness and compassion by the GM (compassion especially along the lines of "understand what I say my character does as something reasonable").
Isn't that what I proposed in my example though? Where a rule is made in advance that if the player abuses their power, they die. due to the canon situation in which that player's character existed?
A player that in good faith wanted to role play such a character, would work with the DM in advance to structure rules well-understood by all parties about exactly what would happen if they abuse their situation.
All the DnD situations can be trivially resolved by good-faith and communication on all sides.
Unlike Chat Control, where good faith cannot be assumed.
While I agree it's a red flag in many cases (power gaming is an issue), I think you already provided an adequate justification for it yourself: ttrpg play is a community told story. While you may want to play a type of game where the DM is always fully in control, I've played at tables where the DM intentionally gives up some of their control to the more experienced players, sharing the load of creating the world. There are even whole systems where this is an intentionally encouraged mechanic! Even giving overpowered stuff isn't fundamentally different from a DM dropping in an overpowered DMPC to help step in when the players need something.
D&D is intentionally a collaborative story, and it shouldn't be out of the question for players to collaborate with the DM. Focusing on "the balance between player and GM" is great for a dungeon-crawl style game (which I would argue is the only thing 5e is actually designed for, and is poor for what most people try to use it for, but that's a whole other rant), but putting too much focus on it in a more roleplay-centered campaign can lead to a very adversarial relationship between players and the DM. If you have great players, you should trust them to collaborate with you, not just opposed to you.
Oh, giving the player power to make a world and otherwise help in GMing process is fine, something I do sometimes. The thing is, a reasonably skilled player can do that without it involving adding power to their character. Indeed, I've seen this device make players less "power-gamey" because it makes them think of the larger picture, they want to interest the other players in their story etc.
But I don't think this really relates to "my character has excess-or-god-like powers but I won't use them" situation. The point isn't the characters can't have more free-form powers that GM interprets sympathetically. The point is if the player has to say their character has special over-the-top-powers, they are creating a rule, not leaving things for free collaboration. I remember in a FATE game in which one player specified has character's aspect that "world's greatest thief" and this both abuse of the FATE system and actual harassment/psychological abuse of another players. I learned the lesson that aspects never should superlatives to them.
The country I come from (Australia) has a similar`ish racial makeup (about 70% white in Australia, vs about 63% in the USA), but I struggle to think of a similar set of values that ties us together. Notably, we also have significantly less political violence, so I don't think we're headed towards anarchy for a lack of one.
On the other hand, I see similar arguments coming from neighbouring countries. Notably both Malaysia and Indonesia have strong civic mythos.
You found the authors' screen names and some other things they've made.
That's not finding who they are. No one has signed their names, like their real names, to this. Who are they? Intelligence agents? For which country? There's no way to know.
At least one of the authors is Russian. They were giving away Helium stickers to “anyone who is in Moscow”, and not many non-Russians are traveling there nowadays.
The neat thing is that it it doesn't actually take much money to start up a new small organization if you want to. You can accomplish a remarkable amount with relatively little money.
Some friends and I just started a tool library in Central Oregon: https://cotool.org/
There some quite generous community donations of tools (not money) to get started. Startup costs were small, and now a couple weeks after opening we have dozens of members.
It scales nicely because we can just buy more or less new tools. It's very impactful to some people, and once started there's very little recurring expenses.
Your tool library sounds fantastic! Congratulations on your success.
That said, although starting a new organization may not take much money, it does take a lot of wisdom and social capital. I would say that you succeeded at something quite difficult.
When I've sought out volunteer activities in the past, it was usually when my social and personal life were on shaky grounds. In particular, when I was in no shape to start something new the way you did.
I've often heard volunteering recommended as an antidote for loneliness, but as grogenaut observed, this advice can sometimes be tricky to follow in practice.
You want home assistant, as other comments have noted.
I have a reasonably complex set of behavior set up. I live in Bend, Oregon at 4000 feet. This is somewhere with hot sunny days, cold nights, and sometimes a lot of smoke. The effect on the interior of the house based on upcoming weather is highly predictable.
My rules look something like this:
If tomorrow's high temperature is above 85, then as today as soon as outdoor temperature drops below indoor temperature, open all the windows and turn on the attic fan until either interior temp is below 62 or outdoor temp rises above indoor, whichever comes first. Unless the AQI outside goes over 100 for more than 2 minutes, in which case close all the windows and turn on the fan/AC to clean the air. All the while, if the house rises above temperature X, cool it to temperature Y.
Additionally, the upstairs heatpump is located in an uninsulated attic, which in winter means that heating is somewhat inefficient and we want to run it a minimal count of times to avoid warmup periods. So we program in our own hysteresis, so that there's a 6-degree difference between when the heat kicks on, and when it turns off.
No one is going to make a dream thermostat that meets your needs out of the box for you, because no one else has your local needs. The best you can do is give yourself the tools to make your reality how you want it.
I hope we see a lot more posts like this in the future.