Extremely overkill for direct next step but whenever you have to eventually replace the range/stove seriously consider an induction stove.

Doesn’t magically get rid of all risk but the fact that the stove itself doesn’t heat up is great. If you haven’t used one it is more efficient and the pan or whatever itself becomes the heating surface. All of them I know of even auto disable themselves if no metal is on it which is great for safety.

Absolutely. Used to work at a small MSP. Got ultra unlucky in that we got chosen as the rest case target for a zero day that leveraged our Remote Support tools so our own systems and all of our client systems that were online got hit with ransomware in a very short time frame.

Some clients had local backups to Synology boxes and those worked ok thankfully. However all the rest had backups based on Hyper-V. The other local copy was on a second windows server that also got hit so the local copies didn’t help. They did also have a remote copy which wasn’t encrypted.

So all good right? Just pull the remote backup copy and apply that… Yea every time we had ever used the service before had either been single servers that physically died and took disks along on the death or just file level restores.

Those all worked fine. Still sounds like not a problem right? Nope. We found both that a couple of the larger servers had backups that didn’t actually have everything in spite of being VM images. No idea how their software even was able to do that.

And the worse part was that their data transfer rate was insanely slow. About 10mbps. Not that per server or par client. Nope that was the max export rate across everything. It would have taken literally months to restore everything at that rate.

I hate to say it but yes we did in fact pay the ransom and the. Had to fight for several days going through getting things decrypted. Then going through months of reinstalling fresh copies and/or putting in new servers. Also changing our entire stack at the same time. Shockingly we handled it well enough we lost no clients. Largely because we were able to prove we couldn’t have known ahead of time.

If you read through all that I’ll even say the vendors name. It was StorageCraft. I now have a deep hate for them.

Also one more is that with the old Apple HFS+ filesystem based time machine backups it would sometimes report as a valid self checked backup even if it had corruption. It would do this as long as some self check confirmed that it could fix the corruption during a restore. However if you tried directly browsing through the time machine backups it would have files that couldn’t be read, unless again you did a full system restore with it.

Nearly lost my wife’s semester ending before finding it worked that way.

I can’t confirm it but seems it is fully fixed with APFS and might be one of the reasons they spent the effort to make that transition.

Also a self reply to add that I don’t use the downmix because I got lucky and in addition to free old PC hardware which most people in the USA at least can also get free or cheap if you are creative with old business hardware. The addition is I got an AV Receiver just barely new enough to support HDMI so I do have the full range of channels on very cheap speakers.

Having used Kodi elsewhere the downmix seems to work just fine and a lot of current and still fairly cheap sound bars can interpret surround mixes directly.

Nope although it has that as an option as well. There are two options I use. The first is to boost the center channel on surround mixes since the voice is almost always on that channel.

Then more specifically in Kodi there is both a main volume option and a separate volume boot option that if you look into the documentation says that it is able to increase volume differently by moving up the middle of the audio while reducing the dynamic range. In other words reducing the difference between the lowest and highest sounds so it can increase it without clipping.

I basically change the main volume to what I want and then since both main and boost use the same numbers I reduce it by the exact same number I increase the boost level. End result is moving the bottom and middle of the audio volume closer.

In an ideal setup like a literal quiet audience in a full IMAX or with studio monitor grade headphones etc. the dynamic range is nice. Let’s you hear talking normally and then get blown away by the action right at the top of the safe listening range. Or for classical orchestra music the quiet solot small instrument then a full booming with the entire band going.

But in reality I have five kids running around. Even in stuff like Pixar I still like having a fairly aggressive setting for the boost. It lets me set a default fairly aggressive one and then only occasionally need to edit it manually from the default for particular movies.

Every time I see a thread like this I feel the same way.

Sure I have to admit there are downsides to it but oh my goodness the number of benefits from running something like Kodi is huge. If you are willing to take a hit to dynamic range of your audio you can fix all but the most extreme cases of audio level problems. I’m sure there are a bunch of other ways to handle it as well.

Control from a phone app once you have Kodi open works great.

Windows or Linux at your preference.

Only ever used old free hardware too so the complaints about the cost of a PC never made sense to me either.

Totally valid feeling but also monopoly was designed to intentionally be awful to get across the point that real monopolies are terrible for the world. So arguably it is exactly how you should feel about it.

One of the top well known examples is Mr. Rogers. Very deeply Christian on a personal level but, to the best I’m aware, he never brought it up on his show.

Ugh I guess I’m going to be this type of fan.

I like both universes but the “they will just get a transporter lock and teleport everyone” is an awful argument that shows a very bad lack of understanding of Star Trek.

There are hundreds of examples of transporters not working. Shields which even the tiny falcon does have are a constant example. Even past that there are tons of other cases. They don’t work in storms, through thick rock, through unusual armor/metal, around jamming which is used basically universally in Star Wars on anything larger or more expensive than a Tie Fighter.

Those are just the ones off the top of my head and there are at least a dozen more. It is one of the top plot lines used in every series.

In a fight the falcon just runs away since even mid grade Star Wars ships have radically faster FTL.

Now if you ignore the running away yes the tiny falcon probably does lose to most or maybe even all of the Trek hero ships. It is a smuggler ship that can just run past blockades if it gets flagged.

Actual combat ships are far harder to figure out. Star Wars deals with a massively larger scale of ship size, total energy output, and FTL speed. At first glance that seems like an obvious win and in a full galaxy scale conflict probably does go to Star Wars.

But any single ship to ship combat especially with the hero ships the range of gadgets/tricks on the Star Trek side is massively in their favor. The rate they pick up tech charges probably would largely even out the tech difference in a galaxy wide fight as well. However that doesn’t solve the scale difference. Maybe convince the Borg to produce ships with stolen FTL and hypermatter reactors so they can produce enough at scale quickly.

Edit - I just realized that while the transporter argument doesn’t generally hold water it would totally work on all the cheap Tie Fighter pilots. LOL. That would be so funny to watch.

I have limited budget but have mostly older gen Unifi gear and they have a built in feature they brand as Teleport that if I understand right uses Wireguard under the hood. Works great for my limited use cases.

Shrug. The closest that real biology allows. I already have children so at least some sense a part of me will live on for at least the duration of their lives.

Past that I’m with most people on here that immortality sounds horrific. Now I can get behind extended life span especially if medicine and society provide for being actually healthy and able to enjoy it. Just not forever.

Oh vehicle controls are definitely a valid issue to have with the game. They are pretty well designed for controller use. However well designed is not the same as saying they are easy to use. True 6 degrees of freedom controls between orbits are definitely complex.

Sad to have that blocking enjoying the story or more accurately solar system spanning puzzle box.

Have you played it?

Flip version of 11. The Perl flip.

A bunch already here that I like for different reasons but I think my favorite is what they did in the game The Sword of the Stars. Sadly a case of a game with great ideas but only so-so-execution.

My memory on the mechanics might be wrong as I haven’t played it for years but basically as a strategy game the fun twist is that every species has a fundamentally different approach to FTL.

You have a Lizard species with basically Star Trek warp drive with fixed speed above light speed from any point to point of their choosing.

Then you have humans that stumbled across naturally occurring interconnect lines between many stars and can travel faster along those routes by comparison to warp drive but have to travel below light speed off of those lines.

Then an aquatic species that doesn’t do FTL in the normal sense. They developed teleportation but is it only for short distance. However they are able to get the power requirements down very low and rapidly repeat the process and so they flicker across space and the distance of each step gets longer the farther they are from a gravity well so they travel faster around the outside of something like a galactic cluster than in the middle of it. Reversing the normal pattern of where things get colonized.

And last was an insect species that developed ship size star gates but travels sub light to anywhere new but as long as they bring a gate ship travel is basically instant after that.

And the bonus layer is that since the game has direct ship to ship combat also in the mechanics the difference drive types have trade offs as well like the insects having extremely good combat drives since they don’t have ANY FTL systems on their combat ships so it all goes to direction propulsion.

So far it is the only Sci-fi setting I can think of that has so many different ones overlapping not just something like a newer system replacing an older one.

Wouldn’t be a problem. G includes the West Indies places like Trinidad which has plenty of food that originated in India. So not the full list of all Indian food but it is perfectly real and not some crappy fusion restaurant knock off.

Results of the British colonial era bringing a lot of people from India after ending the official slave trade and still wanting people to work plantations. So they switched from literally slavery to the not quite but still awful indentured service. The British would get the lowest social groups in India that functionally couldn’t own property in India to sign contracts for many years of work in exchange for a 1 room shack and a micro plot of land of their own.

As AAA said in a comment beside me it isn’t so much that I expect it would predate a space elevator. Simply that it is possible with current tech rather than still waiting on additional moderately likely breakthroughs like long chain carbon nanotube tether.

Also there are plenty of options to have the vast majority of the material be from space and not the surface since the core idea is a metal like copper being spun above orbital speed after being made into a full loop then used for the mag lev to keep at ground speed. There are absolutely a lot of astroids that might allow for that.

Constructing an Orbital ring and then using that to get a form of space elevator built.

Totally possible to build with our current technology but the cost if we do it pre space elevator or similar is pretty insane.

Building a ring let’s us basically have a stable space side anchor at low earth orbit instead of geo sync ish like you need for a normal space elevator to match ground speed.

Even more fun is cost for additional rings drops massively and you can build them in different orientations you can get space elevators to rings without having to be on the equator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E

Last and my favorite part is the possibility of having literally trains that go up to a ring cross an ocean and go back down. Wouldn’t be faster than planes but massively better cargo capacity and efficiency as well as comfortable for passengers.

Absolutely disagree on this. There is no fundamental reason software must have bugs. However old systems can be their own technical debt because of things like the hardware no longer being produced and therefore unable to be directly repaired if it breaks from age.

This leaves either reprogramming for a modern device or things like emulation which can create/surface bugs that weren’t present before.

The most extreme example I have heard of (sadly couldn’t quickly find a link for it) was a disorientation simulator for pilot training that had zero software issues in several decades of use and when the hardware failed they replaced it with an FPGA in a modern system that ran all the old code 1 for 1. PDP stuff originally I think.

Additional edit - I’ll add that “bug free” software is insanely rare in reality and nearly but not quite impossible to create in practice. I can’t say the software didn’t technically have bugs but if multiple decades of use didn’t have them show up in practice it is functionally bug free.

Ok that is one of the most adorable things I have ever seen.

Sadly I don’t but would also like to see it if it is available.