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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • I run both Plex and Jellyfin. Jellyfin is ready for everyone who doesn’t have to deal with the Mother-in-Law Factor. Plex has an easy setup process, and I could walk my MIL through it on my phone. In 5 minutes, her TV was connected to my server.

    Jellyfin isn’t to that point yet, and likely never will be. Since there’s no centralized server for an app to phone home to, there’s no way to create a unified account creation/login experience. Jellyfin is nice as a “just for me” server. But as soon as I have to help others use it, it becomes a nightmare. Walking my MIL through setting up Jellyfin on her TV was the reason I re-installed Plex in the first place.

    I had finally converted my wife away from using paid streaming apps, and dealt with all of the “Why do I have to use three different apps to access it on my three different devices? They all look different and are harder to use” complaints. By the time it got around to my MIL, I was tired of dealing with it and just reinstalled Plex so people could have a consistent experience.

    I still use Jellyfin for my personal viewing because I prefer it. But saying “just ditch Plex, Jellyfin is ready now” is a little disingenuous. Jellyfin is ready for the people who want to use it. But if you’re trying to convince people to ditch their streaming apps, you’re fighting a lot of social inertia. You need to be able to provide a consistent experience across their different devices, with a decent login experience. And Jellyfin definitely isn’t there yet.



  • just not so easy to setup or comparability for my shared users.

    Yeah, the biggest reason I use Plex is because of the wife/mother-in-law factor. Basically, how easy is it to get the people around you to use it? If it’s more difficult to use than Netflix or Hulu, many will immediately throw up their hands in learned helplessness, claim it’s too confusing, and refuse to try any more. Plex is the only self-hosting option that actually provides an elegant user setup experience. With Plex, adding a new user is as simple as having them make an account and then sending them the server invite.








  • I remember in the early days of /AskReddit, where people were using it for general questions and even emergencies. There were a lot of “my house is on fire and I’m on the second floor, what should I do”, “I think there’s a burglar outside my bedroom, what should I do”, “my partner just choked on their steak, how do I do the Heimlich maneuver” types of posts. It got to be so bad that the mods had to add a “this sub is not for emergencies. Call your local emergency hotline instead, you fucking dumbass” rule to the sidebar.

    I think some were trolls, but I think the other side is that people turn their brains off when they panic. They revert back to whatever they’re most used to doing. And if you’re someone who consistently goes to Reddit for answers to basic questions, that’s what you’ll end up doing.





  • Turn off half the breakers. Now you know which half the outlet is on, based on whether or not it has power. Repeat.

    For instance, let’s say you have 100 breakers. You turn off the first 50. Your target outlet still has power. So now you have divided the potential number of breakers by half, and you know the breaker is somewhere in 51-100.

    So you cut that in half, and turn off 51-75. Your outlet is now dead, so you know it’s somewhere in the 51-75 range that you just turned off; if it were still on, it would be somewhere between 76-100.

    So now you reset 51-63, while leaving 64-75 off. It is still dead, so you know it is somewhere between 64-75.

    Maybe now you turn on all of the odd breakers, leaving the evens off. It is still dead, so you know it must be 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, or 74. Reset the first three. Your outlet has power now, so it must be one of the first three.

    Flip 64 and 66 off. If you get lucky, your outlet still has power and you know it is 68. But you get unlucky, and it is dead. So now you know it must be either 64 or 66.

    Flip 64 back on. If it has power, you know it’s 64. If it doesn’t, you know it’s 66.

    We just eliminated 99 breakers and found the correct one using only 7 tests. Because each test eliminated half of the potential values, it whittles things down very quickly. We went from 1-100, to 51-100, to 51-75, to 64-75, to the evens between 64-74, to only 64/66/68, to 64/66, and finally landed on 66 as the correct breaker. If we had gotten lucky earlier, we could have done it in 6 instead. If you had simply started with breaker 1 and worked subsequently, it would have taken 66 trips to the breaker box to figure out.

    Where binary search really excels is with large data sets. Even if it had been 1000 breakers instead of 100, it still would have only taken an extra three or four searches (1-1000 > 1-500 > 1-250 > 1-125 > 1-75… etc…) to narrow it down.


  • If they don’t do their job and you have proof then they’re screwed

    Nope, Warren v. District of Columbia had the SCOTUS rule that the police have no obligation to protect or serve. They can’t be sued for failing/refusing to do their job, even if it puts people in harm’s way.

    The case revolved around a dude on a train who got stabbed. There was a psycho moving down the train cars stabbing people, and the police were chasing him. A passenger saw the attacker coming, saw the police in pursuit, and decided to help. He stopped the stabber, expecting the police to quickly catch up. Instead, the police locked the passenger inside the train car with the stabber, and watched through the tiny windows until the stabber was tired out from stabbing the passenger.

    The passenger sued the police department, stating that they refused to protect him. The SCOTUS ruled that the police have no obligation to protect nor serve, and can’t be sued for failing to help you.


  • Honestly, if your security system didn’t allow you to set motion alerts, that’s a bad system. Basically any modern system will allow you to set motion alerts. You can specify a section (or sections) of the screen that will create a flag in the footage when motion is detected.

    My job’s parking garage had a car get broken into, and a musician’s (very expensive) instrument was stolen. We didn’t have a camera pointed directly at the car that was broken into, but we had cameras at every entrance and exit, and on the ramps leading between each floor. Management was expecting to scrub through literal hours of footage. Using some basic motion detection, I set it to flag any time someone came up or went down the specific ramps or stairs that led to the level the car was on. It ended up being like 45 cars.

    Then I just did a quick timer, to see how long each person lingered on the floor. Like 40 of the cars came up the ramp from the lower level, then like 30 seconds later went up the next ramp to the next level. So it wasn’t them. Only like five of the cars actually didn’t go to the next level.

    And out of those five cars, four had drivers/passengers seen on the stairwells leading back down to the ground floor; They had parked on the same level as the incident, and went downstairs.

    Only one car lingered on the same level for about 2 minutes, then quickly left again. At the exit, there was a camera on the gate which pointed into the cars. We got crystal clear footage of the driver, (someone who the musician knew) and the instrument case was very obviously sitting in the passenger seat.

    The entire search (it was like 3 days of footage) took like 10 minutes total, simply by being able to whittle down when people were coming and going.