Drugs alter your perception, not awareness. Mediation and a philosophy class you didn’t take on YouTube will cure you of that confusion.

Hardlinking files to their new destination and your normalized naming schema. Using symlinks would be madness.

“On a previous android phone”

They’ve been incrementally locking down those features and options (or security holes) over the years. I’ve used Tasker almost from the very first android phone to automate tasks and watched those features it tied into slowly get stripped away or locked down to the point of being useless.

I like your schema. I’ve used something similar. My hosts have always been sci-fi space/time ships/stations, user accounts are characters from or Captain’s of said vessels. Over the years I’ve had a TARDIS, Serenity, Moya, Out of Bands II, Galactica, Millennium Falcon, Rocinante, etc. It’s usually whatever I happen to be discovering or binging at the time I setup the machine. For nearly a decade the TARDIS was my server/NAS because it was bigger on the inside that survived through several generations of smaller devices like laptops and raspberry Pi’s named after smaller lighter vessels like Serenity and Rocinante.

No, the title is a homophone for a slang term for ejaculation.

They knew what they were doing. Obviously this is (I assume) just more of the same step-family kink fad nobody asked for.

They shouldn’t be separate in the first place. It’s just bad design that’s prone to failure. And in this case that failure mode is VERY far from failsafe, it’s potentially deadly.

Too bad those “easily accessible manual releases” aren’t the actual door handle and are hidden so well you’d never find them if you were unfamiliar with the vehicle.

God what a naive and toxic attitude. This peak toxic troll thinking that has absolutely no place in any useful discourse. With all sincerity, you should really seek help. I really do pity you. This isn’t flattery. I’m not angry. I’m not celebrating you. I don’t care to hurt you. You’re just a sad fool and I hope you find a way to be better.

I’m very pro real books and as a result was hesitant to jump on the ebook bandwagon. That all changed after finishing a particularly large book early during a long trip, lugging those damn dead trees around the country for a while and unable to find anything worthwile to read in along the way. Now with my ebook any book and every book on my “to read” list taking up the same space, same weight, and I don’t worry about damaging them because the ebook is waterproof with a rugged cover.

I still buy hard to find and out of print books at used book stores, but those stay home and get gifted to special people when I’m done.

Yeah, the touch screen is awful, but just try finding a decent induction range without one and without spending twice as much for the privilege. (It seems that induction ranges are the most popular for this unfortunate design trend.)There’s not really any choices out there. You can lock the screen, which is great for cleaning. Just don’t do that while you’re using the oven or range because it turns everything off and cancels the bake.

I do love everything else about my induction range though. Cold searing stuff is faster and easier to get right. I can bring a pot of water to a rolling boil in about 4 minutes.

TV static in recent movies and shows that are set in the past almost always instantly pull me out of the narrative because no one seems to be able to get it right and some are just stunningly bad. It’s usually very subtle, so much so that I’m not sure I could even describe what’s wrong. Makes me feel old to notice it.

I’ll phrase it like a shower thought:

“Avoiding politics is about as useless as avoiding economics, math, science, or the arts; they permeate everything we do. We even use them to define what it means to be human. We might as well avoid breathing.”

I think avoiding partisanship and incivility might be more productive, but it has the problem of being more vague and requiring judgement, thus requiring more effort to enforce fairly and consistently. I don’t think there is an answer that will satisfy everyone. Avoiding politics may be a good rule for this community, even if it’s pointless.

The “E” (and similarly the “IE”) at the end is a very different pronunciation indicator than an “E” in the middle of the word.

There’s no need for the weird hate in your spoiler tag just because you don’t understand something.

Yes, I’ve done almost exactly this while traveling. You can even carry around a couple variously configured sd cards for different use cases. I had one with jellyfin for sharing locally and also Kodi for direct HDMI connection to TVs. There is a in app on Android for jellyfin called findroid that allows offline copies from the media server, which allowed me to not need the thing powered the entire time I wanted to watch something on my phone, just long enough to download it. Adding samba shares adds a other layer of accessibility. I had another SD Card with video game ROMs for retro gaming, but this one got left at home because it requires controllers and I didn’t think I’d use it that much. I had another with “little backup box” installed for automatically backing up my photos and videos after a day out exploring with my camera.

I used a Raspberry pi 5 for all of this, running from a battery backup, because I didn’t really need a keyboard once I had remote connections to my phone sorted out. Pick a rugged case and you case just toss it in your bag of chargers. It took up about as much space as a pack of cigarettes. Another option would be the Raspberry Pi 400, built into a keyboard. A little bulkier, but maybe more resilient in the face of technical difficulties.

Setting up Sonarr and Radar with docker isn’t all that complex. If you set up Prowlarr as well then you can still get the instant search and download aspect you mention except you can search ALL the good websites at once and (most importantly for my stress level) avoid all the bullshit ads and malware you’ve got to worry about blocking while browsing those sites through the web. Sonarr is perfect for following any show, not just those you might binge watch. Topical shows like SNL and last week tonight get picked up automatically. Long term favorites with unpredictable release cycles (looking at you Doctor Who) get snapped up when they’re most popular and download super fast. Cleaning up old seasons to clear out space is as simple as navigating a web page. Both radarr and sonarr can connect to other services like that.tv so less tech savvy household members can add a show or movie to their watchlist and it will automatically get added, searched, downloaded, and hosted without any extra interaction from me. You can even set up profiles so that certain lists meet quality standards, so for example the kids cartoons aren’t downloaded at the same high a quality as the adult shows.

My point is this, make the switch to automating the searching and downloading, not so that you can hoarde everything, but so that you can’t stop spending as much time being the home video librarian and more time enjoying it. On more than one occasion I’ve been out with friends and somebody mentions a movie they liked, I’ve taken a minute to add it to my list, and the movie is ready and waiting on my Plex (and/or Jellyfin) before I get home.

This is a gross misinterpretation of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment and how the lottery actually works. That said, this is genuinely a shower thought because it’s logic evaporates as quickly as you dry off and put your thinking pants on.

Don’t blame Plex for that, they’re just aggregating streams from other sources.

“One of the best ways to drain people’s energy is via the internet.” —Colin Robinson

I have setup and run what are basically HTPC’s for decades now. Kodi running on a Debian based Linux distribution or just Debian is a solid recommendation and has lots of support for infrared remotes, but kodi can be very fiddly to setup properly. It will work, but don’t expect it to work “out of the box”. You’ll probably still need a mouse and keyboard for anything outside Kodi. You’ll have to read a bunch of documentation and do some customizing to get the most out of Kodi. It’s still easier than most other setups, but it will feel very frustrating if it’s your introduction to Linux too.

I’ve moved to using my HTPC primarily as a server. Once you get comfortable with linux and docker, setting up new server services like Jellyfish, Plex, and and *ARR stack is relatively trivial. The advantage here being that you can serve your media to any device that can connect to your server. For me that means one library of media to share with any TV in my house, any mobile device I own, and any friends and family computer savvy enough to download the right apps and setup an account. If your network (and your Internet connection) isn’t reliable this kind of setup may not work very well for you at all. For example, Plex account authentication will fail is you don’t have Internet. Jellyfin and Kodi fair better when Internet is only available occasionally or is unreliable.

My least favorite part of using Kodi was setting up the remote. Even worse was trying to configure controllers for retro gaming. The situation is MUCH better than it was, but is still far from easy. I was kind of able to side step the remote problem because now I can just use the remote for the TV (if it supports the Plex or Jellyfin apps) or another streaming stick like fire stick, Nvidia shield, or Roku. My Nvidia shield can pair with any Bluetooth controller and runs RetroArch so that problem was side stepped too. ROMs can be copied via samba shares or loaded directly by a USB drive.

TLDR: Kodi has built-in support for IR, but streaming sticks are cheap, and in the long run I found setting up a server was more versatile, more reliable, and less stressful. I know, I also hate it when people ask for a specific solution and others recommend asking a different question. But in this case, my experience is that IR remotes suck, are flaky, and not worth it if there is any other option.