You know, I was really sick and tired when they updated the nvidia shield with the new android TV version that makes most of the screen show stuff that are basically ads. It didn’t even let me show only stuff I was interested in and this constant “oh you are hovering over this item for 0.000001s so you seem to be interested in this, let me start the video for you with audio” no god damnit I was reading something else or got a text.

I had to install a different launcher so that I could only show on the screen what I actually wanted to see. I have basically removed or reduced all ads as much as I ca.

Lately, I was at my parents place and they don’t have that stuff. Even the 1.5 minutes of ads for a free service is so disruptive to me watching something.

What has this to do with PlayStation?

Well, on the shield you are still able to install a custom launcher that is more to your liking, you could disable the internet access and completely stream your own local content. But on the PS, you don’t have that option and are completely at the mercy of what they think you should watch and see on your screen that you bought with a console that you also bought with your own money.

It’s a bit of an infuriating story that I had not so long ago.

I have a Playstation account and I recently wanted to log into that account on the PlayStation website. The Password I had saved in my Bitwarden Password Manager was apparently wrong. Okay, then I will just reset it, that’s fine.

I went through the Password reset process and generated a new Password, pasted it into the Password field and sent it and everything was fine. I tried to log in with that password and was told that the username or password was wrong. Okay, that is weird, since I reset the password just now the login name couldn’t be wrong because, well, I just used that for the reset.

I tried that several times with the same result and gave up.

A few months later, I wanted to try again and had the same problem. I wanted to sort that out so I went through the same process with the Support bot yet again which then told me that I should come back in the “office hours”. A company making 84 billion in revenue should be able to employ 24/7 customer service or at least tell me that when I request support and not let me go through the bot again.

So, I waited for the customer service personnel to be available and told them my problem. There I was told that “everything was looking fine on their end” and they quickly ended the support. I mean, yes, I was angry but wasn’t abusive to that person because if you couldn’t help me what should I do with my account, it also definitely wasn’t their specific fault. But I would, at least, have expected more than “Well, works on our end, sucks for you, bye”.

The next time I tried again and got a more competent Support dude and we ran through the same troubleshooting steps as before. Reset password (even though I just did that, again, through the bot), logged in again and failed again. This time they suggested that I could use a “normal” password that I don’t generate. THAT worked for some reason.

All of my generated passwords in Bitwarden are up to 32 long with all possible characters, depending on what the website allows or expects. If a website, for example, doesn’t allow 32 characters, I adjust and shorten it to the maximum length they allow. That worked without issues so far.

Well, turns out that the field that you use to reset your password has a character limit of 30 characters. But, this would be fine if the dialogue tells you that your password is too long, but it doesn’t. It just cuts off at 30 characters and happily saves that.

However, the Password field that you use to log in doesn’t have that restriction.

This means that you reset your password with a 32-character long generated password, which is saved in your vault, PlayStation saves a 30-long password and then you use the 32-long password to log in, which fails because it isn’t the same.

And this isn’t even mentioned in the password guidelines. It only said “min 8 characters” but not the maximum.

I don’t know where I read it but IIRC religion is being used as a simple answer to very difficult and possibly uncomfortable questions: why are we here and what is our purpose?

It is fairly easy to believe that something, a god, created us instead of that the existence of humanity was just a fluke, a stroke of luck enabling us to evolve were we are now because it is just easier to grasp even if it is proven. That we evolved from simple beings into more complex organisms instead of just “being created”. Evolution creates so many quite difficult questions that it is easier to understand and believe that someone just wanted us to exist.

When someone is believing in a religion they also always have some form of " it won’t be over" scenario like when you die, there is nothing truly “the end”. You just won’t vanish and this can be terrifying for many because the following question could be, what sense does it make to live at all when our existence is just so insignificant in comparison to everything else?

So, in short, it is an easy too to make sense of things that almost everyone can understand it.

Unfortunately, things like this can and will be abused.

Granted, this is now almost a decade now but I was trained with the HK P8 which, according to what I can find, has a trigger weight of 24N (SA) and 55N (DA)

This would be 2.4kg force or 5.6kg force needed for pulling the trigger.

But as you said, it would make sense that even this is easily overcome depending on how you pull the trigger and the thumbs would be stronger doing that, especially with both hands.

I have seen that while doing a bit of research that the strength needed can be lower for shooting competition which also makes sense but there you have a trained person in a controlled environment for a very specific purpose.

Connectivity or rather the lack of it…

I have a Samsung TV and recently got a new cooling fan and now when I start the fan when my TV is on, it says it detected a new device. I don’t know what my TV would want with a fan maybe control the speed for more immersion?

But there is also no way for me to disable that. I also got regular requests of my neighbor’s to connect to my TV until I disabled the notification for it. No, I couldn’t disable that my TV doesn’t even allow it to be seen, I had to enable to not automatically connect devices and disable that notifications are being shown. That thing isn’t even connected to the internet.

I have a serious question here that I always get when I read news like this. As someone not from the US but having experience with guns through my military training, how is it that toddlers can even pull the trigger of a weapon?

When we had the training for the pistol it was difficult to pull the trigger. IIRC it was even stated that this was by design so that you can’t pull the trigger by accident.

Are there no regulations for such a thing in the US or are toddlers that strong to do it anyway?

My neighbour asked me to take a look at her refrigerator because it wasn’t working. I am a software developer.

Unraid “supports” docker compose. You can install and use it but you won’t be able to utilize how unraid handles docker containers.

All that unraid does is make docker more accessible for the normal user. In the end the container template constructs a docker run command.

So you could use portainer to manage stacks through a webui or install compose and have to SSH into the unraid server all the time.

I had the pleasure recently to create an ffmpeg command to transcode a video into HEVC 10bit with quicksync.

I had tha previously running completely fine on my Nvidia GPU. You would think that it would just be replacing the parameter which device or hardware acceleration to use.

Yeah, turns out that there are like 4 ways to set the quality value of the transcoded output, CRF didn’t work for some reason with quick sync so you need to use global quality or something. I spend days on this trying to figure this out, DAYS.

It is a very powerful tool but every time I have to use it, it is too complicated and I have to spend hours or days to get it working.

Why did I read that with the David Attenborough voice in mind?

What audio problem? because I had issues with my surround sound in which the channels where jumping all over the place. Support wasn’t much help and if that was the same problem then I wish I had found that sooner