Awesome, thanks for sharing this! I haven't gotten into audiobooks yet, but it's good to know that there are user friendly options out there.
Vaguely related: it's also possible to listen to audio books through local libraries in some cases. I think the app is not as friendly, and does a lot to prevent you from getting DRM free mp3s, but at least there's no charge.
Thanks, this is somewhat reassuring. Maybe some day I'll try it. I used to like tinkering with things, but lately I haven't had as much patience or free time.
Ah, I actually have bought a few music CDs a while ago, and they were actually fairly easy to rip myself. I can't complain about that at all. If ripping DVDs was that easy then I would probably enthusiastically buy a few DVD boxsets. But I don't really want to buy dedicated hardware just to read DVDs on my PC to do a cumbersome ripping process, and also probably lug that hardware (or the entire PC) to my TV now and then to watch a movie.
I've been interested in vinyl for a while, does it really sound better?
Ah, good point. I had briefly heard of this and was shocked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code
For anyone who hasn't heard:
This is achieved by way of region-locked DVD players, which will play back only DVDs encoded to their region (plus those without any region code).
This definitely furthers the original post's point. And he may have even mentioned it.
It's infuriating that you can pay for something and then move, and lose your collection. This comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/488/
I may have missed it, but does he (or anyone else) have recommendations for options to simply pay for content and get high quality DRM free files (edit: I mean legally)?
And how much of a pain in the ass is it to buy DVD box sets and rip them? Presumably that’s legal for personal use? Is that the only way? :(
I have some additional frustrations with Netflix:
QTrade is another option. They charge $8.75 to buy and sell most ETFs. I used them before and it worked fairly well. But their app and site seem to be a bit buggy. When I bought an ETF with USD, it immediately shows a big loss— it seems to show the price in CAD after converting with a bad exchange rate. But I can confirm that I effectively got market rate minus the two $8.75 fees when I’ve done it in the past.
The whole process takes a while: a few days for the money to make it into the account, then a day or two for the shares to settle, then a few days to journal the shares between the USD and CAD accounts, then another few days to sell and transfer the money. (The first time I did this, I think I also had to wait 10 days). It’s also annoying that you can’t journal the shares from the app. (Normally I try to do this stuff on a PC, but that’s not always an option given it takes many steps spread out over a week or two)
I haven’t tried it with Questrade. What do they charge to sell? And is it any faster than my experience with QTrade?
Edit: I think QTrade charges a recurring fee in addition to the $8.75 trading commissions, but it’s waived if you keep $25k with them
I really like Aegis for 2FA/TOTP:
https://github.com/beemdevelopment/Aegis
Edit: also Element, a matrix client, for messaging: https://element.io/download
Edit 3: Feeder for RSS (Google Play), (F-Droid), I really like how you can extract the text of articles without ads.
Edit 4: Simon Tatham’s Puzzles, a bunch of simple puzzle games, no ads or BS (Google Play) (I think this is the right one: F-Droid). Fun fact: he created PuTTY.
Edit 2: also minidlna (apparently called ReadyMedia now) as a UPnP/DLNA server to host music and videos on your PC, then you can easily watch using VLC on a phone/computer (and any smart TV with the VLC app, probably) within the LAN. I’d be interested to hear any recommendations for how to easily access my UPnP server from outside my network from my phone. I’m sure there’s some way to do it with a VPN, but I’d rather only route the media streaming traffic through my home network, not all my phone’s traffic.
+1 to everything you said. Another funny thing I noticed: I looked at my steam catalog on a family member’s Macbook. Many of the games aren’t available on Mac, plus they dropped 32 bit executable support.
I never thought that only ~15 years later (from when I first tried Linux) we would start booting into linux from a mainstream OS for gaming. How the times have changed.
Thanks for this info. I’ve always wanted to try some of the FF games, is there any benefit to playing them in order? I rarely manage to stick to a new game, so I’m wondering if I should just try one of the most recommended ones at first, then I can play the others if I liked it. (But I don’t want to spoil the story, if there’s much connecting them)
I came here for tips to be happy but I still enjoyed your tangent dog story. I hope your dog is okay!
I was wondering what this was, here it is:
Ryujinx is an open-source Nintendo Switch emulator created by gdkchan and written in C#. This emulator aims at providing excellent accuracy and performance, a user-friendly interface, and consistent builds.
(from https://ryujinx.org/)
A thousand times, yes. I love Factorio and want to get my partner into it, but she finds the logistics tedious and doesn’t like the gritty art style. We love Cities Skylines (the original, I haven’t tried this new one yet). There aren’t enough city builders (or games focused on building and without much combat) that have good multiplayer.
Does anyone have any recommendations for that? We loved Stardew Valley but I want something with more building. The multiplayer mod for Rimworld works pretty well. I considered vanilla Minecraft but it seems like the buildings don’t feel important enough without mods like FTB.
OpenTTD seems like it should be exactly what we want (also it’s free! And runs on weak hardware, and mobile), but maybe we were playing it wrong. Airports seem to give way too much easy money. And when we first played through we only made transportation for passengers, and I think we should have focused more on industry. I tried it again myself later and did better after focusing on industry, but it still seemed like airports were better money (and way easier).