Paywalled specifications sounds a lot like security through obscurity. It works well until it doesn’t.

Save your money. Buy about 10-13 lbs of backpacking gear. Hike all summer, at least 75 days in the mountains. Maybe one of the Via Alpina routes. You’ll live a different life. You’ll have time to think about what’s important to you, and what’s not. When you return to your former life you’ll feel a bit sad. You may be inspired to make changes, or maybe not. You’ll probably enjoy some of the simple pleasures for a while, like hot water, or cold beverages.

You know when your computer isn’t working. Turn it off and back on. You need a reset.

That or try psilocybin, under the supervision of good friends.

Another option is to have a child. When you’re a parent you’ll be too busy to be depressed.

Is it a documentary or a game? Confusing trailer if it’s a game.

Media piracy cannot be stopped. Don’t forget there was media piracy before the internet too. But back then it was physical piracy, and somebody made money on another’s work. That kind of piracy will always be shut down, because it is actually stealing. The fat cats want their money.

But now we have a different kind. More like Robin Hood. Digital piracy takes something and copies it, giving it away for free. The biggest risk for piracy, is that the content holders offer their product at a price so low, it would be horribly inconvenient to pirate it. For example if Apple Music just had you pay a few pennies per song instead of monthly. You’d load up $20 and listen to a lot of music. If TV series offered ad-free streaming for like $0.25 per episode. If movies could be watched for $1. If academic journal articles could be accessed for $1.

But that will never happen. They’ve done the math. They make more money with subscriptions and pricing right at the edge of affordability for many. Why would they want to make less money?

Actually now that I’m thinking about it. The way for them to hurt piracy the most would be to give away low-bitrate copies of everything for free. Stream all the music you want at 96 kbps. Watch every TV series or movie at 480p. Download this ebook as a plain text file. Read this article with tiny thumbnail photos. Free version of game has low-res textures and 720p at 30fps. Even that wouldn’t end piracy, but it would be a lot less popular. It would be harder to find somebody to invest the time bypassing paywalls when you can read the text easily.

Anyway torrent cannot be stopped. It’s moving to onion and i2p, fully decentralized. There will be nobody to take down. Besides that there’s always independent nations who don’t care about digital piracy, who can host private trackers.

Non-tech. I decided to self host first to send media to my TV. I wanted an always-on solid state hard drive computer that didn’t have to do any transcoding. Tried DLNA but Emby just worked better. Jellyfin didn’t have an LG App at the time so I’m still using Emby. Eventually I also asked my poor ARM server with 2 GB of RAM to also run my wireless access points, but the Omada software is a resource hog. So I have a little Intel machine that can do Omada better and also transcoding for Emby on the go. And then I learned about HomeBridge and that’s been great too. I think together the two computers run about 15W of energy I could decommission the ARM one but it does a couple things I haven’t migrated yet. I’ve tried hosting other stuff but those are the main ones used every day.

Sounds good, best wishes bringing your game into cash flow. If you inspire others to be more active, you’ve already done a lot of good in the world.

I never played RuneScape, but I did just delete Pikmin Bloom. What if players cheat their steps? How will you detect the difference between that, and a Pacific Crest Trail thruhiker who legitimately walks 60,000 steps day after day, and over 1,000,000 steps per month?

Anyway your game sounds cool. I had an idea for a one player game while I was hiking the PCT - kinda like the Oregon trail, or dope wars, but it would be a simulation of the Pacific Crest Trail and the steps would be 1:1. So you’d have to walk 7 million steps to beat the game, and obviously make decisions along the way about food and water, weather, resting, hitchhiking, etc. But there will be long stretches of the game where you just look at a new vista, or look at the location, eat food, camp.

Anyway the reason I’m commenting is I wanted to tell you why I quit playing a walking game. I quit after a backpacking trip of 7 days with no service. When I came back, the game had nothing to do for my ~150,000 steps. No confetti or prizes. If I was actually playing it for any achievements it would be a setback to be offline for 7 days.

So yeah, if you have any players of your game who do serious miles in one day, or one week, or whatever, you should pile on the rewards. Because at the end of the day that’s all I want out of a game like that. An automated micro-recognition that I kicked ass. So I can relax my tired legs and use all my hard earned digital loot.

I would pay if à la carte was remotely economical. For example a digital DRM movie rental should cost $1 in whatever resolution, on any device capable of playing it. A TV show should cost like $5 for a season or $0.5 per episode. To rent, not to own of course. I don’t care about ownership. With that model I would probably end up spending like $10-15/month on media, but I would feel better about it knowing the studio could pay more to those specific individuals who worked on the programs I am enjoying.

A subscription is a blank check to the studio to make whatever they think draws in subscribers, and to pay everyone involved as little as possible with no bonuses for blockbusters.

Wait until they find out what Shellac is made from.

iOS 18 Beta 7 it crashes and reloads back to search so fast it looks like your query is just erased. Band-aid fix maybe.

Mostly real sugar isn’t it? I always viewed Starbucks as kind of an adult breast milk. Sweet warm milk with a little stimulant to keep from crying on the way to work.

Cut the tape, not the box.

Emby is a cousin of Jellyfin that supports DVR functionality. I have successfully recorded from IPTV streams, which shouldn’t be too different from a tuner card. The main thing is it needs to load the programming information from somewhere.

Maybe it can be safely burned?

I was just thinking about this. Love these videos. Cooling of a solar panel is a good application, as long as it gets cold enough for long enough to re-solidify at night.

An alcohol/NaCl solution with a stabilizer can make an ice pack that freezes colder than water. That could be used to keep ice cream frozen in an ice chest.

It would be cool to have recipes for a few different temperatures. There’s a German company Qool Products that sells PCM temperature elements (ice packs), at a variety of temperatures, to store ice cream up to red wine/cellar temp in their ice chest. With some trial and error I guess we could now make our own!

Thanks it looks like the Edgerouter X would meet my needs. I’m not sure I would need a switch though since it has 4 ports.

I’d really like if there was a high end router and switch without WiFi. I already have all my wireless handled by 3 access points. Is there a high end router/switch with 4 ports?

Well if protection from solar heat is the goal, it will be hard to beat the “chrome dome” or reflective parasol. Sometimes the ground reflects quite a bit of heat from below, like snow. Then I guess a shirt might out-perform a parasol.

Google also says to put glue on your pizza.

It seems it’s still an active debate and area of research, but the answer is more complex than wavelengths and emissivity. If you want to know whether black or white is cooler in the sun, it depends on: the breathability or knit, the amount of UV hitting the skin, the amount of skin contact with the fabric, wind speed, relative humidity, how the fabric wets and wicks moisture, and more. We could look at a black trash bag and say, well it’s transparent to IR, and it blocks the visible spectrum, therefore it’s a good shirt material to keep one cool. And obviously that would be wrong. In the same way it’s wrong to say: a white shirt feels less hot when you touch it, therefore it keeps the wearer cooler.