Shurimal

Navidrome just seems to be faster and more responsive. But the main reason of using both is that I just like to try things out and tinker. I also use Foobar2000, Kodi, MPC-HD, AIMP and other media players.

There are lots of people who are willing to endure a dangerous journey in order to become part of a stable, safe society in a country that isn't torn up by a war or ruled by despots, kleptocrats or terrorists.

Somehow when these people reach to a country desperately trying to grow its population (read: have more workforce and taxpayers), we tend to ostracize them, deny them opportunities, make it hard for them to integrate and generally be hostile towards them on both individual and systemic levels. And then scratch our collective heads why we have problems with the "others".

Curious species the human is. No wonder the extraterrestials from the Galactic Society never visit us and try their hardest to hide their existence from us😞

I actually bought just one new 6TB HDD and repurposed an older 3TB one as a redundancy drive for mirroring most critical data using a simple rsync cron job (no need for realtime mirroring of media files that are write-once), plus another old 1 TB drive just because. I haven't run out of storage yet and I have automated download/sharing for OpenStreetMap and some Linux distros which takes up half a TB or so, but I plan on expanding the array using MergerFS and SnapRAID when the need arises.

The rest is just SMB shares, Navidrome, Jellyfin, DLNA and FTP. Remote access from outside my local network is done via Tailscale VPN.

I doubt 0.1...0.2 mm aluminium sheet metal is good for any scissors🙃

Water only gets stuck in your ear if you have wax built up in your ear canal. Regular washing of your ear with warm water (and nothing else!) keeps the wax build-up under control and water will just pour out of your ear canal as soon as you level your head.

For scissors, however, nothing is more expensive and delicate than a decent set of haircutting shears

I have a very cheap pair of haircutting scissors. I've used them to cut thin aluminium sheet. Still work OK for trimming my beard. I'm an absolute monster🙃

As for knives, some 10 years ago I bought a cheap (I think 2 or 3 €) Swedish-made fixed blade with nylon grip—the kind contractors and builders use. Thing is pretty much indestructible, cutting open tin cans and splitting of splinters from logs for firestarter like it's nothing. Has a nice carbon steel blade and used to have very nice hollow ground that has been long been downgraded to flat ground due to many, many sharpenings.

Probably it doesn't quite count as a gadget, but repurposing my old PC as a home server. Firstly it makes a great mass storage solution making all my media accessible from any device, no matter what architecture it is and what apps it can run. I also self-host Home Assistant, Syncthing, Radicale, Navidrome, Jellyfin and UrBackup. The ten years old 2 core Pentium with 8GB of RAM can do it all, it's much cheaper to run than half a dozen subscription services and I have total control over my data and privacy.

Now this is what pistols in sci-fi games should look like (also, Laugo Alien). I'm sick of the silly trend of futuristic sci-fi pistols putting the magazine in front of the trigger and leaving no room for the chamber, not to mention zero possible barrel length and having horrible balance.

To be honest, Freelancer was kind of "meh". Graphics and character animation were very nice, but ship and station design was weird and the combat felt shallow and one-dimensional. In short, too arcade-y. No joystick support was the real downer, space ship combat never feels good with mouse.

For the perspective, though, before Freelancer I played and modded the absolute crap out of Independence War 2 and that is still the pinnacle of space combat that doesn't feel like WWII dogfight arcade in space while still being rather accessible and intuitive.

I'm an Elder Scrolls veteran (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), I know quite well what Bethesda games do well and what not. And they have always clicked for me, even though all of them are flawed in different ways.

As for ship combat, as long as it's comparable to X3, it's fine. I'm not expecting Children of a Dead Earth or Independence War🙂

tons of titles try to go for realism and showing off the scale correctly, which is neat for space nerd

As one of those space nerds, I'm glad we have games like Elite: Dangerous, Starfield, X series, Independence War etc. Choice is good and I, along with many others, love 1:1 scale sandboxes to fly a virtual spaceship in, fight , trade and explore. There are plenty of fast action games including space shooters like Star Wars Squadrons for those who don't appreciate the emptiness and loneliness of space and don't want the travel-and-life-in-space part in a space game.

Starfield is the only new game from past 5 years I'm excited about and going to buy once I upgrade my GPU. It's a life-in-space sandbox that complements E:D well by doing things the latter does not.

You're right, of course, but my point is that it's not only metal, punk and other "angry" music, or more precisely, music that is aesthetically an acquired taste. There's a lot of mellow, danceable and catchy music that has themes other than "Ooh, baby, baby, yeah, aha". That this sort of music is not played on radio is a completely different problem.

Take a listen to eg VNV Nation's Tomorrow Never Comes and tell me it couldn't be a nr. 1 hit on radio and in clubs. It has all the making of a good catchy pop song, yet has some very thoughtful and contemplative lyrics.