butter

I'm playing for the first time in my life now.

I've recently had my first kid, and as such, I need a game that I can quickly pick up and put down. Ideally, the game is also playable in long form as well.

Enter openmw for android. The only on screen controls that have ever been usable. Convenient quick save. Minimal load times.

I can hop on, play a little, and get off in a hurry if I need to. I thought I'd be stuck playing old Pokemon ROMs with save states until she hit an age of independence.

It was such a good episode, though

I've been using pCloud to back up only the most important information. The stuff that's hard to get back if something bad happens. Kept in sync with rclone.

Now I think it's time to scale up. I have 1 computer with 4 hard drives plugged up to it. I want to either back up the whole things. I'm thinking of something like backblaze. What does everyone here do for backups?

I recently made a post asking about getting spotify cheaper via vpn.

My question to everyone: how do you decide what to download?

Do you just grab everything, do you use last fm, do you erase music that you never listen to?

Spotify wants me to have a card from said county. I read that you can use PayPal, but they want a phone number from that country.

Any advice?

Edit: I'm aware that there are a lot of solutions to get it for free. I'm aware that I can just download my music.

Currently, I'm running running navidrome for my downloaded music and x manager Spotify for myself.

My wife has an iPhone. I don't want to download her music. But she's paying full price for Spotify.

I also like to listen from my work desktop. I have administrative rights, but it would be really dumb to download something like this to my work machine.

In several countries, I can get Spotify for like $30 dollars a year for 2 people. This price would be worth moving to legal. Especially for her, since she's paying $11 right now

Obviously, this will probably never happen. In the best future for humanity, maybe we can drop our emissions enough to allow for such a thing. But more likely societal collapse

I want to get my wife a digital picture frame. Just a little screen that we can add pictures to. Nothing too complicated.

Half of them out there run on frameo. A friend of mine has a frameo, it seems nice. The privacy policy isn't great. Facebook, Google, the usual offenders. Supposedly, it's end to end, so the pictures are secure. I don't know and that

Is there a decent alternative? I'm not against going with a flash drive, if that's my only option.

Thinking about buying the fairphone 4. Coming from oneplus 8, which is almost unbrickable, thanks to an EDL MSM tool.

Obviously, I'd be careful. But am I likely to brick a fp4 by ROM hopping? Is it dangerous enough that I should not go into buying this phone with the intention of installing a ROM?

Mainly, I want to play with Ubuntu Touch, PostmarketOS, and maybe sailfish. But I figure if those don't quite work out, I'll land on Lineage with MicroG or /e/, since that'll be stock fp4 in the US.

I'm interested in running a service like homarr. This would give my family access to view stuff easily, and I could link to the rest of my services. My main concern is linking jellyseerr, and giving what could be strangers access to make requests.

Is anyone out there using a home screen with seerr capability? How is it working for you?

By now, it's well known that Pokémon Go sucks. My biggest problem with it is just how shallow it is. It's like a minimum viable product with a vaguely addicting gameplay loop.

Here is a short list of ideas that could've made the game more interesting. Pretty much every problem boils down to "but implementing this would've made us lose money"

Pokestops could've been "typed". Like "hospital" could've been a free heal or have better healing item rates. "Museum" could've been the place to get fossil Pokémon, or maybe revive fossils that you find from regular stops. Maybe a grocery store would've had better item rates. A school could've been a move relearner. Maybe some Pokémon only evolve at church, or at an amusement park. The lures could've done something similar, turning normal stops into typed stops. They had so much power at their disposal. They ran on Google maps, ffs.

The friend system is just so stupid. For some reason, it's the best way to farm items? Why can I send a gift at no personal cost to someone else and they receive items? This caused communities to form where people just share friend codes. Also, the fact that theirs a limit to how many you can open a day, and that each one must be opened individually taking about 10 seconds is to cause you to form either habit or routine. Friends should be people you know or maybe people who live in your area, so you can get to know people.

The battle system is weird, but I don't explicitly hate it. It's more interactive than mainline, and that's fine.

The shadow system is dumb, and designed to be extremely addictive. A small rotation of Pokémon with higher attack, lower defense isn't a horrible idea. But the rates are so hard you're encouraged to log on just to fight rocket balloons.

Why does trading randomize stats? I'm obviously trading because I want their Pokémon. Not just any Pokémon of that species.

Why is there no way to increase appraisal stats? This is what the buddy system should've been. Like raising stats of a Chao from Sonic Adventure 2. Work hard, and reset the Pokémon frequently to slowly increase their stats overtime. Maybe every 10 km as your buddy increased 1 IV by 1 point. This would've been great for Shiny Pokémon. Instead, having a good shiny just means you're lucky.

I hate the limited time moves so much. If you evolve your Pokémon at the wrong time, it can be less than half as useful. The only fix is to pay a lot of money for an elite TM.

I'm very tired of SMS being horrible and necessary. Matrix has a bridge for SMS, but it doesn't work very well. There's other SMS bridges, no idea how well they work.

Does anyone have a good solution for dealing with SMS?