Don’t get short with me, buddy!

Setting up fail2ban to block people trying to brute force the admin panel is a good start.

AreWeAntiCheatYet does a decent job of cataloguing what has anti-cheat, and what actually works on Linux / Wine.

It would be great to have it shown on the Steam store. I refunded a game recently because my kid bought something with anti-play by accident.

PlexAmp is an amazing bit of software for a phone. It doesn’t translate well to the desktop, but it’s still pretty good.

Your flacs will play lossless on wifi, and transcode to 128kbps opus on mobile. You can tweak those settings too.

Most smart TVs have a native plex app available too.

CUPS facing the public internet sounds a bit crazy. Why would you print when not physicly near the printer?

My company has a 6 month probation period. It also has a 6 month password expiry. Because of all the SSO nonsense, it’s quite possible for it to lapse without warning.

It’s now a running joke that get locked out on the last day of probation, and you’re expecting a call from HR any minute.

I remember using Xiph’s integer implementation of Ogg Vorbis on my Nokia N-Gage (Symbian S60). I wonder if it’s not a priority for Opus. IIRC, Opus is floats all the way down.

update: it exists.

https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Is_there_a_fixed-point_implementation?

IPv6. Stop engineering IoT junk on single-stack IPv4, you dipshits.

Ogg Opus. It’s superior to everything in every way. It’s free and there is absolutely no reason to not support it. It blows my mind that MPEG 1.0 Layer III is still so dominant.

I love this standard. If you dig deeper into it, the standard also covers a way to express intervals and periods. E.g. “P1Y2M10DT2H30M” represents one year, 2 months, 10 days, 2 hours and 30 mins.

I recall once using the standard when writing a cron-style scheduler.

I also like the POSIX “seconds since 1970” standard, but I feel that should only be used in RAM when performing operations (time differences in timers etc.). It irks me when it’s used for serialising to text/JSON/XML/CSV.

Also: Does Excel recognise a full ISO8601 timestamp yet?

Wired xbox controller for PC games.

Wired switch controller for Nintendo emulation.

I happen to have both consoles and they work instantly over USB.

I know about that one. The 800MB “fix” for it has been crashing machines quite hard.

I don’t have that problem because I don’t run Windows.

Windows is shit.

IPv6 should not be disabled under any circumstances.

In fact, many devices in my house have IPv4 disabled. Disabling IPv4 on my public-facing SSH reduced the attack traffic to zero.

IPv4 is shit.

Public-facing: Password generator, stored in a password manager.

Internal LAN: Everything gets the same re-used, low-effort password.

Nobody is going to hack my CUPS server.

Ahh. Approving every piece of software would make them… Apple.

You did say “driver”, and Microsoft typically approves every single driver on the majority of PCs.

What do you think WHQL is?

The problem with CrowdStrike’s solution is that they got csagent.sys driver signed by WHQL, and the driver will download p-code from the internet and execute it. This allows them to push out changes without waiting for Microsoft approval.

The biggest problem occurs when you don’t sanitize your inputs and someone accidentally uploads a blank file padded with zeroes. The driver dereferences a null value, and crashes your system. Hard.

Thanks! I’m going through a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter because it was the only way to get 4K video. Pipewire is a bit flaky and applies filters that I don’t want. It’s a 3.1 channel setup. The goal is for the AV receiver to do all the decoding.

I’m on the new HTPC version installed as a snap. I can see that it’s meant to work with passthrough, but I find that it… doesn’t.

I haven’t tried in a few versions. Maybe I should give it another crack.

I used MythTV for decades. I really loved the “raw” digital output of the music player. It would casually hop from 44/16/2.0 to 96/24/5.1 between songs and my amp would decode it. I even contributed a small patch to make the visualizer work with 24bit audio.

The live TV hardware accelerated deinterlacing was really good too. TV recording was super reliable.

The TVDb lookup was a tad glitchy. It turns out that it didn’t include the year in the lookup. I wrote a patch that did it (and improved my metadata lookups heaps) but never made a PR.

I jumped to Plex around 2020. Mostly for things like streaming to my phone so I can have my music on the train. I believe Myth was better for HTPC, but Plex isn’t too far off.

I’m not a fan of Plex audio. Every time I try to make it do AC3 passthrough or skip the OS mixers, the whole thing breaks.

Printers are always horrible to administer. Brother are typically the best on Linux. I wrote a massive instructional blog a few weeks ago because it took so much work to get my HL-3150CDN working over USB. I had to repackage a Frankenstein’s monster of a driver because my printer never got 64-bit CUPS filters.

The longest outage I’ve had in a decade is when my primary SSD died a 2 months ago and I had to reinstall using config backups. It was down for around a day.

I’ve thrown a UPS on it and flown overseas for a week or two. It’s basically just email for me and the kids.

I’ve had longer outages on hosted services, TBH.