EV is negative. Difficult decision.

Yeah, if you can reflash it you are completely in control. This is the optimal state.

Yeah mp4s with h264 will play basically anywhere if the audio format is a common one. Must be the most supported setup.

I’m pretty surprised that all of the audio formats work. I’m not so surprised that the TV has h265, although maybe a bit surprised that it is exposed to the browser. The container support is also pretty surprising. Unless your MKVs are so simple that they are effectively WEBM.

Or maybe it pops the link out of the browser into a dedicated media player which has decent codec support.

iDevices do expose h265 in the browser, but the container support is still a bit surprising. But then again WEBM is basically MKV, so maybe that is why it tends to work.

There are a handful of common reasons.

1. The client doesn’t support the formats. Browser clients are notoriously picky not supporting some common video (for example few browsers support h265 and it isn’t generally considered web-safe) and audio formats. But embedded devices may also cause trouble if they don’t have enough CPU to do non-accelerated playback and don’t have hardware support for the codec used.
2. Playing at a lower bitrate. In that case you can transcode at the fly.
3. Remuxing. This is things like the moov atom where the actual codecs are supported but not the container or exact packaging of the file.

But yeah, especially if you are using a player with wide format support you may not need it.

IMHO for 2 drives you don’t want redundancy. (I assume that is what you want RAID for, mirroring?). The per-drive failure rate is so low that you are unlikely to encounter it and nothing you are running seems particularly availability sensitive. Having a bit of downtime to rebuild in the very rare case of a drive failure is fine. The extra storage space is way more valuable.

lol, I assume he means 1000 Mbps aka 1 Gbps which is reasonable. Maybe even a little low as transferring files around fast is nice.

IMHO this isn’t really worth it.

1. x264 is very fast at lower profiles. Especially if you aren’t streaming across the internet often the size hit from the fast profiles is fine. Even if you are streaming over the internet it is probably fine. Getting a slightly faster CPU will also get you super far and is more useful to have lying around than a GPU as it will benefit most things that you do on the server. And worst-worst case a bit of CPU usage isn’t going to hurt much of the things that he is running (except maybe a game server if people are playing at the same time and you are really maxing out all of your cores).
2. Integrated GPUs are fine for a handful of concurrent streams. Especially the Intel ones which have amazing media engines.
3. Even if you are going for a dedicated GPU I would go with an Intel ARC. They are way better at media encoding and cost less.
4. You can always add a GPU later. Wait until you have a need and are seeing problems without.

I also don’t mind if they are “selling” nothing, or just a supporter icon. As long as they are transparent that that is all you are getting.

Actually I would pick GIMP.

1. Says what it is, an image editor.
2. No popups and random interruptions.
3. Not only AI editing examples which makes me thing the tool is AI only.
4. An overview of the variety of major features it has rather than just AI editing.
5. Links to helpful documentation rather than endless marketing pages that say nothing.

Really think only thing I would like to see is some screenshots and examples of using the tool, rather than just info on what it does. But the Photoshop page barely has this, just a few examples of the AI tools.

For .config it isn’t as important to me, but putting things that can be re-created in .cache (well the proper environment variable that defaults to .cache) is very nice because I don’t need to back up all of that junk.

But it wouldn’t be unreasonable to put something like .config in a git repo, and storing full history for large and frequently changing files is a waste of space if they aren’t really “config”.

It’s definitely an option. It will do the things that you want (as long as your phone is online, but that is the same for any other solution).

sending Signal messages with it would be less secure

Yes, this is because Beeper converts the Signal protocol to the Matrix protocol and vice versa. In order to do this it needs to access the messages. So it needs to decrypt the messages, then re-encrypt them on the other side. This means that the bridge (in this case operated by Beeper) has access to your messages. This is often referred to as “end-to-bridge” encryption, as it isn’t end-to-end anymore.

This is going to be true of any bridge you use that is hosted by a third party. You are always adding one additional trusted party into your communication.

the recommended bridge instructions sends me over to Beeper, since I don’t have my own server

Yes, to practically operate a bridge you need your own Matrix server. This is because the bridge will create a new Matrix user for every remote participant (every phone number you communicate with in this case). Doing this with regular mechanisms would be difficult (as signup is likely restricted in some ways) and inefficient (as each account would need to be checked for new messages separately). Beeper runs their own homeserver so that they can operate their bridges. However Beeper’s bridges are only available to users on the same homeserver (this is not a protocol limitation, just their choice). So in order to use their bridges you need to make an account with them (which you can, it is free IIUC). Beeper also offers custom clients which have special features for interacting with their bridges (for example making it easier to start a conversation with a new phone number).

The alternative would be to run your own server and bridge (or hire someone to it on your behalf).

I’ve been using nginx forever. It works, I can do almost everything I want, even if more complex things sometimes require some contortions. I’m not sure I would pick it again if starting from scratch, but I have no problems that are worth switching for.

Nice. There were a few comics that I followed on Twitter due to lack of them posting other places. But it is nice to know that if I find another account that I am actually interested in I will be able to get a feed.

This is my strategy. If I can’t bank on the website I find a new bank.

It would be nice if there was a shortcut to go “back to previous site”. Because on one hand using back to navigate around map moves is often very convenient, but sometimes I want to go to the site before the map. Having a two-level history with page and site would be super useful.

#1 items should be backups. (Well maybe #2 so that you have something to back up, but don’t delete the source data until the backups are running.)

You need offsite backups, and ideally multiple locations.

That isn’t what that document says. It says that they can impersonate you in non-E2EE scenarios. The clients I use warn me when a message isn’t properly encrypted so someone without E2EE keys can’t impersonate someone in an E2EE room.

That being said the general concept is a problem. I would love to see progress where all events from a user are signed by a device key and non-forgable. There is some thinking about this with portable identities (such as MSC2787) where you server is basically just storing and forwarding events but the root of trust is your identity and keys that you control. But none of this will land soon, not for many years.

Probably yes, it depends on your threat model.

If you are using E2EE on a matrix.org account then your message content, attachments (images) and most other traffic isn’t accessible to anyone but the people in the chat. However Matrix isn’t the most private option, it has a number of leaks such as reactions and chat topics (these are being worked on but aren’t close to happening).

For most people Matrix is a very private and secure option and the fact that it is federated is a huge plus. If you want something more secure you are probably looking at Signal (which you don’t want to use and isn’t federated) or Simplex Chat (which doesn’t have multi-device support).

Closed-source software that sends home tons of information about your system without consent. All communication accessible to a VC funded company that has huge pressure to make as much money as possible.