A few months back we idly pondered using my partner’s PIP towards getting a new EV. As we don’t have a driveway and we rent, we’d have to take the offer that includes membership to one of the charging schemes. Thing is, it includes the subscription, but not the cost of the charging, which ends up being only just shy of what petrol costs. And the nearest charger is a mile away.
So we just bought an old, cheap petrol car.
Just a note to add that if OP does dig in to HDM, bear in mind that there are only three books. There are three more books masquerading as a continuation of Lyra’s story, but they can be safely disregarded as they are a nonsense.
The thing with streaming services for me is the complete lack of humanity. Don’t get me wrong, I sub to Apple Music and use it quite a lot, but when I’m cooking dinner and want a person playing music to me, making recommendations, and just chatting away, there’s no substitute for human-presented radio.
Algorithmic recommendations are fine, but there’s something about clicking with a piece of music that someone has encouraged me to check out.
Yeah, every day. BBC 6 music is where it’s at.
Pretty sure it’s this command;
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 output.mp4
On my M2 Air, conversions are usually pretty quick, depending on the size of the input. After a short while it does throttle because there’s no fan, but it counters along nicely.
As for audio; I use XLD, set to encode HE-AAC at 80kbps. It seems really low, but still sounds great.
As a Brit, 🤷🏽♀
I’ve never really understood the mentality of businesses. They’re losing customers, so they bump the price to compensate, therefore losing more customers.
I guess those that hang on end up making up for those they lose, and because all the other services are doing the same, they end up getting people who’ve jumped ship from another one and signed up at a good introductory cost.
But, like, just charge a bit less and have more customers.
I’ve got an ffmpeg script saved on my Mac which re-encodes video to a fraction of its original size without any apparent loss of quality. Shit’s basically magic.
I have one for audio as well, but I think it’s an Apple-only MP4 codec, that requires you to have to manually build it into ffmpeg on any other platform. But the end result is that my 2 hour radio show AIFFs that start out at 4GB end up being high quality MP4 at around 75mb.
Like I said, magic.
Yeah, I make good use of the Hidden Posts section in the profile page on Voyager, every time the feed refreshes for no good reason.
Oh god, I’ve just remembered a time on holiday when he went to bite into a perfectly innocuous hamburger, and discovered a single slice of tomato. He was so outraged he threw up on his plate.
That was fun.
If watching a recorded theatre performance from the comfort of my own sofa counts, then The National Theatre’s presentation of The Importance of Being Earnest, which is wonderful.
In terms of seeing a live performance while in the actual theatre then it would be Rocky Horror back in 2019.
Edit: Just remembered that we saw Wicked in London in December 2025, before we saw the movie. That was fun.
When my kid was four and refusing to go to bed, he once stood at the top of the stairs, holding tight to the stair gate, looked me dead in the eye, and shit himself.
On the one hand I was impressed with the show of superiority, but on the other, I did briefly consider having him adopted.
So yeah, I get it.
Yes, but it’s not currently hooked up to anything because we don’t actually use it.
Also, time off work AND I get to eat and drink too much. Fine by me.
Ea-nāṣir, merrily flogging low quality copper to unsuspecting punters. The rotter.
I keep it for Messenger and because sometimes I need to flog my old shit on Marketplace. But yeah, I’ve not posted on there regularly since 2019.
Meanwhile, I’m almost always on Mastodon and Lemmy.
The thing with that laptop though, is that you’re probably able to upgrade the storage and RAM if you need to. That’s valuable. I mean, hilariously expensive to do at this point, but possible none the less.
The way I see it, have a think about what you want to achieve, what self-hosted service is most important to you, and start with that. If you have 200gb of music and you’re sick of giving Spotify money, spin up a Navidrome container and a free Tailscale* account so you can stream your own music to your phone wherever you are. Then see how your laptop responds to that. If it falls over then perhaps you’ll need to have another look at your hardware, but honestly, it probably won’t.
As for the RAM, I used SSH to hook into my server yesterday so I could watch htop on it from another computer while I was importing hundreds of photos into Immich. All four CPU cores were maxed out at 100% and it sounded like a jet engine, but the RAM usage sat steady at around 5.5gb. And that’ll do for me. _ *Tailscale is magic, btw. A free account allows 100 devices, so if you’re running things just for yourself it means you can access everything wherever you are. For free. With basically no setup.
My home server is a 2014 Mac mini running Debian that I’ve kitted out with a 250gb NVME drive and a 1tb SATA SSD. It also has a 2tb HDD hooked up to one of the USB sockets.
It has a quad core i5 and 8gb RAM, so pretty low rent as far as these things go.
That system is currently hosting Nextcloud, Navidrome, Invidious, Jellyfin, Grimmory, Mealie, and Immich. I reckon that’s probably about the limit of what it can handle. It’ll only be used by my wife and I, so I don’t forsee it coming under massively heavy abuse.
I’ve been lucky, because the entire cost to me of that setup is £10 for the adapter to fit the NVME drive, and £13 for the external HDD caddy. The rest of it has been stuff my wife didn’t need, and the Mac itself was my dad’s old one that he gave me.
The point is, you really don’t need a hefty box to start with. Just use whatever you’ve got and see what you can get away with.
When using Sunshine/Moonlight to stream games to our Apple TV, you can guarantee that if it begins to stutter it’s because Windows is downloading something in the background.
To be fair, I’m mostly about Craig Charles as well. His funk and soul show is a genuine highlight of my week while I’m cooking.
As for other shows; Jarvis Cocker has just come back on Sunday afternoons, which is very welcome. Also, Cerys Matthews on a Sunday is great.