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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • Swiftfin is the official Apple TV jellyfin app. Swiftfin is great on iOS, but hasn’t been updated on Apple TV for a while. It also lacks a lot of polish and features but it is being worked on. There should be an update soon.

    I’ve been using infuse on Apple TV. Infuse isn’t open source and needs a subscription to watch most 4k hdr content. I think it’s worth it if Swiftfin gets an update soon.

    Apple TV is definitely a better experience compared to Samsung and Android. Apps are nicer and there isn’t any ads, privacy controls and privacy statements are much better. Recommended content can also be disabled and only shows when your hovering over the relevant app.


  • It’s difficult to get anything to work on android tv when you don’t sign and don’t enable all the google shit. Even then the privacy statement is still bend over or your tv doesn’t boot past this screen.

    The Apple TV much better.

    It may be better than current android tv because the shield is so old and not been updated in so long.

    Apple TV doesn’t have ads only what’s on when you have the app icon selected. Except inside apps that have ads.






  • Not all patents are good. But a patent system is good. It could be better but the general concept is not flawed like the person I was responding to suggests.

    The physical object isn’t what is patented in this case. It is the method to create the object that has a patent. One that can’t be reversed engineered as it isn’t part of the final product. You could only reverse engineer it if the process was not novel or not obvious to anyone knowledgeable in the field. If both of these conditions are true then the patent should not have been granted.

    Patents are not inherently bad. This is a bad patent. Patent laws don’t have to be changed, because this patent shouldn’t have been granted. The issue is ineffective patent reviews, not patents. Getting rid of patents is not a good idea. If you think it is you probably don’t have a good enough grasp on what a patent is.

    You can make something if you figure out how they did it because it was obvious. In this case the patent isn’t valid. If you have to develop a solution then the patent is probably valid. The patent is a reward for developing and sharing the solution publically.

    If you still don’t grasp why patents are useful. It may be helpful to think of it like open source software. The patent is the code base that is freely accessible to everyone. This preserves the knowledge and lets others build on it. However, to incentivise people to make their code open source you provide protections that stop others from selling the same code you developed.

    The incentive mechanism is why far more businesses produce patents than produce open source code.

    If you remove patents businesses stop funding internal r and d overnight. It increase the risk and reduces the reward.





  • People have attached pens to 3d printers and used them to write letters, effectively print. Most consumer 3D printers are useing or based on open source software.

    I think the issue is, printers are relatively cheap to buy and replace. So building your own and programming it hasn’t been necessary. Where as 3d printing was completely in accessible before the reprap movement. 3D printing software is open source as it is motivated by people wanting to build their own machines that could build machines. Something you couldn’t easily buy.


  • A small computer, large capacity ssd and two WiFi interfaces (2x usb dongles, or dongle plus usb).

    Small computer could be anything: raspberry pi (or generic and), nuc mini pc or laptop. If you want to use it without a plug you’ll need to add a battery, usb c powered devices could be more convent to power from a battery.

    A ssd is better for this use case. Not because it’s faster, but they are more resilient to being knocked about and dropped. They are also much smaller, especially M.2, and aren’t fussy about how they are mounted.

    The two WiFi interfaces would allow you to create a WiFi bridge to access the internet through a WiFi network and access your media server. It would need some configuration, you may also need to have the computer act as a router if you want to use multiple devices without reconfiguring.

    It may be easier to have your device act as a WiFi hotspot and have the media centre automatically connect to it. This would make it difficult for multiple devices to use it simultaneously, and you could accidentally allow the media centre to do all its updating and downloading over your mobile connection.

    This type of thing is going to be expensive and troublesome to configure unless your already experienced with that sort of thing.

    I think a better solution, especially if you already have a media server. Is to set your media server for external access.

    To get media when you don’t have internet, buy a large capacity flash drive (or external ssd/hdd). When you have access to your media server download all the content you want on to the drive. I think iOS jellyfin can do this without much modification.

    Once out of range of your media server. Delete the content you’ve watched on your device (iPad) to free up space. Connect the external drive through the usb port on the iPad, copy over the next lot of content you want to watch. Disconnect and then watch the content.

    Jellyfin can download the content, but you may need another app to play it when you don’t have access to the media server.

    This approach lets multiple people access a much larger amount of media, effectively simultaneously. It doesn’t require a large amount of often expensive local device storage - you use cheap external storage. It much less expensive if it breaks or gets lost and has very little configuration -if you already have a media server running jellyfin.


  • No it doesn’t, or at least it didn’t for years if that has changed recently.

    No one that knew about this was talking about it or doing anything about it.

    The reality of the situation is only three organisations are capable of producing fully fledged browsers. Google, Apple and Firefox. Every variant, spin and de-whatever is nothing compared to developing a browser. All the chrome derivatives had this in them, arbitrarily execution of code from google. Code that wasn’t included in the binary when you downloaded or updated it. The sort of thing a virus would do. The sort of tool you would use to compromise the security of a system.

    If you want a de-googled chrome the only option is safari, it’s chrome before google got its hands on it. If you want properly open and accessible browsers you need to use something else entirely like Firefox.

    De-googled chrome is a myth.





  • Nixos is an os that’s defined by its config stored in .nix files. Everything is defined here all the software and configurations. Two people with the same script will have the exact same os.

    Any changes you make that aren’t in the scripts won’t be present when you reboot.

    You could maintain a very custom linux distribution (kinda) by just maintaining these config scripts.

    So a user wouldn’t need to install all required software and dependencies. They could get a nixos and the self-host config and adjust some settings and have a working system straight after install.