Ha, I just came here to post this! It’s seriously cool, and the Navajo’s history in the semiconductor industry is something I never knew about.

I would love a rug like that.

Basically the scheme from Office Space

One thing to keep in mind: if someone gave you a 5.25" floppy disk with this type of data on it, even if the data was perfectly readable, would you have any way to do it? You’d need to hunt down someone whos into retro technology and hope you can figure out how to decode the information. The format itself became obsolete, so even if the data would theoretically be accessible, the means to access said data may not be.

Point is, what are the chances that CD drives will be around in hundreds of years outside of a museum or personal collection? They’re already becoming more and more uncommon after only a couple decades. But there really isn’t a great solution to this, especially when it comes to video, because you can’t just print it out.

Side note, are you sure that CD Golds are more durable than M-Disk?

And an ad blocker. Always an ad blocker.

You know that you don’t have to declare copyright in every comment you make, yeah? All I can think of is the "Tryin’ to make a change :-/" SMS signature meme.

How would that affect battery life? The battery would charge a little slower since some power is being used by the screen, but the slower charging would actually improve battery life slightly.

I think it’s just that software to edit video streams is inherently more complicated than editing images. Although the metadata shouldn’t be encoded into the streams, so maybe it’s just a case of no one has gotten around to making such a program yet.

Sorry for the late reply, but it looks like somehow Notepad++ got set as the default program to open .bat files. Right click the .bat file, choose “open with”, and you should get an option to open it with command line / cmd.

EDIT: or just change it to .cmd, which should work basically the same way.

You can try installing Handbrake, it’s basically a user interface to make using FFmpeg easier. As far as removing all the metadata with a click, I’m not aware of anything that does that.

Honestly though, I think this is a simple enough case that you could figure it out even if you’re non-techy. The basic steps would be:

• make a folder somewhere to keep everything in one place

• download FFmpeg from here (this is one of the official Windows builds)

• extract the 7z file you downloaded, there’s a folder inside called “bin” and inside of that should be three .exe files, one of which is just named “ffmpeg.exe”. Put that .exe into the folder you made earlier

• open Notepad, copy/paste the command from my first comment into Notepad, and save it as something like “remove_metadata.bat” to your folder from earlier. In the window where you choose where to save the file, make sure you choose the file type “all files” from the drop down in order to save it as a .bat.

After setting it up, you can just put any .mp4 into the same folder, rename it INPUT.mp4, and run your .bat file by double-clicking it. It should create a new file called OUTPUT.mp4 in the same folder with all of the metadata removed.

Use FFmpeg. You can copy only the audio and video channels (and subtitles) without anything else using a command like:

ffmpeg -i INPUT.mp4 -map_metadata -1 -c:v copy -c:a copy -c:s copy OUTPUT.mp4

That’s what I thought too, but this system doesn’t actually use salt water. It uses a membrane that’s filled with lithium bromide (a “salt” in the chemical sense of the word), which absorbs moisture from the air while the computer is off and then is able to slowly “sweat” the moisture away while the computer is running. They say it can run for about 6.5 hours before needing to be recharged.

This is pretty cool for data centers which use massive amounts of power to keep everything cool, because it’s passive and doesn’t use any extra energy for fans or water pumps or anything. It really isn’t all that great for consumer PCs though, because it’s a lot easier to deal with waste heat.

Hmm, I would only purchase them as a third (or more) layer of redundancy, or maybe for storing things like ripped media that could just be re-ripped (or re-torrented) should the drives fail. I would not trust them for anything important since you have no idea what kind of environment they were in for all those years.

That was just part of it. The entire tech sector massively retracted after the boom it saw during COVID, which is also responsible for the sudden enshittification of so many different products/services all at once.

Personally, I haven’t run into a situation where I could only configure something via UI. There’s always been an option to toggle between a UI editor, and just a text editor for the appropriate YAML. There could be exceptions that I haven’t encountered, but they’re definitely few and far between.

To be fair, I’m guessing the majority of Pi’s are used headless anyway. Plus even the older Optiplexes have DVI, which is just HDMI without the audio or fancy stuff like ARC. Won’t be getting 4K or anything, but still a very good video output and IMO adequate for almost all use cases.

That’s only if you want to watch it outside your home network, and either way I would recommend not just opening a port to the world like that. I’d say to use Tailscale (which is trivially easy to install) for remote viewing.

Yes, because streaming boxes can be upgraded independently of the TV and so you can always have hardware that’s actively supported. My old Roku 3 was still getting updates as of a few years ago, while my “smart” TV from 2015 stopped getting security updates long ago.

This is literally just a type of NFC. The same type of thing that’s used whenever you scan your credit card or use an Amiibo. It is interesting that it doesn’t use RFID standards, but conceptually it’s the same idea of an ultra-low-power chip with an antenna with the only purpose being to transmit a few bytes of data when scanned.

Personally, I used TrueNAS Core (known as simply FreeNAS at the time) for my very first NAS setup knowing nothing about BSD-based systems, and it’s been pretty much fine. It has ZFS which is absolutely desirable for a NAS that you store important things on, and It has some quirks but Ive been able to accomplish everything I’ve wanted to with it just by looking up the miriad of guides available. Not saying it’s better than the alternatives, just sharing my personal experience.

However, if you’ve already got OMV setup and it’s working for you so far, I would stick with it. I believe you could always import your drives into another NAS system if you decide to move later, so why fix what isn’t broken?

Ah, I see. If you’re really looking for a beginner option, I might just setup a Samba share for the drive. Then you can get into more advanced options once you get more comfortable.