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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • What most people are describing here as an improvement is actually HDR rather than a straight resolution upgrade. Not all 4k downloads (or even actual streams) include HDR for all films, so concentrating on films with HDR and preferably Dolby Vision, assuming your TV supports it, is what I would recommend.

    Obviously, not all films are going to be better just because they now have HDR. Even if they have good HDR, there might be other issues such as the green tint for Fellowship of the Ring or the recent problems with the Aliens AI remaster.

    Final thing, if your TV is only average at HDR, then it might not even be worth seeking them out. I went from an average 7 year old LED with basic HDR support to a top of the range LG oled, and it’s night and day better with HDR for good material.





  • So Blade Runner, Alien, and Predator franchises are linked, but I also a believer that the Terminator franchise is linked into the same, shared universe. Obviously Terminator has many different endings depending at which film you look due to timey wimey shenanigans, but if you pick one of the ones that the war is averted (I pick T2 as the sequels are not my favorite), it kinda makes sense. In this universe Dutch is the special forces ace that is picked (probably unknowingly) to be the model for the T800.


  • We’ve had three EVs for a few years now and they been great, had four in total and replaced the first one a bit over a year ago as its lease expired, so no regrets.

    Lengthy road trips aren’t a problem if you plan out your route in advance I get not everyone wants to do this so if this you then wait till there are more charging stations for your region. We plan stops based on charging stations that have a lot of high speed chargers (over 100kw) so we are never waiting more than 20 minutes and never waiting for a charger. It is faster to charge twice to around 80% on one of these than it is to charge to 100% once due to how much charging slows down as the battery nears completion. I would not even consider a car that does not have a 800v architecture due to the slower charging speeds if you plan on road trips.

    We have done 1200 mile round trips, probably small fry for Americans but a lot for us, especially as we towing for all that. Its achievable with planning in most western countries. I want to stop at most every three hours as I want to use the loo, are people who are driving 6 more hours non stop peeing in a bottle or something?

    Cost per mile is stupidly low as we charge at home when not on trips over 280 miles, 8p per kwh, with a monthly cost between the three cars of £40 for around 2000 miles a month (more in summer, about that in winter). Good luck doing 2000 miles on £40 for an ICE car. Charging when out is more expensive the faster you want to charge, ultra rapids work out about the same per mile as high economy petrol ICE, rapids or lower a bit cheaper but nothing significant. Its only going to be cheaper if you can charge at home and your energy provider has a suitable EV tariff as we do.

    Absolutely zero chance I would buy an EV right now as depreciation is already horrendous and the rate of change for EVs is rapid unless you know the car will meet your log term needs and those will not change. We lease so that all the cost of the risk is with the leasing company and we know we want the improvements.

    Edit: Plug in hybrids are fucking useless BTW, you are either doing a ton of miles and using the ICE all the time, or you are using the battery all the time and very rarely the ICE. It means carrying around both a full EV setup and a full ICE setup, so you have more than twice the complexity of either and more weight than an actual pure EV with the same battery that impacts both EV and ICE economy. Plus recent studies have shown that hybrids are far harder on the ICE part than a pure ICE, which is fucking awful for long term ownership.

    They were only ever meant as a stop gap until battery prices dropped, which they have and its now possible to get EVs with over 400 miles of ACTUAL range not just promised range.


  • Long time Kodi user, since it first came out on the original xbox.

    Assuming you are a watch and delete person then for films you really do not need more that a seperate folder than you dump films AND only films into and make sure that the film name is correct AND it includes the accurate year for the film. Vast majority of downloads will already have this in place, I never have to bother to rename or move films about as they just go straight into my download folder that Kodi is looking for my watch and delete films. Older versions of Kodi used to be much more annoying for film scanning requiring proper spacing and so on. However its very very important that only films go into this directory otherwise it will fuck up if you start dumping TV programs into here.

    TV is much more complex if Kodi is doing the metadata scanning as it normally relies on the top level folder name, and a proper season and episode numbering scheme. If you watching TV I would just switch to a managed downloader like sonarr, its a PITA to manually manage weekly show downloads anyway and sonarr will sort everything out for you.




  • People asking why this is a musical is missing the point with the directors choices over the film, as its not really a musical (it has a couple of musical moments rather than being a full blown musical), and its not really what went wrong with the film.

    In order to understand what went wrong, you have to go back to the success of the first film, and how it made the director have a massive tantrum. A large part of the success of Phoenix’s Joker was people identifying with the portrayal of the character, including the sort of person who thinks Homelander is the hero of the Boys.

    Unlike the Boys where the showrunner just doubles down on how much of a shit and how pathetic Homelander is, Phillips decided to reboot the character into what is essentially a alt right grifter who under pressure during the court scenes recants his grift then dies like a bum to the very base that Phillips is attacking.

    He is essentially attacking a large portion of the people who enjoyed the first film, but its incredibly ham fisted and overly blunt. The trailers try to hide this because otherwise none of this base would go and see it, so the trailers have been very meh because they have had not much to work from, its a mess due to Phillips lacking the subtlety to deal with this better.

    The film has other issues, such as the first half being his version of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and the second half seemingly being the court scenes of a Few Good Men, but thats the crux of the matter, the director having a massive tantrum over people liking a character he thought was completely unlikable and his panic that we would see him blamed for Joker copycat killers.






  • I still run ubuntu on my main work desktop and will likely do so until I replace it with a new one as I cannot face rebuilding it at this point in time. I like its broad support, its ease of install and use, but its becoming increasingly annoying having to disable all the enforced decisions the maintainers make, such as snap, ubuntu pro ads and so on. My fear is at some point it will not be reversible


  • Hozelock adjustable long spray lance, absolutely unfit for purpose, disposable garbage that broke after 3 months.

    Last refund was a nightmare as it was a purchase from Amazon and outside their 30 day window, so initially they did not want to accept the return and directed me to the manufacturer. Hozelock just refused to engage, and directed me back to Amazon, endless loop. After going round this loop I then complaining to Amazon for a solid 10 minutes and they eventually agreed to pay for pick up of the item then refund when it was picked up.

    Replaced it with a more expensive Dramm lance that every part is user replaceable with available spare parts, and much less plastic components.



  • So I was talking about hydro generators that go in the water rather than a wind turbine that rely on direct wind. I prefer the former as it doesn’t muck up the aero on the boat (sails can rob it of power with their dirty air) nor does it get in the way of the deck space that is often limited on a smaller boat. You could use both but I am not fan of wind turbines except at anchor.

    With a normal sail boat its common to have more wind that you can safely handle with the boat, you can use the drag of a hydro generator, which goes in the water only when you need it, to help slow the boat down rather than reefing or reefing as much (intentionally making the sails smaller). As wind is the only thing generating motion for the sail boat, its free energy that you otherwise would not be using.

    Motor boats rely on the motor to move them, so any drag means the motor has to work harder, imagine dragging a drogue (water parachute used as an anchor), its the same thing, its no longer free energy and you are actually spending more energy moving the same distance as the hydro generator doesn’t generate as much energy as it costs to use. Its the same problem for a wind turbine, as that increases aero rather than water drag for the motor boat, requiring more effort from the motor for the same speed & distance.

    Motor yachts would be better switching their engine over energy generation as a generator for recharging the EV batteries. Indeed there are some bigger motor yachts that do exactly this as a backup to their solar and dock derived power.