Modder, programmer, and all around tinkerer. Yes, I’m that New Vegas and Deus Ex guy.

You can also find me over at kbin.social under the same username.

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • I like to watch TV shows in the background where I’m not going to be watching the screen obsessively, so I have several shows in 480P or sub-480P. There are also some shows where the “official” HD versions are just awful (most 90s sitcoms) or the show was made for 4:3 and has a different feel converted to 16:9 (MASH, The Wire).

    Going beyond that though, I spent years on a really limited connection (2.6m down/400k up) and my instinct for saving bandwidth and storage space is still there, along with my need to pay it forward since I ain’t no leech. I’ve become fond of making what I call “Bonsai Encodes”, where the files are small enough to be sent over damn near anything. With mono Opus and VP9 video you can cram 45 minutes of perfectly watchable content into a sub-25mb file that’ll play in Discord, with VTT subtitles even (though those won’t play in Discord itself). Looks a bit like watching it on an old tube TV, but it’s watchable.


  • Are your smoke detectors linked to each other? Could be faulty wiring in the circuit, or a completely different smoke detector failing and sending out an alarm that triggers the others. The latter happened in my home when I was growing up: the living room smoke detector kept going off a few seconds before the rest of them would chime in, but it turned out it was the one in the nearest hallway that was failing and sending out bad signals. The living room detector was just the next in the circuit.










  • OP’s home instance is the second-worst in terms of questionable defederations (the worst being beehaw). I used to have an account on lemmy.world but stopped using it once they blocked anything even remotely Piracy-related for that exact reasoning you’re talking about. Just switched to using this instance and Kbin and problem solved. Worst part was re-subbing to all the communities I’d been following. Pretty painless all things considered.

    Defederation has its place but some instances really overuse it.


  • Depends on what counts as “better”.

    Better quality? WAV, since it’s lossless.

    Better efficiency? OGG (well, Vorbis) since it compresses pretty well, but you’ll still get a (minor) loss in quality.

    That said, both of those formats are old news and should only be used if you have weird, specific compatibility needs. For lossy compression, OGG/Vorbis has been succeeded by Opus; it’s what YouTube uses, compresses fantastically, and is supported by damn near everything. For lossless, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is still the gold standard: you can reduce file sizes by as much as 60% with literally zero loss in quality. If you can, use one of those.