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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 28th, 2023

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  • Podcasts are my primary use case (my partner uses audiobooks exclusively), and while it works rather well, I want to put in the caveat that there’s no working playlist functionality in the app, and IME headset controls don’t work from FF for Android.

    That’s not a deal breaker for me, but it was a massive disappointment when I switched over. But the lack of playlist functionality in the app only annoys me when I want to follow one of the shorter news feeds, since I have to stop and select the next track every 5 min as the episode ends. No issue with that feed from the browser, so meh.

    Works great through my reverse proxy/cloudflare tunnel setup, so not too many actual complaints.





  • Tools like restic and Borg and so critical that you will regret not having had them sooner.

    100000%

    I just experienced this when a little mini PC I bought <2y ago cooked its nvme and died this month. Guess who has been meaning to set up backups on that guy for months?

    Unfortunately, that nvme is D. E. D. And even more unfortunately, that had a few critical systems for the local network (like my network controller/DHCP). Thankfully it was mostly docker containers so the services came up pretty easy, but I lost my DBs so configs and data need to be replicated :(

    The first task on the new box was figuring out and automating borg so this doesn’t happen again. I also set up backups via my new proxmox server, so my VMs won’t have that problem too.

    Now to do the whole ‘actually testing the backups’ thing.



  • If there was a way I could leverage the unlimited bandwidth/storage as an offsite backup, that would be amazing, but I’m not sure it would be a great idea backing up stuff to a webserver where there best security I can add it via an .htaccess file.

    Your off-site backup solution shouldn’t have to care about that level of security because you should be encrypting your backups before they leave your network. Even if you have a solid backup host in the cloud, you still want to encrypt your backup data before you send it to their hosted repo.

    Unless your vendor has a reason to read your backups, they shouldn’t be able to.










  • The fact that the launcher isn’t as good isn’t the point.

    It absolutely is the point, because the store and launcher being shit is why they have no market share. You’re basically saying that it’s not their fault that customers don’t want to use their product.

    The whole rest of your argument about physical distribution is a non-sequitor which doesn’t map to digital distribution. And again, you keep alleging monopolistic tactics that don’t exist in the real world. Epic being shit and not even remotely close to the same usable product does not make steam a monopoly.

    Let’s be clear here, no matter how good EGS gets or no matter how good a new alternative made their launcher, the vast majority of people won’t do the switch for the simple reason that their library is centralized in a single place and that place is Steam.

    You have no evidence of this, because no one has tried to offer a competitive service. And in fact, there is evidence against you with people choosing other stores like GoG and itch.io for games they want from those platforms even with the lower feature set. I use both platforms frequently for indie games or stuff I want DRM free, even though my main library is steam.

    But again, those platforms aren’t nearly as popular because they don’t offer the same feature set. It’s not steam forcing out competition, it’s no one being willing to make a product to actually compete. Again, this is a service issue, not a tactics issue.

    Also, L.O.L. at comparing a free service chasing cash to something you have to pay for.

    But I’m done with this argument, have a good day.


  • Lol, your two examples are from companies that have their own shitty launchers that customers hated using because they aren’t very good. That’s a service issue entirely on them, steams MoNoPoLy is a lazy excuse to paper over that glaring fact.

    Again, store do good isn’t a monopoly. Steam isn’t a monopoly just because every other competitor doesn’t know what customers want or don’t care because it’s expensive. And you’re kinda proving my point. There are tons of competing stores out there to use, but people don’t use them nearly as much because they suck or they’re not feature complete. Both Blizzard and Ubisoft have their own competing stores, but neither can get market share because they refuse to offer features that customers want. Epic has the same problem.

    Steam’s MoNoPolY is 100% a lack of services and features from the competition, and that’s what keeps people coming back to the environment. This isn’t Walmart undercutting sales to drive competitors out of the market, this is smaller hobby stores mad they can’t slap their customers and be entitled to the business the big player has.