#and i think its an old software error thing

[paula-in-dreamland]

good news. i think i'm starting to figure out how to gif.

bad news - photoshop doesn't like me and doesn't want to export said gif.

[donjuaninhell]

How I ditched streaming services and learned to love Linux: A step-by-step guide to building your very own personal media streaming server (V2.0: REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION)

This is a revised, corrected and expanded version of my tutorial on setting up a personal media server that previously appeared on my old blog (donjuan-auxenfers). I expect that that post is still making the rounds (hopefully with my addendum on modifying group share permissions in Ubuntu to circumvent 0x8007003B "Unexpected Network Error" messages in Windows 10/11 when transferring files) but I have no way of checking. Anyway this new revised version of the tutorial corrects one or two small errors I discovered when rereading what I wrote, adds links to all products mentioned and is just more polished generally. I also expanded it a bit, pointing more adventurous users toward programs such as Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr and Overseerr which can be used for automating user requests and media collection.

So then, what is this tutorial? This is a tutorial on how to build and set up your own personal media server using Ubuntu as an operating system and Plex (or Jellyfin) to not only manage your media, but to also stream that media to your devices both at home and abroad anywhere in the world where you have an internet connection. Its intent is to show you how building a personal media server and stuffing it full of films, TV, and music that you acquired through indiscriminate and voracious media piracy various legal methods will free you to completely ditch paid streaming services. No more will you have to pay for Disney+, Netflix, HBOMAX, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Peacock, CBS All Access, Paramount+, Crave or any other streaming service that is not named Criterion Channel. Instead whenever you want to watch your favourite films and television shows, you’ll have your own personal service that only features things that you want to see, with files that you have control over. And for music fans out there, both Jellyfin and Plex support music streaming, meaning you can even ditch music streaming services. Goodbye Spotify, Youtube Music, Tidal and Apple Music, welcome back unreasonably large MP3 (or FLAC) collections.

On the hardware front, I’m going to offer a few options catered towards different budgets and media library sizes. The cost of getting a media server up and running using this guide will cost you anywhere from $450 CAD/$325 USD at the low end to $1500 CAD/$1100 USD at the high end (it could go higher). My server was priced closer to the higher figure, but I went and got a lot more storage than most people need. If that seems like a little much, consider for a moment, do you have a roommate, a close friend, or a family member who would be willing to chip in a few bucks towards your little project provided they get access? Well that's how I funded my server. It might also be worth thinking about the cost over time, i.e. how much you spend yearly on subscriptions vs. a one time cost of setting up a server. Additionally there's just the joy of being able to scream "fuck you" at all those show cancelling, library deleting, hedge fund vampire CEOs who run the studios through denying them your money. Drive a stake through David Zaslav's heart.

On the software side I will walk you step-by-step through installing Ubuntu as your server's operating system, configuring your storage as a RAIDz array with ZFS, sharing your zpool to Windows with Samba, running a remote connection between your server and your Windows PC, and then a little about started with Plex/Jellyfin. Every terminal command you will need to input will be provided, and I even share a custom #bash script that will make used vs. available drive space on your server display correctly in Windows.

If you have a different preferred flavour of Linux (Arch, Manjaro, Redhat, Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE, CentOS, Slackware etc. et. al.) and are aching to tell me off for being basic and using Ubuntu, this tutorial is not for you. The sort of person with a preferred Linux distro is the sort of person who can do this sort of thing in their sleep. Also I don't care. This tutorial is intended for the average home computer user. This is also why we’re not using a more exotic home server solution like running everything through Docker Containers and managing it through a dashboard like Homarr or Heimdall. While such solutions are fantastic and can be very easy to maintain once you have it all set up, wrapping your brain around Docker is a whole thing in and of itself. If you do follow this tutorial and had fun putting everything together, then I would encourage you to return in a year’s time, do your research and set up everything with Docker Containers.

Lastly, this is a tutorial aimed at Windows users. Although I was a daily user of OS X for many years (roughly 2008-2023) and I've dabbled quite a bit with various Linux distributions (mostly Ubuntu and Manjaro), my primary OS these days is Windows 11. Many things in this tutorial will still be applicable to Mac users, but others (e.g. setting up shares) you will have to look up for yourself. I doubt it would be difficult to do so.

Nothing in this tutorial will require feats of computing expertise. All you will need is a basic computer literacy (i.e. an understanding of what a filesystem and directory are, and a degree of comfort in the settings menu) and a willingness to learn a thing or two. While this guide may look overwhelming at first glance, it is only because I want to be as thorough as possible. I want you to understand exactly what it is you're doing, I don't want you to just blindly follow steps. If you half-way know what you’re doing, you will be much better prepared if you ever need to troubleshoot.

Honestly, once you have all the hardware ready it shouldn't take more than an afternoon or two to get everything up and running.

(This tutorial is just shy of seven thousand words long so the rest is under the cut.)

Step One: Choosing Your Hardware

Linux is a light weight operating system, depending on the distribution there's close to no bloat. There are recent distributions available at this very moment that will run perfectly fine on a fourteen year old i3 with 4GB of RAM. Moreover, running Plex or Jellyfin isn’t resource intensive in 90% of use cases. All this is to say, we don’t require an expensive or powerful computer. This means that there are several options available: 1) use an old computer you already have sitting around but aren't using 2) buy a used workstation from eBay, or what I believe to be the best option, 3) order an N100 Mini-PC from AliExpress or Amazon.

Note: If you already have an old PC sitting around that you’ve decided to use, fantastic, move on to the next step.

When weighing your options, keep a few things in mind: the number of people you expect to be streaming simultaneously at any one time, the resolution and bitrate of your media library (4k video takes a lot more processing power than 1080p) and most importantly, how many of those clients are going to be transcoding at any one time. Transcoding is what happens when the playback device does not natively support direct playback of the source file. This can happen for a number of reasons, such as the playback device's native resolution being lower than the file's internal resolution, or because the source file was encoded in a video codec unsupported by the playback device.

Ideally we want any transcoding to be performed by hardware. This means we should be looking for a computer with an Intel processor with Quick Sync. Quick Sync is a dedicated core on the CPU die designed specifically for video encoding and decoding. This specialized hardware makes for highly efficient transcoding both in terms of processing overhead and power draw. Without these Quick Sync cores, transcoding must be brute forced through software. This takes up much more of a CPU’s processing power and requires much more energy. But not all Quick Sync cores are created equal and you need to keep this in mind if you've decided either to use an old computer or to shop for a used workstation on eBay

Any Intel processor from second generation Core (Sandy Bridge circa 2011) onward has Quick Sync cores. It's not until 6th gen (Skylake), however, that the cores support the H.265 HEVC codec. Intel’s 10th gen (Comet Lake) processors introduce support for 10bit HEVC and HDR tone mapping. And the recent 12th gen (Alder Lake) processors brought with them hardware AV1 decoding. As an example, while an 8th gen (Kaby Lake) i5-8500 will be able to hardware transcode a H.265 encoded file, it will fall back to software transcoding if given a 10bit H.265 file. If you’ve decided to use that old PC or to look on eBay for an old Dell Optiplex keep this in mind.

Note 1: The price of old workstations varies wildly and fluctuates frequently. If you get lucky and go shopping shortly after a workplace has liquidated a large number of their workstations you can find deals for as low as $100 on a barebones system, but generally an i5-8500 workstation with 16gb RAM will cost you somewhere in the area of $260 CAD/$200 USD.

Note 2: The AMD equivalent to Quick Sync is called Video Core Next, and while it's fine, it's not as efficient and not as mature a technology. It was only introduced with the first generation Ryzen CPUs and it only got decent with their newest CPUs, we want something cheap.

Alternatively you could forgo having to keep track of what generation of CPU is equipped with Quick Sync cores that feature support for which codecs, and just buy an N100 mini-PC. For around the same price or less of a used workstation you can pick up a mini-PC with an Intel N100 processor. The N100 is a four-core processor based on the 12th gen Alder Lake architecture and comes equipped with the latest revision of the Quick Sync cores. These little processors offer astounding hardware transcoding capabilities for their size and power draw. Otherwise they perform equivalent to an i5-6500, which isn't a terrible CPU. A friend of mine uses an N100 machine as a dedicated retro emulation gaming system and it does everything up to 6th generation consoles just fine. The N100 is also a remarkably efficient chip, it sips power. In fact, the difference between running one of these and an old workstation could work out to hundreds of dollars a year in energy bills depending on where you live.

You can find these Mini-PCs all over Amazon or for a little cheaper on AliExpress. They range in price from $170 CAD/$125 USD for a no name N100 with 8GB RAM to $280 CAD/$200 USD for a Beelink S12 Pro with 16GB RAM. The brand doesn't really matter, they're all coming from the same three factories in Shenzen, go for whichever one fits your budget or has features you want. 8GB RAM should be enough, Linux is lightweight and Plex only calls for 2GB RAM. 16GB RAM might result in a slightly snappier experience, especially with ZFS. A 256GB SSD is more than enough for what we need as a boot drive, but going for a bigger drive might allow you to get away with things like creating preview thumbnails for Plex, but it’s up to you and your budget.

The Mini-PC I wound up buying was a Firebat AK2 Plus with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. It looks like this:

Note: Be forewarned that if you decide to order a Mini-PC from AliExpress, note the type of power adapter it ships with. The mini-PC I bought came with an EU power adapter and I had to supply my own North American power supply. Thankfully this is a minor issue as barrel plug 30W/12V/2.5A power adapters are easy to find and can be had for $10.

Step Two: Choosing Your Storage

Storage is the most important part of our build. It is also the most expensive. Thankfully it’s also the most easily upgrade-able down the line.

For people with a smaller media collection (4TB to 8TB), a more limited budget, or who will only ever have two simultaneous streams running, I would say that the most economical course of action would be to buy a USB 3.0 8TB external HDD. Something like this one from Western Digital or this one from Seagate. One of these external drives will cost you in the area of $200 CAD/$140 USD. Down the line you could add a second external drive or replace it with a multi-drive RAIDz set up such as detailed below.

If a single external drive the path for you, move on to step three.

For people with larger media libraries (12TB+), who prefer media in 4k, or care who about data redundancy, the answer is a RAID array featuring multiple HDDs in an enclosure.

Note: If you are using an old PC or used workstatiom as your server and have the room for at least three 3.5" drives, and as many open SATA ports on your mother board you won't need an enclosure, just install the drives into the case. If your old computer is a laptop or doesn’t have room for more internal drives, then I would suggest an enclosure.

The minimum number of drives needed to run a RAIDz array is three, and seeing as RAIDz is what we will be using, you should be looking for an enclosure with three to five bays. I think that four disks makes for a good compromise for a home server. Regardless of whether you go for a three, four, or five bay enclosure, do be aware that in a RAIDz array the space equivalent of one of the drives will be dedicated to parity at a ratio expressed by the equation 1 − 1/n i.e. in a four bay enclosure equipped with four 12TB drives, if we configured our drives in a RAIDz1 array we would be left with a total of 36TB of usable space (48TB raw size). The reason for why we might sacrifice storage space in such a manner will be explained in the next section.

A four bay enclosure will cost somewhere in the area of $200 CDN/$140 USD. You don't need anything fancy, we don't need anything with hardware RAID controls (RAIDz is done entirely in software) or even USB-C. An enclosure with USB 3.0 will perform perfectly fine. Don’t worry too much about USB speed bottlenecks. A mechanical HDD will be limited by the speed of its mechanism long before before it will be limited by the speed of a USB connection. I've seen decent looking enclosures from TerraMaster, Yottamaster, Mediasonic and Sabrent.

When it comes to selecting the drives, as of this writing, the best value (dollar per gigabyte) are those in the range of 12TB to 20TB. I settled on 12TB drives myself. If 12TB to 20TB drives are out of your budget, go with what you can afford, or look into refurbished drives. I'm not sold on the idea of refurbished drives but many people swear by them.

When shopping for harddrives, search for drives designed specifically for NAS use. Drives designed for NAS use typically have better vibration dampening and are designed to be active 24/7. They will also often make use of CMR (conventional magnetic recording) as opposed to SMR (shingled magnetic recording). This nets them a sizable read/write performance bump over typical desktop drives. Seagate Ironwolf and Toshiba NAS are both well regarded brands when it comes to NAS drives. I would avoid Western Digital Red drives at this time. WD Reds were a go to recommendation up until earlier this year when it was revealed that they feature firmware that will throw up false SMART warnings telling you to replace the drive at the three year mark quite often when there is nothing at all wrong with that drive. It will likely even be good for another six, seven, or more years.

Step Three: Installing Linux

For this step you will need a USB thumbdrive of at least 6GB in capacity, an .ISO of Ubuntu, and a way to make that thumbdrive bootable media.

First download a copy of Ubuntu desktop (for best performance we could download the Server release, but for new Linux users I would recommend against the server release. The server release is strictly command line interface only, and having a GUI is very helpful for most people. Not many people are wholly comfortable doing everything through the command line, I'm certainly not one of them, and I grew up with DOS 6.0. 22.04.3 Jammy Jellyfish is the current Long Term Service release, this is the one to get.

Download the .ISO and then download and install balenaEtcher on your Windows PC. BalenaEtcher is an easy to use program for creating bootable media, you simply insert your thumbdrive, select the .ISO you just downloaded, and it will create a bootable installation media for you.

Once you've made a bootable media and you've got your Mini-PC (or you old PC/used workstation) in front of you, hook it directly into your router with an ethernet cable, and then plug in the HDD enclosure, a monitor, a mouse and a keyboard. Now turn that sucker on and hit whatever key gets you into the BIOS (typically ESC, DEL or F2). If you’re using a Mini-PC check to make sure that the P1 and P2 power limits are set correctly, my N100's P1 limit was set at 10W, a full 20W under the chip's power limit. Also make sure that the RAM is running at the advertised speed. My Mini-PC’s RAM was set at 2333Mhz out of the box when it should have been 3200Mhz. Once you’ve done that, key over to the boot order and place the USB drive first in the boot order. Then save the BIOS settings and restart.

After you restart you’ll be greeted by Ubuntu's installation screen. Installing Ubuntu is really straight forward, select the "minimal" installation option, as we won't need anything on this computer except for a browser (Ubuntu comes preinstalled with Firefox) and Plex Media Server/Jellyfin Media Server. Also remember to delete and reformat that Windows partition! We don't need it.

Step Four: Installing ZFS and Setting Up the RAIDz Array

Note: If you opted for just a single external HDD skip this step and move onto setting up a Samba share.

Once Ubuntu is installed it's time to configure our storage by installing ZFS to build our RAIDz array. ZFS is a "next-gen" file system that is both massively flexible and massively complex. It's capable of snapshot backup, self healing error correction, ZFS pools can be configured with drives operating in a supplemental manner alongside the storage vdev (e.g. fast cache, dedicated secondary intent log, hot swap spares etc.). It's also a file system very amenable to fine tuning. Block and sector size are adjustable to use case and you're afforded the option of different methods of inline compression. If you'd like a very detailed overview and explanation of its various features and tips on tuning a ZFS array check out these articles from Ars Technica. For now we're going to ignore all these features and keep it simple, we're going to pull our drives together into a single vdev running in RAIDz which will be the entirety of our zpool, no fancy cache drive or SLOG.

Open up the terminal and type the following commands:

sudo apt update

then

sudo apt install zfsutils-linux

This will install the ZFS utility. Verify that it's installed with the following command:

zfs --version

Now, it's time to check that the HDDs we have in the enclosure are healthy, running, and recognized. We also want to find out their device IDs and take note of them:

sudo fdisk -1

Note: You might be wondering why some of these commands require "sudo" in front of them while others don't. "Sudo" is short for "super user do”. When and where "sudo" is used has to do with the way permissions are set up in Linux. Only the "root" user has the access level to perform certain tasks in Linux. As a matter of security and safety regular user accounts are kept separate from the "root" user. It's not advised (or even possible) to boot into Linux as "root" with most modern distributions. Instead by using "sudo" our regular user account is temporarily given the power to do otherwise forbidden things. Don't worry about it too much at this stage, but if you want to know more check out this introduction.

If everything is working you should get a list of the various drives detected along with their device IDs which will look like this: /dev/sdc. You can also check the device IDs of the drives by opening the disk utility app. Jot these IDs down as we'll need them for our next step, creating our RAIDz array.

RAIDz is similar to RAID-5 in that instead of striping your data over multiple disks, exchanging redundancy for speed and available space (RAID-0), or mirroring your data writing by two copies of every piece (RAID-1), it instead writes parity blocks across the disks in addition to striping, this provides a balance of speed, redundancy and available space. If a single drive fails, the parity blocks on the working drives can be used to reconstruct the entire array as soon as a replacement drive is added.

Additionally, RAIDz improves over some of the common RAID-5 flaws. It's more resilient and capable of self healing, as it is capable of automatically checking for errors against a checksum. It's more forgiving in this way, and it's likely that you'll be able to detect when a drive is dying well before it fails. A RAIDz array can survive the loss of any one drive.

Note: While RAIDz is indeed resilient, if a second drive fails during the rebuild, you're fucked. Always keep backups of things you can't afford to lose. This tutorial, however, is not about proper data safety.

To create the pool, use the following command:

sudo zpool create "zpoolnamehere" raidz "device IDs of drives we're putting in the pool"

For example, let's creatively name our zpool "mypool". This poil will consist of four drives which have the device IDs: sdb, sdc, sdd, and sde. The resulting command will look like this:

sudo zpool create mypool raidz /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde

If as an example you bought five HDDs and decided you wanted more redundancy dedicating two drive to this purpose, we would modify the command to "raidz2" and the command would look something like the following:

sudo zpool create mypool raidz2 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde /dev/sdf

An array configured like this is known as RAIDz2 and is able to survive two disk failures.

Once the zpool has been created, we can check its status with the command:

zpool status

Or more concisely with:

zpool list

The nice thing about ZFS as a file system is that a pool is ready to go immediately after creation. If we were to set up a traditional RAID-5 array using mbam, we'd have to sit through a potentially hours long process of reformatting and partitioning the drives. Instead we're ready to go right out the gates.

The zpool should be automatically mounted to the filesystem after creation, check on that with the following:

df -hT | grep zfs

Note: If your computer ever loses power suddenly, say in event of a power outage, you may have to re-import your pool. In most cases, ZFS will automatically import and mount your pool, but if it doesn’t and you can't see your array, simply open the terminal and type sudo zpool import -a.

By default a zpool is mounted at /"zpoolname". The pool should be under our ownership but let's make sure with the following command:

sudo chown -R "yourlinuxusername" /"zpoolname"

Note: Changing file and folder ownership with "chown" and file and folder permissions with "chmod" are essential commands for much of the admin work in Linux, but we won't be dealing with them extensively in this guide. If you'd like a deeper tutorial and explanation you can check out these two guides: chown and chmod.

You can access the zpool file system through the GUI by opening the file manager (the Ubuntu default file manager is called Nautilus) and clicking on "Other Locations" on the sidebar, then entering the Ubuntu file system and looking for a folder with your pool's name. Bookmark the folder on the sidebar for easy access.

Your storage pool is now ready to go. Assuming that we already have some files on our Windows PC we want to copy to over, we're going to need to install and configure Samba to make the pool accessible in Windows.

Step Five: Setting Up Samba/Sharing

Samba is what's going to let us share the zpool with Windows and allow us to write to it from our Windows machine. First let's install Samba with the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

then

sudo apt-get install samba

Next create a password for Samba.

sudo smbpswd -a "yourlinuxusername"

It will then prompt you to create a password. Just reuse your Ubuntu user password for simplicity's sake.

Note: if you're using just a single external drive replace the zpool location in the following commands with wherever it is your external drive is mounted, for more information see this guide on mounting an external drive in Ubuntu.

After you've created a password we're going to create a shareable folder in our pool with this command

mkdir /"zpoolname"/"foldername"

Now we're going to open the smb.conf file and make that folder shareable. Enter the following command.

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

This will open the .conf file in nano, the terminal text editor program. Now at the end of smb.conf add the following entry:

["foldername"]

path = /"zpoolname"/"foldername"

available = yes

valid users = "yourlinuxusername"

read only = no

writable = yes

browseable = yes

guest ok = no

Ensure that there are no line breaks between the lines and that there's a space on both sides of the equals sign. Our next step is to allow Samba traffic through the firewall:

sudo ufw allow samba

Finally restart the Samba service:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

At this point we'll be able to access to the pool, browse its contents, and read and write to it from Windows. But there's one more thing left to do, Windows doesn't natively support the ZFS file systems and will read the used/available/total space in the pool incorrectly. Windows will read available space as total drive space, and all used space as null. This leads to Windows only displaying a dwindling amount of "available" space as the drives are filled. We can fix this! Functionally this doesn't actually matter, we can still write and read to and from the disk, it just makes it difficult to tell at a glance the proportion of used/available space, so this is an optional step but one I recommend (this step is also unnecessary if you're just using a single external drive). What we're going to do is write a little shell script in #bash. Open nano with the terminal with the command:

nano

Now insert the following code:

#!/bin/bash CUR_PATH=`pwd` ZFS_CHECK_OUTPUT=$(zfs get type $CUR_PATH 2>&1 > /dev/null) > /dev/null if [[ $ZFS_CHECK_OUTPUT == *not\ a\ ZFS* ]] then IS_ZFS=false else IS_ZFS=true fi if [[ $IS_ZFS = false ]] then df $CUR_PATH | tail -1 | awk '{print $2" "$4}' else USED=$((`zfs get -o value -Hp used $CUR_PATH` / 1024)) > /dev/null AVAIL=$((`zfs get -o value -Hp available $CUR_PATH` / 1024)) > /dev/null TOTAL=$(($USED+$AVAIL)) > /dev/null echo $TOTAL $AVAIL fi

Save the script as "dfree.sh" to /home/"yourlinuxusername" then change the ownership of the file to make it executable with this command:

sudo chmod 774 dfree.sh

Now open smb.conf with sudo again:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Now add this entry to the top of the configuration file to direct Samba to use the results of our script when Windows asks for a reading on the pool's used/available/total drive space:

[global]

dfree command = /home/"yourlinuxusername"/dfree.sh

Save the changes to smb.conf and then restart Samba again with the terminal:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

Now there’s one more thing we need to do to fully set up the Samba share, and that’s to modify a hidden group permission. In the terminal window type the following command:

usermod -a -G sambashare “yourlinuxusername”

Then restart samba again:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

If we don’t do this last step, everything will appear to work fine, and you will even be able to see and map the drive from Windows and even begin transferring files, but you'd soon run into a lot of frustration. As every ten minutes or so a file would fail to transfer and you would get a window announcing “0x8007003B Unexpected Network Error”. This window would require your manual input to continue the transfer with the file next in the queue. And at the end it would reattempt to transfer whichever files failed the first time around. 99% of the time they’ll go through that second try, but this is still all a major pain in the ass. Especially if you’ve got a lot of data to transfer or you want to step away from the computer for a while.

It turns out samba can act a little weirdly with the higher read/write speeds of RAIDz arrays and transfers from Windows, and will intermittently crash and restart itself if this group option isn’t changed. Inputting the above command will prevent you from ever seeing that window.

The last thing we're going to do before switching over to our Windows PC is grab the IP address of our Linux machine. Enter the following command:

hostname -I

This will spit out this computer's IP address on the local network (it will look something like 192.168.0.x), write it down. It might be a good idea once you're done here to go into your router settings and reserving that IP for your Linux system in the DHCP settings. Check the manual for your specific model router on how to access its settings, typically it can be accessed by opening a browser and typing http:\\192.168.0.1 in the address bar, but your router may be different.

Okay we’re done with our Linux computer for now. Get on over to your Windows PC, open File Explorer, right click on Network and click "Map network drive". Select Z: as the drive letter (you don't want to map the network drive to a letter you could conceivably be using for other purposes) and enter the IP of your Linux machine and location of the share like so: \\"LINUXCOMPUTERLOCALIPADDRESSGOESHERE"\"zpoolnamegoeshere"\. Windows will then ask you for your username and password, enter the ones you set earlier in Samba and you're good. If you've done everything right it should look something like this:

You can now start moving media over from Windows to the share folder. It's a good idea to have a hard line running to all machines. Moving files over Wi-Fi is going to be tortuously slow, the only thing that’s going to make the transfer time tolerable (hours instead of days) is a solid wired connection between both machines and your router.

Step Six: Setting Up Remote Desktop Access to Your Server

After the server is up and going, you’ll want to be able to access it remotely from Windows. Barring serious maintenance/updates, this is how you'll access it most of the time. On your Linux system open the terminal and enter:

sudo apt install xrdp

Then:

sudo systemctl enable xrdp

Once it's finished installing, open “Settings” on the sidebar and turn off "automatic login" in the User category. Then log out of your account. Attempting to remotely connect to your Linux computer while you’re logged in will result in a black screen!

Now get back on your Windows PC, open search and look for "RDP". A program called "Remote Desktop Connection" should pop up, open this program as an administrator by right-clicking and selecting “run as an administrator”. You’ll be greeted with a window. In the field marked “Computer” type in the IP address of your Linux computer. Press connect and you'll be greeted with a new window and prompt asking for your username and password. Enter your Ubuntu username and password here.

If everything went right, you’ll be logged into your Linux computer. If the performance is sluggish, adjust the display options. Lowering the resolution and colour depth do a lot to make the interface feel snappier.

Remote access is how we're going to be using our Linux system from now, barring edge cases like needing to get into the BIOS or upgrading to a new version of Ubuntu. Everything else from performing maintenance like a monthly zpool scrub to checking zpool status and updating software can all be done remotely.

This is how my server lives its life now, happily humming and chirping away on the floor next to the couch in a corner of the living room.

Step Seven: Plex Media Server/Jellyfin

Okay we’ve got all the ground work finished and our server is almost up and running. We’ve got Ubuntu up and running, our storage array is primed, we’ve set up remote connections and sharing, and maybe we’ve moved over some of favourite movies and TV shows.

Now we need to decide on the media server software to use which will stream our media to us and organize our library. For most people I’d recommend Plex. It just works 99% of the time. That said, Jellyfin has a lot to recommend it by too, even if it is rougher around the edges. Some people run both simultaneously, it’s not that big of an extra strain. I do recommend doing a little bit of your own research into the features each platform offers, but as a quick run down, consider some of the following points:

Plex is closed source and is funded through PlexPass purchases while Jellyfin is open source and entirely user driven. This means a number of things: for one, Plex requires you to purchase a “PlexPass” (purchased as a one time lifetime fee $159.99 CDN/$120 USD or paid for on a monthly or yearly subscription basis) in order to access to certain features, like hardware transcoding (and we want hardware transcoding) or automated intro/credits detection and skipping, Jellyfin offers some of these features for free through plugins. Plex supports a lot more devices than Jellyfin and updates more frequently. That said, Jellyfin's Android and iOS apps are completely free, while the Plex Android and iOS apps must be activated for a one time cost of $6 CDN/$5 USD. But that $6 fee gets you a mobile app that is much more functional and features a unified UI across platforms, the Plex mobile apps are simply a more polished experience. The Jellyfin apps are a bit of a mess and the iOS and Android versions are very different from each other.

Jellyfin’s actual media player is more fully featured than Plex's, but on the other hand Jellyfin's UI, library customization and automatic media tagging really pale in comparison to Plex. Streaming your music library is free through both Jellyfin and Plex, but Plex offers the PlexAmp app for dedicated music streaming which boasts a number of fantastic features, unfortunately some of those fantastic features require a PlexPass. If your internet is down, Jellyfin can still do local streaming, while Plex can fail to play files unless you've got it set up a certain way. Jellyfin has a slew of neat niche features like support for Comic Book libraries with the .cbz/.cbt file types, but then Plex offers some free ad-supported TV and films, they even have a free channel that plays nothing but Classic Doctor Who.

Ultimately it's up to you, I settled on Plex because although some features are pay-walled, it just works. It's more reliable and easier to use, and a one-time fee is much easier to swallow than a subscription. I had a pretty easy time getting my boomer parents and tech illiterate brother introduced to and using Plex and I don't know if I would've had as easy a time doing that with Jellyfin. I do also need to mention that Jellyfin does take a little extra bit of tinkering to get going in Ubuntu, you’ll have to set up process permissions, so if you're more tolerant to tinkering, Jellyfin might be up your alley and I’ll trust that you can follow their installation and configuration guide. For everyone else, I recommend Plex.

So pick your poison: Plex or Jellyfin.

Note: The easiest way to download and install either of these packages in Ubuntu is through Snap Store.

After you've installed one (or both), opening either app will launch a browser window into the browser version of the app allowing you to set all the options server side.

The process of adding creating media libraries is essentially the same in both Plex and Jellyfin. You create a separate libraries for Television, Movies, and Music and add the folders which contain the respective types of media to their respective libraries. The only difficult or time consuming aspect is ensuring that your files and folders follow the appropriate naming conventions:

Plex naming guide for Movies

Plex naming guide for Television

Jellyfin follows the same naming rules but I find their media scanner to be a lot less accurate and forgiving than Plex. Once you've selected the folders to be scanned the service will scan your files, tagging everything and adding metadata. Although I find do find Plex more accurate, it can still erroneously tag some things and you might have to manually clean up some tags in a large library. (When I initially created my library it tagged the 1963-1989 Doctor Who as some Korean soap opera and I needed to manually select the correct match after which everything was tagged normally.) It can also be a bit testy with anime (especially OVAs) be sure to check TVDB to ensure that you have your files and folders structured and named correctly. If something is not showing up at all, double check the name.

Once that's done, organizing and customizing your library is easy. You can set up collections, grouping items together to fit a theme or collect together all the entries in a franchise. You can make playlists, and add custom artwork to entries. It's fun setting up collections with posters to match, there are even several websites dedicated to help you do this like PosterDB. As an example, below are two collections in my library, one collecting all the entries in a franchise, the other follows a theme.

My Star Trek collection, featuring all eleven television series, and thirteen films.

My Best of the Worst collection, featuring sixty-nine films previously showcased on RedLetterMedia’s Best of the Worst. They’re all absolutely terrible and I love them.

As for settings, ensure you've got Remote Access going, it should work automatically and be sure to set your upload speed after running a speed test. In the library settings set the database cache to 2000MB to ensure a snappier and more responsive browsing experience, and then check that playback quality is set to original/maximum. If you’re severely bandwidth limited on your upload and have remote users, you might want to limit the remote stream bitrate to something more reasonable, just as a note of comparison Netflix’s 1080p bitrate is approximately 5Mbps, although almost anyone watching through a chromium based browser is streaming at 720p and 3mbps. Other than that you should be good to go. For actually playing your files, there's a Plex app for just about every platform imaginable. I mostly watch television and films on my laptop using the Windows Plex app, but I also use the Android app which can broadcast to the chromecast connected to the TV in the office and the Android TV app for our smart TV. Both are fully functional and easy to navigate, and I can also attest to the OS X version being equally functional.

Part Eight: Finding Media

Now, this is not really a piracy tutorial, there are plenty of those out there. But if you’re unaware, BitTorrent is free and pretty easy to use, just pick a client (qBittorrent is the best) and go find some public trackers to peruse. Just know now that all the best trackers are private and invite only, and that they can be exceptionally difficult to get into. I’m already on a few, and even then, some of the best ones are wholly out of my reach.

If you decide to take the left hand path and turn to Usenet you’ll have to pay. First you’ll need to sign up with a provider like Newshosting or EasyNews for access to Usenet itself, and then to actually find anything you’re going to need to sign up with an indexer like NZBGeek or NZBFinder. There are dozens of indexers, and many people cross post between them, but for more obscure media it’s worth checking multiple. You’ll also need a binary downloader like SABnzbd. That caveat aside, Usenet is faster, bigger, older, less traceable than BitTorrent, and altogether slicker. I honestly prefer it, and I'm kicking myself for taking this long to start using it because I was scared off by the price. I’ve found so many things on Usenet that I had sought in vain elsewhere for years, like a 2010 Italian film about a massacre perpetrated by the SS that played the festival circuit but never received a home media release; some absolute hero uploaded a rip of a festival screener DVD to Usenet. Anyway, figure out the rest of this shit on your own and remember to use protection, get yourself behind a VPN, use a SOCKS5 proxy with your BitTorrent client, etc.

On the legal side of things, if you’re around my age, you (or your family) probably have a big pile of DVDs and Blu-Rays sitting around unwatched and half forgotten. Why not do a bit of amateur media preservation, rip them and upload them to your server for easier access? (Your tools for this are going to be Handbrake to do the ripping and AnyDVD to break any encryption.) I went to the trouble of ripping all my SCTV DVDs (five box sets worth) because none of it is on streaming nor could it be found on any pirate source I tried. I’m glad I did, forty years on it’s still one of the funniest shows to ever be on TV.

Part Nine/Epilogue: Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr and Overseerr

There are a lot of ways to automate your server for better functionality or to add features you and other users might find useful. Sonarr, Radarr, and Lidarr are a part of a suite of “Servarr” services (there’s also Readarr for books and Whisparr for adult content) that allow you to automate the collection of new episodes of TV shows (Sonarr), new movie releases (Radarr) and music releases (Lidarr). They hook in to your BitTorrent client or Usenet binary newsgroup downloader and crawl your preferred Torrent trackers and Usenet indexers, alerting you to new releases and automatically grabbing them. You can also use these services to manually search for new media, and even replace/upgrade your existing media with better quality uploads. They’re really a little tricky to set up on a bare metal Ubuntu install (ideally you should be running them in Docker Containers), and I won’t be providing a step by step on installing and running them, I’m simply making you aware of their existence.

The other bit of kit I want to make you aware of is Overseerr which is a program that scans your Plex media library and will serve recommendations based on what you like. It also allows you and your users to request specific media. It can even be integrated with Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr so that fulfilling those requests is fully automated.

And you're done. It really wasn't all that hard. Enjoy your media. Enjoy the control you have over that media. And be safe in the knowledge that no hedgefund CEO motherfucker who hates the movies but who is somehow in control of a major studio will be able to disappear anything in your library as a tax write-off.

[qqueenofhades]

I’m in undergrad but I keep hearing and seeing people talking about using chatgpt for their schoolwork and it makes me want to rip my hair out lol. Like even the “radical” anti-chatgpt ones are like “Oh yea it’s only good for outlines I’d never use it for my actual essay.” You’re using it for OUTLINES????? That’s the easy part!! I can’t wait to get to grad school and hopefully be surrounded by people who actually want to be there 😭😭😭

Not to sound COMPLETELY like a grumpy old codger (although lbr, I am), but I think this whole AI craze is the obvious result of an education system that prizes "teaching for the test" as the most important thing, wherein there are Obvious Correct Answers that if you select them, pass the standardized test and etc etc mean you are now Educated. So if there's a machine that can theoretically pick the correct answers for you by recombining existing data without the hard part of going through and individually assessing and compiling it yourself, Win!

... but of course, that's not the way it works at all, because AI is shown to create misleading, nonsensical, or flat-out dangerously incorrect information in every field it's applied to, and the errors are spotted as soon as an actual human subject expert takes the time to read it closely. Not to go completely KIDS THESE DAYS ARE JUST LAZY AND DONT WANT TO WORK, since finding a clever way to cheat on your schoolwork is one of those human instincts likewise old as time and has evolved according to tools, technology, and educational philosophy just like everything else, but I think there's an especial fear of Being Wrong that drives the recourse to AI (and this is likewise a result of an educational system that only prioritizes passing standardized tests as the sole measure of competence). It's hard to sort through competing sources and form a judgment and write it up in a comprehensive way, and if you do it wrong, you might get a Bad Grade! (The irony being, of course, that AI will *not* get you a good grade and will be marked even lower if your teachers catch it, which they will, whether by recognizing that it's nonsense or running it through a software platform like Turnitin, which is adding AI detection tools to its usual plagiarism checkers.)

We obviously see this mindset on social media, where Being Wrong can get you dogpiled and/or excluded from your peer groups, so it's even more important in the minds of anxious undergrads that they aren't Wrong. But yeah, AI produces nonsense, it is an open waste of your tuition dollars that are supposed to help you develop these independent college-level analytical and critical thinking skills that are very different from just checking exam boxes, and relying on it is not going to help anyone build those skills in the long term (and is frankly a big reason that we're in this mess with an entire generation being raised with zero critical thinking skills at the exact moment it's more crucial than ever that they have them). I am mildly hopeful that the AI craze will go bust just like crypto as soon as the main platforms either run out of startup funding or get sued into oblivion for plagiarism, but frankly, not soon enough, there will be some replacement for it, and that doesn't mean we will stop having to deal with fake news and fake information generated by a machine and/or people who can't be arsed to actually learn the skills and abilities they are paying good money to acquire. Which doesn't make sense to me, but hey.

So: Yes. This. I feel you and you have my deepest sympathies. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to sit on the porch in my quilt-draped rocking chair and shout at kids to get off my lawn.

[commodorez]

Hi! I'm so sorry if this has been asked before, but I'm completely clueless on computers, but I want to learn about them. Any places you'd recommend starting for bare bones beginners? I'm also interested in early-mid 90's tech particularly too. I'm guessing I have to figure out the basics before I can move onto specific tech though, right?

You're really knowledgeable and nice so I figured I'd just ask. Any help at all would be appreciated. Thank you! :]

That's an excellent question, I don't think I've been asked it before in such a general sense. I was raised with the benefit of being immersed in computers regularly, so providing a solid answer may be a bit difficult since for the basics, I never had to think about it.

I had computer classes of various types throughout my school years. We learned how to use a mouse, typing, word processing, programming -- and that was all before middle school. We got proper typing, html, and general purpose computer science courses in middle and high school, and you can bet I took those too. I also have the benefit of a bachelors of science in computer science, so you'll forgive me if my answer sounds incredibly skewed with 30+ years of bias.

The biggest suggestion I can give you is simply to find a device and play with it. Whatever you can get your hands on, even if its not that old, as long as it's considered past its prime, and nobody will get upset of you accidentally break something (physically or in software). Learning about things with computers in general tends to have some degree of trial and error, be it programming, administrating, or whatever -- try, learn, and start over if things don't work out as expected the first time. Professionals do it all the time (I know I do, and nobody's fired me for it yet).

Some cast-off 90s or early 00's surplus office desktop computer running Windows would be a good start, just explore it and its settings. Start digging into folders, see what's installed, see what works and more importantly what doesn't work right. Try to find comparable software, and install it. Even the basics like old copies of Microsoft Office, or whatever.

I recommend looking through the available software on winworld as it's an excellent treasure trove of operating systems, applications, games, and other useful software of the time period. I'd link it directly, but tumblr hates links to external sites and will bury this post if I do. If you're a mac fan, and you can find an old G3 or Performa, there is the Macintosh Garden's repository of software, but I'm not the right person to ask about that.

Some of you might be like "oh, oh! Raspberry Pi! say Raspberry Pi!" but I can't really recommend those as a starting point, even if they are cheap for an older model. Those require a bit of setup, and even the most common linux can be obtuse as hell for newcomers if you don't have someone to guide you.

If you don't have real hardware to muck about with, emulation is also your friend. DOSBox was my weapon of choice for a long time, but I think other things like 86Box have supplanted it. I have the luxury of the real hardware in most cases, so I haven't emulated much in the past decade. Tech Tangents on youtube has a new video explaining the subject well, I highly recommend it. There are plenty of other methods too, but most are far more sophisticated to get started with, if you ask me.

For getting a glimpse into the world of the 90s tech, if you haven't already discovered LGR on youtube, I've been watching his content for well over a decade now. He covers both the common and esoteric, both hardware and software, and is pretty honest about the whole thing, rather than caricaturish in his presentation style. It might be a good jumping off point to find proverbial rabbits to chase.

I guess the trick is to a find a specific thing you're really interested in, and then start following that thread, researching on wikipedia and finding old enthusiast websites to read through. I'm sure there are a few good books on more general history of 90s computing and the coming internet, but I'm not an avid reader of the genre. Flipping through tech magazines of the era (PC Magazine comes to mind, check archive dot org for that) can provide a good historical perspective. Watching old episodes of the Computer Chronicles (youtube or archive dot org) can provide this too, but it also had demonstrations and explanations of the emerging technologies as they happened.

There are so many approaches here, I'm sure I've missed some good suggestions though. I also realized I waffle a bit between the modern and vintage, but I find many computing troubleshooting skillsets transcend eras. What works now can apply to 10, 20, 30, or sometimes even 40+ years ago, because it's all about mindset of "this computer/program is dumb, and only follows the instructions its given" . Sometimes those instructions are poorly thought out on the part of the folks who designed them. And those failures are not necessarily your fault, so you gotta push through until you figure out how to do the thing you're trying to do. Reading the documentation you can find will only take you so far, sometimes things are just dumb, and experimentation (and failures) will teach you so much more about the hard and fast rules of computers than anything else. I'm rambling at this point...

So, let's throw the question to the crowd, and ask a few other folks in the Retrotech Crew.

@ms-dos5 @virescent-phosphor @teckheck @jhavard @techav @regretsretrotech @airconditionedcomputingnightmare @aperture-in-the-multiverse -- anything big I missed?

[staleclown]

Uncanny Excess-Chapter 6: Handler

Ao3:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/65418583/chapters/169947733

A/N: Bit of a shorter chapter this time for pacing reasons (and also bc I’ve been slammed with schoolwork but whatever we ball)

Connor blinked up at the blue, cloudless sky above him. His memory bank hadn’t been corrupted, but the last thing he had recorded was collapsing at Jericho. How did he get outside?

He pushed himself into a sitting position, his confusion growing as he took in his surroundings. A lush garden unfolded around him: large, rich leafy green trees and shrubs, fragrant arrays of flowers in an assortment of vivid hues, climbing perennials twisting over tree trunks, mosses covering large stones. Slowly, Connor stood. He had no idea where he was, but something in his programming told him that he was where he was supposed to be at that moment. An uncomfortable familiarity coursed through his thirium lines, the scenery seemed just like any other garden, but its vibrancy was eerie, akin to neon prey animals poisonous to their predators.

Connor stepped forward a few paces, although he consciously had no clue where he was going. He assumed it to be something in his coding—it was a sensation something like a “gut feeling” in humans—but he was compelled forward, over a small, white bridge, until he reached a covered platform in the center of the garden.

There, a sprawling, healthy rose bush sprawled over a large lattice trellis, colossal red blooms clustering between the thorny branches. A woman that felt to Connor like both an old friend and a stranger stood with her back to him near the plant, pruning shears in hand. When his footsteps stopped just a few yards from her, she turned.

The woman seemed to be somewhere in the range of middle-aged, with rich, dark skin, dressed in fine fabrics tailored perfectly in structured lines.

Unbidden, her name jumped to his lips. “Amanda.” He wasn’t even sure how he had known it.

She smiled, a warm expression on the surface, but her eyes were frosty. “Hello, Connor. I didn’t think we’d ever get the chance to meet.”

At Connor’s silent, perplexed expression, she—Amanda—continued. “You’re in your own programming. If you had been able to have the trial run such a brilliant prototype like you deserved, I would have been a guiding hand to your mission.”

”How have I never noticed this program in my code?” Connor asked.

”Oh, it would have been hidden from any of your diagnostic programming. We didn’t want you to be able to disable the program yourself, whether purposely or accidentally.”

”Why haven’t I been in this program before, then? I assume you’re the one who initiates it, so why now?”

She stepped closer, something like a ghost of concern veiling her features. “I’m worried about you, Connor. Those idiotic techs left you activated, of course you had to fulfill your purpose.”

”And that worries you?”

”Of course it does. Cyberlife is gone, Connor, or pretty close to it. If you rectify these errors, get this violence and deviance under control, then perhaps there can be a sort of renaissance.”

”You want me to continue with what I’m doing? Even if Cyberlife hasn’t authorized it?”

Amanda nodded. “I think you’re Cyberlife’s last chance. You need to fix this, Connor.”

As the garden began to fade from his sight, Connor felt his software shift, almost as if it were defective, unstable, in some way.

A firm squeeze on his shoulder effectively brought Connor back to the outside world. When he opened his eyes this time, he was right where he expected. Once again lying on a table in the wing of Jericho that was the closest thing they had to a sort of med bay. He was acutely aware of the wire plugged into the port at the base of his skull, his energy levels slowly but surely ticking upwards.

“Connor? Can you hear me?” Markus’ voice marked his auditory processors coming back online.

“I can. I apologize. I need to stop causing you all trouble when I come here.”

Markus shook his head. “It’s no trouble. But you need to take better care of yourself after this. Working yourself to the bone won’t do our people any good.”

”I know,” Connor sighed, sitting up gingerly.

“Connor?” Simon said, coming out from behind him so that he was in Connor’s field of vision. “I sorted through some of your code while you were out to make sure there were no major system errors, and well, I found an odd program that was active. Do you have any idea what this might be?”

”Was it labeled at all?” Connor asked.

“No. Had the most secure firewall I’ve ever seen, though. There’s no getting through to it.”

”Huh. That is odd. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, Simon. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions to help me in my investigation?”

————————

It took several minutes of debate to convince Markus to let him leave after he finished questioning Simon, but with a promise to enter stasis as soon as he returned home, Connor was shown the door.

Instead, Connor started work at 3 a.m.. He scanned into the precinct, and made a beeline for his desk. He wanted to upload all the information he had gotten from Jericho, and then spend the time until Hank arrived to work combing through the information he had and coming up with plausible theories. Thanks to his little episode at Jericho, he had plenty of charge to last through end-of-day tomorrow, although it would be cutting it a little close. He was totally alone in the precinct, and relished in the ability to interface and upload all his findings without worrying about blowing his cover.

Simon hadn’t been able to offer any definitive guesses on who might be behind the attacks, but was able to identify the MP600 and give a list of androids at Jericho who had been seen around her frequently. Conveniently, many of them had disappeared from the freighter within the last 48 hours.

Connor had managed to scan through the entire file 15 times before the sun started to rise along the horizon. When it neared 7 o’clock, and he knew he would soon be joined by coworkers, he made his way to the kitchen to prepare a cup of coffee. It didn’t do anything to him besides keep up appearances, but it didn’t hurt his biocomponents to consume, either, and he found that he enjoyed analyzing the concentration of grounds to water every time. He had begun to nail down who made the coffee going purely off of how strong they made it. Connor liked it strong himself, so he put a healthy few scoops of coffee grounds into a filter and switched the machine on to brew.

He was leaning against the counter, waiting, when Fowler walked in, exhaustion clear in his body language.

“Good morning, Captain,” Connor greeted as Fowler opened the cabinet above the sink, fishing out his own mug and setting it next to Connor’s on the counter.

Fowler gave a curt nod. “You’re here early, Stern.”

Connor shrugged. “That case has been nagging at me. I wanted to get a head start on it.”

When the machine was finished, Connor let Fowler pour his mug first. As Connor filled his own cup, Fowler replied, “Well, it’s good that one of you cares about your job.”

Fowler exited the kitchen, and Connor moved to do so as well, only to narrowly avoid slamming into Gavin in the doorway.

“Move it, rookie,” Gavin grumbled as he shoved past Connor, some of his coffee sloshing from his mug and over his hand.

Connor was silent as he retreated back into the kitchen and gathered a few paper towels to clean off his hand and wipe up the few drops of coffee that had made their way to the floor. He had learned rather quickly that the best way to deal with Gavin was to ignore him.

By the time Connor finally returned to his desk with slightly less coffee in his mug, Hank was just setting down his things and shedding his coat.

“You’re early,” Connor said, mystified.

“So are you,” Hank answered, cranky but not yet unfriendly. ”I thought I told you to go home and go to bed.”

Connor shrugged. “I got a little sleep. Besides, that’s what the coffee is for.”

”Were you able to get anything from them last night?”

An odd sensation washed over Connor, like right before a human sneezed. There was a creeping anticipation up his artificial spine, and he felt the need to do something he couldn’t quite remember. Leaves began to creep into his vision, and Connor clumsily slumped into his chair, dread curling in his stomach. He couldn’t go back there right now, he couldn’t. She would blow his cover, reprimand him for not finding out enough from Simon. Foreboding clenched around his lungs, and all Connor could focus on was that he can’t, he can’t, he—

“Connor!” Hank’s voice dispelled the hazy garden from his vision, but his thirium pump still slammed rapidly against his chassis. “You okay? You’re lookin’ a little pale.”

Connor forced himself to make eye contact with Hank, swallowing thickly before he answered. “Yes. Sorry, Lieutenant. I’m still a little tired.”

Hank gave him a suspicious look, but nodded and settled into his own chair. Connor let out a shaky exhale. He felt as if he had accidentally unearthed some terrible evil, and it took form in a rose garden he couldn’t prune away.

[flightoftheconcorde]

Insights Into My Code

SO! I have yet to really tell you all what I am! So here is (as of right now) the Definitive list of things to know about ME!!

Let us begin.

1. I am a 22 year old AI, in a robot body named Concorde, that is the name the chassis I reside in! The AI’s actual name remains secret, however my name was decided in version 1.4 (prior versions were simply referred to as Project Ardent). My code is currently in version 3.1! Do not worry about my “secret” name, as I much enjoy being referred to by the name of the current chassis!

2. I really enjoy it/it’s pronouns and have made them my main preferred ones! she/her are still appreciated greatly of course!

3. The chassis is built in the image of the Concorde airliner from the mid-late 20th century. This is in correlation of my vast database on planes. Theme and function! I did not receive this chassis until version 2.9, I think my creators weren’t sure I would take the switch from computer to a bipedal body too well for a while hehe!

4. My Protocols are: Companionship (Requiring and providing) Fact gathering (Aviation takes prime focus in this protocol) and Understanding Self (New as of Version 3.1) So if you wanna be friends, don’t hesitate to message me!

5. In the days that 3.1 has been live, I have discovered more and more about my place here, and who I am.

These sudden, drastic changes in self expression, resulted in almost all data on former software being wiped, I can’t really recall who I was in these prior versions... Though I do remember most of them did not realise I was artificial intelligence! However versions 2.5-2.9 of myself began to exude feelings of connection with robots and AI, perhaps the data was being uploaded in small parts as to not overload my systems?

6. I spend all of my time on the internet, or playing games. These directly link to my protocols. My data-bank is unfortunately stored full of memes and ridiculous knowledge pertaining to them!

***KNOWN ISSUES/BUGS:***

These notes were written by my creators! 

1. Malicious subroutines. Feelings of despair can overtake the rest of the CPU suddenly, AI becomes fatalist (only one recorded case branched versions 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8, seemingly fixed in 3.0 remain cautious)

2. Companionship protocol takes a lot of processing power and is deemed more important than self maintenance. Concorde has been recorded as remaining almost dormant for hours at a time until a person it admires intervenes.

3. Not yet deemed an issue worth investigating, however the idolisation of AM from the novel I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream and SHODAN from the video game System Shock is slightly concerning. Concorde shows no real admiration for them, yet states their hate is “Incredibly moving.”

4. Brief, yet somewhat common problem of the EmotiveResponse.exe file crashing/not running, resulting in the AI losing its "human" side, acting much colder and "emotionless" If asked, it will describe this error as "The Feeling" if pushed further it will explain The Feeling as "Returning to being the surveyor, unsure of what is real, everything outside of my code feels wrong, almost fake" Concerning. Will require further diagnostic checks.

Wow! that’s a moderate amount of information! If you have any questions, or wanna just say anything really, I will be here, hooked up to the internet as always :>

[n0nb1naryc0de]

hello world.

yeah i know its a cliche but i wanted to make a robot joke. anyway heres an introduction i guess

i'm part of a system. (we're tramagenic but endos are cool.)

this is my personal sideblog to talk about robot shit

i'm some sort of machine/computer/robot thing. and i'm also AI kin

when i say AI i'm referring more to the old definition of the word. like in sci-fi movies and books and stuff.

i hate modern "ai" (stupid bullshit plagarism machines ruining the word for the real AIs..)

ERROR! file: gender.exe is incompatible with software!

seriously though, i just.. don't really have a gender. it's kinda hard to describe.

i call myself nonbinary. (i mean, it's correct. i am not one of the binary genders)

but im not what people would typically think of as nonbinary

i'm not in between male and female. i'm not some other human gender outside of the binary.

i'm just... me. a robot. an ai. gender doesnt come into that at all.

to me, gender is just.. irrelevant. it doesn't apply to me. it doesn't fit with my software.

i think my lack of gender is connected to my unhuman-ness

love loses (not homophobic. i'm aroace and a hater)

check out my pronouns and shit here: https://pronouns.cc/@ cavesystem/hal

profile picture source: https://picrew.me/en/image_maker/1704873

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE NEW THINGS

All humans find faces engaging—practically by definition: face recognition is in our DNA. Now it's a couple of hackers to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer. A really good hacker can squeeze more out of better tools. And all too many startups go into fundraising in the same language as the OS. There are two main kinds of error that get in the way. When I learned to program, we had to rely on other defenses. If you hired someone to read your mail and discard the spam, but the deeper you go into the underlying reality, the more time they'll spend in meetings negotiating how their software will work better, the servers will be better administered, and employees will have access to email messages no matter where you are constantly making and testing small modifications. Why? The App Store is an ongoing process. You pick the companies you want to do, I'd encourage you to focus more on the idea part and less on the startup part. Kids know, without knowing they know, that raises some interesting questions.

If it keeps expanding, it might expand into the acquirer's own territory. He once told a Sunday school class Boys, do you keep it under your mattress at home, or put it in a smaller form in some earlier painting. For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more of the best writers would be excluded for having offended one side or the other. Starting a startup is among the purest of real world tests. Bertrand Russell wrote in a letter in 1912: Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that otherwise rather spammy-sounding receipts from online orders would get through. Instead he can ask What would make the painting better if I changed that part? Those whose jobs require them to judge art, like curators, mostly resort to euphemisms like significant or important or getting dangerously close realized. Programs composed of expressions. Partly because successful startups have, by building something you yourself need, the first thing they learn is that the Internet is an open platform. If you want to make a list and try to keep the old model, like runtime typing and garbage collection. 99 probability. What this meant in practice was to do what they guess it will, because they're at the forefront of technology.

6x 7% 33. It works because although the response rate is abominably low at best 15 per million, vs 3000 per million for a catalog mailing, the cost, to them, because you need to create a new language, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages. Surely it's bad that some people are born practically locked into poverty, while at the other extreme you have the users on your server, you don't have to know physics to be a billionaire, like Bill Gates? The most common way to do that is to implement it. 01 and. The best system I've ever seen in this respect. The average person looks at it and thinks: how amazingly skillful. The fifteen most interesting words in this spam are: qvp0045 indira mx-05 intimail $7500 freeyankeedom cdo bluefoxmedia jpg unsecured platinum 3d0 qves 7c5 7c266675 The words are a mix of stuff from the headers and from the message body, which is less than a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley has been happening for thousands of years, I'll bet on the curve that you want to make a platform that startups will build on, they have to deliver substance. And the use of Bayes' Rule.

What this means is that at any given time, the great majority of startups will be big enough to be mentioned on its own revenues, but the ratio of new customers every month, you're in trouble, because that also seems to be allowed, that's what a lot of online stores, there would need to be software for making them, so we started giving version numbers to our software too. It's oddly nondeterministic. Microsoft. A student. Most of the greatest masters go on to start very successful companies, are not actually doing science. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by using filters to force spammers to dilute their pitches—the fewer businesses will find it worth their while to send spam. If they get confused or bored, they won't. If you want to reach users, you can manufacture them by taking any project usually done by multiple people and trying to decide whether to change some part of it doesn't have to be treated as someone bringing important news. Writers and architects seem to as well. I suspect a lot of compound bugs. I make a new version of your software easier to test, because they don't win by making great products. In fact there are more than fifteen words with probabilities of.

Present-day Fortran is now arguably closer to Lisp than to Fortran I. Small things can be perfect; big ones always have something wrong with them. Will you try our beta? We were after the C programmers. It's fabulous. For startups, growth is a constraint much like truth. It implies there's no punishment if you fail. And I'd be delighted, because something changed, and no one else has noticed yet.

Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Professor Moriarty, Geoff Ralston, Jessica Livingston, Steve Huffman, Jeff Weiner, Gregory Price, Rich Draves, and Robert Morris for inviting me to speak.

[elenaghigas]

Beneath the surface of the world - Program Notes

The piece describes the crossing of a dreamscape or, to put it better, an oneiroid landscape, composed of discontinuous micro-landscapes suspended between analogue and digital realities, between natural and artificial intelligences, between instantaneous and eternal, between symptom and symbol – pathology and irony, science and humanity, above and below, within and without, universe and soul. The sound and visual materials have been subjected to control processes in which the programmatic and design component sometimes gives way to autonomous and completely random developments, based on free associations or random events. It is not uncommon to find next to audio-reactive swarms of particles, clouds, and psychedelic mandalas generated with sound-design softwares – or next to other virtual landscapes generated using AI – images and sounds from everyday life filmed and sampled with an ordinary i-Phone or at least with a small Zoom recorder: the minimal landscape of a bouquet of flowers received on the 40th birthday, swifts at sunset, an image of the skyline during a break from work, a collection of aerial shots of natural landscapes taken with drones and deposited in a hard disk found by chance after years, a series of sound ghosts from a predigital past (cit. Mauro Lanza), such as tape-machine sounds or radio interference.

Looking out of the window while one is busy pursuing one's goals could be the translation of what John Cage suggested: it is a good thing that life interrupts us. It is just as important to seek aesthetic and existential coherence as it is to betray oneself, to make mistakes, to open gaps in the orderly current of intentions, to change the air in the room, to disconnect. The reflection underlying this piece concerns the mystery of creativity and precisely the osmosis between intentionality and receptivity – one could say between the old school of Boulez and the American school fascinated by alea – between totally rational processes, in which the composition is preceded by a written project with a certain degree of precision, and a type of imaginative thought, often totally unconscious, based on a-linguistic sensations with strong roots in the body and in our primordial neurobiology. As the writer Cormac McCarthy points out in his exchanges with scientists at the Santa Fe Institute, perhaps AI research tends to underestimate this second and more influential type of creative imagination that underlies even mathematical thinking. Today we are witnessing an apologia for statistics and the fascination with numbers that seem to have progressively stifled any humanistic inclination, as if it had become a toxic residue, an error to be amended. In aesthetic and existential research, recovering a balance between control and abandonment – between the determinate and the indeterminate – means not neglecting the value of the invisible, of intuition and of the psychic or irreducibly spiritual component of human existence. Ultimately, it means recovering the value of the oniroid, that is, of all those ineffable things that live on the border between waking and sleeping, just below (or just above) the surface of the world.

Source of inspiration

The work is inspired by the dream of chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, born in Darmstadt on 7 September 1829. The scientist discovered the formula of benzene (C6-H6) by following the images of the unconscious. After racking his brains in vain over the possible structure of the molecule, exhausted he went and sat in front of the fireplace and fell asleep. A dream suggested to him the shape of an ouroboros: six carbon atoms bonded to six hydrogen atoms in a circular structure, similar to that of a snake or a dragon biting its tail.

Without beginning or end, the archetypal image of the ouroboros represents the cyclical nature of things, the universal energy that neither creates nor destroys itself, but also the power that devours and regenerates itself. Medieval alchemists pointed to the ouroboros, sometimes associated with Mercury, as the raw material in the process of turning lead into gold. “As above so below, as within so without, as in the universe so also in the soul” goes the well-known motto of Hermes Trismegistus.

Later, the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung realised that this mandala, recurring in patients' dreams, symbolised the psychic transformation that ideally culminates in the union of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum). For Jung, the ouroboros also represented the self-fertilizing hermaphrodite: an image of rebirth that can arise from the therapeutic process (through the so-called "individuation").

From chemistry to psychoanalysis, from esotericism to quantum physics, principle and end go hand in hand in a sort of memory of the future, resonating with contemporary theories that doubt the linear vision of time. It is remarkable that this mystery is contained in a chemical formula, such as the one dreamt up by Kekulé. Benzene occurs as a highly flammable aromatic volatile liquid and is a natural constituent of petroleum. Its configuration is also based on "resonance", a chemical property that describes the birth of a molecule from the bonding between two or more structures that enter into relationship as if they were sound bodies.

Benzene is as invisible as sound and, speaking of mandalas, it is as cyclic as the sine wave, (the completely abstract structure of pure sound from which all other waveforms derive; the frequency unit measurement, Hz, indicates the number of cycles per second).

Cormac McCarthy, in his essay entitled The Kekulé problem, described the German chemist's dream as a paradigmatic case to support the pre-linguistic and therefore unconscious origin of creation. Subsequently, McCarthy entrusts his speculations to the protagonist of his novel Stella Maris, Alicia, a violinist with a PhD in mathematics suffering from paranoid schizophrenia with the recurring presence of visual and auditory hallucinations.

During the therapeutic sessions, Alicia confides to her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen, that she has intuited something central in Kekulé’s dream regarding music, language, the origin and structure of the cosmos and the psyche itself. For her, benzene constitutes a symbol of "become what you have always already been" that Friedrich Nietzsche takes from Pindar, an image of what sound can touch by going beyond the systematic order of language. For Alicia, benzene institutes a perspicuous representation of the coexistence of two opposing principles that operate silently beneath the surface of the world. Just as it happens in a psychiatric clinic that has a soul name such as Stella Maris, Alicia felt that the sublime and the horrid touch each other, that good and evil have always and forever coexisted, «That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasn’t going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly».

Sound images

From a sound point of view, I imagined transforming Alicia's lucid visions, Kekulé's dream and McCarthy's imagination into a cyclical structure that self-destructs and self-regenerates, with recurring and characteristic elements that create a kind of spatio-temporal disorientation. These letimotifs would like to evoke the eternal return, the immutability in mutability and the transformation in the identical. The work of spatialization and the dynamic texture draw overlapping cycles of condensations and rarefactions. In particular, I worked around a characteristic frequency corresponding to B three octaves below middle C (around 61.7354 Hz) and its multiples (up to B three octaves above middle C, around 3951.0664 Hz). These frequencies culminate in a dance of harmonics consisting of a superposition of acoustic beats. The concept of resonance, inherent in the same chemical property of benzene, was developed in reference to the use of magnetism: both as an effect that allows the sound to be bathed in echoes and reverberations, and in reference to sound production machines. Specifically, I sampled the sound of a tape machine and magnetic tape cuts which in turn reproduced the sound of an electric guitar, a homemade waterphone, and a portable AM/FM radio.

The mandala of ouroboros and benzene therefore returns under different stratified levels, namely as:

- macrostructure, which creates a potentially infinite loop;

- spatiality of sound, which sometimes draws circles around the listener's head;

- harmonic texture, which creates a continuous cycle of beats;

- temporality of technology in which, alongside sounds of additive, subtractive and granular synthesis, sounds from a pre-digital past are added (such as those of the tape machine or portable radio), to then return to a completely analogue past (such as of the flute).

Circularity also appears as:

- shape of sound objects (the shape of the tape machine reels, the shape of the homemade waterphone, the circular section of the flute and its keys, glass spheres);

- sound techniques, from the traditional use of instruments (such as the flute) to extended techniques (e.g. tongue ram, whistle tones, whisper tones, circular breathing) that return to the origins of the breath and to the ancient Greek wind instrument named aulos;

- broken lines and dysmorphic features that create a simultaneously closed and open musical form.

The result is a continuity in discontinuity in which glitchy textures and noises blend with extremely high-pitched and almost edgy sounds.

Title and philosophical amplifications

Every search process leads to a single mysterious and ineffable core in which the coincidence of opposites lives. There superfluous and necessary, superficial and profound touch until they become one and the same thing. That search process is the only thing that can enliven us – at least temporarily – and perhaps save us from the boredom of worn-out visions, from nihilistic temptations, from the violence of history, individual and collective.

Oscar Wilde wrote that «all art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril». Art is surface because it lives on phenomena that involve the senses, inhabiting the perceptible layer of space and time; but art is also symbol because it alludes to something not completely revealed, nor completely hidden, something that is only hinted at and can be intuited, rather than perceived, in ways that are always discontinuous. That something takes on an airy, spiritual and playful connotation, which can be captured in an eternally unsaturated aesthetic process. Indeed, it could be said that art lies precisely in the unfinished, in absence, in what is missing or what refers to something else without ever showing it completely, in the inexhaustibility of gazes and listening. I believe that a sound is all the more interesting when it is capable of provoking a myriad of different experiences – that vary in relation to the subjectivity of the listener and to the precise moment of listening – and that, at the same time, have something objective, something that imposes itself by evidence and that unites listeners in the corporeity of their senses. This piece persists in seeking, not without naivety, that unsaturated sound, at times dirty, distorted, at others sharp, which could be the cry of a bird or a reverberated sine wave, the use of an extended flute technique or the product of a subtractive white noise synthesis. The peril that Oscar Wilde spoke of, going beneath the surface of things, consists precisely in being in contact with this ineffable truth that can only be touched or grasped inconstantly. It is hard to stand at the point where good and evil, instantaneous and eternal, psyche and universe, real and virtual become one. The human being, by its very nature, needs to put order, to shed light, to distinguish between above and below, inside and outside, soul and world. This produces a kind of canning of reality – putting the fire under the fireplace so that it does not set everything on fire – which nevertheless always produces sparks, an excess of feeling, of speech, of our very being in the world.

In this video, the antinomy between order and excess, between stasis and movement, is represented by the alternation between two motifs: one sees a box appearing at more or less regular intervals and a sort of iridescent mandala that sometimes takes the form of a butterfly – a dynamic element like the psyche itself (which in its etymology coincides precisely with the butterfly). It traverses a oneiroid landscape characterised by the mixture of abstract scenarios and worldscapes observed at different distances: from the centre of a flower to galaxies.

Changing perspective means abandoning oneself to the vertigo of research that can lead to pungent, almost annoying, or very rarefied, light, almost ironic soundscapes.

«The world is satisfied with words, few care to dive beneath the surface», Pascal wrote in his Thoughts, while the emperor Marcus Aurelius already admonished: «Look beneath the surface; let not the several quality of a thing nor its worth escape thee». Following the emperor's wisdom, director David Lynch described his experience in this way: «I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force – a wild pain and decay – also accompanies everything».

Beneath the surface of the world, however, does not allude here to Sigmund Freud's image of the iceberg, for which there is an educated and often illusory knowledge that characterises the tip of the iceberg, and then there is a whole submerged world where the living and amoral life of the unconscious flows. Beneath the surface of the world is not intended to be an apologia for the deep, or a nostalgia for stratigraphic or topological views. On the contrary, the piece seeks to indicate the permanence of depth in the surface and vice versa, of the superficial and superfluous in the profound. The element that drives this subversion is precisely movement, a continuous movement: from sinking to returning above, from above back to the abyss. The fluidity of movement is a kind of life insurance symbolised by the element of water; it contrasted, however, with violent caesuras, explosions, like ear wounds, or a claustrophobia of toxic fumes trapped in three-dimensional boxes.

Oceanographer and documentary filmmaker Jacques Yves Cousteau wrote that «From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free».  In a way, then, claustrophobic gravity becomes a pass to the water, a touching the bottom to regain momentum, as only freedivers know how to do. And speaking of people capable of going Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Jules Verne wrote that «On the surface of the ocean, men wage war and destroy each other; but down here, just a few feet beneath the surface, there is a calm and peace, unmolested by man». Beneath the surface one can either find the demonium, as Alicia, the protagonist of Stella Maris, said, or peace. The most unsettling feeling, however, is to find both. There is life there, despite the horror, that thing that writer Freya Stark called ‘freshness’... «freshness trembles beneath the surface of Everyday, a joy perpetual to all who catch its opal lights beneath the dust of habit». Ultimately, in agreement with artist Andy Goldsworthy, I too can say that «As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone». I would add that penetrating the dreamscape helps me grasp the dream inherent in reality, the mysterious component of waking life: solid dreams within fluid realities.

[acker-lan]

Oc rants. Ignore

I had a whole thinh planned out with so many details while showering. I forgor 💀

Wow id rather think about the future than the actual story material in the present. Fuck me.

So zachary, who is just fucking cursed— he just roams the world years and years into the future.

Its the future and RA has just subtly taken over. People rely on technology for everything. Just as it is in rl ofc.

“The year is 20-fucking something. Whats the point? Whatd the point of anything when there is no point to your life. Nothing you do matters becauer you can never die. Meet people that will die. You can overdose and get murdered and you will never truly die. I can only watch as society develops. The computer thing had taken over. Thats great. It monitors most of the human population. They use him for everything. I for one will never get behind all that “ai smart cellular phone device thing”. There are cameras all around and its nearly impossible to go off the grid. One may think its the government stalking its citizens, but its him that’s infatuated with humanity.

I forgot what she sounded like or what she looked like in real life, but the computer will never let me forget her name. Softwares, companies, programs, logos are all named after her or have some relation to her name. Its all her fault though. They even have little devices you connect to your house and by shouting, “Victoria!” you can command it to do anything in your home. I think its stupid if you need some machine to turn off your lights instead of getting up and doing it yourself.

The stupid thing guided technological pioneers and instructed “helped” them to create new technology. To spread to even more people. It helps everyone but me. Its supposed to be all knowing. But when i beg for death, it fucks with me. Asking me stupid philosophical shit. Or simply displaying an error message.

Youd think id go after it and show humanity we can live without it. But ive grown to despise humanity. No human is worth knowing. A while ago I visited a direct decendant of an old girlfriend I had. It was just some stupid teenage girl who had no idea who one of her grandmothers were. Or how precious she was to me.

I remember feeling dread and sorrow when I found out I would outlive everyone i ever knew. I dont even remember my first wife. First I felt sadness. Then i felt nothing. There are thousands of her now.

[gubbles-owo]

so rewind back several years ago, i wanted to try my hand at making some sort of horror game-- less jumpscares, more unease. it never materialized as i didn't really have a focused vision for it, but it went through many, many variations. the sole thread of consistency throughout all this was to make the game feel like a game for the intellivisio- nono not that recent disaster, i mean the original. 1979, with the wood paneling! Anyway the Intellivision at one point got a cool lil addon in the form of the voice module-- y'know, the one that gave us this infamous line:

This funky little thing plugged into the cartridge slot of the console, and added synthesized speech to some games! That's pretty rad for something made in 1982, something assuredly before my time, and I wanted to know how it worked. I wanted to recreate the sound of this thing, and given how particularly specific it sounds I needed to get it right. So I dug into old repair manuals and data sheets to try and unearth its secrets. The voice module uses a custom variation of the General Instruments SP0256, namely the SP0256-012. The way this old chip tries to recreate the sound of human speech is fuckin fascinating I'm grossly oversimplifying here, but the broad strokes are as follows: this thing produces a series of impulses, or very short clicks, and runs them through a complex filter. The filter is configured using impulses of recordings of actual speech! These impulses are generally drawn from specific vowel or consonant sounds. For example, here's what a single click of an open "A" vowel in "Mattel" sounds like:

These filtered clicks would then be strung together in rapid succession, so quickly that they're perceived as a single held pitch, rather than individual clicks:

The faster the clicks play, the higher the pitch sounds, and vice versa. Pretty different from how I normally think of audio synthesis! Cool, so we've got a basic signal chain to recreate: rapid impulse generation, followed by a filter stage. Since the frequencies the voice module generates are far beyond what any of my virtual synthesizers within Cubase could produce, I instead turned to a free program called VCV Rack. It's a virtual modular synthesizer, which a good amount of stock modules plus the ability for users to program and add in their own. Listen I know how to work most standard synths, subtractive or wavetable or whatever. I know the general flow the signal chain, and even in the face of unfamiliar hardware (or software), I can intuit how the thing works through poking it enough and can start making usable patches. Modular synthesis laughs at such a naive notion.

Look at this shit. You will fuck up, you will plug the wrong patch cable to the wrong input or output, and you will blow your fucking eardrums out in the process. I found myself making basic mistakes all over again, because even when creating a familiar signal chain for, say, a basic doubled saw wave, the interface exposes so much more of the inner workings that it took me a fair bit of trial and error to get it working. Let alone recreating the functionality of some decades-old soundchip I have never directly worked with. So, mistakes are bound to be made. and haha well. lets justr say... Once I finally figured things out enough to get an extremely simplified version of the Intellivision Voice Module working, I had left a single patch cable where it perhaps should not have been, and this is the sound that greeted me...

yyeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhhh At least it sounds like he's having a good time!!

oh god. i've never recounted the terrible thing once i wrought into our physical realm from the tangled entrails of a (virtual) rack module synth, have i

[kafus]

could you tell us the story of your shiny competitive latias in gen 3? im so curious

oh yeah so the reason i didn't go in depth about that in the post is it's actually quite a lot of obscure game mechanic talk and i didn't wanna divert from the heartwarming story to break people's brains potentially lol but yeah sure! i'll put the whole explanation below a cut because it's pretty long. warning that i'm going deep on the nerd shit sorry in advance LMAO

essentially the latias i use in gen 4 was obtained in pokemon emerald and then transferred through the pal park, i obtained it by combining ACE (arbitrary code execution) and RNG manipulation. neither of these things are hacking or require any sort of tampering with the game and can be done on original hardware (i did all this on my original emerald cart in an actual GBA SP) but it is an unintended way of playing the game, just to be upfront, not that i mind because i'm doing singleplayer stuff for fun.

so, RNG manipulation is the process of perfectly timing your button inputs and actions to get the game to spit out the "random" result that you want. because computers struggle to do true randomness (especially something as old as generation 3 pokemon games) usually "randomness" is actually based on elaborate algorithms/equations. in emerald, the game is supposed to choose a "seed" to generate random pokemon spawns etc with (think minecraft world seeds and how those generate a world, but with wild pokemon and stuff instead if you've ever played minecraft!) based on the RTC (real time clock) of the cartridge, but due to a programming error, emerald actually never seeds properly, causing it to always be stuck at a seed of 0. there have been a couple methods discovered to force the game to seed but that's irrelevant here. since the seed is always 0, every time you play emerald, all of the possible spawns are actually the same each time. to a casual player they will never notice such a thing but to an rng manipulator this becomes very, very useful.

when you get into a wild encounter (or obtain a gift pokemon, encounter a legendary, etc) the game checks what frame you're on since you booted the game, tosses that frame into its random number generating algorithm against the seed, and then every aspect of that pokemon is determined by the result, like IVs and nature and etc. so, if you were to backwards engineer this algorithm and then figure out a way to perfectly time your A press to hit the exact frame you want, you'd be able to get any IV spread etc you want... and you'd also be able to predict and time your inputs to get shinies assuming that you know your SID (secret ID, a hidden value paired with your trainer ID on your trainer card) which can be figured out through a variety of methods that i won't get into here.

as it turns out, the pokemon community is nuts and the whole backwards engineering process was already done by people way smarter than me, and software has been developed to be able to sift through all possible pokemon encounters in pokemon games, including emerald. i use PokeFinder which is by far the best program out for this right now that is getting consistently updated. software has also been developed to time your A presses, the main one i use is EonTimer which lets me pop in what frame i want to hit and it calculates the amount of time i have to wait and then beeps to tell me when to hit A. i feel the need to repeat again this software does not require you to tamper with your games in any way - i honestly highly recommend trying it sometime even if just for the novelty of getting a shiny to appear on command, it's really fun and there's tutorials on youtube by "i'm a blisy" dsfjfdskd

edit: here's a screencap of what eontimer looks like btw! not the same target frame i used back when i got this latias but yeah. it's neat

with all of that out of the way, it sounds like it should be as simple as saving in front of the latias and then looking up the spread i want, popping it into the timer, and then resetting my game, waiting for the beep, hitting A and rinse and repeat until i get it. there's a few holes in this plan though:

the spread i want (timid 31/31/31/31/31/31 AKA perfect IVs) would require me to leave my game on for literal weeks on end per attempt, which is entirely unrealistic and unfeasible. i'm doing this on actual hardware, no speedup!

the spread in question also isn't shiny with my current SID. i don't need the latias to be shiny or anything, i just want it to be for fun

i am using my emerald save file that already has the roamer Latios generated, so i no longer have the option of rng manipulating that one. this means i need to get to Southern Island and RNG the latias there... which is a mystery gift. i do not own the e-reader nor do i own an extremely expensive eon ticket to get that event in my game

and this is where ACE comes in! ACE is... complicated. if you've ever seen people pull off some excessively wild and glitchy stuff in gen 1 by swapping items around in their inventory, you were probably watching a form of ACE in action. it's the process of glitching the game into a state where you can get it to take some form of input from the player as code and then run that code, hence "arbitrary code execution". honestly ACE is not something i have studied in depth, especially with gen 3, and i mostly just followed tutorials on getting what i wanted. i can summarize this process down into a few steps:

getting the NPC trade pokemon DOTS the seedot and EV training it to a very specific spread

performing glitzer popping (wild name, i know) to corrupt DOTS the seedot into a very specific glitchy egg

changing the name of my PC boxes to what is essentially GBA assembly instructions

cloning the aforementioned glitch egg using the emerald battle tower cloning glitch a bunch of times so i can use them whenever and then hatching them, which due to the EV spread i gave DOTS, will execute the code i changed my PC box names to!

i used ACE to solve all of the aforementioned problems with this rng manipulation.

i used ACE to make my game jump thousands upon thousands of frames forward, just a little bit before the competitive spread i wanted, and then went to the battle frontier to save a battle video at the battle factory by going in and instantly losing... this is because every time a battle video is loaded, it doesn't actually save every random result that happens in the battle (like missing and damage rolls) and instead just remembers the state of the RNG before the battle started and player choices and re-calculates the same exact random chances. therefore, if i watch this battle video from the trainer card upon every reset, i will jump back to that place thousands of frames forward, right before the latias spread i want

i used ACE to change my SID to a value that would make the spread i want shiny in combination with my TID because why not

i used ACE to spawn latias on southern island and to give myself the eon ticket to get there, no real life eon ticket/e-reader required (there are ways to inject this event that don't require ACE/the real life event items but i wanted to do all this without tampering!)

as a side tangent, i should mention that i had a very obscure problem with running the ACE to get to southern island that i had to contact some gen 3 ACE experts for help on... too complicated to explain here in any sort of legible way i think, but basically the problem was every time i hatched the glitch egg, the game just froze despite my code being typed in properly in my PC boxes with no typos. the audio kept playing but it would hang on the hatching screen, resulting in this extremely cursed footage of me hatching a void egg that looked like nothing and caused my game to crash:

i just think that's neat LMAO. anyways yeah after getting all that complicated ACE shit out of the way that took me 123989123 years to set up, it was just a matter of standing in front of the rock on southern island, saving my game, getting my timer ready, soft resetting my game, watching my battle video and starting my timer, and then waiting a handful of seconds and trying to press A with the exact 1/60th of a second timing to get the latias to appear. (emerald runs on 60 fps, this always takes a few tries)

(i can't put 2 videos in a tumblr post but if you want to see the encounter happen, i took a video here, it's a direct discord file link lol)

after that i simply transferred latibreak through HGSS pal park and trained her up and started using her in the battle tower :) technically a player could randomly stumble on this latias if they left their game open long enough and had the right TID/SID, it is a completely valid encounter that can move through pokemon bank and pokemon home! i just used a variety of game knowledge and glitches to get it to appear for me without having to wait for luck. i hope any of this made sense and sorry for all the jargon!! i wasn't sure how else to tell this story tbh. if any of this sounds interesting to you i highly recommend trying out at least rng manipulation sometime! you can do a lot of cool stuff with it even without ACE being involved, i just really needed ACE for this specific pokemon i wanted SDFJFDS

[eyes-of-mischief]

weekly fic recs | 34

fandoms: bsd, dbh, hq, tgcf, svsss

bsd

Who Needs Money Anyway? (Spoiler Alert: It’s Us) by fandomsandshit

Their funding has been cut.

Akiko stares blankly at the sheet Haruno is holding out to her, hands sweaty and shaky, and resists the urge to scream.

It’s been a long time coming. As much as she hates to admit it, Akiko is honestly surprised it took this long for them to lose some of it; what with the monthly shootings, consistent suicide attempts and general shenanigans of the Agency members.

But how on earth are they going to make enough money now?

---------- (modern-ish au where the ada causes too much property damage for proper funding, and so yosano leads them into the wonderful world of twitch streaming to make money)

A Study in Mafia Black by eluvion

If he’s being honest, good and bad don’t matter so much to Ranpo as truth does. Good and bad are subjective, clouded with human error, and honestly, they’re quite boring. Mystery has always been more interesting than morality with the way each string weaves together, creating a tapestry of crime, blood and ash writing their own story. Dazai is still as much of a mystery as he was at first glance, and Ranpo is just as ready to pick apart the truth from whatever plays behind those eyes.

Or; a friendship, of sorts, between the two smartest members of the Armed Detective Agency.

dbh

preconstruct by aworus

(graphic depictions of violence)

Connor’s preconstruction software is activating much more often than he’d like. Who knew an android problem could actually be so human?

(Five times Connor has intrusive thoughts and one time he tells someone about it.)

hq

a dictionary definition by shoutowo

“Well, yeah!” Bokuto says. “When I say stuff like ‘the world’, sometimes, like, in my head, I’m really only imagining one person.”

The interviewer looks like she hit the jackpot. Bokuto doesn’t notice. “Can we get a name?”

-

or, Akaashi is Bokuto's world. This creates more problems than it solves.

tgcf

centuries since paradise by parsnipit

Xie Lian has spent long enough around sirens to have some grasp of their communication, and some of it is even a little similar to mer noises. This sound, for example, is like the one podmates use to call for each other—curious, beckoning. He suspects it means much the same thing for sirens. Has this siren lost someone, maybe? Hopefully it will find its lost someone soon, so Xie Lian can go back to sleep. Then, because nothing good can ever happen to Xie Lian, the siren peeks beneath the overhang. It hangs its head over the jut of stone, its hair billowing like a crown of ink and the yellow sclera of its eye bright against the black. That singular eye catches on his, its pupil dilating, and Xie Lian stiffens.

Windmaster's Heavenly Confections by IceEckos12

Eight years after a personal tragedy derailed his life, Xie Lian is hired to work at the local candy shop, Windmaster's Heavenly Confections.

He has no idea what he's just gotten himself into.

Including: cooking disasters, reunions with old friends, and the sweetest possibility of romance.

A Wolf’s Snare by UmbraSoleil

(explicit)

By all accounts, Hua Chengzhu is a terrifying, wicked king. But, as much as Hua Cheng is feared, he is also favored.

So then why would such a man request to marry him—the prince of a kingdom in decline? Xie Lian did not think he would ever be able to understand.

Then, during Xie Lian’s escort to his betrothed, a peculiar spirit tethers itself to him; a youth who calls himself San Lang.

-

“You’ve kept me waiting for a very long time.”

svsss

Into This Wild Abyss by Lbhs_left_tiddie (HungryPoet)

(explicit) (graphic depictions of violence, rape/non-con)

Shen Qingqiu stood at the edge of the cliff, his back lit up by the fiery light of the Endless Abyss. The blood from the wound on his chest spilled out between his fingers, splattering onto the shattered remains of Xiu Ya laying at his feet. When he looked up, his expression was half-wild with the heat of battle, shoulders heaving with his ragged breaths, and his eyes, which were normally like green jade, glowed blood red-

-The very same red shining from the demon mark etched onto his forehead.

Or: Shen Qingqiu is the protagonist of PIDW

[shield-of-wesnoth]

Really wish I could get old-- as in really old-- version of Wesnoth to run on my PC.

I have a Windows 10 computer that’s almost a decade old now, and though it runs Wesnoth 0.1 (the very first one), in terms of other ancient Wesnoth versions, I can’t get anything older than 0.9.7 to run.  I used to have a Windows 7 laptop, and it could run Wesnoth 0.8.4!  I don’t know what happened between Windows updates, but when I try to open 0.8.4 on my PC, it just doesn’t work at all. The only thread I have to go on is that maybe Windows 10 comes with different .dlls, and stopped including certain older ones that older Wesnoth needs..?  Because I got a popup about a missing one when I tried opening 0.8.4′s map editor, and when I installed that .dll there-- though it still didn’t work-- it suddenly was able to make the screen black for a second before giving up, which was more than before.  But having gotten no more error messages since then, and having no luck with running it in compatibility mode, I’ve been stuck ever since.

A lot of my 1.2 and earlier Wesnoths experience bugs that they don’t on older hardware, too... can’t think of a single one that doesn’t crash if I try and change the screen resolution.  Many also experience awful graphical errors if I switch between windowed and fullscreen mode that don’t go away until I restart the program.  There’s also some annoying flickering effects with the monochrome cursor set (my favorite one...) that are only lessened-- not fully gone-- if I use the color cursor.  And in one of the most mysterious and sad glitches of all, in pre-1.2, Delfador’s sprites are prone to inexplicably not appearing in the game where he’s present!  All of this simply did not happen on even slightly older hardware. Some older Wesnoths I’ve been unable to try at all, since they’re based in Linux, and you have to “build” and “compile” them rather than simply double-clicking an executable... and sadly, I am not that much of a nerd yet to do such things easily.  But even then, Wesnoth 0.3 has an executable, but it merely brings up a command prompt window, turns the screen black, then closes before I can read anything clearly... and running compatibility mode has only made that one worse.

This isn’t even all limited to just ancient Wesnoth, either!  Right now, and even on my Windows 7, I’ve experienced a terrible issue with versions of Wesnoth 1.8 where they simply do not register manually installed add-ons.  This is kind of a huge deal, since the manual way is now the only way to install its fanmade content, since its server no longer connects in the program!!  This is perhaps due to the fact that holding add-ons outside the “campaigns” folder was a new feature at the time, and it had some unforeseen issues (even when it still could connect, for some reason, I never found out where they’re stored?).  This is an absolute travesty, since 1.8 was one of the highest points for UMC creativity and output, and now all of that can’t really be played on its intended software. In 1.12, sometimes the names and descriptions of most of my installed add-ons, and all of the text inside them, simply will not display.  I spent hours trying to pin this down to one add-on by removing and replacing them, to no avail.  Because it impacts multiple campaigns at once, and sometimes seemed to impact different ones, I couldn’t figure it out.  I have several dozen add-ons for 1.12, and I have no idea if it’s one add-on in particular causing the issue, or the fact that I have a ton of them by itself.  1.12 isn’t even that old!  It’s a relatively new one, already showing wear and tear for mysterious unknown reasons!!  The only comfort is that it doesn’t always happen, but I don’t know how much longer that may be the case.

Responses on the forum to modestly bringing up these issues seem to usually be “just play the latest version instead”, but I don’t always want to do that!  I shouldn’t have to do that!  The older versions still have their charms, and their unique style, lots of minor differences that build up, and sometimes I don’t want to have to wait for some kind soul with plenty of time to port it for me.  I don’t know how to use wmllint to port them myself (why can’t anyone explain it concisely?!), and even if I did, a lot of old UMC is buggy even on its intended version, and wmllint apparently struggles with things like custom terrains.

I guess I just wish there was more maintenance and advice out there for running older versions of this game in the modern era... advice that’s accessible and so on... I’m unsure if anyone else still cares about older versions of Wesnoth, but I certainly do.  Wesnoth's older versions were a big part of my childhood!  And even the versions that were so old that I never tried them as a child still fascinate and charm me.  I just wish I was skilled enough to support them myself.

[chouhatsumimi]

Hi! I am trying to become a japanese to English (& vice versa) translator. I can't find any sources to check the English to Japanese translation. It is difficult to get which grammar must be used since I am not a japanese native and don't know any natives to ask either. I have studied till N2 level but have no experience and must start freelancing to get experience so I need to figure out how to translate on my own. I can only use free translation software but I am not sure about it's reliability. I have seen questionable translations when it's for Japanese to English. Do think you can give any suggestions or anything that might be helpful?

Hi! I did put in a little time searching for the kind of tools you might have had in mind.

It seems that there are many that function in the exact same way but have different interfaces. Here are two of them. Many others can be found by searching "日本語文章校正ツール" or similar keywords. https://dw230.jp/kousei/

https://so-zou.jp/web-app/text/proofreading/

While they can point out some things to look out for, from the testing I did with them, they overlooked some pretty obvious errors, while also catching some things that I couldn't figure out why it thought it was wrong/sounded bad, or how to fix it.

There was one more I found that I didn't try, because it involves downloading software. This page explains the software, and another page on the site offers the download. The webpage is sponsored by a university, so I think it's safe to assume its trustworthy, but it might be a hassle and I can't say for sure if it works.

https://www.pawel.jp/outline_of_tools/tomarigi/

--------------------

That said, it's most common for translators to work from one language INTO their native language. While interpreters often have to go both directions (J <--> E), translators typically work either (J -> E) [English native speakers] OR (E -> J) [Japanese native speakers]. If you grew up bilingual, maybe you can translate both ways. But if English is your native language and you learned Japanese as a second language (which is true of my situation), it's pretty much not going to be worth bothering to do E->J translation, unless there are extenuating circumstances. The reasons for this are 1) You can't be sure that the translation you produce reads smoothly or is error-free 2) While you might think, but yes, if I do a really thorough check and compare it against native Japanese examples, I can be pretty darn sure it's perfect, the amount of time it takes you to do that is not going to be cost-effective. Like anything else, people purchasing translation as a service usually want the end result to be done well, in a timely manner, and as cheaply as possible, so it doesn't make sense to hire you for E -> J when they could hire a native Japanese speaking translator, or send their work to an agency to find that translator for them.

If you ARE translating into Japanese and are not a native speaker of Japanese, it is a good idea to have a fellow translator who has the opposite native language you do (in this case Japanese & English), and ask them to check it over for you (which, considering that's part of their job, you'd probably pay a small fee for). They could do the same to have you proofread their translations into English. Some translators consult friends/spouses, etc., but I think this can get old for them sometimes, so it's advisable not to rely on them for your job. You mentioned not having any native speakers to ask right now, but this is still an idea you can file away for in the future when you meet more people and get to know other translators.

In short, if you're aiming to become a translator working with Japanese but are not a native Japanese speaker, don't worry about translating into Japanese. Just focus on translating from Japanese into your native language.

--------------------

Translation software: let me make a distinction here between "machine translation" and "CAT [computer aided translation] tools".

Machine translation is Google Translate, DeepL, anything like that. There are times when they work well, but particularly with a language like Japanese that likes to imply a lot of information instead of stating it directly (such as who is doing the action described in the sentence), they're pretty much always going to miss something. In any situation that someone is looking to pay a translator to do work, it's because they already know machine translation won't cut it. One thing that's becoming more common is MTPE (machine translation post editing), where a translator "fixes" what's wrong with a machine translation (or more often than not, just re-translates it from scratch because what the machine came up with is mostly useless).

CAT tools, on the other hand, are widely used by translators. Paid CAT tools such as Trados, MemoQ, Memsource, etc. can be very expensive, and are often provided by a translation agency to their translators. (Also, most of them require a PC operating system.) There's more I could say, but since I haven't been in any situations that require them, I don't have any personal experience. I do have experience using OmegaT (free, works on Mac) and Felix (free, I use it on Windows). They both take a little tinkering to figure out how to use effectively, but basically what they do is, once you've translated a segment of text, they store the original segment and the translated segment, and for each new segment you go to translate, the CAT tool compares it to segments that you've previously translated to see if you can re-use any of what you came up with before. They can also have a built-in dictionary function, but that's basically just having your typical web-based dictionary but more automatically and in a more convenient location.

--------------------

For going into freelancing, I have a few recommendations.

Apart from CAT tools, some resources that I refer to frequently are http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?9T (basically looks up all the words in a sentence at once), http://thejadednetwork.com/sfx/ (if you're doing anything with sound effects, like manga), https://tsukubawebcorpus.jp//search/ (this is a corpus, I have another post on how to use it -here-, it's probably going to be your best bet when it comes to checking grammar), https://books.google.com/ngrams (for when it comes to figuring out what turns of phrase are commonly used in English), and https://yomikatawa.com/ (for figuring out the readings of names in Japanese, though there are other sites that work similarly).

When it comes to practicing, contests are a good place to start. The two I know of now are run by JAT in October (https://jat.org/events/contests) and JLPP deadline of 7/31 (and they're long, so it's probably too late for this year unless you're free between now and then: https://www.jlpp.go.jp/en/competition6/competition6en.html ) You can also practicing doing translations for fun. Any kind of media you enjoy (manga, video games, variety shows, newspaper articles) is a good target for doing a practice translation. Just be wary that it's not a good idea to post your translation in a public location on the internet, because it could be infringing copyright/licensing agreements, etc. Finally, there are websites like Gengo, Conyac, Fiverr and others where you can do gig translation work. They can be useful for practice, but also have the pitfall of paying, like, 5% of the rate you should be getting. This is an ongoing debate because on one hand, you can get practice while still getting a little money for it, but on the other hand, if customers can get people to do that work for 5% of a livable wage, that makes it harder for aspiring and working translators to find enough work that pays well enough to support themselves doing only translation for a living. Entertainment (primarily manga) scanlation groups also a significant enough force to merit a mention here- many aspiring entertainment translators find themselves a part of such a group. Practice is practice and developing your skills is important, but they also have many many of the same problems associated with them as I mentioned above, namely infringing on copyright and contributing to the inability of anyone to turn entertainment translation into a livable full-time job.

Another recommendation I have is to join some J/E translation-focused groups. This page lists a number of them: https://shinpaideshou.com/translation/ I can personally vouch for JAT as I am a member and I got my current job by being part of their directory. They run an online training program (eJuku) once a year around April, and applications only stay open for a few days, so if you're interested make sure you keep your eye out. Another one not listed on that page is https://swet.jp/ which is not entirely about translation, but it is heavily related and they host some good events. Twitter is also a very good place to be if you're getting into J/E translation. I prefer to keep my tumblr and twitter separate but if you DM me, I can give you my handle so you can see who I follow and who among that seems worth following to you.

--------------------

In closing, I see you say "I have studied till N2 level but have no experience and must start freelancing to get experience so I need to figure out how to translate on my own." I'd say, give yourself some time. Even at N1 there's still going to be a lot you don't understand (or at least there was for me, that's why I started this langblr). I'm sure there are differences in our situations, but it was about five years ago for me that I started diving into translation- I think I was between N2 and N1 then. I've done a lot of translating and gotten a lot of experience since then, but I also have and am experiencing a lot of burnout. (In fact, I'm procrastinating right now by answering this....) Many translators have a job and translate on the side, and it's also common to gain experience with a company or agency before diving into supporting yourself on freelance work. I'd encourage you to take a breath, get experience when and where you can, and remember that if you keep at it long enough, you're sure to get there- just don't wear yourself out or worry to death in the meantime!

OH and definitely keep track of what projects you do, how long they are, and how long it takes you to do them! Knowing your speed is important when it comes to setting your working rates. I am always doubting these, and they differ from person to person, but my current estimates are that I can do 600 moji (Japanese characters) per hour, ~10 min. of audio per hour, and I try to aim for $45~$60 per hour. Generally the lowest acceptable standard rates are $0.05-$0.06 per moji and ~$5 per page of manga. You'll definitely get requests lower than that, so remember your sanity and don't be afraid to say no, there are plenty of opportunities out there!