For sure. I need to invest in a better Blu-ray drive (or maybe a few for Automatic Ripping Machine ) but MakeMKV, Jellyfin and my library card are all homies as of late. Definitely check your library out.

I don’t know why it took me so long to consider mine. I’m really spoiled having a few branches in my county that lend between one another. Then they further lend with other libraries in counties throughout the state. It’s nothing to put in a few requests, wait to be notified, then swing by the local branch to checkout.

Enter the Fist? Enter the Dragon is in English. Way of the Dragon has Chinese and English dubs. Same for Fist of Fury. I’d have to check my other rips to see about them but I suspect it’s the same. It looks like a lot of the original, Chinese dubs were done in Mandarin for the larger Mandarin-speaking audience. Just how it was done at the time. Here’s an old thread over on KungFuFandom that talks about it.

Anyway, Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits from the Criterion Collection is an exact match to your list. Game of Death II appears amongst the content on the bonus discs and the rest of your list are all feature titles. There are a couple other alternative collections featuring a mostly-identical film lineup but consensus I’ve seen is that Criterion’s is the way to go.

If I’m to believe the AI overview (as you said, Google is useless), Enter the Dragon was the first film to feature his actual voice and it’s an English film. I don’t think I have but one audio track for that . Earlier stuff is dubbed. Search result explanations is that many Hong Kong movies at the time were shot silent then dubbed afterwards. That would make sense, since the “Chinese” audio track I have for Way of the Dragon seems to fit the lip movements rather precisely but it isn’t his voice. I’d have to check the other films to confirm they’re the same.

Your list, sure you’re aware, matches the Bruce Lee Criterion Collection set. I’d be adding “criterion” to the searches, if you’re not already, and hoping someone has full-set rip with multi audio and subs. I got remarkably lucky and my local library actually had the Criterion set (along with some “Universal Horror” Karloff and Lugosi films) so I was able to check them out and rip them myself. Depending on where you are and your local infrastructure, might be a good shout to check your local library too.

A bit odd I suppose, but he’s also “The ansible guy” and a solid “proxmox/truenas” guy. It’s not unlikely they could’ve become aware of him looking for information on automation or virtualization. That’s actually how I first came across his content. The Pi and other hardware reviews are okay but I care more about the how-to’s and what I’m actually running on my toys over the toys themselves.

Anyway, I didn’t dig real deep but I’m not ready to nail him to a cross. I’ve met Christians who “don’t approve” of whatever while simultaneously acknowledging someone else doesn’t need their approval in the first place to be who they are. That it isn’t their place to thrust their moral beliefs upon others. Not to say I don’t still find their worldview problematic either, and their level headedness is being drowned out by Christofascist rhetoric as of late, but time is still sanding the edges off their faith and it remains light-years ahead of other parts of the world.

Going back roughly a decade you can find blog posts and some bits on Twitter. I don’t see anything outright gay-bashing but his moral worldview, when he speaks on the matter, seems to be shaped by his Catholic faith. I don’t think he hates homosexuals, and I can’t guess at how his beliefs effect others (who for, or how, he votes and such), but he certainly seems to have a moral opposition and hasn’t since stated otherwise that I am aware.

If you need a smoking gun, here’s a quote from Twitter around 2017. Context is that this apparently stemmed from the removal of developer Larry “Crell” Garfield over “Gorean” (?) beliefs or participation in that subculture. Relating to some BDSM, male-domination, female slaves “Gor” novel series, that I cannot be assed to dig deeper into, and concerns he’d carry the “misogyny” into into the workplace. Anyway:

The Drupal community is treading perilous waters right now. Risk of excluding more members than just Crell. Careful with moral equivalence! It’s a heck of a lot more nuanced than that. But basically, if the criteria for being part of the Drupal community anymore is “Must both publicly and privately support Gay marriage, etc.” then… I think I might be excluded.

As an atheist looking in, I find Abrahamic faiths fundamentally incompatible with homosexuality. Having a gay Christian marriage, for example, is an absurdity to me. To be clear I’m not personally opposed to it. I find very much wrong with his faith but I don’t believe Jeff is wrong about his faith. But kudos and power to whoever wants to lie to themselves and retcon Christianity in order to believe (what I perceive to be) a bigger, more comforting lie. If we can keep eroding at it maybe we’ll finally get over the hatred and hangups it causes, or at least no longer be able to point to it as a justifying source.

I played a lot of Sky Force and Sky Force Reloaded. Pretty sure you have to pay to remove ads. Another single payment doubles the “stars” you earn which cuts back on the grind for upgrades. There aren’t a ton of stages so a lot of the replay value comes from trying to beat stages on higher difficulty. If you’re into v-scrollers it’s a visually beautiful game with fun bosses and solid gameplay.

I sunk some time into Retro Bowl for a while too. Fun little football (Gridiron/American football) game with retro inspired graphics.

Truth be told that’s about the extent of Android games I found enjoyable. Since getting a Steam Deck and TrimUI brick, I bounce between Factorio, OpenTTD (has an Android port but I haven’t tried it), Rimworld and emulating plethora of nostalgic console games.

Edit: forgot about Mindustry and just saw it mentioned above. I’ll definitely add that to my recommendations. I prefer on PC or Steam Deck but it plays well enough on Android.

I was overdue for a reminder about this site. In the same spirit “USB Killers” are indeed a thing. One I saw, a while back on Hackaday, was basically a bunch of small surface mount capacitors on a board stuffed in a generic thumb-drive type case.

Intended to prevent accidental input from the side of your palm, when it’s resting on the screen, while using the stylus.

Haven’t listened to that since radio wazee was a thing. I know they had other streams but I probably listened to their Punk stream more than anything else. I miss a lot of the old traditional streaming radio websites. Used to be my favorite way of discovering new music. Winamp’s library window had a built-in stream list, probably populated by anyone running their Shoutcast server, that made “stations” easy to find). I think Digitally Imported and SomaFM are probably two of longest running web radio stations that are still going. So many others have disappeared over the years.

Everything old is new again. In my teens, one of the more popular RATs out there was Sub7. In one of the later releases an IRC bot feature was added. Fortunately I was neither tech savvy enough nor grand enough in thinking to grasp the implications or I’d have probably set about building my own botnet. To what end? Who knows. Driven more by curiosity than malice, I’d probably have been tickled just kicking back and watching machines pop in and out of my own little digital aquarium. The same way I got a goofy grin firing off an ansible playbook just to watch the LEDs blink on my RPi devices (maybe I’m still not grand enough in thought 😅).

I played a little PSO on Dreamcast but never got far; spotty dial-up made it difficult to enjoy online play. Still a console “MMO” was mind-blowing to me at the time, and it was a beautiful game. (Q3A became my primary addiction. Much easier to just connect, mindlessly frag for a few, and not be upset when someone inevitably picked up the phone and starting dialing without listening for the modem first.)

I’ve emulated Dreamcast PSO on my Steam Deck and I know private servers still exist for Dreamcast (and it can made to get back online with an RPi and a little fiddling) but is Blue Burst the preferred game these days? PC version? I’m tempted to give it a proper playthrough sometime.

Had to look it up myself. The song was used as the main theme to an older web miniseries about a fictitious scene group. Just watched through the first episode and it tickled some nostalgia; mIRC, ICQ and such. Might have to give the rest of it a watch.

Same friend had UT3 for the PS3. We’d rotate stick on it but I wasn’t great at it. I had the keeb and mouse for my Dreamcast, basically cheat mode against controller players, and that led to my switch to PC for the FPS genre. I faintly remember the PS3 version having cross play and/or mod/map support. I’m pretty sure we all played a bunch of instagib CTF on a map that was like a long hallway.

He eventually bought UT3 again for PC I helped him put together. It was a great looking game on PS3 but we were all blown away when we hooked the PC up to the big screen. Good times.

For a very brief moment in time I held the leaderboard for the Bowman in Mech Assault. I think the main contender at the time was a total loudmouth and XBL Forum regular with the gamertag “GeorgeTheGreek.” A certified shit talker, but he was also damned good with that Mech. One of my fondest memories of the game was using the Bowman to stomp someone in an Atlas on the city map (River City?). I hadn’t seen it done before, and most others in the lobby must not have either, because a bunch of them went ape. My team might’ve still gone on to lose, I seem to recall the map meta being “pick a Mad Cat and sit back sniping,” but that moment was worth any outcome.

OG Xbox Live was probably my favorite console experience after Quake 3 Arena on Dreamcast. I wouldn’t own a console after the 360. My next favorite console experience was when a buddy got Mortal Kombat 2 online for his PS3. One regular, whose name I’ve forgotten, would bust out all the old glitches (could’ve been using a macro controller) but it was the first time I’d send Fatality Friendship on the Kombat Tomb stage. Another had a novelty account named “ItsTheToe” that always played as Liu Kang. Anyone familiar with MK2 would know his crouching low kick was this stupid stick-his-toe-out move that was nearly impossible for any of the ninjas to jump kick into. Absolutely hilarious when I first encountered them, then frustrating but rewarding having to relearn my favorite three characters to deal with them.

I remember him being gifted a golden pager and I’m still holding out hope that he gets the call.

Now that is an ambition to strive for! Easily one of the most significant communal projects of our time which, despite still remaining almost unheard of to countless people who unknowingly rely upon it, would be such a remarkable honor to take part in.

Unfortunately I can’t help in that regard. I keep everything local/unexposed so my solution for them was just running Jellyfin at their place. I was already rsyncing some stuff to a NAS I set up for them (and vice versa), as off-site backup. Since the files were already there it made the most sense to just give them their own instance.

Same boat except my Arduino and Pi devices are still gathering dust (but I do want to eventually get a general, foundational knowledge of electronics). My own ideas most often devolve into timesinks that leave me questioning how I even convinced myself to start down that road. I like doing dev stuff more if it happens when an update breaks something, like a service or a plugin to some app I host. “Hey, that’s a goddamn puzzle! I fucking love puzzles!” And there’s the underlying fact that, if I manage to solve it, I might be helping somebody else out. Some psychological compulsion to help others that I can identify but still not deny.

Anyway, I might never end up a “contributor” to anything else but one of my biggest highs was singlehandedly debugging, submitting, and having a fix merged to a Jellyfin plugin I use. From first reporting it and thinking out loud about it in the app’s Discord, to poking through the source on GitHub (in a language I’ve never touched), I worked it out in a few hours and even compiled a replacement .dll for my own use until the merge was accepted. To the reception of some compliments and pats on the back from regulars on the server that, at the risk of over sharing, did more for my emotional well being than my last lay. The problem ended up being a simple order-of-operations issue but the experience was the sort of the thing that makes a guy, who hasn’t worked so much as a help desk position, briefly think “Maybe I could hack it.”

Conversely, my biggest low was wasting 45 minutes on an Advent of Code problem because I forgot to switch from the sample data to my actual puzzle data in the second half. It was a first-week problem, probably child’s play for any pro, but I had a working solution fast enough to have landed on that day’s leaderboard. It would’ve been entirely self serving and good for nothing but bragging rights. Instead I wasted nearly an hour to reach the “duh” moment and subsequent self loathing. I wanted those bragging rights!

The TLDR is Programming turns bipolar disorder into a speed run session too easily for it to be more than an on-again off-again hobby or the occasional necessity for me. I can’t fathom how the actual pros, especially those in prestigious and lucrative positions, keep from crashing out or falling into imposter syndrome any time they let themselves get caught up in an off-by-one or some other nonsense.

I don’t have the link(s) on hand but there’s a Tizen build of Jellyfin for Samsung TVs. It runs rather slow on my old tube so I wouldn’t recommend it outside of a last resort. It’s actually smoother for me to just open the app on the TV and then remote control it from a browser/app on another device (my Steam Deck is my homelab universal remote). But you can use the Tizen dev tools or a simpler docker container to push it to the TV.

For my folks I got a cheap Walmart brand Android box (Onn 4k Plus). I installed Jellyfin from the app store then black hole’d the thing because I’m wary of cheap Android apps and their history of supply chain attacks. It’s much more responsive and also leaves me with the option of installing additional stuff like Smart Tubes, Retro Arch and whatnot.

I’m a fucking dolt that dabbles and picks up the gist of things pretty quick, but I’m not authority on anything, so “grain of salt”:

You’re already familiar with OCR so my naive approach (assuming consistent fields on the documents where you can nab name, case no., form type, blah blah) would be to populate a simple sqlite db with that data and the full paths to the files. But I can write very basic SQL queries, so for your pops you might then need to cobble together some sort of search form. Something for people that don’t learn SELECT filepath FROM casedata WHERE name LIKE "%Luigi%"; because they had to manually repair their Jellyfin DB one time when a plugin made a bunch of erroneous entries >:|