Encrypt-Keeper

You can get a VPS on Vultr for $5 a month that’ll be plenty for your use case. For security look into mTLS. Web servers like Caddy support it pretty easy. You put a certificate on you and your wife’s phones and only you will be able to connect to your endpoint.

Why is the article using diagonal screen size as their measurement for phone size? In that case you could have a phone the exact same size get “bigger” just because bezel sizes have shrunk over the years.

They specifically call out the iPhone SE as a “small phone” that they seem to want. But the newest iPhone, the iPhone 16 is only 6% bigger in width and height. Fractions of an inch larger. I can totally understand why somebody would want a phone with smaller overall dimensions, but why on earth would your metric for an ideal phone be a smaller screen?

Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo/OnePlus, and Vivo, the top four Android smartphone manufacturers, have not released a single phone with a display 5.5 inches or smaller in the past three years, according to data from GSMArena.

Seems like they’re going away on the Android side too.

You can use programs like Ripper or Automated Ripping Machine to watch for inserted disks and rip them automatically. You can even add remixing or transcoding into the workflow so that all you do is insert the disk into the drive and after some time out pops the file in the exact format and size you want, even directly into your media library if you want.

I’d imagine that’s the case for a lot of people actually. People don’t just pirate to get things for free. Lots of people buy easily pirateable games on GOG because it doesn’t have DRM. Lots of people buy and rip Blu-rays instead of torrenting movies.

Lack of feature parity is the number one thing holding so many people back from switching to Jellyfin. Of Plex is going to start deleting beloved features, a lot of minds will be made up very quick.

You’re not going to be shunned or ridiculed for using an AI helper when coding. It’s not appropriate for use in a game jam generally, but that’s not the same as being shunned or ridiculed.

Like if you go into a big weightlifting gym, there will be people there on various chemical substances that augment your bodies natural abilities. These people aren’t going to be shunned or ridiculed from the weightlifting community just because they’re not 100% natural. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be allowed into most competitions and they understand that.

I’m sure if you look hard enough you’ll even find some that allow the use of AI as long as you disclose what it is you use and how. But if the point of a given game jam is to demonstrate natural ability, why would they allow AI when that isn’t your natural ability?

In the game jam? no, because the point to write something yourself from scratch. You’d join the game jam once you no longer require the AI as a crutch. It’s ok to not be ready for a game jam.

Buddy, using AI as a coding crutch is not the issue for the same reason it’s not an issue if you rely on stack overflow for learning how other people do things. The issue is when generative AI is used to generate assets for a game.

In order to discover someone’s posts on Mastodon, they need to be on the same instance as you, or someone else on your instance has to already be following them.

I would assume the same reason anyone chooses it over the fediverse, because they want their content to be easily discoverable.

A fediverse, but not the fediverse (ActivityPub/the one you’re on right now)

He’s a bot

That vast, vast majority of spam callers are operating out of illegal call centers in India, they’re spoofing phone numbers, and they could not care less that you’re on a do not call list.

For automating maintenance and updates? How exactly does it not?

Ansible.

Yeah people avoid pre ordering because they don’t want to signal to the publishers support for a game before they know it’ll be good. And that’s a perfectly valid reason not to pre order. But it’s also the only reason not to pre order, and it’s more political than practical.

They are all objectively practical, every single one. They are upsides without a downside. That being said, it’s ultimately your choice whether you choose practicality over the morals of the thing. If you want to choose not to preorder something just to send a message, I get it.

• You get content only available if you pre order
• You get early access to the game
• You get some amount of later expansion content for free
• you can preload the game so when it releases, you can just begin playing it.

There are lots of practical reasons TO preorder something, thought it’s not always all of those things. And you can both preorder something and “Wait for reviews” because the vast majority of the time, reviews release before a game releases.

For example, Civ 7 comes out on the 11th, if you pre order you get the benefit of getting to play it on the 6th, and the reviews for it all released today, the 3rd. That means I’ll know today if the game sucks and I can just… cancel my preorder if I wanted to. Then in a couple days I get to play the game early, so in case the reviews were all paid for I get to see for myself if I don’t like the game, and if I don’t like it, I can cancel my pre order.

In case I don’t cancel my pre order, I also save $10 on Civ packs I would otherwise be paying for. If I waited for release day to buy it, I’d lose out on the benefits of pre ordering, but gain nothing.

Yeah I’ll pre order any game that I plan on buying. There’s no practical reason not to.