Makes sense. Pathfinder already shifted over to Ancestries in their 2nd Edition. Paizo has a pretty good history of representation and sensitivity to stuff like this though.

It’s not Jellyfin, but here’s my N100 simultaneously doing two 4K HDR transcodes with tone mapping enabled. Neither stream had buffering.

So it’s definitely a capable chip, but might be dependent on transcode settings.

Oh I know, but my thermostat and a handful of other devices are Zwave, so for me specifically it’s probably not worth changing things up at this time.

That does also look like a good option. In my case, I have a Pi 4 running both zigbee2mqtt and zwave-js-ui using connected Zigbee and Zwave USB dongles placed centrally in the house (Eclipse mosquitto is running on a separate 3-server cluster). I’ve only briefly searched, but network zwave controllers seem to be much less common or more expensive, so I probably wouldn’t benefit much from changing my Zigbee controller at the moment.

Nginx is a lot less painful if you use Nginx Proxy Manager. You get a nice GUI and can easily get SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt, including wildcard certs. I’m running it in front of a docker swarm and 3 other servers, and in most cases, it takes me about 30 seconds to add a new proxy host and set it up with https using my *.domain.com wildcard cert. I also use it with Authentik as a forward proxy auth for SSO (since many containers out there don’t have the best security).

It’s good to be cautious about nonprofit organizations, but in the case of DSI, they’ve been around a while, have a good reputation, and score well on third-party sites like Charity Navigator.

I’d also like to make clear that their Dark Sky Sanctuary certification isn’t a scientific one based solely on light pollution, but also that the local/state/etc governments have implemented certain policies to help ensure the area remains a dark sky area. It’s best to think of it akin to something like a designated “wilderness” or “wildlife sanctuary” area, but for starry skies. Because DSI works with governments to certify these areas, you’re right that certain regions are likely to be more represented, and some not represented at all due to geographic and political barriers.

P.S. I’m not affiliated with DSI, but have used their accreditations in the past to pick wilderness areas to visit for hiking/camping/photography.

They do accreditations internationally too, though you’re almost certainly right that some locations aren’t as represented, especially since it requires communication and cooperation with the governments for these areas.

This is the way. I’ve had absolutely zero issues with my Hue bulbs directly connected to a USB Zigbee controller and running zigbee2mqtt. With Zigbee bindings to smart switches, they respond practically instantly as well whenever we decide to control them that way.

Traditionally in systems like D&D and Pathfinder, Wisdom is more representative of inherent common sense, awareness, and intuition and Intelligence representative of the ability to reason and learn. What actually represents accumulated knowledge is your bonus in the related skill, which is a combination of ranks (representative of time spent training/studying that skill) plus inherent bonus (in the case of knowledge, usually Intelligence since Int is representative of your ability to learn).

Some skills end up seeming like they should be a bit of both though. For example, Healing/Medicine requires knowledge of anatomy, ailments, treatments, etc (which would be Int aligned) but actually diagnosing and using it requires perception to recognize symptoms and often some intuitive choices about how best to treat ailments (which is more Wisdom aligned). It’s simpler to just pick one, and often Wisdom is chosen to avoid too many things being Int.

The only way I see a company like this having “significant economic harm” from you not using their free app is if 1) they eventually plan to charge a fee to use the app or 2) they profit from data their app collects about you (third party data sales, for example).

Not something I’m interested in either way, so they’ve lost a potential customer.

That’s a good point I hadn’t considered from a legal standpoint before. I believe there’s also some network media players out there that can load up iso files, so in theory you could have a library of iso files that you load up as if you were playing the disc, complete with menus and all.

I have no idea if this is any better from a legal standpoint though, since you’d still be using what I assume is unauthorized software to bypass the DVD and Blu-ray encryption whenever you play the iso.

Long story short, they really need to carve out a DMCA exception for this specific conflicting case (which they’ve done for other conflicting situations), but I suspect there’s some strong lobbying against it by interested parties…

That one certainly came to mind. ;)

Yup. “Buying” a movie online is a grift, since all you’re actually doing is buying a license to stream as long as they decide they want to host it. Companies can, and have, removed movies people have bought because of things like studio distribution agreements expiring.

My dream would be for UHD Blu-ray quality (or better) DRM-free digital movie purchases, much like you already can with high res music. But until that becomes a thing, I’ll be buying a physical copy of any movies or shows that I want to own (rather than rent).

Nah. I’m sure there are multiple factors, as mentioned in the article, but another big thing preserving physical media is home theater enthusiasts. With a good system, the higher bitrate video and lossless audio on a UHD Blu-ray is noticable compared to most streamed content.

Even better, have a NAS with a raid array and data scrubbing for your primary storage, and periodically make backups to off-site storage (an off-site NAS or external hard drive are good options that don’t rely on commercial cloud services).

SD cards are far worse than hard drives or SSDs for long term storage. They are useful for temporary mobile data storage and transit, but anything you want to keep long term should be transferred off relatively quickly.

In the US, my understanding is that there’s a weird catch-22 where it’s legal to make digital copies of media you own for personal use thanks to Fair Use laws, but it’s illegal to break copy protection under DMCA law. So you end up unable to exercise your right to copy DVDs and Blu-ray discs because they have copy protection, but it’s perfectly legal to copy music CDs for personal use because they don’t have copy protection.

Personally, I find it extremely unlikely you’ll get jailed or fined for ripping your discs for personal use. It’s only if you start redistributing it that you increase your likelihood of legal problems.

This. Plus, if you beat the DC by 10 or more, you get a Critical Success or if you fail by 10 or more you get a Critical Failure, regardless of the dice roll.

And for opposed skill checks only the player/NPC taking the action rolls a d20, and that’s compared against the opposing skill DC (10 + Skill Bonus). This streamlines play and reduces random variability.

So in the example here, only the rogue would have rolled the natural 1 and added 26 for a 27. The paladin’s Perception DC would be 16, so the Rogue beat it by 11 and it’d normally be a Critical Success. But since it was a natural 1, the Critical Success is reduced to a Success. They still succeeded at deception, but not quite as well as they could have.

Yup. I seem to remember most mainstream albums were around $15-20 in the 1990s. Adjusted for inflation, that’d be about $28-37 today.

My understanding is that, currently, a PIN or password is protected. So if you secure your phone with one of those, access to it is under 4th amendment protection. Given this, I’m curious how passkey legality would work out since it’s a physical key, but access to use it would still require a knowledge element.