For certain cats, shelters do more harm than good, unfortunately. One of mine was a stray and we went through the formal process of taking her to the local shelter (pound) to confirm she didn’t have an owner and get her checked out, etc., stating that we clearly wanted to adopt her if she had no owner. She went backward in the shelter (they flagged her as having “behavioural issues” - she initially started to warm to staff, but then became very withdrawn and defensive after they tried to wash her chin and stayed that way, apparently). She steadily recovered when we brought her home (no doubt being in a familiar place helped), although it took years for her to get used to strangers and her to stop responding to a couple of trauma triggers we were able to identify (I don’t know what happened to her in her first few years of life).

To this day we’re not sure whether they would have tried to adopt her out if we hadn’t been so keen to take her. She has never been hostile towards us and her default is to run and hide if anything disturbs her (so on the rare occasion I get scratched if something startles her whilst she’s on my lap or I’m holding her).

I wish you all the best with Maylin and hope that, with time, she’ll improve.

For games, perhaps, but I would have to disagree for HD & 4K video. Streaming and digital downloads rarely match the bitrate and quality you can get from a properly-authored BD or UHD disc, especially paired with the right player.

Thanks for the explanation, much appreciated.

Ah, that makes more sense. At least they’re retraining the staff, but I have to wonder if they offered the factory as part of the sale to TCL (If they did, why did TCL decline? If not, why not, if they’re now needing to retrain and repurpose the plant?)

So, they’re producing over 200 million discs a year, with 50% of that being for Playstation and 20% new orders currently, but want to kill that market? The projections of reduced disc production seem to be a clear result of Sony’s decision to stop making games on physical media, not a dying market. I have to wonder if the problem is that the market isn’t growing fast enough for Sony.

Ironically I wasn’t able to get EAC working on my Windows 10 installation due to the WinFSP clash, whilst CUERipper errors out on WINE (something to do with how it interacts with the ODD).

However, CUETools works fine and so I was able to compare the same CD ripped by CUETools/CUERipper on Windows with EAC under WINE. I used an ABBA CD as the test case (100+ matches in CTDB, 10+ in AccurateRip).

The CUE sheets are functionally identical (barring the differences in extra metadata stored between the two, as CUERipper included the IRSC where EAC has a Composer comment instead) – the gaps and indices are all the same. The raw rip itself is also identical - I ripped the CD to a disc image (with offset correction in both cases) and the md5 checksum of the WAV file from both applications is the same.

In both tools the rip validated against AccurateRip and CUETools DB as well. I double-checked the EAC rip afterwards using CUETools (again under WINE), as a further test.

Finally got around to testing out EAC on WINE (prompted by my previous comment a few hours ago).

It seems to work without major issues on WINE 11 in a 32-bit prefix (at least on LMDE 7). Plugins need dotnet20 and dotnet48 installed, otherwise only the in-built AccurateRip meta engine shows up. I’ve only tested ripping to WAVE and FLAC, though.

In short, I’d say it’s worth a try now.

I’ve been looking into this myself recently. EAC still seems to be the top option (followed by CUERipper/CUETools). CUETools itself runs under WINE, but CUERipper doesn’t (at least for me). Haven’t tried EAC on WINE yet.

https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Comparison_of_CD_rippers

Exactly. The fact that “AI” has now been almost completely associated with LLMs is incredibly frustrating.

I use the last supported version of LineageOS on my old Note 3 (Lineage 18.1 / Android 11) as a spare device around the house. Always meant to try building a newer version but never got around to it, and it’s not as though the phone ever ventures outside my LAN anyway (mostly acts as an alarm clock + media player these days).

Lineage itself is still active.

Older devices do eventually have support dropped by Lineage, but depending on which version of the G7 you have it looks like it may still be supported (note that discontinued devices are filtered by default, so you have to change the filter setting to see previously supported devices): https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

Hibernation technically does this to any SSD. It’s not just Windows 11.

Writing the entire contents of RAM to disk increases the wear on the SSD. The risk goes up if your SSD is nearly full and wear-levelling has to move more data around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification#Wear_leveling

I’ve been using it for years too. Can recommend.

Good to know, thanks.

You can indeed: https://tailscale.com/docs/integrations/identity

Not usually. More likely to be considered a bit odd or eccentric (occasionally called OCD even though I’m technically not, I just can be rather pedantic or particular in certain contexts).

Yes. I’ve been aware of that I was different pretty much my entire life.

That sounds like it may be a good fit for my use case, then. Thanks again and I’ll definitely look into it!

Thanks for the suggestion. I’m trying to move away from Google, but the idea of a shared account for tailscale (which seems to support a lot of different SSO options) may be useful.

Good to know, thanks. Not keen on Cloudflare, so it’s good to see that there’s now multiple recommendations for Pangolin and Tailscale in this thread.

I agree completely. But as a first step (especially since they do seem to have a keyword filter in place), “no restrictions” (or “no censorship” as the case is for the last image) seems like a very obvious phrase to include.