I got invited to see a NIN show recently, which was very kind of them.
The process of actually getting in, post-invite, was a bit of a weird experience: Waiting around at the front of the venue, meeting some of his PR folks, walking all the way around the outside to go in the back door to get escorted in. At one point we were given some armbands so we could do what we wanted as if we were regular concert-goers and they turned us loose.
Anyway, as we were walking around that huge place and chatting, one of them (Marcus?) asked me how I got interested in Nine Inch Nails.
And the first thing that came that came out of my mouth was "It is entirely possible that I banned Trent Reznor from IRC 30 years ago."
The response was immediate: "Never tell him that."
Anyhow, the crew that I met were all a bunch of great folks. Wonderful positivity, fun to talk to. 10/10.
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(Now, you might be wondering why I banned Trent from #nin. That's easy: We banned everyone in that channel who said they were Trent Reznor. There's only one Trent, and these imposters showed up all the time so we did the right thing and got rid of them.
Except... I read an interview with him way back then, where he was asked specifically about IRC. His response was something like "Yeah, I tried IRC once and they banned me right away. Those guys are a bunch of dicks."
I mostly wrote a story about a concert. It was an amazing concert. I also wrote a missive about banning Trent Reznor from IRC three decades ago.
At the show, the music was good (of course it was -- I like NIN and have for decades), but the musicality of its performance was also very good. They all played it both with expert precision, and a great deal of passion. The endurance was staggering. And the technicals -- the management of different spaces (3 stages!), the PA, the lights, effects, video projections -- they all combined to alter my perspective of what is possible in a temporary, physical performance space.
I love going to concerts, big and small. This was my 4th NIN show. I've never been to any concert like that before.
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Anyway, you've already elected to change channels. So let's change channels.
You think Pretty Hate Machine was the embodiment of everything that Trent Reznor ever learned, or performed?
How does Broken fit into that picture? (It's very different, to me.)
How does the period-correct Purest Feeling fit into it? (It's very similar, but the horns are a bit much.)
How do the various Ghosts albums fit in there?
How do the rest of them?
What fits together, and what falls apart?
Please elaborate. While I'm not a musician and I don't have the background to dissect it myself, I do appreciate the elaborations of technical makeups of music when those who can take it apart elect to do so.
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The dude, Trent Reznor, has been publishing recorded music since 1989. I find the claim that it's all the same to be pretty extraordinary. I think that satisfaction of that claim would require extraordinary proof. (And I welcome that proof.)
I watched a backup of a [480p24] DVD movie with a (hacked) Wii quite a long time ago, as a fallback after the PS3 I was using got tripped up on that film's Cinavia[1] watermarks.
The Wii worked OK-ish, but it was evident that it was barely keeping up with decoding the MPEG 2 video from the disc and putting it on the screen. Perhaps there is or was better software for that job, but there were some glitches and brief hangs.
Get your elderly mother an Apple TV and infuse, then connect with Tailscale. It’s pretty friggin’ smooth in daily operation. Apple TV’s UI is no easier to get lost in than Roku, and actually has fewer pitfalls if you toggle one setting (the one that makes one home tap open the Apple TV app, and a second press while in that app actually go home, by default; switch that to always go home on any press of that button no matter what)
I dunno if Tailscale works on Roku but otherwise that would indeed be entirely viable too, last I saw Jellyfin’s app on there is really good. Likely need a server powerful enough to transcode, though, lots of (all?) Roku devices don’t have hardware decoding for newer codecs like h.265. That’s one big benefit of an Apple TV, it can hardware decode damn near everything.
But she likes the Roku. She's even got silicone skins for the remotes (plural; spares!), and two of them are tethered near the chairs that her and dad tend to sit in.
Also: The Roku stuff already exists, and is paid for, and it works with Plex (without a VPN, because my local Plex container didn't come with the caveat to avoid exposing it to the world).
Buying them one or more Apple TV devices to use instead seems expensive and likely to fail somehow.
Switching them to (cheap? linux?) PCs also sounds expensive and bad, particularly with my dad. He's certainly had more years to learn how to use a computer than I have, but he's spent most of the recent decades deliberately avoiding them. He hates them, and he doesn't want to learn them. He'd fall apart and give up on television entirely if I gave him a PC with a slick Logitech K400 to run it with. (He can drive a Roku with Youtube TV and Plex like a pro, but that's mostly only a D-pad and a back button.)
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But since you and others have mentioned it: Transcoding. That's really not a big problem for many vaguely-recent PCs. With Plex, at least: The quite old i7-6700k desktop box I use for this transcodes to h.264 like a beast using its paltry iGPU, and does h.265 just fine with an old nVidia RTX 2080 if I elect to use that instead. Either way works well and never breaks a sweat.
It may have been a powerful machine a decade ago, but a used computer with a 6700k (or so) to serve media with is cheap these days. (And a brand-new power-sipping N150 box does transcoding waaaay better, even in credit-card form factor.)
Sad to hear about people getting stuck in weak ecosystems.
By the way, I switched from Jellyfin to plain SMB + Nova Player (Android), which has basically the same interface, but no user profiles, and works over SMB, obviously. No transcoding, best format support, and best performance for large files I've found yet for my TCL Android TV.
I mean, for my TV at home where everything is connected with a gigabit LAN, I usually use Kodi on a Pi4, over SMB, with a Logitech KT400 to drive it from wherever I feel like sitting.
It's silent, reasonably self-contained, and is appliance-like to get going (just dump OpenELEC onto an SD card, plug everything in, and then simply begin using it).
Plus, there's two HDMI outputs: One that connects directly to the the dumb TV and sends only video, while the other sends only lossless PCM audio to the once-rather-high-end AV receiver (that gets choked up on more-modern HDMI bitrates).
And that's great for me at my house, with my pile of gear, and with my technical proclivities.
But I'm not my mom, and this isn't my mom's house. :)
I use Jellyfin and when it works it’s great but a few small things make it totally unusable for a non-technical family member.
One thing is when it can’t see the server it doesn’t just say it can’t see it, it acts like the issue is you’re not logged in and then when you log in (having to type your password manually each time, on a TV) it then fails.
This is only really diagnosable if you can access both the client and server and is a complete failure and very tedious experience if you only have client access.
Feels like I experience this at least once a month so couldn’t ever set this up for family members remotely.
I set my dad up with a Linux box as a daily driver for him - he keeps the desktop on , and the roku jellyfin now has a clean proxy into jellyfin over the tailscale network. Giving him a desktop I can remote into was a great decision that paid dividends for him :)
You can point Tailscale toward a $5 exit-node VPS and Caddy/nginx through a cheapo-but-memorable-domain to get a Jellyfin Dashboard up in a browser. I assume running the domain and port through the Jellyfin Roku app would work fine (can't be sure as I've never used a Roku).
It needs more of the feature that makes it a networked player for the media I already have (which works great -- once a person gets to it), and less of the misfeature that is the sideshow also-ran ad-supported and rental live streaming and on-demand offerings (which I will never, ever use -- and that Jellyfin lacks altogether).
Plex been swinging in the wrong direction for a number of years now.
It worked fine until it got to the point where it showed me how many tax dollars I contributed in 2025, and had a little popup fade in (and disappear again) that said "Swipe to continue"
That was the end of the road for me. It was impossible to proceed further.
(These UI non-elements can all go die in a fire together.)
Interestingly, the Nakamichi Dragon is/was a cassette deck that can do automatic azimuth adjustment on playback -- without having recorded tones to work with.
In loose terms: It does this with a special read head that splits one of the recorded tracks into 2 distinct signals (for a total of 3 signals from 1 stereo recording). The split tracks' signals are compared, and it adjusts the azimuth (by minutely rotating the head) until the signals from the split track match most-perfectly.
(Take note of the pictures of the machine. If anyone finds one sitting around at a flea market or in a forgotten pile of old junk, please rescue it. Nothing like this will ever be manufactured again. Even if the condition is "it looks like someone went after it with a big hammer as part of their anger management process," the bits that remain still have significant value and are easy to sell.)
I'm glad you called out the Dragon. Besides being an impressive piece of engineering, it's a beautiful piece of art. One of the most striking pieces of consumer electronics I've ever seen.
There's a Kroger grocery store near my house. It's very convenient -- I'm near it almost every day I'm alive. They have all kinds of things there, including factory-made bread and factory-made eggs.
There's also a tiny little Amish bakery that I know of. They make all kinds of things there, but the most interesting to me are the loaves of plain white bread that they bake every day (except Sunday) in their wood-fired oven. It is not near to me and is also off the beaten path a good bit, but I try to make a point to go there when I'm in the area. I usually just get a loaf of that plain white bread along with a dozen eggs from the chickens that they have roaming around outside eating bugs.
I wouldn't call any aspect of it artisanal or anything like that, but it's definitely not made by machines.
And for reasons I can't really rationalize or explain, I enjoy having things from the Amish bakery in my kitchen more than I do the superficially similar things that I get from Kroger.
And yet: I usually eat the factory stuff from Kroger. On a strictly functional basis it's about the same to me.
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Anyway: Software. Did a bot write it? Did a person? Was it a combined effort? Does it even matter?
I can accept that folks might prefer to have software in their library that is written by people. My acceptance of this does not require them to rationalize their preference, or for me to agree with it or even understand it.
It's fine when someone cares about that kind of thing. And it's fine if they don't care, too.
We're allowed to like what we like. It's good to have options, and it's OK to prefer one way over another.
> Does not specify if it's vibe coded or not, which I think should be normal practice now
I am trying to say that when people freely share software with the world, I do not think you are entitled to try to add conditions. People are free to share whatever they like, in the conditions they like - in this case the MIT license. Everybody else is free to take the code AS IS.
There is a difference between a commercial transaction and software which is shared without any expectations in return. With software shared without any expectations in return. I don’t believe that we should be trying to create normal practices on top of existing licences or trying to specify under what conditions somebody can share something
> It's fine when someone cares about that kind of thing. And it's fine if they don't care, too.
> We're allowed to like what we like. It's good to have options, and it's OK to prefer one way over another.
I agree and never said anything different, but if somebody wants to share under different conditions, then their conditions will always trump yours
If it's free (libre) software, then it is shared freely. Others are free to take and use it. They can also change it; they don't have to accept it as it is. The existing code can be molded to be something different, or the ideas copied and used in some new implementation.
We're free to hype it up and become huge supporters. We're free to be critical and dismissive of of it. We're free talk about these things.
We're even free to leave the software where it is and walk away from it while bitching and moaning the entire time we do so.
People aren't beholden to the author, and the author isn't beholden to the end-user. We're all mutually free of those kinds of chains.
> Does not specify if it's vibe coded or not, which I think should be normal practice now
That's just a preferential statement wrapped up in a critical package. It could be stated with a greater abundance of tact, but it's no better nor worse than stating "Doesn't have a GPL-compatible license, which I think should be normal practice now".
But the things from that bakery are made as the product of a soulless megacorp. The process may occur in-store, but it is prescribed from on-high, not invented or tweaked locally. And bread from the Kroger bakery costs more to buy than bread from this Amish bakery does.
So for those reasons, and some others that I could probably never properly articulate, having bread from the Kroger bakery in my kitchen does not enhance my joy. It instead diminishes it.
Personal preferences can be weird. In this instance, I prefer to actively avoid things from the Kroger bakery.
All we really have to look forward to in the future of increasing-performance personal computing is doing the same things as yesterday, but doing them faster.
The future after today will probably turn out more interesting than that, of course, but we can't know that until it happens.
And the future after 1988 certainly turned out to be a very interesting time in computing -- but they had no idea what was in store. Perhaps you can use your time machine to go back and let them know?
The process of actually getting in, post-invite, was a bit of a weird experience: Waiting around at the front of the venue, meeting some of his PR folks, walking all the way around the outside to go in the back door to get escorted in. At one point we were given some armbands so we could do what we wanted as if we were regular concert-goers and they turned us loose.
Anyway, as we were walking around that huge place and chatting, one of them (Marcus?) asked me how I got interested in Nine Inch Nails.
And the first thing that came that came out of my mouth was "It is entirely possible that I banned Trent Reznor from IRC 30 years ago."
The response was immediate: "Never tell him that."
Anyhow, the crew that I met were all a bunch of great folks. Wonderful positivity, fun to talk to. 10/10.
---
(Now, you might be wondering why I banned Trent from #nin. That's easy: We banned everyone in that channel who said they were Trent Reznor. There's only one Trent, and these imposters showed up all the time so we did the right thing and got rid of them.
Except... I read an interview with him way back then, where he was asked specifically about IRC. His response was something like "Yeah, I tried IRC once and they banned me right away. Those guys are a bunch of dicks."
Whoops.)
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