I’ve done similar as well. My work gave me a real hard time with a grocery receipt, because there was a grocery store an easy walk from the hotel and I bought some deodorant or something along with some snacks and sandwich ingredients. It was maybe $30. My choices were don’t claim it or recalculate the cost without deodorant including tax from just the deodorant and write a memo detailing what meal(s) I was charging. I Also had to say why I wasn’t claiming certain meals (because leftovers, etc., I even had to have a meeting with the refund person because the company putting on the training fed us and I didn’t have receipts). After that I made sure I ordered as close to ~$43 as I could (meal plus 15% tip maxed out what I could claim) three times a day.

I also couldn’t order two appetizers or entrees without needing a memo and/or showing it was for the next meal because we couldn’t buy someone else food. Pizzas were never questioned beyond “you ate it all yourself?” though. I really like expensive pizza parlors when I’m traveling for work.

I believe it would have been winlink or amprnet. I think winlink really only does low bandwidth things like email and weather bulletins. Not sure about amprnet

There’s also that pesky low r/w bitrate.

You gave a snarky response implying that there aren’t ads on Ubuntu and they replied with confirmation from a developer that they’ll be forcing ads on ubuntu.

Are you still arguing that canonical isn’t serving ads on Ubuntu? Or are you just being an ass because you were proven wrong?

As far as I know, it isn’t illegal to attain or have media for personal use. It is illegal to circumvent DRM and to distribute the media.

So, for example, it isn’t illegal to record a stream. But the hoops you’d have to jump through in order to do so would end up circumventing DRM or with incredibly poor quality.

Well, if they didn’t push trash with their algorithms, maybe people would finish more videos.

It’s pretty wild. I have recently been ripping my DVD/Blu-ray collection and encoding them from a clean rip to my server. Encoding at 480p is perfectly acceptable if you’re starting with a high enough bitrate source. You can tell it’s 480p, but its so much better than Netflix’s absolute trash streams that will give you “UHD” at bitrates lower than a DVD. 360p does leave something to be desired, but they’re still perfectly watchable.

There are certainly shows and movies that deserve higher definition, but I’ve found that unless they’re from the ground up meant to be purely visually masterpieces, it’s better to have lower resolution and a matching bitrate than to ruin the experience with artifacts.

That’s only after taking away all the toys they pulled out instead of doing anything to get ready for the last 30 minutes.

I really like my synology DS216j. Pretty much all I use it for is as a file server and storage, mostly because it can’t really do much beyond that these days, but it sure does handle that like a champ. I’m not trying to run a business with multiple users on it, just me and the family, which means mostly just me and my projects. It was super easy to set up in my early days of home networking knowing that I wanted a central location for storing my files from different devices and holding my expanding media collection. I think I saw that it had been running for over a year (would have been several years, but we get power outages occasionally and it’s not on a UPS) without a restart when I increased my storage, and it’s been running without issue since 2017. I’m planning on upgrading to a device that has 4+ drives sometime soon to make expanding and redundancy easier to handle, but it’s a hard sell when this one is still chugging along.

I think it helps that I’ve always had a raspberry pi or other computer do the tasky things, so I never got entrenched in trying to make it do anything other than be a dlna/upnp server for media and shared file jockey for everything else.

Tar lzma nuts, amirite?