Media piracy cannot be stopped. Don’t forget there was media piracy before the internet too. But back then it was physical piracy, and somebody made money on another’s work. That kind of piracy will always be shut down, because it is actually stealing. The fat cats want their money.

But now we have a different kind. More like Robin Hood. Digital piracy takes something and copies it, giving it away for free. The biggest risk for piracy, is that the content holders offer their product at a price so low, it would be horribly inconvenient to pirate it. For example if Apple Music just had you pay a few pennies per song instead of monthly. You’d load up $20 and listen to a lot of music. If TV series offered ad-free streaming for like $0.25 per episode. If movies could be watched for $1. If academic journal articles could be accessed for $1.

But that will never happen. They’ve done the math. They make more money with subscriptions and pricing right at the edge of affordability for many. Why would they want to make less money?

Actually now that I’m thinking about it. The way for them to hurt piracy the most would be to give away low-bitrate copies of everything for free. Stream all the music you want at 96 kbps. Watch every TV series or movie at 480p. Download this ebook as a plain text file. Read this article with tiny thumbnail photos. Free version of game has low-res textures and 720p at 30fps. Even that wouldn’t end piracy, but it would be a lot less popular. It would be harder to find somebody to invest the time bypassing paywalls when you can read the text easily.

Anyway torrent cannot be stopped. It’s moving to onion and i2p, fully decentralized. There will be nobody to take down. Besides that there’s always independent nations who don’t care about digital piracy, who can host private trackers.

Non-tech. I decided to self host first to send media to my TV. I wanted an always-on solid state hard drive computer that didn’t have to do any transcoding. Tried DLNA but Emby just worked better. Jellyfin didn’t have an LG App at the time so I’m still using Emby. Eventually I also asked my poor ARM server with 2 GB of RAM to also run my wireless access points, but the Omada software is a resource hog. So I have a little Intel machine that can do Omada better and also transcoding for Emby on the go. And then I learned about HomeBridge and that’s been great too. I think together the two computers run about 15W of energy I could decommission the ARM one but it does a couple things I haven’t migrated yet. I’ve tried hosting other stuff but those are the main ones used every day.

Sounds good, best wishes bringing your game into cash flow. If you inspire others to be more active, you’ve already done a lot of good in the world.

I never played RuneScape, but I did just delete Pikmin Bloom. What if players cheat their steps? How will you detect the difference between that, and a Pacific Crest Trail thruhiker who legitimately walks 60,000 steps day after day, and over 1,000,000 steps per month?

Anyway your game sounds cool. I had an idea for a one player game while I was hiking the PCT - kinda like the Oregon trail, or dope wars, but it would be a simulation of the Pacific Crest Trail and the steps would be 1:1. So you’d have to walk 7 million steps to beat the game, and obviously make decisions along the way about food and water, weather, resting, hitchhiking, etc. But there will be long stretches of the game where you just look at a new vista, or look at the location, eat food, camp.

Anyway the reason I’m commenting is I wanted to tell you why I quit playing a walking game. I quit after a backpacking trip of 7 days with no service. When I came back, the game had nothing to do for my ~150,000 steps. No confetti or prizes. If I was actually playing it for any achievements it would be a setback to be offline for 7 days.

So yeah, if you have any players of your game who do serious miles in one day, or one week, or whatever, you should pile on the rewards. Because at the end of the day that’s all I want out of a game like that. An automated micro-recognition that I kicked ass. So I can relax my tired legs and use all my hard earned digital loot.

I would pay if à la carte was remotely economical. For example a digital DRM movie rental should cost $1 in whatever resolution, on any device capable of playing it. A TV show should cost like $5 for a season or $0.5 per episode. To rent, not to own of course. I don’t care about ownership. With that model I would probably end up spending like $10-15/month on media, but I would feel better about it knowing the studio could pay more to those specific individuals who worked on the programs I am enjoying.

A subscription is a blank check to the studio to make whatever they think draws in subscribers, and to pay everyone involved as little as possible with no bonuses for blockbusters.

Emby is a cousin of Jellyfin that supports DVR functionality. I have successfully recorded from IPTV streams, which shouldn’t be too different from a tuner card. The main thing is it needs to load the programming information from somewhere.

I was just thinking about this. Love these videos. Cooling of a solar panel is a good application, as long as it gets cold enough for long enough to re-solidify at night.

An alcohol/NaCl solution with a stabilizer can make an ice pack that freezes colder than water. That could be used to keep ice cream frozen in an ice chest.

It would be cool to have recipes for a few different temperatures. There’s a German company Qool Products that sells PCM temperature elements (ice packs), at a variety of temperatures, to store ice cream up to red wine/cellar temp in their ice chest. With some trial and error I guess we could now make our own!

I would probably do a one-time purchase but I don’t do subscriptions.

Piwigo is more like a shared gallery. Users create album/folders and upload individual photos, which other users can access. Piwigo has poor support for videos and no support for Live Photos.

Photoprism has only a single user for the free tier. It supports Live Photos and videos, and individual photo uploads. It does facial recognition tagging.

Immich supports video/Live Photos, facial recognition, and has multiple users, but it expects a full backup/synchronization (not individual photos). Sharing between users is manual, not automatic or permissions-based like Piwigo. Each user has access only to their own backups or shared albums.

In summary, I think Piwigo is the simplest to set up and use, but it doesn’t do much beyond photos - it’s a simple shared gallery. Photoprism is good and stable, but you have to pay a subscription for multiple user accounts. Immich is rapidly developing, which means things will break, but also it has the most features. My only issue with Immich is that I don’t want to use it as a backup - only as a “best of” shared gallery. While it’s possible with Immich, I would have to maintain an Immich album on my phone, and sync only that, and I would have to set up shares with other users manually.

Well at least all the international visitors wouldn’t be disappointed with the dry cliffs.

There’s already a dam at Hetch Hetchy. All they need now is some pumps and pipes to bring more tourists to Yosemite Valley in Summer.

Two hours outside per day for children.

I think it would be cool if you were writing a ransom note on your computer, if the paper clip popped up and said, ‘Looks like you’re writing a ransom note. Need help? You should use more forceful language, you’ll get more money.’

-Demetri Martin, 2007

I’ve been using Piwigo for the past 4 years. The video plugin kinda half works (breaks during upgrades, doesn’t work on Android). It would be cool if Live Photos end up supported, as that’s my main reason for trying out alternatives. But since Live Photos are part video, which itself doesn’t work, I’m not holding my breath.

Yes but in Immich each user has their own independent album/gallery, whereas Piwigo is a single gallery with different access rights to users.

Piwigo supports multiple users with different access rights, while Immich does not. Immich supports videos and Live Photos while Piwigo does not. Piwigo is a php application and can be installed by ftp on a basic web server and database (same requirements as Wordpress), while Immich requires a docker container. Both Piwigo and Immich have phone apps, but they differ in functionality. Piwigo is set up to upload individual photos while Immich is set up to backup ALL of your photos.

Here are my tick tips.

• Do not wear denim or yoga pants. Wear some kind of water repellent type of polyester hiking pant from REI. Ticks can’t jump they have to grab on. They can’t grab onto slick pants that don’t have holes.
• Use trekking poles to whack any grass before you brush your leg against it. They get really excited when something touches their blade of grass and they let go and fall to the ground. You don’t have to whack it hard. Whack it gently.
• Keep your eyes open. They aren’t too hard to spot on a blade of grass. They don’t jump. Take a close look.
• Ticks can be higher up than grass. When you see ticks don’t walk through manzanita or other shrubs, getting stuff in your hair.
• Should go without saying but stay on the trail.

At this point I basically need to do 25 Google searches to find what I’m looking for anyway. This is a stupid comparison. When I eat cabbage and beer my digestive tract releases more GHGs than my whole day of using ChatGPT (zero). I just need to figure out how to harvest and burn my own methane so I can do more ChatGPT queries guilt-free.

An app called Lamucal can make them for you, lyrics and all.

An older app (now defunct), can be found on archive.org, called Riffstation, can do the chords.

Once you have a version of your song you can put it in an app called JustChords. This app will store, display, and transpose your songs. It also has a search feature to pull tabs from other sources.

I agree with your criticisms of BitTorrent vs older P2P sharing. The closest successor I know of might be Tribler. I haven’t used it so I don’t know how the uploads are - and it still has many drawbacks/inefficiencies relating to hashing/duplication because it’s torrent-based. But it does contain search, and the ability to share without a website indexing it. It’s kind of like eMule: torrent/tor edition?