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git-annex is something to consider too. It's kind of like git LFS in that it doesn't directly store files in the git repo (so the files can be enormous or change frequently without all the overhead of commits in git), but it's more flexible and allows you to direct the files to be stored and retrieved from many different types of file stores (network drives, piles of discs/burned CDs/USB drives, S3 storage, etc.). Basically throw all your music files wherever you want, tell git-annex where they live, and then ask it what music you want on what machines and it will do the rest to go figure out what needs to happen to materialize those files in the right locations.

I'd be leery of storing the music files in a git repo directly as MP3 tags and metadata are a wild west and some music players do wacky things like update ID3 tags with play counts, etc. on every listen (which would require committing and pushing music on every listen!).


anecdote but last year I sunk three solid weekends into trying to make git-annex work to sync my files between devices, and was defeated. it is such a fucking incomprehensible buggy pain in the ass.

I settled on syncthing instead. it has given me few troubles.


If SyncThing works for your use case, I agree that you should choose it over git-annex. However, git-annex is also much more flexible than SyncThing.

For example, if you want to protect your music collection from accidental changes and are willing to use it manually from the command line, git-annex will work better. Or when I used it for my music, I had a branch for all my lossless files, and then a separate branch for curated and transcoded files that I used for syncing to devices with less disc space. (Perhaps not the most useful example, but the point is that there are a bunch of git-annex workflows that have no parallel in SyncThing or similar tools.)


>if you want to protect your music collection from accidental changes and are willing to use it manually from the command line, git-annex will work better.

that's what plain old backups are for, surely? if I screw something up I can just restore from backup.

and anyway this is just not something that has ever caused me a problem in the first place. how often do you even do something that has a chance of fucking up your music collection in particular?


It's not always obvious when music players are changing the metadata of your files vs storing stuff in some other database.


Mine has learned exactly what corners to yell into such that their cry/meow echoes and reverberates everywhere so it can't be ignored. It's kind of impressive how smart and adaptable cats are, lol.


Is there some kind of bug or issue with HN comments? Maybe a bug in a client people are using? I've noticed over the last couple days what appear to be comments like this one above that are completely unrelated to the post. It almost seems like they were made in error or associated with the wrong post.


It’s probably referencing the “iron” in Ironman. So it’s not attached the wrong story. It’s just an off-topic, nonsensical unfunny attempt at a joke.


I honestly thought it was amusing. Finding humour in disaster is comforting.

My mom passed away a week ago. She was an adventurer, and known to travel to unpredictable remote places on very short notice. I prefer to say, half jokingly, she just left for her next adventure.


I've also noticed playback of DVDs is terrible these days too. Long ago I ripped my DVD collection to iso files so I could preserve the full experience of the menus, etc. But almost nothing these days supports DVD iso playback and menus, not even VLC! The only software I can get to work to play them is Kodi. It's wild how much DVD software has disappeared, I don't remember it being this bad 20 years ago.


Same here. I've once `dd`'d a VideoCD into a `*.iso` file and there's seemingly no app that can read it now. VLC only detects the video stream and plays whatever frames it can decode, but since it's mixed with CD layout and filesystem stuff, it's rather garbled.

I can't mount the file and also can't find any software that can make sense out of the raw CD sectors. Very strange.


VLC does support DVD menus... maybe not from iso, but you can play ripped DVDs with menus from VIDEO_TS folders.

Why you'd want DVD menus in the first place, though...


Mount the ISO as a drive and play it ? It's a double click worth of effort on windows, and probably one mount call away on linux


I was trying to play it on Android devices and can't mount it unfortunately.


What about mpv? I don't have a DVD iso to test at the moment..


In my experience mpv and VLC will handle .IFO files in DVD’s VIDEO_TS folder structure just fine.

You could open the .VOB files directly, but that’s more cumbersome.


There's mention of it in the DMCA if I remember correctly. It says DRM can be cracked if something isn't available to be sold anymore or something similar: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dmca-game-preservation-exemp...


You definitely should, I know some folks that keep their huge TV on 24/7 because they like the pretty screensaver and photos it shows when idle. These same folks take a lot of other steps in their life to try to help the environment (recycle, drive electric cars, etc) but simple stuff like turning things off completely confounds them.


I'm a Brit. We don't have air con by default. For a few years me and the wife had Floridian relos (Coral Springs). We visited in summer and the house is about 17C (65F). Outside it is at least 35C (95F). The air con unit in the garage is pissing water everywhere and under quite some load.

I did ask why they kept the house so cold and was told "because we can". I got it: they had a really hard start off in life and were now able, through parental sacrifices etc, and their own hard work, be able to basically show off and keep their house cold in summer. I've seen the same in TX - my brother worked for EDS near Fort Worth a while back (20 years back). The attitude is the same there and again, I understand the individual stories of being able to conquer something that they could not growing up. Obviously you also get the "because we can" from multi millionaires too but for what sounds like a different reason but is really the same.

In the UK we constantly get badgered about water use. The fucking stuff falls out of the sky with monotonous regularity. The place is a series of islands. The Atlantic is off to the left and that's a lot of water. What is really wrong is our management of the stuff. There is rather a lot of technical debt in our water management system and it will need real money to fix.

Faffing about a TV isn't going to save the world - that bollocks is for politicians and fossil fuel companies to victim shame consumers instead of giving a shit.

A TV uses eleccy and that can be solar/wind/unicorn farts or good old fashioned gas or liquidised puppies.

My home's underfloor heating is eleccy and hence seriously expensive but I am told that my supplier - Shell Energy - only uses renewables to deliver it (Shell? RLY?). I originally signed up with a "green" supplier but they went bust along with a few other shyster energy suppliers hereabouts when the shit really hit the fan. Ukraine invasion nightmare. OPEC opportunistically taking the piss as usual and massive companies filling their boots post a pandemic.

I can almost feel the pain in Saudi and Shell.


Fun fact: average household electricity consumption in Florida is among the lowest in the US. [1] This is because heating generally requires more power than air-con, and indeed, the average British home uses 12,000 kWh on heating, vs. on the order of 8,000 for air-conditioning the the average Florida home. This is despite Florida using 4x more power for air-con than the US average, and that the average Florida home is a lot larger than an average UK home.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/reports/2009/sta...


Actually, your reference [1] states the opposite: Florida's "annual electricity expenditures are 40% more than the U.S. average"... which is caused by air conditioning.

I think you meant to state that Florida's energy (not electricity) expenditures are amongst the lowest in the US.


Sorry, you're right: FL has low energy consumption but high electricity consumption. The point still stands though, it's still better for the environment to live in FL and use air-con than to live in the UK and heat your house through the winter.


This is kind of messed up as it makes global warming cheap to avoid the felt effects


Wow, I had no idea Floridians cared so much about the environment.


Neither did they!


A typical 55” TV uses ~100 watts. That’s roughly 10 LED bulbs. That’s ~900 KWh/year

A Tesla model S has between 60-100kwH battery depending on the model.

So a TV can be powered for 1/10th-1/20th a year with one Tesla charge.

In the US, our electricity generated ~0.85lbs of carbon emissions per kWh. Some places (California) can run part of the day entirely renewably. The EPA says a gallon of gas generates 20 lbs of carbon. A single car tank of 20g generates 400lbs, while a Tesla would generate 85lbs, and a year of TV would generate 765lbs. a model s Tesla has a 400m range, while the average American car has 22mpg, so that’s why I picked a 20g tank.

If running the TV 24/7 stops 2 trips a year by making the home more pleasant, it’s a carbon positive. If those same people who like the “pretty photos” drive an electric car, each “tank equivalent” is 1/8th a year of TV.


My country (just to the north of yours) produced ~0.0551lbs of carbon emissions per kWh. That works out to less than 50lbs, less than a Tesla charge for you.

I certainly don't have my TV on all the time, but I don't think much of my energy consumption as it is predominantly renewable and ultimately the superfluous usage is negated by any unnecessary driving due to my car's combustion engine. If anything, the larger concern is almost always expense, as prices here are roughly the same as there.

I don't have much of a point to make, just thought it was interesting to compare. My peers and I are pretty worried about the situation in the US, though.


> My peers and I are pretty worried about the situation in the US, though

TBH I'm not too worried. Not in the head-in-sand way, but in the optimism of the future way. The US largely has issues with coordination but tends to lurch in the right direction on things like this once momentum builds. The economics of it will inevitably lead to the healthy outcome, and enough people care to pressure big industries (slowly...). We've been rapidly converting to renewable energy lately, so we're starting to make big moves in the right direction. Thankfully we're a rich nation, and somehow have endless money to burn. It's hard to coordinate, since we have a geographically large nation to power, and an unfathomable appetite to use energy.

I'm jealous of your nation, which seems to have a sensible populace and leadership, relatively high wealth, and a relatively constrained geography with ample sources of power.


For reference, the OLED LG G3 55-inch TV is rated for a power consumption of 375 W, but that rating typically indicates a worst case scenario (eg. maximum brightness, all-white screen, loudest volume, etc). So your 100 W figure is probably about right.


What’s the relative impact of a mile driven vs. an hour of the tv being on?

Edit: Hmmm. According to gpt-4, the average TV would incur about .02 kg of CO2 per hour of usage, assuming a typical electrical grid mix in the US. While it estimates that driving 1 mile emits avout 0.1 kg of CO2.

If that’s the case, 5 hours of TV is roughly equal 1 mile of driving. Interesting.

Of course, if the grid has a higher percentage of renewables or the car is electric, that changes things.


A year of an Energy Star-rated TV being on for 5 hours a day is equivalent to charging a Tesla Model 3 once.


A 26” TV or an 80”?


How much does turning the TV off reduce energy consumption? I know some appliances waste nearly as much power in "standby" mode as they do during operation.


And during the times of the year when you heat the house, it’s often basically a wash - the energy goes into heat anyway.


Unless you are heating the house with a heat pump.


Counter-argument:

Beauty and art are important for human welfare and are worth spending resources on.


Counter-counter-argument:

Neither beauty nor art are available through Netflix's streaming platform.


Solid argument


Hang a freaking painting or photo.


Do you have any idea how much CO2 it takes to create and hang a painting or photo?


I assume that you incur the cost once and amortise it over the life of the photo/painting.


Still wasteful and frivolous. Imagine how many more people the globe could support if we stopped being so greedy and thoughtless with entertaining ourselves.


I think of it more like MS Access but a sane backend of sqlite and python. There are thousands and thousands of critical business processes cludged together in Excel and Access--datasette could be a much better choice for those use cases. Something both devs and business people can use.


Yeah Access is a really interesting comparison (Datasette has quite a way to go on that front).

I find it baffling that Microsoft haven't invested more in Access. The world needs a truly great desktop/mobile database solution! Excel isn't enough.

Regular human beings should be able to point a full database at their own problems.


Check out Grist in the ‘Access with sane backend’ space. SQLite, open source and fantastic UX https://www.getgrist.com/ and https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core

I use and love both Datasette and Grist - they’re complementary.


Totally agree, so many things people get strong feelings about customizing workflows--note taking, todo lists, personal document management, inventory of goods, etc.--are really just a sqlite database with some nice custom views and interfaces. I could definitely see a future where datasette or similar tools can replace some of that stuff.

Access is probably caught in a weird spot internally at MS. If they put effort into it then it just removes some of the need to sell proper SQL server or azure cloud database tech. Better to just limp it along then start internal wars with bigger organizations/products.


And the great thing about those tools is that Datasette doesn't need to replace them - SQLite becomes the integration layer, so you can use any tool you like that provides a neat UI to storing data in SQLite, then use Datasette itself directly against that same database when you need to run your own SQL or integrate with other JSON apps or run custom plugins.


I was constantly thinking about MS Access while watching the introductory video. I loved MS Access in the 90s, and this being based on SQLite and Python makes it really great.

The bigger pro is the fact that you can export the data as JSON, which basically means that you have a server for your SQLite file which other applications can query against, without needing a full blown database server like MariaDB or Postgres while you still have the possibility to explore the data manually.

So for small projects this seems to be a really good tool.


WTF is with your account? Are you trying to impersonate dang, the official moderator?


Yeah I wish more modern retro games would embrace the mostly flat shaded polygon aesthetic of mech 2 and similar games. There's a certain 80's future cool to early polygon graphics before it all became texture-mapped hyper realism.


Wow I wonder how much record of the arab spring protests and uprising are now lost forever. Those protests were all around 2010 to 2012 or so and was in my mind what really pushed Twitter into the public consciousness. I hope the Library of Congress managed to archive all that stuff like they said they would years ago, it would be a big loss to historians for it to disappear overnight.


I'm not sure Twitter had media upload in 2010. We had to upload videos on other platforms, then post the links


History begins when billionaires and wiki say they do.


You think Arab Spring was good? For whom?


The parent comment did not say anything about whether or not it was good or bad, simply that it was historic and that the record of it should be preserved


> that the record of it should be preserved

by whom?


qbasic_forever suggested the Library of Congress. You could read his comment you know.


I didn't say anything either way. I think everyone can agree that losing a huge record of how it happened is a big loss.


It seemed to work out alright for Tunisia.


Don't they have massive youth unemployment and emigration?

https://www.ft.com/content/319c62a6-7698-4953-8c69-1109175f0...


How was their youth employment before the Arab spring? Hadn’t that been a problem in that region for decades?


for historians


Of course it was good.


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