Unpopular opinion: while Vista was undercooked until service pack 1, it gets a lot of undeserved hate and introduced several important innovations.
1 Like
My first Gateway Pentium 60 came with a copy of Windows 3.1 on 15 floppies. It got passed around to a lot of people who didnāt have CD-ROM drives yet.
1 Like
I first used Windows when you had to boot it up from the DOS C: prompt. Which one was that?
Also, I started using Lotus 1-2-3 before there was a Windows.
1 Like
DOS4LIFE
1 Like
Dad worked for IBM and used to dual-boot our home computer with DOS/Windows and OS/2. Whenever he needed to install a new version of either one he would pay me $5 to sit there and feed floppy disks into the computer one at a time. IIRC OS/2 would come in a huge 3-ring binder with like 40 diskettes in it.
1 Like
JFC! I remember those Windows ābooksā from when I got my first home PC - circa 1995.
My first ever workplace bonus came from when I wrote a script to copy the 30+ floppies onto a DAT tape then, using a SCSI to Parallel interface converter, gave the IT team a āportableā installer drive; a small-ish DAT drive with the OS install files ready to go. It was like 50x faster than doing the installs over the Token Ring network. Plug up the ādriveā, boot to DOS, type the script executable and voila!
I donāt understand how rapidly this thread propagates.
Whatever you did in a computer, I did by hand.
You drew your own porn?
2 Likes
I only regret that I have but one like to give for this post.
3 Likes
Iām trying out Plex. The fact that Apple still doesnāt pull your locally-stored media into the TV app on an Apple TV box means they probably never will. If Iām going to to have to use a separate app for my own media content, then I might as well give Plex a whirl.
So, as some of you may be aware, sometimes I can be a stubborn SOB. No, really, hear me out. When I started ripping Blu Rays to my Mac - maybe 15 years ago (or more) - I used software to compress the rips to take up less HDD space. I had to have the movies stored on an internal drive to relieve the pressure on my network bandwidth, so the compression was necessary.
Fast forward to now, I am still maintaining my ripped media under those same principles. I have long convinced myself that the compressed video quality is fine and looks good. Donāt fix what aināt broken, right? Except it was broken.
Now that I am rocking a rack-based NAS, and HDDs are cheap as chips, there is no reason to worry about storage limitations. Further, moving the media off my Macās internals will work better if I use one of the HDDs in the rack as a media server; that way, my Mac wonāt be burdened with handling the distribution. So I took the advice offered above (soooo many years ago) and gave Plex a whirl.
[Insert gif of Phillip Seymore Hoffman in āBoogie Nightsā, sitting on the hood of his Camero, saying āIām a fucking idiotā]
Plex is very simple, easy to set up and free. I started by ripping a few BDs and dropping the raw .mkv files onto the server to see how that all worked and what the result looked like. Fuck me! The video quality is substantially and obviously better. I mean, of course it has to be, but I was so used to the reduced quality of my compressed movie files that I had convinced myself that the effort to re-do my entire library wasnāt worth it.
All of the above is based on what I see on my main living room TV at 1080p. In my office, I have a 4K TV (because you canāt buy not-4K TV these days). As good as the raw 1080p video looks on my 1080p living room TV, the upscaled video on the office 4K TV is a whole nother level again. The quality improvement with my 720p despecialized Star Wars OT is gobsmacking.
So now I am going through my entire BD library and ripping the raw files directly to my Plex server. Itās a substantially faster process than the old process of ripping and compressing the files, and far less CPU intensive. Even tagging the files with metadata is so much easier - although I have yet to figure out how to add chapter data to the video files (any help here would be welcomed).
That is all. If anyone cares to translate the above into Sanskrit for Jim, Iām sure heād appreciate it.
1 Like
Iāll just hit the highlight(s):
āI can be a stubborn SOBā
3 Likes
Wouldnāt help. The simple English befuddles me.
2 Likes
Apple is soon to release iPhone 15, and rumor is that at least some of them will have USB-C charging, as mandated by the EU. Of course, there is also the rumor that the new iPhones will require an Apple-branded USB-C charger that you can conveniently purchase for only an additional $49.99.
Apple could be about to make the biggest change to the iPhone in 11 years (yahoo.com)
What are you using to rip your BluRays to .MKV?
The rumors are that this Apple-branded USB-C cable would enable faster charging. It isnāt total horseshit as there are a lot of non-compliant cables out there. Charging $50 for the cable would be horseshit though.
MakeMKV. Itās free.