I've seen bigger spiders in my life but this the biggest in this house by a long way. Was hanging out on the garage wall yesterday. Seems to have disappeared today.

It says plum wine, but it's very sweet and sugary and is made using sorghum alcohol and plums so I think it's more of a liqueur. I had some once and it was absolutely delicious and was just gifted a bottle but I don't know if I have to treat it like wine and drink it all within a few days or if it's more like port and can stick around for a long time after opening. I feel like it's the latter but the bottle is unhelpful saying only to consume it promptly. It recommends refrigerating but even that doesn't seem a requirement. Don't want to waste it but I'm also unlikely to be able to quaff a whole bottle of the stuff in like 2-3 days.

I actually really liked the thing, hence it sticking around these 11 years since I got it. One thing I especially liked about it was that it initially just did the one thing. I went to a website or sometimes used an app, either in my phone or computer and pressed a button and whatever still image or video I'd been looking at on that source device, showed up on the TV I plugged the Chromecast in to.

Technically it still works, but it's getting harder and harder to do this simple task. It's been whinging about me not being signed in if I use it with YouTube and for an outrageously long time displays some kind of media control overlay that takes up a massive portion of the screen. That's what the phone or computer screen is for and the Chromecast gen1, not having been designed for this, is way too slow to do it properly so it struggles. It's increasingly difficult to actually get the cast button to appear even on Chrome on desktop, and there's some confusing shit to do with "web apps" on just about every website with media involved that I see no reason to indulge when the media plays without them anyway, but I assume that refusal has something to do with the damn thing not working anymore. Basically google have all but killed this device.

I see those Roku things as an alternative but that seems to be a full media player solution intended to essentially function as a smart tv in a removable stick. I basically just want a wireless HDMI input receiver that will work with web browsers or any media streaming service/app just like the Chromecast USED TO! Do they exist?

I want to be able to, without hassle, decide on a whim to send whatever media I'm looking at on a device, to the tv screen wirelessly.

Or apple wallet for that matter. I'm pretty new to the concept of a digital wallet, and I'm guessing that if I eschew these google and apple offerings then I'm not really doing much beyond basically a folder called 'passes' but nonetheless a dedicated app that only opens pdfs and images and 'passes' rather than anything else still seems helpful.

Unfortunately so far I've now been offered the opportunity to add things to a wallet twice in 2 days and both times I'm provided only with a link to add to a google wallet or an apple wallet, I don't get .pkpass or .espass files. Those links, whether loaded on a desktop or an android smartphone don't directly link to a file in any way so there seems to be no obvious way to bypass being asked to sign in and use google's wallet. So far I've had to download a PDF, to add in to Pass Android but it only imported 1 of 2 pages so I had to then manually make 2 pdfs out of it at which point, if I'm keeping the pdf locally anyway, I'm not sure it was really easier even if the app is convenient access. I did manage to use Pass Android to make my own barcode to get around the fact that the membership card I was offered only had the google wallet links.

Is there a way to actually make use of these FOSS wallets? Because I'm not sure what they really do if it's so hard to actually get a hold of pass files.

DDG, to its credit, behaves like search engines used to, that is you just get results, not "answers" however for all the ways they annoy, Google has over the years made advances where "answers" actually are what I want.

Specifically, google search integrates very well with google maps so if I type the name of a business, the first thing I see is a formatted, sanitised presentation of the information I actually want from the business' website that is so rarely even on the site or at least not easy to find there: Where they are and when they open. DDG will usually find me the business' website if they have one and that's good and what you'd expect of a search engine but it takes much longer to go to that page, navigate through all the places they might have hidden that information only to discover they don't in fact include it at all anyway.

Is there any way to get that basic information very fast like Google has always provided? I'm talking specifically about browser based searches because this usually comes up when I'm using desktop, and even on my phone I don't want to open or obtain another app just for this.

I miss Dark Reader, UBO is pre-installed, but the only way I can see to install Dark Reader is through firefox add-ons page. I'm hoping that simply going to that page to install the add-on is relatively safe, I wouldn't feel too worried visiting the mozilla website generally, but given I'm installing extensions the browser I wonder if I'm somehow undoing the good that's done switching to LibreWolf.

With recent concerns about Firefox and the mozilla corporation I am starting to wonder if I should take stock of alternatives. A common recommendation seems to be Fennec, but given what F-droid describes as anti-features, I wonder if I'm essentially replacing the problem like for like.

What do they mean? What services? Optional ones? Can it be used without connecting to any mozilla services at all?

Kind of a two fold problem. First and most importantly, you press the profile button from the 3 lines menu on left of screen expecting to see your own profile and instead it displays someone else's profile who's not even on the same instance. The second is that now, changing user (I have one on one instance and another on another) goes to profile view rather than the front page or local or all of the instance for the chosen account (it is also of course, displaying the wrong user profile when it does this as well).

Though the choice of incorrect user profile seems to be random, it does settle on the one user and will always display that one. It seems to have selected someone from the lemmy.nsfw instance who likes AI porn in this case. I don't have any accounts on that instance and have never interacted with content they're commenting on lol.

I used to be able to do it fine on my computer without really needing to do anything, I don't know why that was, maybe something to do with ublock origin? I didn't really look in to it because it worked. Then I started having to actually deal with the problem because eventually the browser couldn't just load the video no issue anymore. I had to either use Newpipe on my phone or yt-dlp to watch locally. Recently neither of those options worked. I also tried invidious or other various proxies hosting youtube videos, they are met with the same age restriction issues.

My final last recourse had been using Shutter Encoder which somehow managed to download age restricted videos that yt-dlp couldn't which is odd because I was fairly sure it was actually using yt-dlp but now even THAT doesn't work.

I'm about 70-80% sure it was actually just someone asking for my help but I did render that assistance and I'm still worried I may have fallen for something.

Someone on the street standing outside an apartment building I was walking past asked if they could have some of my data to tell they're friend they'd arrived somewhere as theirs had run out. This scenario seemed strange, I mean it's certainly possible, I just hadn't really heard of this happening to anyone these days. That said I couldn't immediately think of how it could be a scam and didn't want to deny help to someone if they needed it.

I gave them the name of my personal hotspot along with the password and they joined the network. It was awkward after that point because I was very keen to see what they did in case it was dodgy, but if it wasn't, well basically I'd just watching someone else's private messenger conversation over their shoulder. Either because he didn't care or didn't notice I watched and he did just send someone a message, the screen didn't change to another app. The message was in Spanish so I couldn't understand it. They then called the same person via messenger (I think via messenger, they raised their phone too quickly for me to verify that), their phone was pressed to their ear during their call, and I watched the whole time, so as far as I know there wasn't an opportunity to quickly do anything bad via operation of their phone that I wouldn't have seen. As soon as they concluded their call I turned off the hotspot.

The story is plausible, if unlikely, I find the likelihood of it being true actually slightly higher by the fact that their conversation was conducted in Spanish as I don't come across a lot of Spanish speakers here and the few people I could imagine actually running out of data would be people on some kind of tourist phone plan with really stingy data which is something I can imagine an international student opting for which also makes sense as this took place right near a language school and an area with a lot of backpackers. They were also about the age of your average backpacker. Still I worry I might fallen for something just given the way the whole thing was conducted and the general atmosphere of the situation.

I've played this game since only a couple of years after release, but on other people's systems. I used to see people use Samus' grapple as a recovery mechanism not just grabbing but my play style got too ingrained for me to really learn new tricks and I considered this too hard and never took advantage of it.

I want to learn it now and it seems like it should be simple but something's wrong and I can't figure out what. I throw hook towards a vertical surface, it seems to 'latch on' but I can't figure out how to reel in after that. The hook just extends as samus falls until cancels out and she dies. I thought maybe I should be pushing the stick in the direction of the grapple hook, but it doesn't work, I tried holding other buttons after the latch on animation begins but nothing. I'm using an Xbox series X controller with Dolphin on Mac OS. Am I just too stupid to figure this out, or is it a glitch to do with this configuration?

EDIT: Oh wait, nevermind. Even though I thought I wasn't, I was unconsciously holding the grab button after the throw. As it turns out if you don't do that, and you press A after the latch on, it works.

They don't even really fit properly, but it happens every time and I find myself trying to find ways to fit the lyrics to the tune. In particular, the lyrics "I looked at my kingdom, I was finally there To sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel-Air" feels like it sorta fits right, even if the rest of the song doesn't.

That is all.

I'm learning Blender as I'd like to try it out as a tool for 2D animation. I was following a tutorial on making a bouncing ball. Everything was fine until we started adding materials, ever since, Blender has become very unstable. I can be doing fine following along with the tutorial but then if I hit space to play and then space to stop playback, either the whole thing freezes and the UI is unresponsive yet the force quite menu reports no issue with Blender that would indicate it wasn't responding, or, it renders bizarre frames that are not at all what I drew before then crashing in the manner described again.

The only way I can fix it is by reloading the project file but even then sometimes even after I've restarted the session, the fucked up frames that don't correspond to anything I actually did as part of the project appear at random intervals. At first I thought maybe they'd tweaned that way and they're really part of the project, but the same frames don't always display the weird artifacting or incorrect shape of things I've drawn. you can move the playhead to a frame, see something wrong with it, move it away to another frame, move back to that original problem frame and suddenly it no longer has the issue, but now another frame will. Sometimes the whole sequence is suddenly ok again but I live in fear of the next crash.

I've heard the adaptation is not faithful in the slightest, but having not read the source material I wouldn't know. On the one hand though, I thought this might be a blessing because the series has ignited an interest in me to read the books and if they're greatly different then they should still read pretty fresh for me but obviously on the other hand if the series is what ignited the interest then probably what I found engaging is not the same thing I'd find in those books.

What are they like and would I still get as much out of them if I hadn't first watched the adaptation?

I've installed NTFS-3g but as far as I can tell it only allows me to mount and write to NTFS partitions, I need to actually create one. Free as in beer.

When I started using Connect, all the other apps I'd tried for Lemmy were so janky that I considered this too small an issue to ask about but after many versions I'd like to get to the bottom of it and see if it's just my phone.

In landscape mode, images will frequently not scale to fit the screen so you're essentially looking at a small section of the image greatly zoomed in. This would be frustrating at the best of times but it couples with another oddity of Connect, which is how it handles standard touchscreen ways of interacting with images. When the image is incorrectly scaled as I described you can't zoom out so you have to have this zoomed in view and try to pan around to view the image in sections but that can't really be done either because there's flow on effects to this glitch making that impossible. You simply can't move the image around enough to be able view the whole image when no matter how careful you are because there's some kind of imposed limit on the movement which is very small and if you exceed it, the image closes back to the comments again. Often though no always, if you zoom in by double tapping, you can't then zoom out again to where you were before and sometimes this also goes for pinch to zoom, if you try to move the image around to see at least a bit more of it, you have to do so very carefully because if you move by too much, or too quickly it closes the image and returns to the comments or posts view. Also if you single tap an image, it closes the image as well. It will also frequently kind of rubber band the image back to where you started if you didn't move it in just the right way.

If you view in portrait mode, things are a lot better, but still odd. You still have all the weird image navigation issues described above, but they are made worse because to adequately view most landscape images in portrait you're really going to have to zoom significantly but that means lots of extreme movement and if you're not very careful with this, you end up closing the image and also sometimes you'll zoom in on a feature and now it won't zoom out again and you need to reload the image. Also in portrait mode, the image loads at the very top of the screen under the UI 'x' in the corner for quitting the image which means to actually see that part of the image unobscured you have to move the image by a large amount which puts you at great risk of accidentally closing it. On phones with notches this is especially annoying because loading the image at the very top puts it below the notch as well.

Is anyone else getting this? I've heard it a few times but the 2 recent examples I bothered to remember were this one:

https://youtu.be/oSG7HpdQ34w?t=876

Where at around 14:37 the entire video actually, not just dialogue in this instance, went mute mid sentence and remained that way until 14:49

And then this one again today:

https://youtu.be/hS2emKDlGmE?t=1788

At around 29:48 where only the dialogue cuts out. The first few times I ran in to this I assumed the video had just had an editing error but it's happening too often for that to be it. I noticed recently that my laptop will do some kind of automatic downmixing of 5.1 audio so I can hear it in stereo, but only if playing through my laptops speakers and not through the dock it's connected to with attached speakers, in which case it only monitors some channels in a 6 channel audio source but I checked that by switching to the internal speakers for the sections of mute video in question and it made no difference.

I used to search for a video file using spotlight and it would return several results and when it was a file I accessed more than a couple of times it'd be the top result. I'd see an icon of the application used to play the media type and the name of the file.

Nowadays, with the same keyword, I frequently can't find the file I successfully found before but also, even when it does find it, it doesn't display it anywhere near the top results, it's down in a section called 'photos from apps' which presents a grid of options, rather than a list, all of which represented by the VLC icon as it's my default media player but with NO filename. I have found it before because usually it's the one preselected, although not always. It's super frustrating not being able to actually see what's found. I think this is probably supposed to display photos as photographs or maybe videos using thumbnails, to make it easier finding an image compared to filenames given the name of the section 'photos from apps', but I'm not even looking for an image anyway and besides if I was and the thumbnails actually worked, I'd have to have typed the exact or at least similar filename to the image I'm looking for anyway making a visual search pretty useless.

To be clear, I'm not looking to get rid of the ability for spotlight to be able to search media such as videos or images, I just want the results of that search presented in the sane way they used to be back on High Sierra. (Probably persisted beyond that but I jumped from HS to Sonoma and now Sequoia).

It's way cheaper than the app store and Steam and Humble Bundle

This used to be an option, now it isn't. I found command line solutions which would be fine, but they're all for scheduling sleep for set times, I want set durations.