The first game was cool. Vastly over-promised, but still cool. Fable 2 was mid, at best. Then Fable 3 was just pure dogwater.

I don’t have high hopes for a reboot. If it’s actually done properly, it’ll be a nice surprise. But I refuse to get my hopes up.

This is the answer. It’s freely accessible, and duplicated across servers all over the world so it’s difficult for copyright claims to take down.

This is how it works in Germany. Lots of their water bottles are made of glass, and end up with textured/worn rings along the bottle; The rings are from where it goes through the recycling machines to get prepped for the next use. The rings mean the bottle has been reused a lot, and has gone through the machines enough to get slightly worn.

I’d argue that is just another example of why delaying games isn’t a bad thing. 2077 clearly wasn’t ready at launch, and would have benefitted from a delayed launch.

Yeah, the Witcher 3 release should have taught the game publishers this. CDPR delayed the launch by several months because the game wasn’t ready to ship yet. And the game was phenomenal, and received rave reviews pretty much across the board. Gamers were disappointed about the launch, but basically went “this game will be worth the wait.”

Holy shit, I had forgotten about SOLDAT. My friends and I used to play that on the library computers in middle school.

IIRC it had a portable version that you could boot from a flash drive. Or at least the installation happened on your local user account, so it didn’t require admin rights from the school IT team.

Also, the old Dungeon Siege games. IIRC, 1 and 2 both had LAN multiplayer, where each person took control of a different character. It was basically the groundwork for the gameplay that Dragon Age Origins built upon.

Calibre doesn’t natively support reading DRMed files, but there are anti-DRM plugins which are trivial to install. You need to provide a legitimate Kindle serial number for Amazon DRM, as it uses that to de-encrypt the files. When you add the file(s) to your library, the plugin automatically runs as a file conversion. It basically converts it from a DRM-locked .epub/.azw3 to a DRM-free .epub/.azw3 instead. Since Calibre already has file conversions built in, the plugin simply uses that existing system to spit out a DRM-free version of the same file, then it adds that to your library instead.

Even better, wear loose generic clothes like a long black skirt and a baggy long sleeve shirt.

Investigators can narrow down suspects by using security footage to measure things like femur or forearm length. Baggy clothes make this much harder to do, because you can’t see exactly where the joints are. It introduces a lot of reasonable doubt that your defense lawyer can use to tear apart any video evidence they present.

Yup, that’s also why it’s so blurry; As the pressure moves through each sheet of paper, it gets more and more spread out. You could technically dial up the tension on your typewriter to make more copies, but they would still end up blurry as the paper spread out the force of the impact.

You can disable the streaming completely if you really want to. It’s in your preferences, under the “Online Media Sources” section. You can disable it for only managed users, or disable it completely if you don’t even want access to it via the admin profile. Or just move it farther down the list, or hide it completely by unpinning it as a source.

Because running it on your router gives you access to the entire network of devices, not just the Jellyfin server.

Not in the way you’re probably thinking, no. The VPN (like Proton) will be isolating devices from each other. This is by design, so you don’t end up in situations like different customers seeing each other on the network.

Your router might be able to act as a VPN host. This would allow you to connect to your home network from anywhere, and use it just like you would use a service like Proton. And if your home network is set to allow devices to see each other, then you could see your Jellyfin server. See if your router can run Tailscale or can act as a WireGuard (or OpenVPN) host. Tailscale will be the most straightforward approach, but not everything can run it. Worst case scenario, you could just run Tailscale directly on your Jellyfin server.

The big issue with requiring a VPN is that it makes remote access on some devices difficult or damned near impossible. For instance, good luck getting a smart TV to run Tailscale. Tailscale will be fine for things like phones, laptops, or tablets. But if you have a smart TV you want to remote view things on, you may need to consider a reverse proxy instead. And a reverse proxy is such a rabbit hole that it would deserve its own post.

Yeah, this is the unfortunate truth. Jellyfin’s setup will never be as simple as Plex, purely because the simple setup requires a centralized server to coordinate things. And Jellyfin is built specifically to rebel against centralization. Plex is easy because the company has servers set up specifically to handle the remote access handshake.

Because of the Wife Factor. Getting people to convert requires getting past a lot of social inertia. It requires you to first convince them that the convenience of streaming services isn’t actually worth paying for. Then it requires an elegant onboarding experience. Lastly, Plex simply makes remote access easy. Sure, you could fiddle with reverse proxies for Jellyfin. But that’s easy to mess up. Instead, it’s much smoother to simply sign into Plex.

I can talk my tech-illiterate “My google chrome desktop icon got moved, and now I don’t know how to check my email” mother-in-law through Plex’s sign-up process over the phone. In fact, I did. It’s familiar enough that anyone who has signed up for a streaming service can figure it out. I can’t do that with Jellyfin, because their eyes glaze over as soon as you start talking about custom server URLs or IP addresses. Hell, my MIL’s TV doesn’t even have a native Jellyfin app available on the App Store. If I wanted to install it for her, I would need to sideload it.

Jellyfin does a lot of things right. But by design, the setup process will never be as elegant as Plex’s, because that elegant system requires a centralized server to actually handle it. And centralized servers are exactly what Jellyfin was built to rebel against.

To be clear, I run both concurrently; Jellyfin for myself, and Plex for friends/family. I got the lifetime Plex Pass license a decade ago, and it has more than paid for itself since then. But it sounds like a bunch of my friends and family may end up switching to Jellyfin if they don’t want to deal with the PlexPass subscription.