Somehow I think the national lab test company’s lawyers have got them covered. This wasn’t exactly a fly by night, no name company. Having in known third party send you a medical bill months later is pretty fucking common place. This was just one anecdote of many, not an isolated incident.

The best part is the random bill.

• Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
• Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

Or another variant.

• Go to the emergency room.
• Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.

Songs are cheap. Ever heard of buying something for a song?

It’s because that recording industry, the RIAA vs. the MPAA, has had a stranglehold on the industry and artists for much longer. They are much better at exploiting artists while paying them next to nothing.

Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.

Classic Microsoft Business Strategy

• Embrace
• Extend
• Extinguish

Hardlinking files to their new destination and your normalized naming schema. Using symlinks would be madness.

I like your schema. I’ve used something similar. My hosts have always been sci-fi space/time ships/stations, user accounts are characters from or Captain’s of said vessels. Over the years I’ve had a TARDIS, Serenity, Moya, Out of Bands II, Galactica, Millennium Falcon, Rocinante, etc. It’s usually whatever I happen to be discovering or binging at the time I setup the machine. For nearly a decade the TARDIS was my server/NAS because it was bigger on the inside that survived through several generations of smaller devices like laptops and raspberry Pi’s named after smaller lighter vessels like Serenity and Rocinante.

Ah yes, the modern day equivalent of recording radio broadcasts to magnetic tape. Made a few mixtapes that way myself. They were absolute garbage quality and I never listen to them anymore, but it was an interesting exercise and my only option for some stuff at the time.

Now I just buy as directly from the artist as I can for things that are rare enough that they are difficult to pirate.

They’ve used the exact same reasoning to excuse running down actual pedestrians on crosswalks.

Like quibbling over the difference between rape and sexual assault.

Let this be a lesson to you then. Checking the logs should be your first troubleshooting step, not installing a variety of distros until one “just works”. Good luck.

Shit, my bus stop was at least a half mile away without so much as a sidewalk anywhere, just a dirt road and a canal. You didn’t even get a bus stop if you were less than 2 miles from school. We regularly rode our bikes like 12 miles away from home to the movie theater, I think we were pre-teens. Technically I could have ridden my bike to grade 6 (it was on the way to the movie theater), but who wants to show up to 6th grade everyday drenched in sweat or rain (it would always have been one or the other).

Also, isn’t that the whole point of scary movies? I love scary movies and I show that by reacting to the good jump scares, gore, and creepiness. If it bored me so much I didn’t react, I probably would find something else to watch. My partner gets a real kick out of watching me jump too.

I’m not biased and I’m not picking a side, but there is a lot of whataboutism is this thread and I stand by my stance that it is a weak argument and a logical fallacy.

Whataboutism isn’t a very convincing argument.

Just organize your library properly and pretty much every software will manage it better. There are options for organizing and renaming them mostly automatically, like EastTAG or filebot. Some people use Sonarr and Radarr to organize shows and movies, but those are probably overkill for you. The various *arrs will be more useful if you’re consuming new media through a server hosting Plex or Jellyfin. Kodi is also a waste if the library isn’t already meticulously organized and you don’t need a 10 foot interface.

If you’re only consuming on desktop and you insist on being disorganized, then why even bother with anything other than VLC? It runs on Linux, Windows, iOS, and Android.

Jokes on them. Batman is fighting crime in a failing empire. I might have fun writing a paper about how the comic series is actually about the fall of empires like the Roman empire. I’d footnote and meticulously cite the shit out of that paper just to code clues that I knew exactly what the Professor was trying to do.

Yes, I’ve done almost exactly this while traveling. You can even carry around a couple variously configured sd cards for different use cases. I had one with jellyfin for sharing locally and also Kodi for direct HDMI connection to TVs. There is a in app on Android for jellyfin called findroid that allows offline copies from the media server, which allowed me to not need the thing powered the entire time I wanted to watch something on my phone, just long enough to download it. Adding samba shares adds a other layer of accessibility. I had another SD Card with video game ROMs for retro gaming, but this one got left at home because it requires controllers and I didn’t think I’d use it that much. I had another with “little backup box” installed for automatically backing up my photos and videos after a day out exploring with my camera.

I used a Raspberry pi 5 for all of this, running from a battery backup, because I didn’t really need a keyboard once I had remote connections to my phone sorted out. Pick a rugged case and you case just toss it in your bag of chargers. It took up about as much space as a pack of cigarettes. Another option would be the Raspberry Pi 400, built into a keyboard. A little bulkier, but maybe more resilient in the face of technical difficulties.

Oh yeah, I totally support the local copy. That will save you in times up hardware failure or fuck ups. I could just never keep up with the maintenance and kind of gave up making automatic backups and syncing. But reorganizing often translates to integrating deletions into rsync or whatever syncing protocol you use, and that has caused me headaches and heartaches.

Yeah, that was a typo. Thanks, I’ll fix it.