Switch to a PAYG account. Continue to use Always Free resources. Still pay nothing. And don’t get your account yoinked for underutilization anymore.

That’s worked for me so far, for almost a year now. (knock on wood)

I like old school Final Fantasy. But I also like a good braindead story game. And that’s pretty much what 16 is (well, as braindead as it can get when the game has a built-in Pepe Silvia string map to explain what’s going on)

Even on the “hard” not-story mode, if you happen to fail a boss fight, your second try is in ultra-easy mode. You get all of your potions back, and the boss is at half-health or something.

Bloodborne.

It didn’t even feel like a game. It was simply pattern-recognition torture.

I guess I sucked at it. I played for 10-12 hours and didn’t beat a single boss. Graveyard Werewolf Dude and Weird Bridge Monster would just wreck me on the rare occasion I could actually make it to them.

After giving up, I learned online that shooting your gun is not actually a range weapon, but it’s meant to parry. Stuff like that – unintuitive mechanics you’d only know about if you were nuts-deep in “the community” – I have little patience for.

And mostly, I’m not playing videogames to prove myself to anyone. I want to have fun – not torture myself.

What’ll bite me is that almost every single game I “own” are the PSPlus freebies I’ve claimed over the years…

So, I just added another year to my sub ahead of the price increase.

I’m weak.

I bought every FromSoft game up to DS3 during various sales because I’d heard unanimously how amazing they were.

Then I eventually played Bloodborne. Haaaaaated it. Never touched any of the other games I bought, and never plan to.

Cyberpunk is out of people’s minds enough at this point, that to continue devoting resources to it would be a waste.

I’m honestly surprised they rode it as far as they did. Though I do wish they’d have delayed its release until the initial product could’ve been what we saw when they did the PS5/Series X version releases.

Multiplayer and three free games added to your library every month.

Long games like this were never what I spun up a Game Pass trial for anyways. It was always “finish as many 8-12hr games as I can in a month”.

That said, I still have plenty of Microsoft Rewards points racked up for the next time I decide to do this for free…

Unless tons of people are accessing your pictures, I’d recommend Tailscale instead.

7th gen Intel (Kaby Lake) can encode h265, also. Not just 8th gen.

Source: I encode to h265 almost daily using Quicksync on my i5-7500.

Intel 7th gen & higher CPUs have Quicksync that does hardware h265 encoding.

You can get an old i5-7500 PC pretty cheap these days. That’s what I have, and tDarr converts about an hour of 1080p h264 content to h265 in roughly 10min.

Comcast (no other ISPs thanks to local legislation). Suburbs of the 2nd largest city in my state (Michigan).

$84/month for 200/10Mbps with a 1.2TB cap.

You have it great.

I’m in that comment.

I’m very slowly typing up a blog post on how I did it, but I had success tunneling my Plex through T-Mobile’s CGNAT by running this Docker container on my local machine and on a free (technically PAYGo using always-free services) Oracle Cloud account.

Much like Cloudflare, this is for sending specific-port traffic through the tunnel.

https://github.com/DigitallyRefined/docker-wireguard-tunnel

Oh, this comment section… Go on. Continue discussing…

Definitely consider 16GB if you’re using Immich. I started with 8GB and had to upgrade. (on the bright side, 32GB DDR4 was just over $40)

I’d also say that an i7 is likely overkill for your use case (despite other comments here).

I run an i5-7500 with PhotoPrism, Plex, tDarr, and about 30 other services. The power draw barely registers on my 1000W UPS (this includes my SFF PC, external USB HDD, and 3 network switches). And my CPU rarely jumps above 20% utilization.

I would say at least 7th gen Intel. Its QuickSync is one version newer than 6th gen, and QuickSync didn’t get another update until the 10th gen CPUs.

7th through 9th gen CPUs QuickSync added h265 encoding, and 10bit h265 decoding. Also there are the all-around speed & quality improvements that come with each QuickSync generation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video

Yeah. A year or two ago, Plex added a thing where you can add any show or movie to a “Watchlist”, no matter what service it’s on.

Overseerr can already automatically pull in that in and turn it into Radarr / Sonarr requests. I would think Reiverr could eventually do it, too.

I’ve got one friend who just cancelled all of his streaming services, and is asking for only the most recent season of stuff he watched.

So, Overseerr actually works in his favor.

Can you request specific seasons or episodes of a TV series that way?

Yep, I have that enabled in Overseerr. A couple people have used it. But mostly, people prefer to manually request stuff with Overseerr.

Unfortunately, it usually takes a minute or so to get Overseer to load.

It’d be really nice to have a web interface that primarily links up to Sonarr & Radarr (minus the playback part) – just for requesting stuff.

Though Plex login integration would be nice, also – especially if I’m exposing it publicly. And that also opens the possibility to auto-import peoples’ Plex wishlists.

Was curious to take a look as an Overseerr replacement (Overseer has been running painfully, painfully slow for awhile)

But it looks like Jellyfin is currently a hard requirement to use Reiverr (I have Plex).

Well, I can say that T-Mobile 5G Home Internet completely blocks all incoming port traffic.

So, you have to get creative with stuff like WireGuard & Cloudflare tunnels to do some stuff properly.

Huh. I played the Game Pass version on my RTX 3070 a few months ago, and had no issues whatsoever. I probably spent 30 seconds in the video settings & said, “yup, that sounds about right”.

Then I played the game. I never had a fps number on my screen at any point, but it felt like 60fps. 🤷‍♂️