Just a warning to anyone interested in the coming eclipse. Avoid the glasses sold at Canadian Tire. I just bought two pairs of eclipse glasses at Canadian Tire. I decided to test them right after I got outside and immediately noticed an issue. Both glasses have a hazy appearance around the sun.

With proper eclipse glasses the sun should appear crisp and not too bright. You should be able to distinctly see the edge of the sun and even see detail on the surface. There should be no haze of any kind. If you see any kind of haze, immediately take off the glasses and throw them out.

I knew the glasses from Canadian Tire were suspect because they had "NASA APPROVED" on the sides, which is why I bought them. I wanted to test them.

There is no such thing as "NASA APPROVED". NASA doesn't approve or certify anything. If you see that, it's a massive red flag.

One very good trusted source for where to buy eclipse glasses is the American Astronomical Society which has a list of trusted vendors. I myself bought a bulk quantity from solareyewear.ca and have tested the glasses to be working properly.

https://eclipse.aas.org/eye-safety/viewers-filters

Unfortunately, there will be a massive amount of scams going around with eclipse glasses and shady people trying to make a quick buck. Don't risk it and make sure your glasses will protect your eyes.

If someone tries to convince you that their glasses are genuine because they have ISO-12312-2 printed on them, it doesn't matter. I could print that on a pair of toilet paper rolls taped together, but that doesn't mean it'll protect your eyes.

Here are some resources to check out:

https://aas.org/press/american-astronomical-society-warns-counterfeit-fake-eclipse-glasses

https://opto.ca/eye-health-library/solar-eclipse-safety

I find it hard to believe that Popular Science would make such a mistake, but the author has reinforced the mistake by starting the article with "The dark side of the moon, despite its name, is a perfect vantage point for observing the universe."

But all the quotes from scientists correctly say "far side of the moon".

I know this isn't really "science news" but I couldn't find any other community to share this.

So this isn't meant to be a post bashing the devs/owner of OpenSubtitles. This is meant simply as awareness.

A few months ago I signed up for the VIP tier at OST ($5/mo for 1000 downloads a day) for a bit to populate my catalogue of videos with subtitles as my father uses my Jellyfin server and he's lost a lot of his hearing. I also wanted to support the development a bit. At first the service seemed to be downloading a bit, but then it stopped. I waited a few days and it would download at most one or two a day (despite a few thousand videos not having any subtitles). I look around online and found that OST had changed their API and the Jellyfin plugin still needed to catch-up with a newer release. No big deal, so I just waited.

Then the update released which specifically stated that the changes to the API calls were made. I waited a few days, nothing. I uninstalled the OST plugin and reinstalled, still nothing.

So I figured something was wrong either on my end or the server-side, but I didn't want to bother getting into it. I've been planning to rebuild my Jellyfin server with newer hardware with HW acceleration for decoding and encoding. I sent an email to OST support explaining what I've been seeing and asked if I could get a refund.

The person who responded asked for logs so that they could help troubleshoot. So I obliged.

They said it wasn't much help and to get even more logs. Which I provided again.

I even removed over 14 thousand "[query]" lines to make the logs more readable. They said there wasn't anything there that was useful, and asked me to try again. I indicated that Jellyfin has a scheduled job that checks for missing subtitles and pulls as needed once a day. But I said that at this point I'm just looking for the refund.

A while passes by but then I get a notification that the subscription is going to be renewed again, so I cancelled before that happened and reached out again about the refund. At this point it was more about the principle of the matter as I originally just asked for a refund and that got side-stepped into a support request.

Then I got this as a response:

Which resulted in this:

I waited over two weeks to write this post. I wanted to wait and see if somebody replied back to me with even just an apology or something. If they had originally told me that doing refunds is hassle for them I would have let it go. But telling me off and then deleting my account is just... special. I was astonished at the response and cannot fathom that being the response from any company taking payments for a service.

And I'm not holding a grudge of any kind and I get it, I used to do IT support and some days can be tough dealing with annoying emails. But in my defence all I asked for was a refund because something wasn't working. In any case, I just wanted to bring this to the attention of the Self-hosting community so that others can make more informed decisions. To be clear, I'm not advocating anyone to pull support. In face I think they should have more support as it's an invaluable service. Despite the treatment I still plan on getting the VIP subscription again at some point after I rebuild my Jellyfin server. But I also don't think that customers should be treated like this.

I have two systems right next to each other. One of them doesn't have a monitor attached and it's not simple to do so. They are both on the same 1Gbps LAN.

I'm currently using FreeRDP/xRDP to remote into the other system, but the latency is just terrible. I'm able to deal with it, but in some circumstances (like if dynamic ads or videos autoplay on websites) the latency just skyrockets to a a frame very few seconds. The remote system is Kubuntu 20.04 using X.org and not Wayland. I have just about every window decoration turned off or down. And just about every setting I can find to increase performance. The connection settings are the best they can be (I've looked through so many guides and posts about increasing performance), and they have helped a bit, but it's still far from ideal.

I've even tried VNC and AnyDesk and they're both just as bad, which is odd because I've connected to my brother's system in another part of the country on many occasions, and even when he loads up a Youtube video the connection and latency is buttery smooth.

Does anyone here have any recommendations or suggestions on what I can use or do to improve the connection quality?