Zedstrian

Nearing the 2,000 find mark after ten years of caching on and off, the creative caches have definitely stuck with me more than the rest.

Sometimes it's a particularly unique container, such as one where a metal tube cache sat at the bottom of a PVC pipe, retrieved by pouring water into the pipe, making the cache float to the top as the water drained slowly from holes in the bottom of the pipe.

Sometimes it's a particularly creative puzzle, such as one where I had to use GIMP to see what barely noticeable differences the cache owner had made to a picture, revealing the faint outlines of Roman numerals and a Morse code sequence that gave the cache's final coordinates.

What are some of the most creative caches that you guys have found so far?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23066599

Since 2017, Wikipedia editors have compiled a list of news sources from which articles are highly likely to employ systematic bias, lack professional editing and/or journalistic standards, regularly misrepresent sources, and/or fabricate information.

While its list is by no means a complete list of publications with the aforementioned problems, it has helped make Wikipedia articles more reliable by basing them off of sources covering the same events and information from a less biased point of view.

To make Lemmy news communities better than their Reddit counterparts, I think avoiding links to those sources in favor of more reliable alternatives would be worthwhile.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23066599

Since 2017, Wikipedia editors have compiled a list of news sources from which articles are highly likely to employ systematic bias, lack professional editing and/or journalistic standards, regularly misrepresent sources, and/or fabricate information.

While its list is by no means a complete list of publications with the aforementioned problems, it has helped make Wikipedia articles more reliable by basing them off of sources covering the same events and information from a less biased point of view.

To make Lemmy news communities better than their Reddit counterparts, I think avoiding links to those sources in favor of more reliable alternatives would be worthwhile.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23066599

Since 2017, Wikipedia editors have compiled a list of news sources from which articles are highly likely to employ systematic bias, lack professional editing and/or journalistic standards, regularly misrepresent sources, and/or fabricate information.

While its list is by no means a complete list of publications with the aforementioned problems, it has helped make Wikipedia articles more reliable by basing them off of sources covering the same events and information from a less biased point of view.

To make Lemmy news communities better than their Reddit counterparts, I think avoiding links to those sources in favor of more reliable alternatives would be worthwhile.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23066599

Since 2017, Wikipedia editors have compiled a list of news sources from which articles are highly likely to employ systematic bias, lack professional editing and/or journalistic standards, regularly misrepresent sources, and/or fabricate information.

While its list is by no means a complete list of publications with the aforementioned problems, it has helped make Wikipedia articles more reliable by basing them off of sources covering the same events and information from a less biased point of view.

To make Lemmy news communities better than their Reddit counterparts, I think avoiding links to those sources in favor of more reliable alternatives would be worthwhile.

Since 2017, Wikipedia editors have compiled a list of news sources from which articles are highly likely to employ systematic bias, lack professional editing and/or journalistic standards, regularly misrepresent sources, and/or fabricate information.

While its list is by no means a complete list of publications with the aforementioned problems, it has helped make Wikipedia articles more reliable by basing them off of sources covering the same events and information from a more objective and factual point of view.

To make Lemmy news communities better than their Reddit counterparts, I think avoiding links to those sources in favor of more reliable alternatives would be worthwhile.

In the months since I deleted my Reddit accounts and joined Lemmy, the lack of user base growth has made it clear that we need some users to stay on Reddit as a means of shepherding more users over on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, Reddit simply got what it wanted: less users who make a fuss about how it manages its platform without losing users en-masse.

In doing so, however, does Reddit shadowban posts that mention or promote Lemmy? Googling mentions of Lemmy on Reddit mostly brings up posts from around the time of the blackout, suggesting that mentions of it since then have been suppressed. Before I return to Reddit to promote Lemmy, does anyone know for certain one way or the other?

In the past I've chosen I've often kept AC3 audio tracks thinking that their substantially higher bitrates made them better than the AAC tracks I compared them to. As I've since learned that AAC can be comparable to AC3 at a substantially lower bitrate, to have a means of comparing the two codecs, what would the AAC-equivalent bitrates be for 224kbps and 640kbps AC3?

To compile optimal video, audio, and subtitle track combinations of videos for my media library, I've found MPC-HC's millisecond counter and frame skip features useful for finding the exact offset between different video and audio tracks. After using MKVToolNix to combine the video track of an MP4 file with the delay-adjusted audio track of an MKV file, I noticed that the resulting MKV file was 0.143 seconds (about 3.5 frames in this case) shorter than the original MP4 file. As the frames of both videos remained in alignment until the end, it seems that the 0.143 seconds were taken off the end of the video.

Is there a difference between the two formats that affects video length?

Nearing the filling of my 14.5TB hard drive and wanting to wait a bit longer before shelling out for a 60TB raid array, I've been trying to replace as many x264 releases in my collection with x265 releases of equivalent quality. While popular movies are usually available in x265, less popular ones and TV shows usually have fewer x265 options available, with low quality MeGusta encodes often being the only x265 option.

While x265 playback is more demanding than x264 playback, its compatibility is much closer to x264 than the new x266 codec. Is there a reason many release groups still opt for x264 over x265?

Having gradually built up my media collection to near the capacity of my 16TB external HDD, I've reached the point where I'll probably need to build a RAID array to keep the collection in one place. Assuming the RAID array will be at least 32TB, I have a few questions:

1. From what I've read RAID arrays can help mitigate the risk of individual drives failing if extra space is allotted on the hard drives. Assuming a total capacity of 32TB, how much of that space would be reserved by the RAID array for data loss prevention?

2. Is there a certain type of hard drive I would have to use? Aside from my 16TB drive, I also have two 2 8TB drives that I'd ideally like to be able to re-use in the RAID array, but have left them in their enclosures for the time being.

3. If the hard drives in the array have different transfer speeds, does the array as a whole default to the slowest one?

4. Whether the hard drives I already have are compatible or not, what RAID enclosure and hard drives would you recommend?

While my initial motivation to try usenet was to find releases that weren't being seeded on torrent trackers, I've found it to be a helpful alternative to keeping content seeded on my laptop's limited hard drive for extended amounts of time. To increase the chances that I find what I'm looking for, I check several usenet indexers simultaneously, preferring to use ones that have lifetime subscriptions (altHUB, Miatrix, and NZBGeek). Should those three lack what I'm looking for, I also use DrunkenSlug, NZB Finder, and Tabula Rasa, as their free plans can be used indefinitely. Aside from the six aforementioned indexers, are there any good ones that I've missed with free plans that don't expire?

From what I remember DogNZB, NinjaCentral, and NZBPlanet either have limited-time free plans or require account activity at least once every two weeks, which is why I chose to forego them in favor of the six I use now.