u/bnelson333

I got bored today so I hooked up my Pentium Windows 95 machine, but now what do? I want to play something in all that OG hardware glory, but can't think of WHAT. I thougth of MDK, but I beat that a couple months ago. Then I thought of Worms, which I have a disc around here somewhere I might put in. What else?

For clarification, I have a much nicer retro machine. P3 1GHZ, lots of RAM, Geforce 2, Win2k, SB Live, etc. That's what I play most of my old games on. But I want something that even that's too new for. To play something truly designed for 95, on 95.

Yes, I know, perfectly predicting future events is not possible, including weather. But is it just me or has the reliability of weather forecasts gotten dramatically worse over the last few years?

Every time I need to schedule something around there being no rain/storms, e.g. sealing my driveway. I check multiple different sources, they all say there will be no rain X day. So I do the work and then gues what it does that day? Rains.

It's become comical at this point. I don't ever remember it being this unreliable.

I can't decide if this is a stupid question or the impossible standard, but I have never found a platformer on PC I like on par with Super Mario. I like the 2D Mario games like New Super Mario Bros U, and Super Mario Wonder. I don't want stupid hard like Super Meat Boy, I just want a chill platformer that I can rip through without thinking too much about anything. Ideas?

I have a Nexgrill 4 burner grill that I wonder if it's running too hot. It seems to run much hotter than my old Weber did. If we assume that the onboard temp probe works, with all 4 burners on their lowest setting, it sits at about 550 degrees F. That's too hot, right? If I try to grill something like skewers or fish, the outside/veggies burn before the meat is actually to temp.

I know I can turn off burners, I'll typically turn one off for something like this and I can get a better result, but then I lose a lot of cooking area, sort of defeating the purpose of buying the larger grill.

Is this just normal for a (cheap) grill? Or is this running too hot? I've read that it might be possible to calibrate the burners to run lower, but the manual doesn't actually me how and I can't figure out how to get the knobs off to check.

I have been a fan of honey roasted nuts, especially cashews, for practically my whole life. Is it just me, or did they completely change the definition of "honey roasted" sometime in the last 5-10 years?

They used to be "glazed". They had a little extra crunch to them. They were smooth on the outside.

Nowadays it seems every single one, regardless of brand, isn't like that. It's just a nut lightly coated in "honey sugar". It's not terrible, but it's not the same. Where did those glazed ones go?

I've used omdb for years to scrape metadata for OTA recorded movies (via MythTV), but I'm finding it's very limited when it comes to episode lists within a series. It seems to be missing a lot of information, and can't be relied on. Anything better out there for TV shows?

I don't know how to word it, but I'm so tired of the survival craft games where the only point is just to survive. I want something that's more like a story/progression, but co-op. Progression should be "shared", meaning that if person 1 unlocks the current objective, then it applies server-wide (so person 2 doesn't have to redo the same objective). Extra bonus points if it has a dedicated server that can be run, although not strictly necessary.

The best example of what I'm looking for is Return to Moria, but I've already finished that (and the DLC).

I don't mind survival elements, I just don't want it to be the entire point of the game. I want something more linear to work towards.

Appreciate any suggestions!

For reference, I'm white. I watch almost exclusively older TV shows, mainly from the 70s to the 90s. There are several that I enjoy that are "black-centric". I often wonder if these shows are something black people truly enjoy and identify with, or if they were largely "black shows meant for white consumption"? Does it vary on the specific show? Which shows are considered more "authentic"?

Some examples right off the top of my head, in no specific order: The Parkers, 227, That's My Mama, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Family Matters, Sister Sister, Amen, A Different World, Fresh Prince.

I'm finding very different answers about this and not sure how to fix. I did some babyback ribs in the electric smoker today and they were really tough.

I used a dual probe thermometer to watch both the ambient temp, as well as the internal meat temp. Ambient fluctuates a bit, but generally hovered around 225-250F. After about 3.5 hours, the ribs were at 203F internal and I turned off the smoker. Sauced and finished in the broiler. Tasted great, but was very tough.

I am finding conflicting information. Some say tough ribs are always undercooked. Some say I went too far and dried them out.

Caveat: I love "fall off the bone". During the winter I do them in the crockpot and love the way they turn out, but I was hoping to get some smoke in them today, hence the smoker.

Should I have pulled them at 195? Do I need to let them rest? Do I HAVE to do the 3-2-1 method? Do they get inedible >205? Like if I had let them go longer, would they have gotten better or worse? Ideas?

I'm not sure this is useful to anyone, because I'm sure my setup is a little different than most, but hey what can it hurt. Maybe it'll give someone an idea.

I don't use Home Assistant or Proxmox or anything like that. Just bare metal servers (mostly old Optiplexes running headless Linux). And most of my services are confined to their own server computer. I don't like having them all running on one machine because if that one machine goes down, everything goes down.

Anyway, I've been becoming more mindful of electricity usage lately and a few things I've been doing to conserve:

1. Seriously consider whether I need/use a service. A lot of my projects start out as a fun idea. It isn't the result I'm interested in, just in the process. Once it's done, it sits idle. Consuming power, with no real benefit. Taking a hard look at all the things I really don't need, or can do a slightly different way the one or two times a month I need it, lets me turn off servers for good.

2. Consider whether a lower power device can handle the job. I quite literally used to have a dozen or more Optiplexes. But I started taking inventory of what needed what hardware to run and found lots of projects can be moved either to a Wyse terminal, Mini PC, or even Raspberry Pi to save a lot of cost in electricity.

3. Non-24/7 availability. I've also started looking at which services I just legitimately don't need to be on all the time. I can't watch my DVR media server while I'm sleeping, so why should I keep running it all night every night?

For #3, there are probably more elegant solutions than this, but this is how I do it: a central server that is on all the time, Kasa smart plugs, and a little PHP/Python scripting.

I have to have at least one server that's always on, but that could simply be a Raspberry Pi Zero W. It just needs to keep track of the states of each server's smart power plug and issue commands at the right time (via cron).

I have a small PHP script on each server that loads up on bootup and runs in an infinite loop. Checking the power state for its smart plug on the central server say every minute or so:

23:58:00 -> "BEON"

23:59:00 -> "BEON"

00:00:00 -> "TURNOFF"

If it's a "BEON" state, do nothing (sleep for 60 seconds and try again later). But, if it's now "TURNOFF", shut down gracefully.

So now on the central server, I just need to have a cron job set that power state to "TURNOFF" whenever makes sense for that server and my normal usage. For example, many of my servers shut down at 11pm on weeknights, but stay on longer during the weekend because I tend to be up later. I just reflect this in the cron entries to do what I want, when I want it to.

Now we just need a way to turn it back on. There's actual kit for this of course, or you can even use a relay to simulate the short across the power switch leads. But what I do for most of mine is just power cycle the smart plug. Most computers can be set in the BIOS to "turn on after AC loss/restore". Like a power outage, if you lose power for a few hours and then it comes back on, the computer knows to turn itself back on. I simply have the central server issue an "off" command to the smart plug, wait a minute or so (to drain all power so the computer really thinks it was a power outage) and then issue an "on" command to the plug. There are utilities in Linux to do this. You just send a specially formed payload to the IP of the smart plug to tell it to turn on or off.

And again, add another cron job on the central server to say, turn that smart plug back on at 7 am every morning. Now the server has gracefully shut down at 11pm, and turned back on at 7am, and I never noticed the difference because I was sleeping.

This is driving me crazy. Long story short I built a server/NAS out of old parts, running Ubuntu server on an SSD and inside is a WD Green 1 TB HDD. Eventually I want to replace the WD Green with larger disks, I'm just testing it for reliability/uptime right now, it doesn't have a workload yet so it sits mostly idle.

One day I walked by and it was making awful electronic/buzzing noises. Kinda like how when you turn on the computer for the first time, the HDD makes these little electronic noises before the motor spins up the platters. But it was in a loop of doing that, then silence, then noise, then silence. This went on for several minutes until I could even figure out what device was making the noise. Almost like it was stuck in boot/crash/repeat loop.

I hard powered it down, and back up again. All was fine, and it never did it again. I did diagnostics on the HDD, all is well. I saw nothing in the Ubuntu logs that told me anything.

I'm pretty sure the noise was the WD Green drive, and I hope it is because I don't care about that drive. But I have not been able to confirm it because I just can't get it to do it again! I messed with schedule reads/writes/spindowns/spinups. It's been running fine for weeks.

I'm hoping to confirm it's the drive so I can rule out the rest of the components, so I'll feel comfortable putting hundreds of dollars worth of NAS HDDs in it.

Any ideas? Anything else I can try? SMART says it's fine, HD Sentinel says it's fine. Even very long extended tests that take days to run, show fine.