captain_aggravated

A lot of the laws of physics I've studied, like Boyle's Law and Charles' Law, describe the behavior of "An ideal confined gas."

I've had to tell several flight students to unlearn what they've learned about that in the meteorology chapter, because, for example, in a confined gas, increasing the temperature causes an increase in pressure while the density stays the same. In the Earth's atmosphere, increasing temperature does nothing to the pressure and decreases the density. Because the Earth's atmosphere isn't "confined," there's no lid, the air is relatively free to change volume. Heat the entire planet up and the atmosphere will just get a little taller.

But, I think, even if we put a magical vacuum tight shell around the planet 200 miles up, making the volume finite, I think the atmosphere would still act like an unconfined gas, because 1. it's so vast that it never homogenizes, parcels of different temperatures, pressures and moisture content take days to slosh across the available space, and 2. the Earth's gravity will cause a pressure gradient; most of the air is at the bottom and if you heat it up, it may not change volume but the pressure at the top will increase.

So I guess there has to be an upper limit to the volume and/or mass of air that can be "confined" and it's somewhere below planetary scale.

Something written had to exist in order to be read, so writing is at least a second older than reading.

I have a 3DConnexion Spacemouse. I bought it, and use it, for CAD work, but I'm drunk enough to think it'd be fun to play Satisfactory with. What do you think I'd need to do to map it to a controller or something? Am I gonna have to fuck around with the Python library? It's been awhile since I've fucked around with a Python library.

So here's the state of things right now:

I've got a Synology NAS with stuff like my movie collection stored on it. I think at some point I'll move my music collection up there, too. It's an ARM powered 2-bay thing, I'm not particularly interested in using any of Synology's software, and there's some stuff that won't run on that box because it's ARM instead of x86. I don't really have a "server" box running.

A few years ago I bought a "commercial TV" aka one that doesn't have Roku or whatever. For awhile, I ran OSMC (basically Debian Kodi) on a Raspberry Pi, which...I had enough problems with that it's unlivable. I'd rather just not have a television than continue to use OSMC.

In the meantime, I built a new gaming PC for my desk, the old machine (which happens to be in a Fractal Node 202 case so it already looks like a TiVo) has been moved into the living room. It's a Ryzen 3600/GeForce GTX-1080 machine with a bit over a terabyte of SSD and 16GB of RAM. It's still kicking bubblegum and chewing ass. Yes, it idles at a greater power draw than the Pi pulls at full steam, but it'll spend most of its time asleep, we'll be okay.

I'm currently still using Mint Cinnamon on it. Which is a hilariously unusable home theater OS. Plus I have my desktop (a Ryzen 7700/Radeon 7900GRE machine running Fedora KDE) and my phone (A Galaxy S10e) that I sometimes watch media on. Some questions:

• Why does VLC error out when trying to play mp4s stored on my NAS? Is it because SMB is Microsoft fucksewage that doesn't actually work? Because that's my working hypothesis.

• I have so little information on what Plex/Jellyfin even are, I gather Plex is at least semi-commercial while Jellyfin is the open source but worse option. These may or may not have a server component that has to run on a server-like box, which I don't and won't have.

• On the client side, I don't know if they take the place of a DE the way Kodi does, or if it's a separate app, or if you'd have to exit Plex or Jellyfin to use something like Steam, or if Steam Big Picture mode would work as a media center, but can it get to Youtube...

Is there anything out there that works better than throwing my TV away and forgetting about it?

I'll go first: r/kitty. One of the hundred grillion cat subs back on Reddit, the culture in this one was you posted a cat picture, and the only word allowed in the title or in any comments or replies was "Kitty."

Someone is using that subreddit for covert communications, I just know it. Either on the level of "if u/PM_me_your_nostrils posts an orange cat, we attack at dawn!" or there's some steganography going on with the pictures, but that subreddit was too stupid to be as active as it was.