My son‘s birthday is coming up and I’ve been telling people for years to get us steam gift cards.

I second this. I would use an epic account like a burner account and just get all those free giveaways. Heroic works for the Amazon prime games as well. I played a little bit of trek to Yomi the other day because I had a friend mentioned it was free on epic and I didn’t even realize I already had it.

Knowing the usefulness that we’ve gotten at our house out of having them, I would probably say if I didn’t have the PS5 I would get a steam deck at this point. A refurbished one from valve when they’re on sale would be my pick. Plus, it works on my 20 year catalog of games.

I’ll give my recommendation to local LLMs as well. I have a 1060 super that I bought years ago in 2019 and it’s just big enough to do some very basic auto completion within visual studio. I love it. I wouldn’t trust it to write an entire program on its own, but when I have hit a mental block and need a rough estimate of how to use a library or how I can arrange some code, it gives me enough inspiration to get through that hump.

My joystick broke on my Ultimate controller. It could have been my fault or it could’ve been when I was traveling for work or the two year-old. Either way, I managed to take the front cover off and look at the joysticks and order a new set from AliExpress. Less than four dollars later and 20 minutes of work it was all fixed up. It wasn’t due to contacting customer support, but replacement parts were readily available.

Do you have a kobo? I’m wondering how much people enjoy reading with them. I’ve got an older Kindle that I was able to jailbreak, but I was looking for something a little simpler to maintain.

One thing that I do, though it may not be as secure as a reverse proxy is just using tailscale funnel to expose my jellyfin instance.

I’d like to learn a self-hosted SSO but time is my least abundant resource at the moment.

I don’t have the quantitative metrics, but I will say that I had the flu last year and I just laid on the couch with my steam deck and streamed cyberpunk using Moonlight. The latency was imperceptible to my flu brain, and it was a much better experience than playing for an hour at a much lower quality natively on the deck. I have a friend who also streams his desktop to his Apple TV (hardwired desktop, wireless Apple TV) and he beat metal gear solid V like that.

I’m doing a very similar thing with an old Dell thin client. I did inherit a large server from a company that was upgrading, but I’ve been thinking about downsizing a lot lately so now I use a few small computers on a 10 inch rack.

the best server is one that you already have

As someone that aggressively takes advantage of the prime gaming giveaways, heroic launcher has been nearly perfect for all the random games that I’ve received on epic/amazon/gog.

I hate how good bazzite is at just being a game console. But then there’s lots of little Fedora ublue things in there that are useful. Like the fact that it has podman by default makes running silly things like ollama so easy.

Roku TV has been unbearable lately. There’s a whole row of ads before I even get to the physical inputs on the TV. Plus there is a full height ad on the right and a half height ad on the left.

I think they mean no ads in the UI. There are still ads in the YouTube app since Google needs that revenue. Ads don’t take up approximately 50% of the home screen though like they do on a Roku TV.