Awesome. I really enjoyed it as well as the other tie-in novels for PIC.

If you’re planning to buy (you should but I won’t judge lol), here’s a tip if you use ebooks [dot] com. Put everything you’re interested in into a wish list (might need to register an account) and check in on it every few days. Sometimes books randomly go on unannounced sales for $1.99. It’s listed at $13.99 now, but I got “The Last Best Hope” for $1.99 by sheer luck when someone recommended it to me a few months ago.

I realize there’s major differences between writing a novel and writing a screenplay, but yeah, they should definitely try to involve them. Maybe it’s just cheaper to hire screenwriters than it is to license a novel and adapt it?

I had similar thoughts on it, but then I read the prequel novel which fills in a LOT of blanks. The backstory in PIC S1 is only touched on in dialog but I feel like it should have been the first half of the season. It makes so much of the story in the show make sense.

Specifically:

• Why Picard had such a dramatic, passionate, and public split from Starfleet
• Who Raffi is, why she’s actually way more awesome than she was portrayed in S1, and why she and Picard are such BFFs now (and their falling out / why Raffi is angry at Picard)
• How Worf got command of the Enterprise-E (not really relevant until S3 but still good addition to the backstory).
• The full scope/scale of the aborted Romulan evacuation
• The absolute political shitstorm that was happening within the Federation because of the amount of resources being (re) allocated for the effort. In the show, we got one line from Admiral Clancy but it’s a very important part of the backstory that’s covered in detail in the novel.
• Why neither Picard nor Starfleet Command are really in the wrong. The situation was shitty / “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” no matter what way you looked at it. The show clearly takes Picard’s side, but it’s much more complex than that.

All of that context was lacking in the show and only vaguely touched on in either throwaway lines or cryptic dialog.

I read the prequel novel (and the rest in the series that happen between seasons) and am on ep 3 of a PIC S1 rewatch. Everything just makes more sense this time around with all of that in mind.

So if you’re only a few episodes in, do yourself a favor and pause that. Go buy, pirate, and/or otherwise obtain the prequel novel and read it first.

Link: https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/209722657/star-trek-picard-the-last-best-hope/una-mccormack/

That’s assuming OP tags it as AI, though. I don’t have that much faith in the people who would spread AI slop in the first place. It’s a nice feature, and I’m not shitting on it, but it’s less impressive to me once I factor in the human equation.

Or can mods apply the “AI” tag to it? I still need to at least try Piefed.

I don’t disagree, but prioritize to what people need to know in daily use instead of burying the lede in a sea of boilerplate.

I’m old, so I remember product info/safety labels before they turned into this. If you need gloves for something, step 1 was usually “Put on gloves”.

Exactly. And cut that in half if you’ve consumed any alcohol in the last ~12-24 hours.

That’s the kind of information that should be front and center without having to search the tiny text in the whole label.

Ugh, I’m not optimistic enough to dispute that. Surely there must be a sane middle ground between unregulated free-for-all and forcing people to read through a whole MSDS just to see if they should take 1 or 2.

Safety regulations are written in blood, but warning labels seem to be written in stupidity and litigiousness.

Ah. The 5 Plus uses a Rockchip SOC where the Opi 3 / Zero 2W use Allwinner. I’ve read Rockchip is better supported, so maybe I’ll look into one of those. I just wanted the Pi Zero form factor for this project so went with that one. I should also have clarified that there’s no stable GPU support in Armbian for the OPi 3/Zero 2W but there are for other models.

Even without GPU, I’m surprised it runs Jellyfin at all let alone quite well (lack of transcoding aside). That’s in addition to running everything else I threw on it at the same time, so I’m still genuinely impressed.

I’m very pleased with the OrangePi. I use it for my Jellyfin server. It sometimes struggles with real-time 4k transcoding

What model OPi do you use and what system image (Armbian, Diet Pi, OrangeOS)?

I’ve got the Orange Pi Zero 2W (effectively the OPi 3 in a different form factor) and also run Jellyfin on it, but there’s no stable GPU support in Armbian. It also doesn’t even transcode 720p at a usable rate, so I just pre-encode everything to something it can direct stream.

It’s not my primary JF server, but it is nice to have during power outages and such since I can run it all day from a power bank.

How are the Orange Pis?

I got the 4 GB Orange Pi version of the Zero W2. The performance is there but I found it to be a bit quirky. That said, you might have better luck using the manufacturer’s images. Only reason I didn’t was that they were several years old and on an unsupported kernel. Took some doing, but I finally got Armbian working stable.

Tips:

• Don’t enable zram for more than 50%. It’ll happily compress more than that, but allocating more than 50% causes all kinds of random weirdness and crashes.
• The GPU either doesn’t work or isn’t stable. I gave up on it and just pre-encoded the media to a format that Jellyfin wouldn’t need to transcode.
• Make sure the antenna is mounted away and perpendicular from the main board. Had a lot of weird EMF-induced crashes when the antenna was parallel to the board inside a case.
• You will need a heatsink. Unless you underclock it below 1 GHz, a heatsink isn’t optional like it is on a Pi.
• Unless you just need the USB A ports or the IR receiver, skip the expansion board. The ribbon cable that connects it exacerbates the EMF issues. The 3 buttons on the front do not work with the Armbian builds (and the overlay that enables them doesn’t seem to work on newer kernels and no one seems to be working on it). The analog audio, likewise, does not work on Armbian with newer kernels and, last I checked, there are no overlays.

I also have a 4 GB Banana Pi in the same “Pi Zero” form factor. I haven’t messed with it much, but the three things I’ve noticed so far is the wifi chip is much better than the Orange Pi (I think it’s a Realtek chip here), the Bluetooth doesn’t work in Armbian (though it’s close), and it has eMMC which makes the system much faster.

the segment has been shared widely on social media

Not widely enough.

https://files.catbox.moe/4kv1gt.mp4

See Also:

• https://www.threads.com/@erikveland/post/DSl4-P8iWfp
• https://www.thereset.news/p/breaking-heres-the-60-minutes-segment

Even if they do eventually air it, it would be enlightening to play “spot the difference” between what they didn’t want to air and what they finally do. My guess would be CBS doing something like sed s/Trump/Biden/g to the script.

https://github.com/marytts/marytts

I’ve used MaryTTS semi-recently. It’s older but works well enough for my cases. I have it running on a server (locally) and my endpoints make a call to it and playback the returned audio file.

On Android, I use SherpaTTS which has good voices, but I’m not aware of a desktop/Linux option. It mentions using voices from Coqui which you linked, so I would guess that would be the way to go for desktop.

Saw some posts and comments from a while back about the Trek books

That was probably me. I started reading them over the summer and have talked about them quite a bit. I haven’t read Q-Squared yet, but I also have it in my collection (not for $1.99 though 😠). I took a break after I finished the Cold Equations trilogy but am probably going to start on the Titan series next.

Thanks for the heads up about it being confusing to follow. I tend to do marathon reads rather than short sprints, so hopefully that helps. I don’t think I’ve read any of Peter David’s books yet, but the ones by David Mack are all great and well paced.

and not let it ruin the medium

If you’re not a fan of that one, yes, please don’t let it ruin the rest of them for you. The Destiny trilogy is absolutely amazing as are most of the ones I’ve read (though Destiny is for sure my favorite).

My collection so far:

Mastodon, not my cup of tea (to be fair, neither was Twitter). I just don’t find micro-blogging to be very engaging and my mind categorizes it as “brain rot”.

Sharkey? Haven’t heard of that one until I just googled it, but one look at their mascot and…no. Just… no.

Have been looking at joining Piefed instance, though.

Also the way it links with Lemmy feels weird

And the culture is just different. I’m not sure how to describe it, but I’ll try. It’s like…imagine the threadiverse portion of the fediverse as a library or a meeting room where people are having a quiet discussion. Mastodon accounts feel like they’re barging in all loud and boorish like “HEYYYYY! LOOK AT ME!!! HASHTAG HASHTAG HASHTAG”

Oh, yeah. I totally forgot about serving size chicanery.

• “Up to…” when used to describe things like internet speeds
• “Wholesome” when used to describe food. Not really a lie, per se, but “wholesome” has absolutely no meaning when it comes to nutrition and just sounds good
• “Zero calories” or 0 grams of [blank] in the nutrition information. The regulations let them round down if it’s less than 1 gram standard unit of measurement for that item (edited from grams).
• Any time you see “free” there’s always at least an implied asterisk

Dunno how I missed this, but I referenced this post as a reply to another and am just now seeing it.

The box I ssh into is headless, and AFAIK, use of /media/{user}/{mountpoint} is just a desktop environment convention. When I plug in any kind of removable media to this box, I manually mount it under /mnt. I mount my NAS’s media share to /media mostly for convenience since that’s the main purpose of this box in my workshop.

https://startrek.website/post/30351229

Basically ssh into the box in my workshop and mplayer my whole music folder on shuffle.

I thought that was the Mid-Atlantic Accent?