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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Short answer: Because their motivation is to win!

    I read something about this in the Book “Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development: From Concept to Playable Game With Unity and C#” by Jeremy Gibson a while ago, maybe that can explain this a bit.

    Basically, every Player has some Intention or the “Player Intent” which is described by the Personality Types of Richard Bartle. For example, you have:

    • The Achiever who seeks to get the highest score in the game and wants to dominate it
    • The Explorer who seeks to find all the hidden places in the game and wants to understand the game
    • The Socializer wants to play the game with friends and wants to understand other players
    • The Killer who wants to provoke other players and wants to dominate them

    And then you have two others that you will be encountering:

    • The Cheater who only cares about winning and does not care about the integrity of the Game and they will bend or break the rules to win
    • The Spoilsport who doesn’t care about winning or about the game but rather will break the game to ruin the other player’s experience

    So, the motivation to “cheat” could either be that this player doesn’t really care about the game, is able to get away with cheating and just wants to beat the game. According to Jeremy Gibson, a cheater might not cheat if they can win legitimately but I would argue that cheaters are usually not great players in the first place so the bar would be pretty low for them to “win legitimately”.

    As for the spoilsport, this is extremely hard to work against or prevent because the motivation isn’t about the game anymore but other players, to make their experience miserable so that the spoilsport can gain satisfaction from it. Hence also the use of “don’t feed the trolls”.

    With that being said, when you ask why someone would cheat, the question would rather be “What is their motivation” and the answer to that is “to win the game, at all costs”. And, most of the time, they will get away with this because they apparently cannot be caught as quickly as they can still continue doing it, if there is any action against them at all.


  • The health check that Tdarr can do depend on what health check you select, the “quick” health check will only check the file headers. This probably won’t find any video corruption unless the file headers are corrupted or invalid.

    The thourough health check will basically do a transcode of the input file without an output. This is being used to run and check each single frame of the file and “process” it without actually producing an output. https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Null

    Would this screw with plexs own traditional transcoding?

    No, Plex and Tdarr are two completely different things.

    Transcoding is not some universal thing but rather a term to describe what is happening. In general “transcoding” means that you convert something from one format into another.

    When you use the processing pipeline through Tdarr, it would detect a file in your library and run it through your specified pipeline. Depending on what you want to do with the file and how the pipeline is configured, it might or might not do anything with that specific file. When you, for example, configure that you want any file that has a video stream that isn’t encoded with HEVC to be HEVC then a H.264 file would then be transcoded.

    This is on a “replacement” bases, so any file you run through this would replace the existing file in your library. Meaning: you have a H.264 file before tdarrs processing and after it is finished, you have the file with HEVC as video stream.

    With the health check, as explained above, this is a bit different since you don’t have an ouput file, there is also no replacement happening. It is just a “check” that the file can be transcoded in its entirety (with a thourough health check).

    When Plex transcodes something, this is done “on the fly”. This means that it only transcodes the current file in your library.

    Technically, tdarr could “screw” with the Plex transcoder when Tdarr processes a file while you yourself watch the same file that is then transcoded by plex. When Tdarr is finished, it would replace the file which then could throw off the Plex transcoder. But this is very rare or non existent and you could even configure tdarr to do those things only at a certain time and it wouldn’t happen with health checks. as someone who runs both, I have yet to come across something like this.

    Or does it attempt to repair a file by transcoding

    As the name suggests, health checks are only “checking” if the file is healthy, there is nothing being repaired here. While you might be able to repair the file header, a corrupted video or audio is not something you can repair because of missing information. But that is nothing that Tdarr will do anyway, it just verifies/checks if it is healthy or not.


  • From the very low amount of information, there isn’t much to go by so the usual would have to be checked.

    OP should definitely use the new agents, again, anything other than the official agents are unsupported and shouldn’t be used unless you use a specific metadata agent for a specific source. If that is tmdb, tvdb or imdb then the new agents will work just as fine if not better.

    Then the usual suspects would need to be checked. Naming convention being followed, content not being merged into other episodes etc.

    So if the new season is not appearing inside the show, it either wasn’t detected because of the file naming or merged with some other content (filter -> duplicates).

    Without any further information, there is very little to speculate further


  • A bit of clarification here because this is a mistake I have seen too many make.

    The first thing is that You should only use the Plex Series and Plex Movies Agent. They are the official and up-to-date Agents that you need. All other Metadata Agents like TheTVDB and TheMovieDB are outdated and unmaintained. The new Metadata Agents are also faster than the old ones, Unless you use some specific 3rd Party Agents, the Plex Series and plex Movies Agent are more than enough for you because they get their metadata from watch.plex.tv which aggregates them from TheMovieDB, TheTVDB and IMDB.

    When you use those agents, you only configure them through the Advanced Section in your library. The “Agents” Section in your Plex Server Settings is absolutely meaningless for those new and official Agents because the Agents listed there are based on the old Metadata Agent system written in Python (IIRC the new ones are written in C++ like the rest of Plex).

    Also, that Agent section is based on a Priority list, not on an “override” list. This means that the list is being processed from Top to bottom, each agent in that list will provide their own metadata and write that to the Library item but it will only add metadata that doesn’t already exist yet. This means that if the first metadata agent provides a Synopsis for the library item, the next Agent will not override it.

    So, with the new Metadata Agents, there is nothing to override and the Agent section can be completely ignored. Only when you use 3rd party metadata Agents, this section would be of interest to you.

    Source: I am the developer of the MyAnimeList Metadata Agent for Plex.


  • The problem with brushing on resin is actually not that great because resin for printers will need to be cured. Unless that material is letting the UV light through, only the outer parts will get cured and hold onto the models but when you open it up again the whole middle part would be liquid resin again which stinks and is toxic.

    I had this misunderstanding for quite a while myself and though that I can just weld resin party with resin together until I did that with a larger piece and it broke quite easily and seeing that the whole inside wasn’t even touched at all by the UV light.

    Hence also why you should shine some UV light into a hollowed model to fully cure it.

    CA/superglue should do fine if applied correctly.


  • I don’t know where I read it but IIRC religion is being used as a simple answer to very difficult and possibly uncomfortable questions: why are we here and what is our purpose?

    It is fairly easy to believe that something, a god, created us instead of that the existence of humanity was just a fluke, a stroke of luck enabling us to evolve were we are now because it is just easier to grasp even if it is proven. That we evolved from simple beings into more complex organisms instead of just “being created”. Evolution creates so many quite difficult questions that it is easier to understand and believe that someone just wanted us to exist.

    When someone is believing in a religion they also always have some form of " it won’t be over" scenario like when you die, there is nothing truly “the end”. You just won’t vanish and this can be terrifying for many because the following question could be, what sense does it make to live at all when our existence is just so insignificant in comparison to everything else?

    So, in short, it is an easy too to make sense of things that almost everyone can understand it.

    Unfortunately, things like this can and will be abused.



  • Connectivity or rather the lack of it…

    I have a Samsung TV and recently got a new cooling fan and now when I start the fan when my TV is on, it says it detected a new device. I don’t know what my TV would want with a fan maybe control the speed for more immersion?

    But there is also no way for me to disable that. I also got regular requests of my neighbor’s to connect to my TV until I disabled the notification for it. No, I couldn’t disable that my TV doesn’t even allow it to be seen, I had to enable to not automatically connect devices and disable that notifications are being shown. That thing isn’t even connected to the internet.



  • Depends. I recently was in that situation and it was easier and more cost-effective to just print them.

    I recently bought some Lego Star Wars sets and printed out some Display stands for them but the connection between the stands and the model was expected to be a 2x4 Lego plate. I didn’t have those plates at hand so I looked online and found it from the official Lego site.

    The individual “Plate 2x4” would cost 0.14EUR each. Since I needed 3 this would be 0.42EUR. But the mailing costs would be over 9EUR.

    So ordering 3 of those Lego pieces would cost me almost 10 bucks. I just printed them out which worked well, they were a bit tight fit but are still holding.

    But I wouldn’t necessarily say that this is a replacement for actual Lego pieces. As a quick alternative that you can’t see or that has less interaction with other pieces (doesn’t need to fit correctly on all sides) then I think this can work.



  • Unraid “supports” docker compose. You can install and use it but you won’t be able to utilize how unraid handles docker containers.

    All that unraid does is make docker more accessible for the normal user. In the end the container template constructs a docker run command.

    So you could use portainer to manage stacks through a webui or install compose and have to SSH into the unraid server all the time.


  • I had the pleasure recently to create an ffmpeg command to transcode a video into HEVC 10bit with quicksync.

    I had tha previously running completely fine on my Nvidia GPU. You would think that it would just be replacing the parameter which device or hardware acceleration to use.

    Yeah, turns out that there are like 4 ways to set the quality value of the transcoded output, CRF didn’t work for some reason with quick sync so you need to use global quality or something. I spend days on this trying to figure this out, DAYS.

    It is a very powerful tool but every time I have to use it, it is too complicated and I have to spend hours or days to get it working.


  • If you look at your library it shows you what they currently use and you can even set which you want as default.

    yeah, can’t say that this is the case. Since the Metadata Agent would be responsible for requesting and adding metadata to your library items it would be set to the Official Plex Metadata Agents, since this is specifically for Movie Artworks, this would then only apply to the Plex Movie Metadata Agent.

    But nowhere is any mention of where that metadata is coming from. Since I already wrote my own Metadata Agent and have some experience with it I know that the metadata is coming from watch.plex.tv as the metadata aggregator. I also know that movie-related Metadata is coming from TheMovieDB or IMDB.

    You can specifically define that you want metadata from any of the sources if your “force match” the related source through the {tvdb-110381} on your folders. But not in the agent settings itself.

    For TV Shows this is somewhat different because you can specifically select the Episode ordering to either TVDB or TMDB. By default, and from my tests, everything is coming from TheMovieDB unless otherwise specified.

    I am curious where you did see that…

    But, again, the point is to make this more clear what the origin is because I have had multiple instances in which I had to do some detective work telling a user where that incorrect metadata is coming from because all they see is some wrong metadata in their library that someone maliciously changed on on TVDB, IMDB or TMDB.



  • Yeah. The general speed that you set isn’t necessarily the speed that your printer will print at. That might be the max speed you might get in the best situation or location.

    For example, depending on the settings, first layer, outer walls, bridges and other parts of the model cann all be printed at a lower speed to preserve quality. Your print head also needs to accelerate and decelerate for every corner so that it doesn’t overshoot and go where it should. So low acceleration/deceleration play also a part. And the model itself has to be considered in this too because long, mostly straight lines can accelerate to that speed and stay on it for longer.

    So what you set as “speed” in the slicer is mostly not what you actually get. Some slicers have a speed display with a colour gradient after you sliced it so that you can see which parts are faster or slower.

    The only thing you can really do about it is to do test prints and slowly push the speed up as far as you can to get a decent quality at a nice speed. But you can still end up in parts where you would be fairly slow.



  • I am pretty sure I have disabled this as well but I am not sure about the “set everything to private”. I know I have seen this recently but I cannot find it anywhere so it isn’t that easy to find, at least for me right now.

    On the other hand, even if I would set that family and friends could see my watch history, I would still have to have some assumptions about what is shared and what is not and how that is being accessed. There is a huge difference between “they can see everything that I have watched regardless of whether they have access to the library or not” and, more importantly getting notified about what I have watched or they have to go to some UI element or browser to see what a user has played.