MakeMKV Works on Linux. I got it working with Xubuntu in proxmox.

Unoccupied does not mean unowned.

Star Trek First Contact - Commentary from Director Jonathan Frakes (Commander Riker)

I included several Star Trek commentaries in my list just because of Jonathan Frakes. Star Trek Picard Season 3 and (of all things) Star Trek Insurrection have just superior commentaries thanks in large part to Frakes and his love for the franchise and his respect for the craft of directing and the fans. I often think that the next time someone asks me, “If you could have dinner with anyone alive, who would ti be?” I would pick him. Such a great, intelligent person!

I learned a lot about the production and design choices around Terminator 2 from the commentary – the totally legitimate digital copy I have has 2 tracks (one labeled just director and the other director & writer) and I think I remember most stuff from the one with the writer.

My physical copy doesn’t have any commentary tracks on it! Now I want to hear them!

Some of these are commentaries that I just remember enjoying while I watched them, but they might have been listened to so long ago that I can’t remember what it was that I enjoyed. They’re in alphabetical order because that’s how my movies are organized.

1. El Camino. (All Vince Gilligan commentaries are fun for me.)
2. Forgetting Sarah Marshall. (The commentary was fun, but I remember they called Kristen Bell on the phone to include her, and she was driving on the freeway at the time, and wasn’t really interested in talking. That was rather disappointing. But the others who were talking were just clearly having a great time.)
3. Hot Fuzz
4. Inception. (My copy didn’t have audio commentary, but I remember the special featurettes on this were fabulous!)
5. Interstellar. (Again, no audio commentary on my copy, but the special features were noteworthy.)
6. John Wick 1, 2, 3, and 4. Great commentaries, great special features.
7. The Last Samurai
8. Lord of the Rings Extended Edition. (Holy moly, the commentaries on this set are incredible, and there are so many of them! It is worth listening to every second of all of them. These are probably the best commentaries of any film I have ever listened to.)
9. The Matrix 1, 2, and 3
10. Mean Girls (2004)
11. Mission Impossible Movies (I don’t think any of them actually had audio commentaries, but this one sticks out in my memory for having just endless amazing special featurettes that were worth watching. Especially Dead Reckoning!)
12. Showgirls (Yes, Showgirls. David Schmader’s commentary is … incomparable. There are some amazing lines in this. “Basically Nomi has two emotions: staring, and kicking.” There are some real gems in that commentary. While you’re at it, go watch Red Letter Media’s review of this film. It’s hilarious.)
13. Spaceballs (Every single Mel Brooks commentary is solid gold. There are so many movies I wrote down because I vaguely remember listening to the commentary, but then I deleted them from the list because I didn’t think they really had much memorable stuff. (Ocean’s 11, Rounders…) But Spaceballs is not like that. Spaceballs has an amazing commentary that is a blast!)
14. Star Trek II. (Nicholas Meyer did a great commentary that had insights on both Star Treks II and VI. There’s a second commentary with Manny Coto and Nicholas Meyer that I haven’t listened to yet, but the love that gushes out of him in the first few minutes makes me want to keep listening! It sounds like it’s shaping up to be a discussion between the director and a real fan, giving the director a chance to respond to fan reactions.)
15. Star Trek III (Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor have a track on this film for some reason, but I always enjoy Moore’s perspective on Star Trek. The original Leonard Nimoy commentary is the one I listened to, and it is quite good. This is Nimoy’s first feature film that he directed, I think, which is why I listened to the track in the first place, although it has been years and I can’t quite remember the content.)
16. Star Trek IV (I listened to the Nimoy commentary, but there’s also an Alex Kurtzman commentary on it. There’s a lot of recent dislike for Kurtzman, but frankly he’s a great fan of the franchise and always gives good commentary and special features.)
17. Star Trek VI
18. Star Trek Generations (I listened to the Ron Moore and Branon Braga commentary and loved it.)
19. Star Trek First Contact
20. Star Trek Insurrection (Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis basically have a great time in this commentary, so I did, too. This commentary is where I first noticed how much adoration Jonathan Frakes has for the franchise and the fans. I’m already a huge fan of his directing, so it was nice to see what he had to say about the craft, too.)
21. Starship Troopers (Listen to all the commentaries on this movie, especially given the current political climate.)
22. Superbad (This is another fun commentary.)
23. Superman II The Donner Cut.
24. This is the End (I seriously love Seth Rogan commentaries.)
25. Top Gun (I think this is one of those ensemble commentaries where you get several groups talking on a single commentary track, so some people who are interesting depart after 10-15 minutes, which is unfortunate. But I remember it being good.)
26. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
27. What Dreams May Come (I listened to this years and years ago, but I seem to remember it helped me understand some of the movie’s symbols better.)

Added: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. (I took this one off, but I’m adding it back again. I think I liked some of the commentaries but not others. Still, it keeps re-entering my brain as a good one, so maybe go listen to the director commentary with the original writer of the comic.)

Bonus! Recommended TV Series commentaries:

1. Better Call Saul. (As I said above, Vince Gilligan does great, GREAT commentaries. Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad have a huge amount of commentary on their discs, and every second of it is a treasure.)
2. Breaking Bad
3. South Park. (Matt and Trey don’t like doing commentaries, so they only talk for a couple of minutes per episode. But they are a lot of fun to listen to regardless.)
4. Star Trek Lower Decks. (I could listen to Jonathan Frakes and/or Mike McMahon all day. These commentaries are hilarious and fun. Stick around to hear Jonathan Frakes ALMOST get himself fired by spoiling that the Titan is…
5. Star Trek Picard Season 3. (All TNG fans should listen to the commentary on every episode of Season 3.)

You probably only need the iPad. The iPad is great for giving you access to most stuff until you get home and can do the more serious work. If you absolutely must do your work away from home, get the Macbook Pro, because iPads are great, but as you mentioned, they don’t have a desktop OS, and that’s a limiting factor.

First things first: Synology as a beginner NAS is perfect! It’s what I recommend to everyone that is getting started out. So good move there.

I think you should get a four-bay NAS. You don’t have to put four drives in it; you can put two drives in it and have an upgrade path for later. Plus the drives are far easier to install and remove. The processor will also be better in a four-bay NAS, which will give you more options if you want to play around with a docker container or run a VM.

To answer your questions:

1. If the NAS you choose has a USB port on it, you will be able to connect things like external hard drives, thumb drives, etc. NASes with USB3 connectors support USB 3 drives. Just be sure to use a file system that is not proprietary. So NTFS is out, but exFat is fine.
2. I have connected to volumes on the NAS and have connected the NAS to other volumes without issues. It will work fine.
3. I had two NASes sitting right next to my head in my office at ear level — probably the worst case scenario for noise. I barely noticed them. I could hear them crunching away during backups, but it wasn’t bad. I never heard a fan running — just the internal drives making their read/write noises.
4. The drives fail before the NASes do. Synology had some issues with bult-in power supplies going bad after a few years. Their modern NASes now have plugs with a power brick on the cable, which I assume was in response to this issue. It’s a lot less expensive to replace a power cable than a whole NAS! But beyond that one issue (which affected one NAS of mine), the NASes I’ve been using have lasted for … oh, 8 years now.
5. There are many choices for syncing data with your synology NAS. They provide Synology Drive, which gives you a local drop-box-like folder syncing option. They support rsync, and they provide HyperBackup, which is a block-level backup utility. You can choose a Synology shared drive as the destination for a Time Machine backup on a Mac. (I assume you can do this with Windows’ backup solution, but I’ve never personally used it.)

I used homebridge for a long time, but found maintaining it to be a bit of a chore. Home Assistant was easier to maintain and configure, thanks to its web-based interface. And it has a bridge to homekit that achieves basically everything that homebridge did. You may want to investigate it!

However there is already at least one third party app that plays SBS video just fine.

Which app?

You can also convert SBS video to MV-HEVC, which is arguably a better 3D format, and use the built-in player.

I investigated this and couldn’t find a tool to do this. Which tools have you seen that do this?

Using AI to flag footage for review by a person seems like a good time-saving practice. I would bet that without some kind of automation like this, a lot of footage would just go unreviewed. This is far better than waiting for someone to lodge a complaint first, since you could conceivably identify problem behaviors and fix them before someone gets hurt.

The use of AI-based solutions to examine body-cam footage, however, is getting pushback from police unions pressuring the departments not to make the findings public to save potentially problematic officers.

According to this, the unions are against this because they want to shield bad-behaving officers. That tells me the AI review is working!

If a company requires you to re-apply for the job you already have, you lost your job long before you ever recorded yourself with HireVue.

I went to my local Apple Store yesterday morning and saw one person leaving with an Apple Vision Pro and maybe a few people inside trying it out. It wasn’t crowded at all. It seemed like the store was pretty overcrowded with employees, though.

On the bright side, I was able to get in and out with my purchase really fast!

It’s so much better! Where I first saw how much better OLED was than LCD was in the opening credits of Foundation. There’s a bit where a ship passes in front of a star, and the silhouette of the ship is precise and perfect. Just be sure to get your TV calibrated, or do it yourself. Mine came with the whites set to 100%, which sunburns your eyeballs at night.

Totally unintentional. I’ll edit it.

Porkbun is sort of the darling of the self hosting community. I settled on them after doing a huge comparison of prices and features of all the different registrars available to me. Porkbun was by far the best.

Of course they will exist. China will own them all.

Entire departments? I’m skeptical.

Readers will be available for $99

Has anyone here used a different VR headeset who also needs reading glasses? I use readers (I had laser eye surgery, which made me need reading glasses much earlier than usual). I tried the Meta Quest 3 over the holidays and was surprised to discover that I didn’t need reading glasses to see things “up close.”

Don’t forget spatial video. A minute of spatial video is approximately 130MB. 256 GB is going to fill up fast.

Using the search bar in iPad OS to solve equations does not require access to the internet.

If you have a keyboard, press command-space. You can then enter an equation that you want to solve in the search bar. If the syntax is correct, it will give you the solution. Try this equation as an example:

(2+pi)/(3^3)

It will display this result: 0.1904293575

If you press enter and you do have internet access, then it will send the equation to Safari and execute a search in your default search engine. I’m not sure why it odes that; that doesn’t seem too useful.

Some other operations you can do in the search bar:

sqrt(n), cos(n), sin(n), tan(n), log(n), ln(n), etc.

Some other functions that I’ve used in Excel also work in the search bar, such as min(12,2)

My guess is that it supports many or all of the functions that are supported in Numbers.

With this, you should be able to quickly solve just about anything you would type into a calculator app.