Normal hifi gear, particularly second hand can sound way way better than generic computer crap. However normal hi-fi speakers are designed to work best a certain distance from the wall **and ** a certain distance from you. These distances vary between speakers but it is important to check this before spending any cash as some speakers need to be many feet from you, which isn’t always remotely practical for most pc setups.

I went with Dali Minutes for this reason, so they can be right on the wall and really close to me. I paired mine with a Rega Brio amp and RME ADI 2 USB DAC, then added a monitor audio sub later.

Most proper studio monitors are designed for near field listening they also make a good choice although they can be a little clean for some people’s taste.

I use powershell by default on windows and I prefer it for scripting any day of the week vs. shell scripts. It’s not the fastest but you can always plug in .net to your scripts to dramatically improve performance. Sure, I could write the script in rust or whatever to make it even faster, but that’s way more work than I need for the lifespan of the script.

Not the OP but having got rid of my Flair as it was too painful to get great coffee out of at 6am every morning, the learning curve is very steep unless you are already familiar with making espresso.

Everything Dies by Spirted Adrift, its a cover of the Type O Negative song

You could set it to only manually download the shows, then you would go into the interface and click the manual search button. It will then aggregate the results for you into a single list and give you a single click to download, rename, and import the file to your library. You can even download a temporary lower quality version and then replace it later when a better one comes out if you wish.

I particularly like it for shows that often have a week or more of downtime as I often forget when they coming back and this saves me having to check when they back.

It’s a decent machine for the money but compared to its competitors from gaggia and rancilio what they lose in fancy programming or the pid or the easy steaming (which is still way off mine) they gain in actually having an opv (depending which one you have), build quality and self service.

I’ve seen far too many people have issues with breville stuff and then problems returning it. It’s not that good ones don’t exist it’s just that more reliable does.

To put your seven years into perspective I should be getting 30 to 40 years out of mine with some regular servicing.

They nice machines but I wanted more consistent with its pressure and water flow, better steaming, not made by breville,and made with industry standard components that can last decades.

No, its a smart thing switch as I have the hub, so its z wave. However I have a lot of smart home switches, lights and so on so that makes sense for me. Plenty of options if you do not want a hub now.

The espresso machine has a proper on off button so I just leave it in on position and the switch turns the power on and off

Majority of any e61 espresso machine is like that, pretty much par for the course for anything other than budget non e61 or some of the new high end espresso machines that use some variation of electrically heated groups.

Mine will be “ready” after about 15 minutes but as an e61 group head is a heavy block it takes along time to get good thermal stability. Difference is I can steam and extract shots at the same time with 2bar steam and 9bar espresso, shot after shot.

My espresso machine has a proper on/off switch, so I just leave that set to on and control the power from the smart switch.

A smart switch for my espresso machine so it turns on a timer each morning so it’s ready for when I get up, it takes about 25 minutes to fully warm up. Also I can turn it on or off using voice controls, great when I want another coffee later in the day.

I love mine, if for nothing more than making my porridge on a timer so it’s ready for when I get up in the morning

While at university I did a lot of work on the SPARCs and this lead to Unix development as an early career for me. I moved into the windows world after that and I missed Unix so I picked up Linux around 98. I installed it on my work laptop of all things and made everything I needed work. Never looked back since although I run Windows VM for office and testing stuff.

Servers I run Debian, I do not want flashy I just want stable and tested security fixes.

I could not hack being that far behind for my desktop OS however (which I run on three different devices), so I run Ubuntu, which I remove as much Ubuntu and Gnome baggage as possible such as snaps and by running Sway.

I should really swap to a different distro that also has Debian as its root but without the stuff I don’t want and Sway by default. However I also want stuff to be simple and up to date, as I make my money on my desktop PCs, I cannot afford for it to be a PITA every time I try to install patches.

I do have one PC running arch, but its mostly for the memes (and for PIKVM)

I did used to be Red Hat through and through. I started with Linux back in 98 using Red Hat CD ROMs, but I left for Debian over some previous controversy that I do not remember now, years before the Centos stuff.

Ha, love the audio tell of the resource stealing

One of my favourite wars was to open audio files on other people’s SPARCs, somebody had the loudest bag pipe music that usually ended things.

Access to the SPARCs was normally restricted to third year but if you knew the right person you could get an account created pretty easily. Had the fastest access to the internet at the time within the uni as well.

Stories like that make me glad when I had the choice as a kid to go to Chef School or to get into Software Eng. I chose Software Eng. At the time it was down to the normal working hours being better for why I chose Tech, but as toxic and exploitive as Tech can be, it just seems to be nowhere near as bad as all of food service.

I still wonder what my life would be like if I had chosen to be a chef, and I still really enjoy cooking.

While I really dislike Amazon I can email ebooks including pdfs and epubs direct to my kindle, I don’t even need to go get it and plug it in and I can do this from my phone if I want.

If I have something really funky I can use calibre to convert and then email, or if it’s really big I can always plug it in and transfer directly.

There are a lot of reasons to not like Amazon products but the kindle is actually pretty good considering who makes it.

NVIDIA Shield with USB drive, and the Shield supports running Plex. Hook the Shield up to your main TV, share its content anywhere else you need it using Plex. You can even torrent directly on the Shield.

For music there is no bottleneck, it even properly supports external DACs via USB that almost everything else struggles with.

For video it’s only really missing AV1, which is only a pain for YouTube but not to the point it’s a real problem as I can still watch 4k on YouTube. It does support things like Dolby Vision, HDR10, TrueHD, etc.

For emulation it’s only going to struggle when you get to as recent consoles as the PS2, if modern emulation is what you are after you want a dedicated, powerful, and recent handheld emulator.

Why would you need newer and more powerful hardware for listening to music? Really doesn’t seem a good use for the money.

The existing shield has been THE longest android device ever and still has ample power to play back even reasonably high quality x265 4k hdr without issue (15gb per hour). Couple with it being one of the most flexible without having to jail break.

The WiiM Pro if you just want audio would be the only other device I would consider as it has Roon support. If you are serious about audio then Roon can be a game changer particularly for multi room audio and multi service audio. Yes you have to pay for Roon, but no FOSS is as easy to setup and use for the average user.