tomkatt

Just finished the Live-A-Live remake last night. Highly recommend. It’s absolutely bonkers.

The inspiration for Octopath Traveler is obvious, but it’s got none of the fluff, and there’s essentially zero grinding at all until the final chapter.

I finished it in around 28 hours at a leisurely pace.

Take the drawbacks with a grain of salt, I’ve seen good professional installations, a lot of buildings in my area (both residential and commercial) use this kind of flooring. The good stuff is durable, can look really nice and hold up well with lots of foot traffic and doesn’t need the extra maintenance when done right. But you gotta pay more for the better stuff, like anything else.

My house was custom built on a reasonable budget during the pandemic, “builder’s special” kinda thing. We made it work, but there were definitely corners cut in places. Some things are quality, some things are cheap but work, and I guarantee the flooring was one of the things they cheaped out on. 😅

Floating floor planks. Generally wood laminate / artificial planks that sit on top of existing flooring or subfloor, and generally click together at the sides and ends. They’re pretty common for newer homes and for cheaper floor replacements.

They’re not a bad option. They’re cheap and benefit from individual planks being relatively easy to replace if damaged, but the drawback is they tend to shrink and expand a bit and can shift with temperature and humidity fluctuations.

I have floating floor in my home and every few months as the temp and humidity changes occur with the seasons have to use a suction gripper and mallet to knock closed gaps in a few places where they can shift anywhere from 1/16 to up to 1/4 inch if/where the ends have separated in places. But it means caulking under the toilet was a bad move because they’re designed to be able to shift slightly, and sealing them down that way can cause issues and eventually the seal will break from the pressure of the planks shifting. And doing it caused a few gaps to form where there were none previously.

I’m not a big fan of this flooring application, and am considering going with glue down engineered wood in the future when it needs replacing.

If you have floating flooring in your bathroom don’t caulk, it will move and separate. Ask me how I know. 🙃

I do this with my Wiims already, no account needed. Via Squeezelite they support speaker linking and whole home playback, or just linking individual devices.

I used it for a bit, but after getting Navidrome up and running, Arpeggi replaced it as my download “away from home” client, and at home I use Lyrion or Music Assistant via Squeezelite since I have Wiims in every room of the house.

The Xeon server would be a good bet. Your other machine would be potentially bottleneck for memory. There’s a NOAVX deployment available, would be slower but should work fine. Just be sure to disable anything associated with lyric detection, it’s an absolute performance nightmare.

I ran it onaRyzen 5500u with 32 GB RAM with the standard deployment with AVX2 support and scaled up to three worker threads. For a collection of 53k tracks it was processing about 100 per hour that way with lyrics/whisper translation enabled, but once I turned that off it was doing 1300-1400 tracks per hour.

Not for me, but I could see the appeal for some.

I have Wiim Pro and Wiim Pro Pluses in every room in my house that I’d stream to, and send via Squeezelite or DLNA (with Chromecast and AirPlay as available, but IMO inferior options). Plus virtual squeezelite software allows for local PC play the same way if needed (wife uses this on her Mac Mini, I don’t generally play music on my PC, just direct via the Wiim to my amp).

TBH I don’t recommend FinAmp, but it’s an option if you only want to deal with Jellyfin.

Lyrion (LMS) and Navidrome server/clients though, absolutely. They’re great.

Even with a 4k TV, 1080p is fine. Most TVs these days will upscale 1080p and 480p content, and even if not, 4k is an exact integer scale of 1080p (3840x2160 is 2x 1920x1080)

I have a 5 TB NAS (technically 4x2 TB of SSDs in RAID5, plus float space for backups of my servers), but it’s shared for music, video, books and audiobooks, and retro game ROMs, plus other necessities (personal documents and such).

I mostly enjoy older stuff, and don’t bother with 4k. I let the TV upscale it, don’t really care. Looks like I’ve got about 1.5 TB worth of video (movies, TV, and anime) at the moment, plus another 1.4 TB of music.

Despite all of this, I haven’t completely abandoned Plex.

Plexamp remains one of the best self-hosted music applications I’ve ever used.

Lyrion, Music Assistant, and Navidrome are all solid options. And Jellyfin also supports music hosting, along with FinAmp, which has similar functionality to PlexAmp (maybe not as good, but download functionality works).

Personally, I abandoned PlexAmp. Wasn’t worth keeping with the rest and it has been downhill since the loss of Tidal integration. Navidrome clients work great, have solid radio and discovery features for large collections, and support local downloading for on the go.

And for local listening, I’d argue that Lyrion with Blissmix or LastFM “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins are as good and sometimes better than PlexAmp. And Navidrome and/or Music Assistant with AudioMuse-AI plugin utterly destroys PlexAmp’s radio/DJ functionality. Install AudioMuse, scan your library and go, it just works. Especially with recent builds having native Linux, Mac, and Windows now (I deployed with Docker compose before these options were available).

All good, and picking it up on sale is a good idea. I finished it today. It’s a good game and the gameplay loop is fun, but the story was just… ugh, convoluted to fit into Final Fantasy canon. The plot suffered from “good idea, poor execution.”

I’m enjoying it. I bounced off the game the first time I played as I was expecting maybe a more traditional Final Fantasy experience and it didn’t click with me. I’ve played a few souls-likes since and the gameplay is meshing better for me now, though it’s still difficult at times.

Combat is enjoyable, but the gear filtering and management is kind of annoying.

I’ve read it’s similar to Nioh’s gameplay but I’m not familiar with that one.

Been going hard on Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin.

Besides that, I’m 10-11 hours into Stella Glow on my 2DS XL, and have been playing Grim Dawn and Slay the Spire 2 co-op with my wife.