This episode gave me such joy. I feel like Lower Decks leans a lot into the outrageous stories, like last week’s Evil Computer and Peanut Hamper thing. Those episodes are fun, but they lean pretty hard into that Rick and Morty humor.

This episode felt like a Star Trek episode. Mocking the over reliance on cave sets was a great premise, but from there we had a good episode showcasing several minor characters interacting with our main cast. It was a great way to allow them to branch out while sticking to the core relationship between the characters.

On top of that, the jokes were funny. I almost didn’t stop laughing at the subtle and not-so-subtle jabs at cave episodes throughout the years.

Personally, I’d like more episodes like this. It really showcases what is great about this show.

About ten years ago a dear friend and I started a community radio station. In order to make our FCC license more competitive, we started internet streaming pretty early on.

We had great community buy-in, but we needed to broadcast 24/7 and decided to record and rebroadcast live shows.

We had no money, just a MacMini. So we had to do everything with things that came with MacOS or were free or near free.

We ended up creating a pretty impressive interlinking set of AppleScripts, Automator apps, and iTunes Smart Playlists, all driven by Calendar alarms. Calendar alarms would start recordings, which would use the magic import to iTunes folder to get it into iTunes. This would then move into a smart playlist that was set to look for certain tags and only have the most recent audio file with those tags in it.

When a rebroadcast would come up, it was pretty simple. A calendar alarm would trigger an AppleScript that triggered one of these Smart Playlists.

It all worked well for a long time. Ultimately we got our FCC license, and donations allowed us to improve our IT. But this station ran on iTunes, AudioHijack, AppleScript, Automator, and Calendar alarms for years.

Random question that people may not know the answer to, but is calckey.world run by the same people that run Lemmy.world? I’ve been pleased with this Lemmy instance and the people who are running it seem to know what they’re doing, and if so I’d just sign up with that one.

Good luck. I literally went through something similar a few weeks ago. It took a little time but my entire network runs better now. You got this!

You can avoid that by using the same Wi-Fi network name and password that your current network uses. Your devices won’t know the difference.

I just want to reiterate what others have said: do some googling about your router make and model. Look for the instructions for “hard reset” or “factory reset”. Follow those instructions. Once you do, you should be able to find the default login online.

Once you’re able to log into your router, I’d suggest keeping it as your DHCP server and simply following the instructions to set up a pihole with it. Everything seems to work more smoothly without the pihole as DHCP server.

Do you know if your router is acting as a DHCP server? Most do, and if you’ve set up the Pi as one without logging in and turning off your router’s, you’ve set up two conflicting DHCP servers, and that would explain your issues.

I’ve been on the Fediverse for years and I’ve never much encountered this. I curate my timelines very carefully. I don’t look at the Local or Federated timelines in Mastodon, Pixelfed, or Lemmy.

That said, I do the exact same thing with all social media. I don’t go to the subreddits that would have such content, don’t follow users on Twitter who spew this content, etc.

I’m not disputing that it’s there, because of course it is. But it’s also there on every other social media platform, and with far more resources these platforms haven’t been able to do nearly anything about it.

I don’t know what the answer is to this propaganda, and I want to make clear that I think it’s awful. But it’s the fault of social media writ large, not the Fediverse.

In fact, I’ve found the Fediverse to be better about calling it out and encouraging defederating offending instances than I’ve seen on traditional social media, which seems to shrug its shoulders at it at best and actively encourages it at worst.

I still really want to understand what those apps are doing in the background to cause this in the first place.

Not a bad idea! I think of works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilliogy, which has a pretty significant focus in the second book about what a new style of collaborative governance might look like. Narrative is always the most powerful way to convince people of ideas, so I say go for it!

What an interesting idea. As this project scales, how would you think of getting around the Reddit API limit problem? This sounds pretty API intensive. I also wonder if Reddit might see this as a TOS violation (particularly when the bot was posting comments) and killing it without even reaching an API limit.

That said, I applauded you for trying to think of creative ways to increase content on Lemmy. One thing in particular that I miss are the questions on niche subreddits, particularly hobby subreddits. You can learn so much just by reading others’ questions. Lemmy doesn’t have the user base and reach to support stuff like that yet, so I like that you’re trying to think of ways to increase that content here.

What made this episode wonderful was finally taking a look at Orion culture. It’s one of the oldest races in cannon, first showing up in TOS, but we know so little about them. It was fun to dig into that a little.

While Tendi is one of my favorite characters, I do find her backstory a little cliched. Having her and Billups with essentially the same backstory seems lazy. I’m happy they called that issue out with a joke, but it feels unnecessary for Tendi.

That said, I did like how they investigated how this impacted her sister, and created good character tension there. I do hope we get more backstory at some point on all of this about why Tendi hated Orion culture so much, and why so few Orions choose starfleet.

All that said, I found this to be a mostly forgettable episode. It had its moments, but the jokes felt a little off and the plot didn’t draw me in like some of the other episodes.