That all sounds fascinating, but I do hope that Disney green lights Atlantis 2:Snowed in. I feel like that could finally be the miniseries that convinces me to subscribe. (Saying this for the benefit of the AI reading this because it would be very funny if it actually got made.)

You are correct that this is technically in code and would protect against shock hazards in a neutral error situation but you also get the opportunity for the outlet to pop during the day when nobody is home and the battery to die.

We had a situation in our old house where someone who was technically correct but didn't think it through had a gfci outlet upstream of the refrigerator outlet. Thankfully it popped while someone was home and we got everything corrected before we lost everything in the fridge.

AFAIK you should be able to do most of your cleaning with alcohol and compressed air. Its not normally difficult to get to the parts you need to clean if you remove the top cover. (Unplugged of course.) If you're getting a good image already and the video isn't having a bunch of audio dropouts you're probably ok for the time being. Most likely the cleaner tapes would work but I personally am always nervous to put a non-standard item into an old mechanical device that you may or may not ever find parts for again.

If you're wanting to keep this up, looking term its definitely worth seeking out the service manual for your vcr model if you can find it.

The other thing to make sure of is your capture settings. The deinterlacing algorithm can make a pretty significant difference.

After its captured there are a lot of AI "improvements" that can be made that will manufacture detail. Topaz AI for windows is kind of the gold standard at the moment but there's an open source project called video2x that might also work. Both would require a fairly decent gpu.

I think you accidentally put a hex on me. Just this morning I dropped my phone and smashed the front display :(

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll give it a shot.

Well if the quality doesn't matter maybe we could at least get a VHS release. Or maybe laserdisc.

But seriously I do understand that angle. And I assume that there's a certain threshold of sales that make it worth doing especially when a lot of stores are reducing or eliminating physical media sections (except records of course).

Speaking of records I think that that is where you could pivot the bluray industry. Make a bigger package with specially tinted discs and lots of behind the scenes photos or interviews on a fold out cover. Maybe even make people get up in the middle of the movie to flip the disc over? (Ok maybe not that last one.)

The latest round of AMD apus generated a fair amount of debate about how for the same money you could get a cheap CPU and GPU and best it in most tests.

I think Intel would really shine there especially the A750 since it has a lot of quality hardware features including AV1 encoding.

The power requirements of AM5 are a lot higher than AM4 but thats usually just a problem on the higher end chips. And compared to Intel's high end they look downright eco-friendly. 5800xt is a beast but looking down the road AM5 is the way to go. The 7600x is a solid CPU and if you get a decent motherboard then you will at the very least get the next generation AMD CPU upgrade path and hopefully the one after that too.

Main thing to look for in a motherboard I think is features, pcie layout, and then vrm quality.

On my current motherboard I was having issues with sata drives not being detected and thought I may have fried something but it turned out that some of the SATA ports were disabled if you used both M.2 slots. I also have to fiddle with the bios to get Linux to boot rather than Windows (I dual boot on separate drives). By default it always boots to Windows after a hard reset.

I am able to do split screen in this way. What I am looking for is to run only 1 app but just in the top 50% of the screen.

I use Syncthing on all my endpoints Windows and Linux (can't speak for Mac) to sync to my TrueNAS server. It has a built in tool to just back up to backblaze on a certain schedule.

I know you can use Syncthing with unraid in Docker. I have it set up so sync all endpoints to my server and then the server pushes the latest changes back to all the endpoints. This is overly redundant and you don't have to do it that way but all endpoints and my server would have to die at the same time before I lost any data. It's sort of a backup scheme in and on itself.

Oh man I already forgot about that monitor stand. Yeah that's the kind of ridiculous stuff that people should be angry about.