The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

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Alan
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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Alan » Wed Sep 03, 2025 5:51 pm

Because what’s a CD?
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Raid
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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Raid » Wed Sep 03, 2025 6:19 pm

Yeah, could be worse, they could have called it Product Code formerly CDKeys.

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Alan
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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Alan » Wed Sep 03, 2025 9:06 pm

I kind of like that actually…. :-k
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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Animalmother » Fri Sep 05, 2025 9:03 am

Back to phone moaning. My Samsung did a software update last night which resulted in it locking my SIM and making the phone unusable. It's only in moments like these you realise how much you utterly depend on the phone, you're basically fucked without it. I was lucky to find the original SIM booklet and unlock it. Looking online apparently its a known issue with updating to UI 7.

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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Wrathbone » Thu Sep 11, 2025 7:38 am

We have a regular Wednesday meeting at work that has no clear agenda (I may have previously ranted about it here), and it typically has no relevance to me or several others. About a month ago, our manager very clearly stated that his view on the meeting is that we should only attend it if we feel it will be useful to us, and so with no small amount of glee I stopped attending.

This morning I got a message from him asking why I wasn't at yesterday's meeting. I pointed out the above, and also that at the daily meeting half an hour before that meeting we'd all discussed the agenda, which had absolutely no relevance to anything I was doing. Apparently that's not going to cut it, and he now thinks it would be better if I attended the start of the meeting to make absolutely sure it won't be useful to me before I leave and get on with actual fucking work. ](*,)

I might suggest we have a separate post-standup / pre-agendaless-Wednesday meeting agenda-confirmation meeting, followed by a post-meeting review meeting, just to make sure we've got all bases covered.

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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by eny » Thu Sep 11, 2025 8:26 am

Back when I was working, I only had to worry about completing 150m+ of fence a day and listening to a young robin learning to sing... :lol:
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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Wrathbone » Thu Sep 11, 2025 8:36 am

We're going to end up with a group of AIs perpetually stuck in a meeting because none of them know what it's for or when it should end.

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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Raid » Thu Sep 11, 2025 12:04 pm

Wrathbone wrote:
Thu Sep 11, 2025 8:36 am
We're going to end up with a group of AIs perpetually stuck in a meeting because none of them know what it's for or when it should end.
10 Print "Thankyou all for attending."
20 Print "Let's circle back to that at the end and move on."
30 Goto 10

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Wrathbone
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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Wrathbone » Fri Sep 19, 2025 7:01 am

This is an especially niche rant, but I have to vent somewhere. Having overcome numerous challenges in my DVD ripping adventures to build a Jellyfin streaming server, I've started ripping blu ray TV series (reducing the file size with Handbrake while maintaining near-source quality). It's a longer, more cumbersome process but the final result is worth it. However, I've arrived at a boxset which appears to be a perfect storm of obstacles: The Good Place.

Initially I thought it was a dead end, as it couldn't read the disc - couldn't even detect a disc had been inserted. And then after half an hour of restarts, unplugging and reconnecting the drive, checking discs I knew worked and general frustration, it read one of the discs. Turns out the discs and the drive aren't faulty, they're just heavily encrypted to the point where it's a coin flip as to whether they'll register as a disc at all when you insert them each time.

Then there's the output files from MakeMKV. Unfortunately there's no guarantee that the file order will match the episode order when ripping, as it depends on the disc, and with The Good Place the episodes come out in a totally random order, meaning I have to check each one and rename it accordingly.

But the real kick in the teeth is that each episode is being output with a test card at the start which lasts anywhere from 90 seconds to a few minutes, along with a high-pitch continuous beep to make it more entertaining. And so I'm having to use LosslessCut to manually strip that out of each episode. :evil:

It'll be worth it in the end. I really like The Good Place and the blu ray quality is stunning, and having it all in the convenience of a home streaming server will be glorious. But did they have to make it this much of a pain?

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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Sly Boots » Fri Sep 19, 2025 7:23 am

So is this all anti-piracy stuff they've put on all their discs?

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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Wrathbone » Fri Sep 19, 2025 7:47 am

I'm not entirely certain - blu rays do have much more intensive encyption than DVDs, but this is the first blu ray where it's been an issue. Reading up on it, the test card thing appears to be something to do with it having extended length episodes. MakeMKV (which is what I use for ripping and is a magnificent bit of software) is very good at identfying all the metadata and other crap that goes around content on discs (e.g. FBI warnings, trailers, etc) so that it only extracts the content itself, so it could be that this is something new it isn't yet capable of handling automatically.

It could be that studios are trying to make it harder to rip stuff. At this point, physical media feels like a concession from some studios, as in they want to reap the money that they know they'll make from their niche audience, but they clearly want everyone to subscribe to their streaming platforms. Case in point is Cobra Kai - seasons 1 to 3 got blu ray releases, whereas 4 to 6 only got DVD releases after there was demand for them to produce some kind of physical release, the result being you can have the series on disc but it's not going to be as high a quality as it is on Netflix, which is a shitty move. Honestly, it's a rare case where I'd consider pirating 1080p episodes out of spite.

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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Stormbringer » Sat Sep 20, 2025 5:11 pm

When you get an email from Netflix saying they're dropping (as in removing) a film you want to watch, so you're like "Oh right, better get around to that!”

Then the next time you remember, you open up NF and it's already too late.

Image
"Kingdoms and empires pass away like mist from the sea; the people shout and triumph and even in the revelry of Belshazzar's feast, the Medes break the gates of Babylon."

— Robert E. Howard, The Gates of Bal-Sagoth

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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Wrathbone » Sat Sep 20, 2025 9:47 pm

The Dark Knight blu ray is £2.39 second hand on Amazon. £13 for a month of Netflix without adverts. Streaming services are a false economy.

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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Stormbringer » Sat Sep 20, 2025 10:02 pm

I despise physical media. Absolutely despise it.

I think I hate physical media more than the inconvenience of streaming services dropping their films after a while.

It's not The Dark Knight I was wanting to watch, by the way. I just used that for the "It's gone!" gif.
"Kingdoms and empires pass away like mist from the sea; the people shout and triumph and even in the revelry of Belshazzar's feast, the Medes break the gates of Babylon."

— Robert E. Howard, The Gates of Bal-Sagoth

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Re: The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

Post by Wrathbone » Sun Sep 21, 2025 7:43 am

Stormbringer wrote:
Sat Sep 20, 2025 10:02 pm
I despise physical media. Absolutely despise it.

I think I hate physical media more than the inconvenience of streaming services dropping their films after a while.
Whatever for? It’s my primary hobby at the moment, so I’m naturally curious what could warrant such ire.

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