Dos_Box

Job title amended at OP's request. Please note that we do not allow discussion or comments on wage levels (unless spectacular). There are other threads for that

Just watched the first couple (well, fell asleep during the second due to sleepy) episodes of Pluribus last night, and it's very, very good. Not sure if it's sci-fi, sci-fi horror, satire, comedy or what yet. The TLDR is that a virus has struck the entire planet (after an alien signal tells us how to make a DNA change and it escapes the lab) turning everyone into an interconnected species and making everyone very content and happy. The protagonist, a writer of romantic fiction, finds out that only herself and 13 others on the entire planet are immune to the virus. The rest of humanity is not hostile towards them at all, but do want to make them like themselves. It's very watchable, and the writing top notch. If you have Apple TV then I suggest you give it a shot.

For the Manba One v2? That is silly cheap. It does have the microswitches on the buttons yes?

The same as Garry, £69. Now we just have to wait to see how cheap it goes (if at all) on BF!

I thought this was for the 80's Troll films 🤣 I have seen the prequel to this (and very good it was too). This seems a bit less scandi-horror and more Godzilla like. Will there be a Norwegian Mothra I wonder?

You got one then @BKGarry?

They have also removed drivers for HEVC and 264 transcoding on their NAS boxes in September. On a more positive note, I bought one of those new 2 bay UGREEN DH2300 NAS boxes a couple of weeks back and I'm very impressed with it. My old HP Microserver Gen 8 was getting too slow and as it was running on Server 2012, much new software simply refused to install on it, and its 2 TB of storage, whilst a seemingly huge amount 13 years ago when we bought them, was now filling up. It can sync my cloud storage (Google Drive and OneDrive as well as iCloud), host Plex using Docker, Portainer and a modified version of Plex that enables hardware decoding on the DH2300 (basic Plex does not do this without paying for a Plex Pass). This was an hour of faff, SSH, re-editing config files and one do-over from scratch. This has now taken almost all the video processing load off the CPU and 4k vids look gorgeous) I can also stream my music and videos to wherever I might be, even on my phone. Out of the box, thanks to the UGREEN NAS app. I'm looking at nerfing my Spotify subscription now. I have stuck 2 x 14TB drives (mirrored)in there thanks thanks to @ICTDirect_Dave. If you need some affordable, warrantied, large capacity drives, give him a bell!. The device is specced quite well with an 8 core ARM processor, VPU (for hardware codec and 264/HEVC encoding\decoding) and a NPU for AI stuff. Not only that, it has HDMI with 4k\60fps output, 2 x USB 3.2 Gen1 ports, USB C and 1Gb ethernet. It only has 4GB of RAM (un-upgradable), but so far I have not run any tasks that used more than a third of that. With the aid of Docker you can also set it up as a web server and run VPN, Home Server and a whole raft of other things you might want to do with it. It's also very small and quiet, so can live in the front room without annoying me. If you are after a home NAS with a great feature set and price (currently for £152.99 without disks). It may go even lower on Black Friday. *You may see a lot of reviews for the UGREEN DH2300 on YouTube for this little box (all very positive), but I have to let you know that I selected and bought this all off my own bat. It seems that many reviewers had been sent them.

Yep, I'd go as far as to say that it actually makes you want to play games, just for the joy of using it!

I think that was the original Xbox with it's off the shelf PC components. As regards the price of their next-gen console, given the price rises of the Series X and S this year (primarily due to tariffs), I hope they take a good look at the market and where it should fit. Not at all helped by the very silly decision that Xbox should be making 30% profit across the board (games, hardware etc.).

I may also be looking at cancelling my Spotify subscription as my new NAS allows me to stream live from it.

After many, many years of subscribing to Game Pass, I have now reduced this to the PC Game Pass. Mainly because my son uses this heavily. Given the choice, I would have unsubscribed completely, especially as the only games I play on my Xbox on a regular basis are ones I'd bought myself. The price hikes have just been silly. I would quote the famous word created by Cory Doctorow's, but don't want to break our own profanity rules. Anyone else either unsubscribed or reduced their subscription?

It is very good, no Xbox compatibility, but seeing as Microsoft seem to be keen in putting the Xbox in its grave, there's no loss there (mental note, reduce Xbox Live subscription). For its price, you are looking at paying a lot more from other vendors for similar specs although, you may get nice extras suck as joystick tensioners, but it's a hell of a price jump to there. My son brought his Steam Deck with him, and it worked fine with that too with the deck linked to the TV via a Steam Link box. I've had this years and it was the first time it had ever been used. It worked very well!

Wow, that took it's time, I think mine came from a UK supplier via Amazon. Took 2 days 😊 I hope you have fun with it this weekend. My son wants one now for his Xmas pressie.

This could be fun, and brought to you by the people who watched the first two season of Downton Abbey according to them. It is (slightly) NSFW.

I'll start us off...

From the poster, I can only assume that there are 5 passwords to reset already.

@Jaan Did you get yours ok? If so, how are you getting on with it? I'm quite impressed tbh, and the button switches are a joy (no pun intended)!

I'd never seen it on the big screen before though, and it was a £5 ticket

I went to see The Thing at the local Odeon last night. It's the first time I've seen it in years and its aged very well I must say. I'd forgotten just how much of the film is about paranoia. Hopefully off to see Good Boy tomorrow 😊

The past couple of weeks have seen my phone get many spam calls (pretty much all 0330 numbers), and all after 4pm for some bizarre reason.

Bit of a thread bump, but I've just bought on of these new Ugreen 2-drive NAS boxes - https://nas-uk.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-nasync-dh2300-nas-storage?from=mega-menu They have only been out a week and have a discount on ATM @£152.99, which compared to other 2 bay NAS devices is pretty good. I've been running a HP Microserver Gen8 for about 12-13 years now and seeign as all of our stuff is now in the cloud have not been using it even a fraction as much as I had, but still need somewhere to put large files and photos\movies etc that isn't drawing a small PC's worth of power. This seems to fit the bill nicely.

Yeah, I do see they already have one (to fix a Switch connection issue) - https://www.manba.cc/pages/manba-one-connection-of-switch2 - but I had to search for that, I couldn't find any direct links on the site.

The screen has a fitted screen protector and the A-B-X-Y buttons have moved from a membrane backing to mechanical mouse switches. They feel soooo good! They also give you a spare screen protector. Hopefully there will be a firmware update in the future to make Xbox compatibility easier without having to buy a third party dongle.

I got the transparent one, but you can buy the black cover separately from them, and I think that is a great look with that combination. Let me know how you get on with yours. One to watch is that the V2 comes in the same packaging as the original, so just make sure you haven't been scammed!