When traveling on the German high speed ICE trains, you have access to the ICEportal website with a.o. information on your journey and newspapers. The portal also gives you some stuff to waste time on, which includes games. What I love about it, its a collection of simple classics, such as a bubble shooter, a 2048 style puzzle, an arcade motorbike game, and all without the typical freemium advertising or grinding.
Does anyone know about similar offerings? I really don't mind paying, I do mind the advertising or grinding which seems to have become standard. Or even better, if anyone knows how to have the ICEportal games without being on the wifi of the train? What are your thoughts?

Hello! I live in an area where a great part of socializing is done by going to bars and having a drink (or several). I don't drink alcohol, and always get weird stares after the third Nestea/Aquarius, plus I get bored from drinking the same thing over and over again. Sometimes the places we go to have the option of alcohol-free cocktails, but it's not the usual thing.

So, what are you suggestions of other drinks I could order, that do not contain alcohol? Things that I could drink in hot weather, day or night? I'm open to all sorts of flavours.

The ones I have listed:

• Coke
• Tea
• Coffee
• Aquarius
• Nestea

Thank you all for your help in advance!

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads.

Don't forget to format your code using the triple backticks or tildes:

Here is my schema:

```sql
CREATE TABLE article_to_warehouse (
  article_id   INTEGER
, warehouse_id INTEGER
)
;
```

How do I add a `UNIQUE` constraint?

The original title I conceived of for this was “How are you your own hypocrite?” but I didn’t like that it came across as negative and judgmental. Nevertheless, you can use that as a jumping off point for what I’m trying to get at.

I think we all have ideals and beliefs and values that we simultaneously hold but also fail to meet on a regular basis. I also think these can be hard to identify. We all like to think that we’re consistent individuals and, when something is out of alignment, we often find very good reasons or explanations for why that is. Sometimes those can be valid, but sometimes they’re really just motivated reasoning aimed at keeping a sense of internal consistency in ourselves.

I’m interested in people exploring the inconsistent areas of themselves (it’s been something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately), but I think to do that this topic needs to be a space where people can be open, honest, and vulnerable.

Please do not jump on someone for the inconsistencies they share or for their failure to meet certain standards. Please do not use this as an opportunity to get in arguments with others.

The whole point of the thread is to explore difficult areas rather than judge them. If people feel that they will have to be pressured to defend themselves in doing so, they simply won’t comment and the whole thought experiment will be for moot. Think of this as a shared space for thoughtful self-reflection and commiseration rather than a battleground.

Sorry Tabletiddles, couple of days late with the thread as I've been busy on the bank holiday weekend here in UK.

What boardgames have you all been playing this week? Please share your experiences,.no matter what you've been playing.

I suspect many don’t write anything down and do this largely by intuition/experience but I want to tease out some ideas.

when it comes to describing and designing a system from a blank piece of paper, what are the parameters you think of?

I’m thinking napkin sketch level of software design.

So things like:
Number of users, are they concurrent users, what load dimensions there are (disk IO, network IO etc.), target platform (everything is a web app these days), how do you design/visualise the data model?

Any decisions or constraints that impact what and how you build a proof of concept / MVP? How do you document this? How do you test it against the finished software?

I've recently been watching the old episodes of Patriot act, and it occured to me that since we cut the cord with regular cable I have no clue if there is a contemporary analog for that show. Basically, a left leaning, comedic news and current events show that tends toward actually doing it's homework on the topics covered would be awesome.

This thread is posted weekly on Thursday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.

If you'd like to help support Ukraine, please visit the official site at https://help.gov.ua/ - an official portal for those who want to provide humanitarian or financial assistance to people of Ukraine, businesses or the government at the times of resistance against the Russian aggression.

Happy Friday everyone! I'm making a post to see if anyone wants to beta test my Tildes.net iOS app Backtick.

Background

I've been wanting to create a Reddit app for quite a while, and just when I got started, the API change chaos happened. Thankfully, I remembered signing up for Tildes.net a few years ago and decided to pivot to make an app for this site instead! The app is still a work in progress, but I believe releasing early and getting as many eyes on it during development results in a better end product (and it's more fun for me 😊).

Features

Here are the current features of Backtick:

• Light mode/dark mode
• Login to Tildes.net (suports 2FA)
• Front page feed with sorting support
• View, vote, and comment on posts
• Reply and vote on comments
• Collapse comments
• View notifications
• Full markdown rendering
• Text-to-speech for posts and comments

Here is a video demo of the app in its current state (updated for v1.8.1): https://youtube.com/shorts/iukQJyJbtw8?feature=share

I know there missing features, but as I mentioned before, I would love to get as many people in as early as possible to help shape Backtick's future.

Testing

If you're interested in testing the app as I continue to work on it during my free time you will need:

• An iOS 16 device
• TestFlight (Apple's testing app)

You can access the beta here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/gNH18NE9. If you have any issues please DM me your Apple ID email and I will send you an invite manually.

Thanks, everyone! Have a great weekend.
- Ash

Edit:
Getting some great feedback! I'll be tracking bugs and potential features here if anyone is curious: https://chatter-brick-3d3.notion.site/Backtick-Tracker-888150b641ae4c0ab39dc0345783bc50?pvs=4

Edit2:
I created the Discord server to help facilitate better collaboration with those who wish to be more involved. It will be a place for discussion around potential features, bugs, and general chat. I will still be taking in feedback via TestFlight and Tildes.net, so it's perfectly fine if you don't want to join.
Join here: https://discord.gg/aah7nkfpBY

Edit: I've just purchased an Unraid license. I'll give it a go and it may not turn out well, but for the time being, the question is settled. I appreciate everyone for providing insightful and informative answers!

Hey everyone,

I've recently bought myself a NUC (NUC11TNHi3) that I intend to run as a home server, using many of my external USB drives as the storage.

My use case is very narrow. I'll use it as a Plex server and seed/leech torrents with it.

I've never built a home server like this before (I did dabble with it on a RPi, but that was just for PiHole), so I've never had to research what operating systems are available to me. After some research, I narrowed it down to two options.

1. Windows
   This option is the most straightforward given that it's the system I'm familiar with the most. My use case is also very narrow, so I could set everything up in a couple of hours. All I'd have to do is install Plex server, a torrent client, exposing them to the outside world with port forwarding or Tailscale (never used it before but seems easy enough), and share my external USB drives locally so that I can access them using my regular desktop computer at home. The downside of this is that Windows can be finicky. I'd also prefer to have my drives pooled under a single drive. A cursory research suggests that Windows can do this as well, but not in a way that inspires confidence.

2. Unraid
   I hadn't heard about this since last week, but it seems like a nice option. It costs money, it's proprietary, and I'd likely have to reformat all my NTFS drives to be able to use it but I was wondering if this would be the best long term solution. The learning curve will be there. Arrays, cache drives, share drives etc. are terms I'm not familiar with (though I can guess what purpose they serve) so it will be more time consuming to set things up properly. But given how narrow my use case is, as elegant a solution as it seems, is it necessary? I'm only considering this because seems like this is the best purpose built OS in the market right now.

Some clarifications:

• I'm sure someone will suggest a Linux distro. I have used Fedora as my main OS for a couple of years and I was quite happy with it, however I could never wrap my head around the Linux permissions structure, which Plex is awful with, as it creates its own user and look for drives under that user. I must have spent hours and hours to make Plex read my external drives properly before, but I've never managed to make it do so without some sort of hacky way and I don't want to do that with my home server. I don't want to have any doubts that things can go wrong. I want something that just works. (If only Synology had a capable device that could handle multiple simultaneous 4K transcodings. I'd have just throw my money at them instead of buying a NUC.)

• My use case will remain narrow. Maybe way down the road I can automate stuff with Sonarr or Radarr or stuff like that, but I don't think I'll ever consume enough recently released stuff to justify it. One thing is for certain, I'm never going to host my password server, feed reader, or something like that on this device.

That's about it. What should I do?

Given that I'm a novice is this area, I'd be all ears to listen any other related or unrelated advice for someone who's just starting to build their first home server.

Thank you in advance.

Hey all, hope everyone is well today and staying cool!

Lately I've been very interested in incremental mobile games, and also idle games. I'm not 100% on the terminology, but for whatever reason I've found myself enjoying games that simply make me wait. It's odd, I know, but I think it's related to a recent personal decision to distance myself from online apps; an oxymoron, I'm aware.

Anyway! Recommend your favorite incremental/idle apps please. I'm currently enjoying:

• Kittens Game

• Tiny Tower

• Pocket Trains

And.. that's it! If you have any recommendations yourself, let me know. Thanks in advance, and have a wonderful day.

PS: bonus points for outer space! I swear there's a space trading game that was mostly text-based, but the title escapes me.

PPS: Android!

I'm very interested in the inner-workings of a writer's room. I have seen glimpses in "making of" documentaries, but I don't feel that they show much of the actual process.

I'd love to see more about how the sausage is made. Bonus points if it's a beloved, popular tv show or movie. I feel like I would be most interested in seeing the best of the best at work.