User and book club ping recipient Maevens said that it would help them if the book and questions were posted to Storygraph, so I created a basic book club template, but I haven't done anything with it yet.

What do you all think? Options include simply posting the book title each month, posting the book title and the discussion questions each month or posting and including a link to the Tildes book club discussion. I'm going to do something minimal regardless, to honor Maevens' request but I want to know what you all think and whether there are things you specifically don't want me to do.

Bottom line, the two book clubs could run in parallel with crossover and links, or they could be essentially separate. Please advise.

I was reading the recent post about strategy games, and I'm still astonished to see for how many hours (at least hundreds, often 1000+) people are playing these. I'm guessing that in these cases, all your gaming time is exclusively taken by that single game.

So, do you have (or did you have) games, or series, like that? Do you play solo or multi? What compels you to spend so much time on a single game? How do you feel about it?

Its a heavy show but three episodes in, I'm loving the single shot approach that they took.

Without cuts, it's all about the pace of the drama, the honesty of each beat and the quality of the performance. That, and I haven't seen a show tackle toxic masculinity in quite this way and I'm super here for it.

Has anybody else seen it? What did you think?

An RPG book is a book containing the rules and setting for a tabletop RPG game. Like Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, Worlds Without Number, Star Trek Adventures, etc.

The fact that they are rarely in text format always puts me off reading RPG books. I don't want to diminish the importance of art, but importing printed RPG books is prohibitively expensive, and reading huge PDFs on a laptop is not a good experience for me.

I also find it unpleasant to navigate the complicated design of these books. They're distracting.

I have a 6.8" Kindle Paperwhite but reading RPG PDFs on it is awful. RPG books have lots of art and complicated layouts. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to make an RPG into text. I was seriously considering just copying the text and converting it to markdown myself (it doesn't need to be markdown, just something that I can convert into a format my Kindle understands) when I remembered chatGPT.

Copying the text and asking GPT to make it into markdown worked okay, but it missed the tables. Sending an image of a page worked pretty well, so I think AI is the way here. But I am not a GPT subscriber and I bet I'll hit a limit at some point. Also, instead of sending pages individually, I would prefer to send the PDF and get the result in text. Even if there were limitations (like only 10 pages in one go), it would be an improvement.

In any case, using chatGPT will be much better than doing it by hand. But is there an AI or other kind of PDF service that is better suited for that task, so I can reduce the amount of manual input?

You do it, and it's against the grain -- outside the norm.

But you like it, or think it's worthwhile.

In fact, you'd recommend that more people do it, so that it can shift the grain or become the norm.

What is it, and why do you recommend it?

Background:

I've been using a 9-year-old 13.3 inch Dell Latitude 7370 laptop running MX Linux to stream games via Moonlight from a beefier desktop machine. It is SO good and works flawlessly. My only complaint is the smaller screen size.

I would like to upgrade to a larger computer, and given that the computer will literally only be used for streaming games, it doesn't need to have great stats. I'm looking at used/refurbished models -- both for price and because buying something new feels like complete overkill for my needs.

My only requirements are:

• 17 inch screen
• USB-C charging

That's it! I'm assuming that literally anything I can get with that will work for what I need given that my small, decade-old laptop is already doing the same job perfectly. USB-C charging is a must-have for me. I already have USB-C power cords in all the places I plan on using it, and I don't want to have to use a separate charger for it.

My Situation:

Because I'm searching for used/refurbished models, I'm limited to what's available rather than going for any specific model of computer. I can easily find listings for computers with 17 inch screens. What I can't find easily is whether or not they support USB-C charging. Most sites don't have a filter for that, and a lot of the listings don't specify the type of charger used and just list "AC adapter" (or don't mention it at all). Many sites don't have pictures of the ports, or the pictures they do have are stock photos that aren't of the exact model.

Is there some easy way to find these that I'm missing? Some keyword, or a site that does have a filter for that, or brand knowledge that can point me in the right direction?

Also, if anyone has any recommended sites for used/refurbished laptops, let me know. I have had success with Backmarket for used tech before, but I'm open to recommendations.

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Lately there's been a rash of people ripping apart AC units on small business' so they can sell them for parts (mostly the copper). Tends to take days to months to discover, and by that time they're long gone and the police are rarely interested in it (in my experience even when you figure out who's actually buying stolen copper, or car parts....but i digress).

I was asked as a friend to help with this for a couple of small business locations that otherwise don't need normal security. To start it's just one large, 60x300', roof with a couple of units on it. They're willing to spend money, but also don't want to get scammed, so I've been looking into it for them.

They're getting a quote from one of the big security companies like ADT, but didn't feel they were getting it right since they just wanted a camera pointing at the access ladder, when it sure looks like the first time this happened it was someone who brought their own, so they really do need some good coverage and not just one camera pointed at a ladder while they pay for some 24/7 person to stare at the feed.

The rough requirements are:

1. Some decent weatherproofing, as this will be on a roof all day. We can put an enclosure around it but trying to keep this simple.

2. Easy remote access to footage, ideally with notifications that can be setup for things like human motion, or lost connection.

3. Ideally fewer cameras. Not exactly because of cost, but because of the difficulty of getting the power/network up there. Be a lot easier to do one drop in the middle of the roof than say a drop at every corner.

4. Probably not wifi cameras. I figure we need to run power up there anyways, so it might as well be POE if at all possible. Added bonus being that you don't need to worry as much about wifi signal and the rare enterprising criminal with a jammer/scrambler/whatever?

and the tricky one
5. No on site storage. Likely they'll want cloud.

My first thoughts:
I have ubiquiti at home, and this seemed fine for it as a nice in-between since they probably need 2-4 POE cameras max (was going to see if i could get away with 2 in the middle of the roof, one looking each way). Was going to mess around and see what level of alerts they give and make them a couple of accounts (basically one alert to the person who'd call the cops and one to the person who'd look at it if the feed went down).

The no on site storage thing however, complicates stuff....i think?

The short version is there's no way to do even a basic NVR there (i've been over this thoroughly, and it's more a drama thing than a business thing). I figured that wouldn't be an issue, they'd just have to pay extra for some cloud storage and host it there, and it would probably scale well for them if they liked the solution and rolled it out anywhere else. Rather than having a bunch of NVR's they could just have one cloud based one, neat.

buuuuut it seems ubiquiti doesn't really do that. The people i'm helping are somewhat technical but i'd like to keep this turnkey as possible. I don't think there's any clean/easy way to accomplish this with ubiquiti, or at least that I can find?

In theory I think there might be some clever network way to host the NVR at some other physical/central location (with less drama) and then route all the traffic there, but that's beyond my current ability, and i'm skeptical that even if I learn how, i can keep it simple enough that i'd feel comfortable suggesting it.

The followup research:
So there's huge professional companies like verkanda/axis. I did some basic pricing research and it looks like $2kish, minimum, a year for these things. That might be within their budget (i'm told the damage done was easily into the 5 figure territory), but it also feels like extreme overkill for something that should be easier to solve?

Another one i've come across before is Reolink, but I have 0 experience with it and haven't found much in either direction that makes me think it'd be a good solution or a terrible one.

I'm pretty against ring/nest just due to a mixture of "fuck em" and also feeling like you don't get what you pay for.

Overall-

Anyone have any experience or guidance with this sort of thing? I really feel like my own home network/camera setup has me right on the edge of being able to say "ah yeah here's what you need...." and yet i've fallen at the finish line. Is there some easy way to make ubiquiti work (seems to meet all the needs except the cloud storage)? Or some system you're familiar with that does have that feature?

I feel like i bump into these kinds of problems more and more where the options are "make it a second hobby/job" or "pay through the nose" when it feels like there should be a reasonable inbetween.