It's all a small price to pay for Eat Your Veggies.

Exactly this.

The DVR setup using TCP/IP tuners like the Silicon Dust HDHomeRun series (which I have) is very easy, not quite 1-button, but close. It scans for the Tuner, creates a "DVR" and then scans for over the air channels and populates a list automatically. Then, it downloads the guide data automatically. The quality of the guide data so far as not been bad, not too many errors, but it only goes about a week into the future so far.

The Plex Pass might give you more than you expect, free lifetime DVR guide data as mentioned above is but one of the things the Pass gets you. Here's a quick list off the top of my head:

1. Registration with their proxy servers in case forwarding is needed for double-NAT situations, a nice feature every now and then.

2. Free OTA DVR guide data (as mentioned above, probably what, a $20.00/year value or so?).

3. Access to paid client binaries like for phones or tablets (such as iOS or Android). Some clients are free, like PC/Mac clients.

4. About 200-300 streaming TV channels, IPTV like HULU/FUBO/Sling, etc. It's the same slop you get on cable TV besides the premium stuff HBO, etc and live Sports, mostly. You know, 24-hour History Channel (but not the actual History Channel, like a "best of" thing.

So, the "Lifetime Plex Pass" gets you IPTV, worth about $50 a month, and Guide Service, worth about $20 a year, you're saving about $620 per YEAR. For IPTV and/or DVR service, that's not too bad comparatively. But now, it looks like the new price point is right up there - it looks like they have priced it so that unless things get more expensive (a likely possibility!) you're just about at the break-even point.

Also, just so no one thinks I'm a biased rabid drooling fan, here's a few of the things I DON'T like about Plex:

1. Seems to go "offline" or have internet connection issues related to the server being available. Sometimes the proxy bridging servers (mentioned above) help this situation, but not always.

2. Transcoding and speed issues related to that. Unfortunately, it seems like Plex tries to aggressively transcode EVERYTHING, even when it shouldn't or doesn't need to. There are some settings that affect this or are supposed to but there are still some issues with it (there are some good Reddit threads on this).

3. Customer Service just seems mostly like a search engine for some things that people have had issues with, and somehow never got responses or resolutions to. I hate tech support threads or forums that exactly describe the problem that I am having, but don't have a solution or any published answer or followup. "At that point the poster suffered a fatal coronary?"

OK, that's about it. I just wanted to comment about the mixed feelings I had since the price was going up. FWIW, I bought mine back in 2021 and back then it was just under $100.00, I show $95 and change, probably with tax. As I recall it went to $100, $110 or $120, then $150. Then I think it jumped to $250 where it's at now. It's still a VERY good deal until July 1, 2026, at which point it will become a FAIR deal, unless things change.

Note: I am not an employee or affiliated with Plex in any way, but I'm a reasonably happy customer. I've been using it now for about 6 years with my own local video server, a local TV Tuner (Silicon Dust HDHomeRun QUATTRO) and TV viewing PC, which will record 4 OTA channels at once. I have had very few issues, as I said it was beguilingly easy to get set up initially, very simple configuration and maintenance, and most things seem to work pretty well in general.

Mr.T

Not sure I understand how to vibe code a new app with a simple db look up. If you can get an AI into a loop where It can test its solutions... thats what leads to impressive things. And skynet of course. We will have sky net soon. But like the first wave of bombs will be defective because humans were in the loop and didn't maintain them. Then the bombs may go off for real, then stop and try to apologize to people, then blame others for the deads, then bomb those that complain about their frame job. It will be fun for those that survive a bit.

It seems to me they could redirect the 10 figures a year they are spending on building a VR world no one wants or will use. Or did they cannibalize that already?

You know XAI has a purchase agreement to buy cursor, right? I don't understand what the point of that is anymore. I'm guessing that doesn't go through and xAI just uses cursor to steal all of its usage data. But if it does go through, you likely won't have that option anymore.

Duke 3D's soundtrack was not exclusively the work of Bobby Prince; Lee Jackson, Apogee's go-to music guy, also did some of the tracks, including the title theme, Grabbag.

Prince used not only his MIDI skills but also his experience as a lawyer to ensure his 'inspired' derivatives were as close as legally possible to the originals. The relationship between individual tracks is often very clear and sometimes even hinted in the metadata of the source files.

Yes but the youtube videos of the accidents are much more entertaining than any other power plant type. So there's one in the plus column.

Grimes was right. We stan Frank

We get it. You don't like Beyonce. Neither do I, but I'm not making a scene over that fact.

Around 1990, I worked for a couple months on an embedded device that had an 80186 and a megabyte of RAM. At one point, I had access to a huge pile of 1MB SIMMs and took a stack home for the evening and using memory boards that allowed you to stack up to 8 of them into one SIMM slot in your computer to figure out just how little RAM Windows NT 3.5 really needed to boot. It booted successfully with 12MB of RAM. It really wasn't usable, but it did boot up. Nowadays, Windows is probably only marginally usable with 12GB of RAM.

They work for Meta. I would expect them to be miserable.

The company has been dumping 10 figures a year into trying to build a VR world no one wants, with nothing to show for it after the better part of a decade. At some point, you expect morale to decrease.

They'll use the same excuse when AI perfects the Torment Nexus, I'm sure.

Oops. I thought I was responding to the story about the grossly insecure White House app.

Still, it's incompetence all the way down.

Although I'm not as big a fan of Hanlon's Razor as I used to be, I'd be willing to chalk this up to typical government incompetence, farming this work out to the cheapest bidder in a way where no one involved in any decision-making has any technical expertise whatsoever.

Nothing is going to get better as long as the U.S. education system is captured by ideologues whose priorities are _not_ an educated, literate and thinking populace.