This is what I came here to suggest. Everybody should be using power toys and keyboard entry as much as possible on windows.

So I collect physical media, and I carefully preserve the audio commentaries and the special features. What I’ve found is that a lot of the special features that are worth keeping are available on youtube. You just have to know about them to find them. For example, the recent Mission Impossible movie had the famous motorcycle jump featurette on youtube, and some of the great John Wick featurettes are on youtube as well. But after buying and cataloging over 1200 movies, I have to say – a lot of the special features just aren’t worthwhile to me to keep. I think this is more of a reflection of the major studios not wanting to spend money on the special features than anything else. You seem to only get good special features on really big movies or movies made before 2010.

Star Trek First Contact - Commentary from Director Jonathan Frakes (Commander Riker)

I included several Star Trek commentaries in my list just because of Jonathan Frakes. Star Trek Picard Season 3 and (of all things) Star Trek Insurrection have just superior commentaries thanks in large part to Frakes and his love for the franchise and his respect for the craft of directing and the fans. I often think that the next time someone asks me, “If you could have dinner with anyone alive, who would ti be?” I would pick him. Such a great, intelligent person!

I learned a lot about the production and design choices around Terminator 2 from the commentary – the totally legitimate digital copy I have has 2 tracks (one labeled just director and the other director & writer) and I think I remember most stuff from the one with the writer.

My physical copy doesn’t have any commentary tracks on it! Now I want to hear them!

Some of these are commentaries that I just remember enjoying while I watched them, but they might have been listened to so long ago that I can’t remember what it was that I enjoyed. They’re in alphabetical order because that’s how my movies are organized.

1. El Camino. (All Vince Gilligan commentaries are fun for me.)
2. Forgetting Sarah Marshall. (The commentary was fun, but I remember they called Kristen Bell on the phone to include her, and she was driving on the freeway at the time, and wasn’t really interested in talking. That was rather disappointing. But the others who were talking were just clearly having a great time.)
3. Hot Fuzz
4. Inception. (My copy didn’t have audio commentary, but I remember the special featurettes on this were fabulous!)
5. Interstellar. (Again, no audio commentary on my copy, but the special features were noteworthy.)
6. John Wick 1, 2, 3, and 4. Great commentaries, great special features.
7. The Last Samurai
8. Lord of the Rings Extended Edition. (Holy moly, the commentaries on this set are incredible, and there are so many of them! It is worth listening to every second of all of them. These are probably the best commentaries of any film I have ever listened to.)
9. The Matrix 1, 2, and 3
10. Mean Girls (2004)
11. Mission Impossible Movies (I don’t think any of them actually had audio commentaries, but this one sticks out in my memory for having just endless amazing special featurettes that were worth watching. Especially Dead Reckoning!)
12. Showgirls (Yes, Showgirls. David Schmader’s commentary is … incomparable. There are some amazing lines in this. “Basically Nomi has two emotions: staring, and kicking.” There are some real gems in that commentary. While you’re at it, go watch Red Letter Media’s review of this film. It’s hilarious.)
13. Spaceballs (Every single Mel Brooks commentary is solid gold. There are so many movies I wrote down because I vaguely remember listening to the commentary, but then I deleted them from the list because I didn’t think they really had much memorable stuff. (Ocean’s 11, Rounders…) But Spaceballs is not like that. Spaceballs has an amazing commentary that is a blast!)
14. Star Trek II. (Nicholas Meyer did a great commentary that had insights on both Star Treks II and VI. There’s a second commentary with Manny Coto and Nicholas Meyer that I haven’t listened to yet, but the love that gushes out of him in the first few minutes makes me want to keep listening! It sounds like it’s shaping up to be a discussion between the director and a real fan, giving the director a chance to respond to fan reactions.)
15. Star Trek III (Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor have a track on this film for some reason, but I always enjoy Moore’s perspective on Star Trek. The original Leonard Nimoy commentary is the one I listened to, and it is quite good. This is Nimoy’s first feature film that he directed, I think, which is why I listened to the track in the first place, although it has been years and I can’t quite remember the content.)
16. Star Trek IV (I listened to the Nimoy commentary, but there’s also an Alex Kurtzman commentary on it. There’s a lot of recent dislike for Kurtzman, but frankly he’s a great fan of the franchise and always gives good commentary and special features.)
17. Star Trek VI
18. Star Trek Generations (I listened to the Ron Moore and Branon Braga commentary and loved it.)
19. Star Trek First Contact
20. Star Trek Insurrection (Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis basically have a great time in this commentary, so I did, too. This commentary is where I first noticed how much adoration Jonathan Frakes has for the franchise and the fans. I’m already a huge fan of his directing, so it was nice to see what he had to say about the craft, too.)
21. Starship Troopers (Listen to all the commentaries on this movie, especially given the current political climate.)
22. Superbad (This is another fun commentary.)
23. Superman II The Donner Cut.
24. This is the End (I seriously love Seth Rogan commentaries.)
25. Top Gun (I think this is one of those ensemble commentaries where you get several groups talking on a single commentary track, so some people who are interesting depart after 10-15 minutes, which is unfortunate. But I remember it being good.)
26. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
27. What Dreams May Come (I listened to this years and years ago, but I seem to remember it helped me understand some of the movie’s symbols better.)

Added: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. (I took this one off, but I’m adding it back again. I think I liked some of the commentaries but not others. Still, it keeps re-entering my brain as a good one, so maybe go listen to the director commentary with the original writer of the comic.)

Bonus! Recommended TV Series commentaries:

1. Better Call Saul. (As I said above, Vince Gilligan does great, GREAT commentaries. Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad have a huge amount of commentary on their discs, and every second of it is a treasure.)
2. Breaking Bad
3. South Park. (Matt and Trey don’t like doing commentaries, so they only talk for a couple of minutes per episode. But they are a lot of fun to listen to regardless.)
4. Star Trek Lower Decks. (I could listen to Jonathan Frakes and/or Mike McMahon all day. These commentaries are hilarious and fun. Stick around to hear Jonathan Frakes ALMOST get himself fired by spoiling that the Titan is…
5. Star Trek Picard Season 3. (All TNG fans should listen to the commentary on every episode of Season 3.)

I used homebridge for a long time, but found maintaining it to be a bit of a chore. Home Assistant was easier to maintain and configure, thanks to its web-based interface. And it has a bridge to homekit that achieves basically everything that homebridge did. You may want to investigate it!

Using AI to flag footage for review by a person seems like a good time-saving practice. I would bet that without some kind of automation like this, a lot of footage would just go unreviewed. This is far better than waiting for someone to lodge a complaint first, since you could conceivably identify problem behaviors and fix them before someone gets hurt.

The use of AI-based solutions to examine body-cam footage, however, is getting pushback from police unions pressuring the departments not to make the findings public to save potentially problematic officers.

According to this, the unions are against this because they want to shield bad-behaving officers. That tells me the AI review is working!

If a company requires you to re-apply for the job you already have, you lost your job long before you ever recorded yourself with HireVue.

I went to my local Apple Store yesterday morning and saw one person leaving with an Apple Vision Pro and maybe a few people inside trying it out. It wasn’t crowded at all. It seemed like the store was pretty overcrowded with employees, though.

On the bright side, I was able to get in and out with my purchase really fast!

It’s so much better! Where I first saw how much better OLED was than LCD was in the opening credits of Foundation. There’s a bit where a ship passes in front of a star, and the silhouette of the ship is precise and perfect. Just be sure to get your TV calibrated, or do it yourself. Mine came with the whites set to 100%, which sunburns your eyeballs at night.

Totally unintentional. I’ll edit it.

Porkbun is sort of the darling of the self hosting community. I settled on them after doing a huge comparison of prices and features of all the different registrars available to me. Porkbun was by far the best.

Of course they will exist. China will own them all.

Entire departments? I’m skeptical.

I can’t believe they published this article without including a copy of Computer Shopper in the image!

Seeing people recommend nginx proxy manager, I’ve tried to set this up but never managed to get the certificates to work from letsencrypt (“internal server error” when trying to get one). When I finally got it working a while ago (I think I imported a cert), any proxy I tried to setup just sent me to the Synology login page.

I think WebStation is causing this. I just investigated my Synology NAS and discovered that the default web portal is redirecting ports 80 and 443 to the synology login portal (which lives in ports 5000 and 5001 depending on whether you use SSL or not.)

That’s amazing! I’ve been living in fear of my super expensive OLED TV getting burn-in. I turn it off during software updates, etc. Now maybe I can de-stress a little.

I give them three months before the new society collapses due to arguments over age of consent.

please don’t say it … please don’t say it … please don’t say it …

God dammit!

I don’t know what I expected, actually.

Thank you for going to the extra trouble to explain this! This is why I love communities like this.