• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • I’m no expert. I can only recommend what I’ve learned from the dog trainer I hired and my personal experience with a slightly “Nervous Nelly”. Find a treat that your dog loves and give it to her when the scary noise happens. Like someone else said, you don’t want to reward the fright response, but you do want to build a more positive association with noise. You don’t have to start outside. You can do this at home. Get something like a gun-noise app on your phone. Turn the volume down to 1%. Trigger the noise, feed her a treat. Slowly build the volume and start randomizing it so she isn’t expecting it.

    Try to catch moments at home where she’s inside, but the landscaping equipment is running. Loud noise = treat. You want her to learn that the loud noise isn’t a bad thing. She’s possibly scared of kitchen noises as well because kitchens are loud. Pots and pans banging around, boiling, fans whirring, etc.

    My dog isn’t food motivated generally, but string cheese and chicken will get her to do anything I ask. What kinds of treats are you using? Sometimes a scared dog isn’t going to be interested in food. If someone was actively breaking into my house and you offered me a cookie, I’d probably refuse the cookie. I think the key is to try and find ways to train in isolated environments that don’t cause her to go full flight or fight.

    My dog used to be very scared of a vent outside in the city I adopted her in. She was afraid of the loud whirring noise. I loved the vent because it blew out hot air, which I loved in the -20F weather. I wanted her to not avoid it because it meant we both lost the heat opportunity lol So I always carried a treat bag on me and I fed her when we passed it. That’s all I did. As we approached/passed it, I gave her a treat and said “good girl”. By the 2nd week (of doing this daily), she was walking past it without even noticing. She even started to sniff it. I did the same thing with poles (she hates certain random poles. In a line? They’re fine. Alone? We groan.). I reward her if she investigates something that seems to make her nervous.

    Another couple of pro tips, get a jar and fill it with 1/3 kibble, 1/3 random treats, 1/3 the best treat you can find (that’s shelf stable). Mix it all up. Put it on your coffee table or somewhere where she can’t reach it, but you can easily grab it. When she hears a loud noise in the house, try to immediately go “treat!” or some command. Then you can quickly grab the jar and slowly feed 1-20 pieces depending on your dog’s weight, treat size, etc. The slower the feed, the better. You only want to occasionally hand out many pieces at the same time. The key is being able to respond quickly. They say associations have something like ~10 seconds before they stop being effective. So, if you want to associate a noise with something positive, you have to be quick.

    The only negative of this approach is - if you’re super successful - she might start looking at you for treats when a loud noise goes off. But hopefully that means her mind isn’t focused on the fear aspect anymore. And maybe someday you can redirect her to some other behavior like “place” or “crate” when she hears the noise. Somewhere that’s safe and comfortable for her to relax.

    Again, this is just what my trainer recommended. Obviously there are tons of caveats. Maybe your dog just isn’t going to acclimate and you shouldn’t try this forever. Try maybe training to her to enjoy those head wraps that reduce noise (I picked a random website to illustrate the concept. this is not an endorsement). Maybe your dog just needs to go somewhere else sometimes to unwind (e.g., doggy daycare can sometimes be a nice reprieve for some dogs. It can help them relax and get some energy out playing with other dogs). But in my experience, my “Nervous Nelly” tends to be capable of confidence if I give her treats at the right time/place when she’s about to be scared by something.



  • First day on a job and a coworker took a pistol out of his briefcase/bag and began cleaning it/wiping it down. It was a small office of 5ish people. I was just basically there to help play a tech support role for some outdated software they were running. My coworker was an older sales rep for the company and he was responsible for hiring me (don’t ask me why). Anyways, first official day I was working he brandished his pistol. I don’t know why. He looked a bit like Kelsey Grammer which bummed me out because I love Frasier. (Shout-out to /c/Frasier ) He had other hangups and ultimately quit a few weeks later.

    When he pulled that gun, time slowed down. With all of these mass shootings I just didn’t know what to expect. My mind raced but my body froze. I wish I could say I said something but I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and pretended like nothing was happening.

    People can be so unhinged. That was almost 10 years ago now.


  • Personally, it’s not worth it. Giving up your DNA can be used against you. People can perform “social proof” phishing attacks on you by claiming sibling relationships. In the USA, law enforcement can use ancestry.com data to aid them in an investigation. So, if you leave some DNA at a crime scene (guilty or not) you might get caught up in the investigation.

    You can also get caught up in the information breaches that seem inevitable with these things.

    Plus: Ancestry.com is not necessarily as accurate as it is purportedly advertised. DNA doesn’t have magic labels that tell us what it represents or where it came from. The only way to associate certain aspects of DNA with a particular gene, region, etc. is by comparing it to large sample sizes of people that exhibit the features you’re seeking out. So, basically lets say you want to know if you come from Scotland. The way they would accomplish that is they would collect DNA from tons of people who - at least anecdotally - claim they are from Scotland. They then use that as a baseline for “Scottish DNA”. When you submit your DNA sample, they look for markers that are unique to those people who claimed they were from Scotland. The less DNA they have from a particular race/region, the less accurate they can be. I’m not saying Ancestry.com is lying. Their methodology makes sense and across broad strokes will give you a reasonably accurate genealogy. They are also capable of validating siblings/cousins thanks to DNA matching. But it’s only as good as the data they have. The more data they have, the more accurate it will be. But that’s probably not public information and would be impossible to tell without access to their PII data. They might have 0% of data from people in Kazakhstan or Laos or Papua New Guinea. So, it’s possible you have ancestry in places they currently can’t know about.

    It’s just not worth it because it opens you up to a lot of risk and the reward is dubious information about your family history. They might know where you’re from, but they can’t give you a 100% ancestral lineage. You might discover lost siblings, cousins, etc. but it’s not really that uncommon (so who cares?)

    Lastly, the cost is just silly. They make you pay so they can have access to your most personal data? That’s wild to me. They should pay you.

    Just my 2 cents though.




  • TBF if you want, you can have a bastion server which is solely whitelisted by IP to stream your content from your local server. It’s obviously a pivot point for hackers, but it’s the level of effort that 99% of hackers would ignore unless they really wanted to target you. And if you’re that high value of a target, you probably shouldn’t be opening any ports on your network, which brings us back to your original solution.

    I, too, don’t expose things to the public because I cannot afford the more safe/obfuscated solutions. But I do think there are reasonable measures that can be taken to expose your content to a wider audience if you wanted.




  • In a nutshell, if your app isn’t able to make a direct connection to your Plex Media Server when you’re away from home, we can act as sort of a middle man and “relay” the stream from your server to your app. To accomplish this, your Plex Media Server establishes a secure connection to one of our Relay servers. Your app then also connects securely to the same Relay server and accesses the stream from your Plex Media Server. (In technical terms, the content is tunneled through.)

    So, your Plex Media Server basically “relays” the media stream through our server so that your app can access it since the app can’t connect with your server directly.

    Source: https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-server-through-relay/

    It’s not a requirement to stream and it’s sort of dumb they are lumping this relay service as a part of the remote streaming. Remote streaming should be allowed for free - if you are not a subscriber. The relay should just be a paid service, which makes sense. But if it’s a direct connection to my server, it should be free.

    That being said, I understand how Plex may have built some technical debt into this relay system. It might be hard for them to decouple the relay from the remote streaming. What they should have done is:

    We are removing the relay service as a free service, but you can still do remote streaming with a direct connection.

    And they should have built their architecture in a way that’s easy to decouple the two services.



  • That’s true for PC gaming but might not be true for these NUCs. I’m not an expert but I wouldn’t be surprised if they shaved costs with bulk purchases of RAM and SSDs for these devices. Regardless, I was just addressing a point you made about being forced to buy the components yourself which isn’t the case. Pricing is probably going to vary wildly depending on what you pick and you might be able to save money if you’re ok with less RAM or less storage.