As someone who has “won” the games (that aren’t actually games) and claimed the prizes a bunch of times, I’d advise you just ignore them. The fish/farm/etc games, and the popups that claim free items, anything else. Close them, and just buy whatever you were going to buy. Unless you have a lot, I mean a LOT of people that are willing to sign up for temu as a first time user, using you as the referral, the only way to complete those so-called games is to spend around $800+ to earn your way to conspiring the game and claiming the free prizes. Prizes that if you pay attention, you could simply bought outright for somewhere in the range of $5-20.

And the stuff with the spinning wheels and whatnot, claiming this or that percentage discount, you’ll get a cheap item for free(something that you could have bought for $3-4 max), but only by adding it to an order with a predetermined number of other items, which have had their prices dynamically increased, and will actually cost you more than if you had simply purchased all of the same items but by searching them up and just adding them to your cart normally. If you add some items to your wishlist, you’ll start to see those items being offered to you in these supposed deals and discounts. You will also notice that if that item was $5 when you added it to your wishlist, the “deal” page might be showing it to you with a crossed out $50 price, and a new amazing discount price of let’s say $9(I call this the J. C. Penny method). I tend to keep a large wishlist, with items that sit there for months while I decide if I’ll get around to buying them or not, so this kind of fuckery with the prices sticks out to me a lot.

This all exactly the same for when they had the cash back deal. Place an order, and they credit your account with, well credit, that you can spend on more stuff. The more you spend in the order, the higher the percentage of cash back. But as before, the prices of the items you buy to earn that cash back are getting fucked around with dynamically, and increased as you shop. Not only that, but they change the way that you received the cash back. It used to be that after the order shipped, you go to a certain page and cash out your earned credit, and it is then available for use. Then they started placing limits on how much you could cash out per day. And then the last time I had used it, you instead only got a few cents per day, and you had to keep opening the app every single day and manually claiming those few cents. And if you forgot one day, you just lose that credit entirely.

Ask of this is to say, I absolutely promise anyone reading this, the games, deals, discounts, or whatever else they are promising you on temu, are absolutely, in no uncertain terms, not worth your time (even if you believe your time to hold no value), and will cost you more money than if you had simply purchased the items normally through just searching for what you want and adding it to your cart. Back when temu was still pissing away ass-loads of money to get people onto their platform, you could legitimately get free and/or heavily discounted items, as well as decent amount of cash back/credit. But that’s is no longer the case. They got the massive number of users they wanted, now they are looking to actually make money from them.

The only reason I but anything on temu at all, where I would have bought it on AliExpress previously, is that temu will usually get the items to me between 1 and 2 weeks, while AE still often takes several weeks before the seller even THINKS about shipping the order, and then often an additional 3-4 weeks minimum for it to actually arrive. I had some stuff that I needed a bunch of, and they only had a few in stock on temu. So I ordered them all, then ordered more on AE right after. The temu ones came in 6 days. The AE ones took 2 and a half months. And before anyone asks, the identical item on Amazon was more than triple the price. Most of this stuff tends to be.

I mean, NOW I’m suspicious that they in fact do.

I’ve been using it for the last year or so, no issues, as long as I confirm there are no breaking changes before updating my docker container. My only real problem is that I sorely, SORELY, miss the editing features I had in Google photos. There’s been more than a couple of times now that I needed to quickly edit a photo as I would have done with Google photos, and when I couldn’t, got aggravated enough to consider switching back. Still chugging along on immich, though. Still holding out hope that one day they’ll add at least some basic editing features.

Wait, do we actually get something for our old lifetime Pocketcasts licenses? Because I remember when they switched the app to being free, with any extra features being locked behind a subscription, existing licenses holders got… not anything, as far as I remember. I’ve been using the app daily for years now, and have no reason to give it up, but I don’t feel like having bought the license back in the day is getting me anything extra over what a new free-tier user is getting now. Am I missing something?

Some still do. I just started working at Walmart, and they give you a Samsung phone to do your job. You use the camera for scanning tags, shelving, check item status, and a bunch of other shit. It’s a modern phone, with USB c, fingerprint sensor in the power button, android 13, stupid hole-punch camera, etc. And when I pulled off the otterbox case they gave me with it, I found that the back pulls off and the battery pops out, like all of my phones used to do back in the day. I assume that’s so they can more easily keep these phones in use, as they can pull out a failing battery and pop a new one in without having to send the phone sent off for servicing.

Much of the bullshit they’re doing aside, I’d kill to have that much granularity in notification preferences on various services. Too many times it’s an “all-or-nothing” situation. The more specific I can get, the better.

Edit: actually, I just realized that they don’t even give any real options for each communication method. Nevermind lol

I switched from Google photos to immich just recently. I’m still looking for a good solution to replace Google’s editing features. I used, and miss, those features a LOT.

Unfortunately, that’s not an error. Apparently, the BBC insists that the 2005 Doctor Who reboot ended in 2022, and the new specials and the upcoming season, are all technically a new series. So now it has its own new entry on TMDB. It’s stupid, and I hate it, but here we are. I guess it makes some amount of sense, since the original Doctor Who and the 2005 reboot are also conaidered to be seperate series. I wonder if that means the episodes going forward are considered to be yet another reboot of the series.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006q2x0

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0gglvqn

https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/57243-doctor-who/discuss/656034cd2b113d010cc0997d

The very unfortunate solution that I have decided upon, is to switch it over to using TMDB, which seems to have no trouble syncing the correct metadata. I say unfortunate, because TMDB has yet another completely different idea as to what the episode orders, numbers, and titles should be, which required renaming the files yet again. And I don’t want my library turning into a hodgepodge of metadata from multiple sources(and I’d be constantly worried that anything using tvdb was wrong, anyway), so that means I’m going to have to go in and rename/reorder/etc who knows how many files, from who knows how many series, so everything detects correctly. That, in turn, means completely removing the physical files from the library and deleting the nfo files, to ensure everything is completely removed, then doing to rename and adding them back to the library all over again. I wonder how long this is gonna take. Or how badly this is going to fuck with my trakt data.

And of course sonarr only uses tvdb, so that’s a whole thing. Yup, definitely remembering why I originally abandoned jellyfin for Plex in a hurry the first time around. Metadata issues.

I was typing up a response and it got so long I decided to just add it as an edit to my OP so it’s more easily visible to anyone else that might happen to read my post.

The top and only metadata source.

Sure, if you have family photos. Or a family that you want to have access to anything of yours. I do not. And I very specifically want to do everything in my power to prevent my so-called family from gaining access to anything of mine, digital or physical.

I want the opposite. I want all of my data to be completely inaccessible to anyone, and potentially even self-destruct somehow.

If robbing a bank got you 10 million dollars, and the legal penalty for robbing a bank was a few thousand dollars, why would you choose to refrain from robbing the bank?

Pre…pare…? What’s that? Some sorta fruit?

Actually, I just finished importing all of my media to jellyfin a few hours ago, and just opened Plex and jellyfin side to by side, and manually verified everything. Took maybe an hour and a half to carefully look through everything, and just listened to a podcast in the meantime. Only had to manually identify maybe 10 anime, change cover art for 4 or 5, and I was good. Setup the docker version of that jellyPlex-Watched tool, let it do it’s thing for another hour, and I’m basically now fully moved over to Jellyfin and ready to go.

And yeah, first thing I did was turn on the nfo file setting. Thankfully, I don’t put anything into my library without first manually organizing/naming the internal folder structure, and then using the RenameMyTVSeries app to rename the actual files using data from tvdb. So as long as I have Plex/jellyfin set to be forced to prioritize metadata from tvdb, it is almost always detected correctly. Sometimes it’ll decide to identify an anime like One Piece or Witchblade as the live-action show instead, since they have the same name. But that rarely happens, and only needs to be fixed once. And with now having those files sitting in with the actual media files, if I ever have to make another move like this in the future, it should be that much easier.

Thanks for the info. Looks like pretty much everything important has a solution. If the subtitle/audio track settings you mentioned work well enough, then that’s a good bonus, not having to load up a separate tool in a browser every time. And yeah, I was planning to run the two side-by-side for a bit to test, and to make sure that everything I want properly replicated gets done, even if I have to do some of it manually. I’m hoping to eventually ditch Plex entirely, it’s just so bad, and they keep making it worse. Next, I’ll have to go have a look around at any other mods/add-ons/etc that are available and see what else I can do.

This is your daily reminder to steal anything you can from large corporations at every possible opportunity. Got five identical items? Whoops, you only seem to have scanned four of them. Are four of them the brand name, and one of them the cheaper store brand? Shit, it seems you scanned the store brand one five four times. They just looked so similar, after all. How confusing!