I’m beautiful and tough like a diamond…or beef jerky in a ball gown.

  • 166 Posts
  • 795 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 15th, 2025

help-circle
  • I had similar thoughts on it, but then I read the prequel novel which fills in a LOT of blanks. The backstory in PIC S1 is only touched on in dialog but I feel like it should have been the first half of the season. It makes so much of the story in the show make sense.

    Specifically:

    • Why Picard had such a dramatic, passionate, and public split from Starfleet
    • Who Raffi is and why she and Picard are such BFFs now (and their falling out / why Raffi is angry at Picard)
    • How Worf got command of the Enterprise-E
    • The full scope/scale of the aborted Romulan evacuation
    • The absolute political shitstorm that was happening within the Federation because of the amount of resources being (re) allocated for the effort. In the show, we got one line from Admiral Clancy but it’s a very important part of the backstory that’s covered in detail in the novel.
    • Why neither Picard nor Starfleet Command are really in the wrong. The situation was shitty / “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” no matter what way you looked at it. The show clearly takes Picard’s side, but it’s much more complex than that.

    All of that context was lacking in the show and only vaguely touched on in either throwaway lines or cryptic dialog.

    I read the prequel novel (and the rest in the series that happen between seasons) and am on ep 3 of a PIC S1 rewatch. Everything just makes more sense this time around with all of that in mind.

    So if you’re only a few episodes in, do yourself a favor and pause that. Go buy, pirate, and/or otherwise obtain the prequel novel and read it first.

    Link: https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/209722657/star-trek-picard-the-last-best-hope/una-mccormack/
























  • Ah. The 5 Plus uses a Rockchip SOC where the Opi 3 / Zero 2W use Allwinner. I’ve read Rockchip is better supported, so maybe I’ll look into one of those. I just wanted the Pi Zero form factor for this project so went with that one. I should also have clarified that there’s no stable GPU support in Armbian for the OPi 3/Zero 2W but there are for other models.

    Even without GPU, I’m surprised it runs Jellyfin at all let alone quite well (lack of transcoding aside). That’s in addition to running everything else I threw on it at the same time, so I’m still genuinely impressed.


  • I’m very pleased with the OrangePi. I use it for my Jellyfin server. It sometimes struggles with real-time 4k transcoding

    What model OPi do you use and what system image (Armbian, Diet Pi, OrangeOS)?

    I’ve got the Orange Pi Zero 2W (effectively the OPi 3 in a different form factor) and also run Jellyfin on it, but there’s no stable GPU support in Armbian. It also doesn’t even transcode 720p at a usable rate, so I just pre-encode everything to something it can direct stream.

    It’s not my primary JF server, but it is nice to have during power outages and such since I can run it all day from a power bank.