I’ve never been against most micro transactions. At least runscape have monthly costs so helping to cover them is ok.

The thing I take issue with in all games is they aren’t ‘micro’ to begin with. 99p for some gimmicky furniture/clothing and i’d probably buy it to support the game. The moment you start charging £5+, thats when i’m out. And sadly thats the problem with all games, greed! No amount of profit is ever enough and you’d think more people would vote with there wallet but here we are! 🤦‍♂️🙄

Its why i quit eve online, think i still have a pilot with like a trillion isk but they got greedy and went down the micro transaction route on top of nerfing all that was unique about the because it annoyed a few rich vocal players. Should probably login and take an expensive ship into lowsec for shits n giggles! 😂

Well, in case anyone thinks of torturing yourself building doing, don’t use SD cards!

Set everything up but there was a little stuttering and no amount of offloading to ram eliminated it so now testing an NVME drive thru USB. Again, not ideal but I’m not in a rush to pay inflated PI prices so while I have a 2TB NVME hat, I don’t have a PI 5 so… make do where you can! lol

My plan was to get a 2-3TB but thought it’d be too much so tried shoehorning it before remembering I already had the drive! 🤦‍♂️ 🤨

I run my own unifi setup so network stuff spread over a number of devices so don’t really have much of an issue. The zero’s only do audio streaming though on minimal os that can’t phone home or update and they seem ok so far but atm i’m still breaking stuff while i tweak stuff, lol

But when i leave them alone to play they seem to do fine. I mean they should all cache a few seconds of audio so drop outs aren’t an issue, the problem with most wifi is likely too many devices on 1 AP or poor reconnect coding which unifi seem pretty good with. 😎

I’m in the process of building a multi-room audio system atm.

Snapserver/snapclients for the streaming audio, 1 audio stream with mpd to be set as 24/7 music, 1 for podcasts, 1 for alerts.

Alerts interrupt both streams to play the alerts. PI 4 for the main audio stack, first speaker, 2nd PI zero w/pirate radio hat/2 5w speakers for the portable speaker that should run most of the day on battery.

PodFetch gets the podcasts, script creates a playlist each day to play the oldest podcasts first. Although kinda surprised PodFetch doesn’t seem to let me do this.

Once it all runs smoothly i’ll put PI Zero W’s/Speakers in the other room and then going to build a 7” esp32 display to allow selecting which speaker plays which stream. Maybe later do something where each stream plays a different genre.

[rant] The Internet is not FREE. Its just free at the point of use!

Just like ad funded websites aren’t free to use, they are also just free at the point of use!

People seem to forget where the all this ‘ad money’ comes from. It’s not growing on magic money trees, it’s coming from every product you buy and it’ll be interesting to see how much products have gone up against the sheer amount of ads that are shovelled everywhere now.

The reason the internet used to be great was because people shared information with no expectation of monetary gain. Just the love of what they knew and the joy of sharing information.

So the sooner everyone realises you’re all paying for the ads on every product/service to be shown already, and blocking them actually saves you money because the more ads that are shown, the more websites get paid, the more ad/tracking companies charge companies and yes, the more expensive you’re product and services get! [/rant]