4grams

I did say “should have just bought a stick instead”.

Because they are short and my ceilings are tall. We also cook a lot and with kids, smoke happens. So, the requirement from the wife was being able to silence remotely.

Yeah, I went with LG because I wanted to try an OLED, and the price was right. Never buying anything from them again, and whatever tv I do buy next I’ll disable all the shit from the get-go.

I’ve always been privacy minded, but things have gotten so bad, and I’ve gotten complacent. Hell, I just bought a connected smoke alarm system because my wife and kids needed something they can mute remotely. Should have just bought a stick instead.

I need to replace my WiFi, about time I get one with real VLAN support, so I can build an isolated guest/IoT network.

I thought I had disabled everything but mine was still connected to WiFi. Thanks for the reminder. I disconnected it and blocked it at the router.

Tired of doing this for so many devices. We truly live in a full on surveillance state.

I’m m running bazzite on an Alienware m15 laptop, with an i7 & a 1070ti. Works great, no issues at all. When my last machine died, I rolled the dice on an HP Envy refurb machine with an i9 and a 4070 Ti Super (cheapest I could find with 16gb vram). I daily drive LMDE on it, also works perfectly. This is a desktop though to be fair.

The public are idiots, consumption will continue.

I’ll second bazzite. I have it on an old laptop as the family machine, so it’s kid approved. I don’t personally love it, but I have nothing bad to say about it, I’m just a greybeard who prefers my boring LMDE.

So, it’s one of my go-to suggestions for a good, daily drive-able step into Linux. I like that the immutability makes it easier to recover, for when they inevitably call me for tech support (haven’t had to rely on it much yet, but that’s the theory anyway).

I actually replaced my suv with a full sized truck last year. Funny enough my average mileage went up from 17 to 28mpg. Hybrids rule.

(Yes, 28 is still shit, but much better and more useful shit than I had before).

Well said.

Ultimately it’s a capitalism problem, it makes the value proposition drift towards addiction in every single case.

I mean, mine is a dumpster dive. It’s an old small form factor office pc. Tore out the guts and stuck them in a silver stone case with a SATA backplane and loaded it up with refurb hard drives.

Previous iteration was a broken g5 tower case I got for free, hacked with an old server motherboard that had been decommissioned at work.

So, definitely spent money on it with the additions, but all my home servers have started out with free spare parts.

Oh, I do of course run Debian.

I’m already kicking myself for buying into them in the first place. Fuck cameras, I’m going back to wired headphones. My $20 IEMs sound better than my AirPod pros, without all the fancy over processing.

I don’t know man, I’m a fairly old person and I’m constantly surrounded by people who seem unable to think without it.

What drives me up a fucking wall these days is how people will use AI to make a more “professional” message, then due to it’s verbosity it needs an AI to summarize on the receiving end.

Yet more evidence for my “never trust a self described libertarian” stance. Hasn’t failed me yet.

Because they have invested heavily into automation. A couple years ago the ford ceo went over there and came back terrified. He didn’t think it here was any way that american companies had a chance of competing.

So it’s working as intended. It’s always been the Hotel Cloudifonia.

No, I think I can downgrade it, I need to find an older version of the firmware as they don’t have it available anymore. I think I need a 2024 version.

I do have auto updates turned off, I should just block it at the router.

I don’t know about brother anymore. I have one I bought because it would work with 3rd party ink. I updated the firmware and am now locked out from using anything but brother. I would up finding a hack to get it to stop checking the ink level, so I can at least print, but it’s a temporary fix (have had to do it a few times), and it makes it unable to tell me how much ink is left. No big deal, I just run the cartridges dry, but it’s less functional than when I bought it…

Nutshell, I used to trust bother, not anymore so an open option is a big desire of mine. If this is halfway decent, I’ll pick one up.

Same, I just figure if they want to use windows, then they need to accept all the work impacting problems and stoppages. Just like how they accept the security implications of an all windows network…

It’s so entrenched though, and the typical user doesn’t know any different these days so it’s all windows and cloud now. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for these things, but it doesn’t have to be the default all the time…

It came to me last night, how all this AI and the difficulties obtaining hardware. This is all them trying to end the idea of ownership, at least of your data. They want to control all the data, so everything you do, every picture you take, every game you play, every essay you write, will be only available in the cloud. We are getting close to the point where are must pay for every bit of our own data that we access.

This is the inevitable result. I’m very glad I’ve spent years building my own library of content. I just hope I can continue getting replacement hardware to keep it alive.