rob_t_firefly

I listen to music a lot, and I also just use VLC. I have a well-sorted media collection and just drag whatever files/folders I want into VLC.

You either die Old Mozilla or you live to see yourself become Current Mozilla.

In ancient times...

Hundreds of years before the dawn of history...

Lived a strange race of people...

The Druids.

While I respect Marc Maron's work, why does he care what I'm using?

I was named after my dad while my first sister born after me was named after my mom. (My parents would not have won any points for originality.)

If I'd been assigned female at birth I would probably have been named after my mom instead, and given the name my sister ended up with rather than just the feminine version of my present name.

As it stands I'm a cis man, but if I suddenly needed to change to a woman's name for some reason my name has a common feminine variant I'd use.

At least give them to the nations which aren't currently trying to ignore and undo the last 100 years of medicine, physics, and biology. (Sorry, United States.)

Thanks for your kind words! I'm happy to help.

Hi! I'm just one guy on the radio, there may be others.

The common "why doesn't someone just make a 'dumb' TV for people who don't want this crap?" question has an easy answer. Dumb TVs do exist, they're called "commercial monitors" or "commercial displays" and just show the audiovisual signal given to them by whatever else you hook up, in the manner of old TVs before additional apps or spyware were a thing. As implied by the name, stores and other businesses use them to show what they want without the added guff of the apps and ads they wouldn't be able to fully control.

Important detail: commercial displays tend to be fuckoff expensive compared to smart TVs of comparable size, quality, and feature set.

"Hey," you may be thinking, "how do they get away with charging so big a premium for an appliance with fewer features?" And you wouldn't be out of line to think that. However, what's going on is more insidious.

The higher price of a "dumb" TV is more correctly thought of as the real price of the appliance. The reason you pay so much less for a comparable "smart" TV is because the companies behind all the apps and spyware, the preinstalled shovelware apps which get you interested to subscribe to their services (Netflix, Hulu, Prime, etc.) and/or send you advertisements, as well as the spyware companies who profit from all the data about you that gets phoned home as you use the thing, pay the hardware manufacturers to put their shit software onto the device at the factory. That money made by the manufacturer from the shit companies goes, at least partially, toward lowering the price of the TV to entice you to pick it up at the store instead of a competitor's TV.

Look at that big chunk of money you save buying a smart TV over a comparable dumb display, and consider that the shit companies are paying the manufacturer that amount or more for the opportunity to monetize you and your household.

Then, if you have the wherewithal to pay what is now easily considered a ridiculous amount more for an appliance that isn't part of a system meant to take permanent advantage of you, you can just buy the commercial display instead. Alternatively, you can find clever technological ways to buy the cheaper "smart" one but counteract the ways in which it monetizes you, whether technical ways like jailbreaking or installing alternative OSes (some very early-stage efforts to get this sort of thing going are out there, but still very scattershot compared to the scene for doing so to smartphones) or simpler methods like just never letting the thing onto the Internet no matter how much it begs or enshittifies your user experience (a strategy which will stop working once it becomes cheap enough for the shit companies to just include their own connectivity hardware in the device which uses its own wireless and doesn't need your network.)

It's a continuing battle.

It was a Geico ad which took advantage of it being the era with all those competing collect-call services everyone knew about.

I knew someone who used Unicode glyphs to name their wifi the following string: ┓┏ 凵 =╱⊿┌┬┐

It was a reference to a Doctor Who episode in which people were getting zapped by the monster of the week after connecting to a mysterious alien wifi network.

The minuscule touchpad sucked on that netbook, making it far quicker and easier to type than smush my finger around while clicking awkwardly-placed buttons.