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The LED strips are somewhat replaceable - you should be able to find them on either eBay, AliExpress or ShopJimmy.

I will warn you however that it's quite an involved process - I know a fair few people who have managed to crack their LCDs or rip ribbon cables in the process of trying to fix backlights.

Unfortunately it seems that backlight issues are becoming more and more common - especially as most sets have a "Dynamic" mode or similar which sets the backlights to full brightness and drastically shortens their lives.

I doubt South America particularly wants it back - I worked on quite a few of the South America rallies and it was quite clear that many countries didn't want it and couldn't afford it towards the end.

It was particularly interesting driving through Bolivia one year with some of the locals in some towns literally hurling whatever they could at the service vehicles....

It's such a shame that something like this has to exist and that the creators have to resort to a fairly fixed playbook of SEO techniques (like whole life story, recipe development etc etc).

From my personal experience running a small tech tips site - it seems that I constantly end up further down the rankings cause I refuse to stuff each page with information that is not relevant.

Link that isn't hiding behind paywall- https://archive.is/dGn3n

For small family home deployments I've always used ASUS stuff flashed with AsusWRT-Merlin - https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/ - has been super stable and I've never required anything other than a local account to set them up.

Quite surprised that How I Built This has not been posted so far - https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this?t=16405...

Very enjoyable to hear stories from founders of a selection of interesting companies and very well presented by Guy Raz.

Damn that brings back some good memories of the internet of old !

I think a JISA (if you are in UK) with Vanguard is probably the best way to go with things - given the amount of time you'll have it open for you'll most likely see fairly decent returns.

The Vanguard Lifestrategy funds get recommended time and time again - basically pick your risk level / fund and then it's pretty much set and forget.

I guess there's nothing stopping you from putting a small amount into crypto but I certainly wouldn't want to bet my children's future on it.

One thing that I end up relying on fairly often as part of my day job is Hotel Mode - https://factory-reset.com/wiki/Category:Hotel_Mode - most likely it will be of use to a lot of you who just want to lock the set to one particular input and have it function as a dumb monitor.

Give me a shout if anyone needs a hand accessing it - or wants to know what some of the set specific features are.

https://archive.md/ATvE3 for those who are unable to see past the paywall.

Didn't really expect to see this from the Guardian - but at least it's nice that it's not stuffed full of affiliate links, as far as I could see almost all of them just link to the product page on the manufacturers websites.

Disable Samsung TV Plus - https://factory-reset.com/wiki/Samsung_TV_Plus - and you'll be most of the way there to removing a lot of the intrusive advertising that currently shows on the Samsung homescreen.

Most of the time - at least within events, we end up using "Hotel Mode" to disable some of the features or force the LCD to always boot up into a specific source.

I was kinda shocked by The Guardian to be honest with you - I had a similar experience when I came to cancel my subscription to The Guardian Weekly, which is an excellent magazine.

In the end I just told my bank to stop the direct debit - I had a few what seemed like automated payment emails from The Guardian telling me that my payments had failed and to update my payment choices - but other than that I considered my subscription over.

I would completely understand if other types of debit card were accepted - but at least in the vast majority of my arguments with local shop owners, Visa Debit or Mastercard Debit are not accepted - cards which are otherwise accepted globally.

I understand if the the fees accepted need to be added on and covered by the consumer who wants to pay with the most convenient form of payment they have - but again in Germany that's not even a possibility. I find it quite strange that it's one of the only places (if not the only place) in Western Europe where you struggle to pay with either cash or a card type that is only available in the country.

Yep, I had a direct email from Amazon this morning advising me that I could no longer use my Visa Credit card for orders.

"Starting 19 January, 2022, we will unfortunately no longer accept Visa credit cards issued in the UK, due to the high fees Visa charges for processing credit card transactions. You can still use debit cards (including Visa debit cards) and non-Visa credit cards like Mastercard, Amex, and Eurocard to make purchases. Please update your default payment method now, or add one of these new, eligible payment methods if you do not have one."

Oh don't get me started with the EC card shenanigans - I've had so many problems in Munich with shops demanding an EC card as the only form of card accepted.

Drives me crazy that in some cases it's either that (which is unavailable to non German residents) or cash....

Rather interestingly my bank (First Direct) in the UK swapped over from a Visa Debit card to a Mastercard recently - I wonder if perhaps there are things going on behind the scenes that consumers are not currently aware of.

Rather annoyingly most of my spending with Amazon is on my Visa credit card - can't quite figure out why they are now more expensive to process than the historically expensive AMEX.

Somehow the OneDrive clients still refuse to allow leading or trailing spaces in the filenames, along with a few other characters that are not allowed - seems to cause quite a bit of user friction at least with the non-tech guys that I work with who are confused about why OneDrive is one of the few file syncing clients that has these requirements....

Salvia is pretty crazy stuff, I tried it in my younger years, made the mistake of taking a hit - not feeling much and then taking a much bigger hit of much stronger stuff.

Needless to say - the pictures on my walls came alive, cars started driving around my room and at some point I was sure that I lived in New York (I live in the UK). The whole experience was absolutely hilarious, felt like it lasted hours - but was over in about 10 minutes.

I chalked it up to something that was fun - but something that I'm in no massive rush to try again. After speaking with friends about it - it would appear that whatever mood you are in gets massively amplified, so for anyone wanting to try, make sure you are in a good place mentally before smoking.

I must admit - after having been a loyal Apple trackpad user for the past 10 or so years, I've never really had an issue with miss clicks or unexpected behaviour.

With the recent WFH trend - I did convince myself to buy an actual mouse about 6 months ago (MX Master 3 for those curious) and I must say, despite never having a problem with the trackpad I now find it to be far superior to the trackpad. In fact using the trackpad now for a prolonged period makes my hands/wrists hurt somewhat which I'm sure I never struggled with in the past.

I can tell you however that the touchbar is a daily source of annoyance when it comes to miss clicked items - despite having a 2019 Macbook for the last year or so now I still manage to press random keys on the touchbar on an almost daily basis - so happy to hear that the new MBPs do not have the touchbar.

Aren’t most sales of NFTs some sort of publicity stunt, given their limited utility ?

Busier than ever to be honest with you - with the added difficultly that a lot of our regular freelancers have either left the industry or are being snapped up quicker than we can book people.

I guess it will no doubt be chaos for another few months as the industry gets back to it's feet.

Surely this will be circumvented primarily by people just registering with TLD registries that are not in Europe ?

Whilst I almost certainly work in a different industry to that of most of HN readers, I can tell you that it's having a massive effect.

Our freelance pool has massively reduced in size - mostly through people moving on to find full-time work in completely different industries.

In our case (events + conferences) - I'm finding it quite hard to comprehend, as we were one of the only companies still paying our freelancers during COVID as we believed it was the right thing to do, so that we would still have freelance staff who we could rely on post-pandemic. We were paying them on a completely no strings attached basis too - there was no expectation that they would have to pay it back or work for us in future. Our rates are well above average too - which makes the issue even more hard to understand.

I suspect that in quite a few cases - people have gotten used to spending more time at home and with loved ones and have decided that they enjoy it more than travelling on a fairly regular basis.

I work predominantly in Event Production - I love to read anything tech related and occasionally some of the links posted here contribute to more creative solutions in my day job.

Based on the SammyGo project - https://www.samygo.tv/ - I'd say that it's relatively difficult, I think in most cases people are inclined purely to attach a HTPC or something similar to the TV and then just use the TV as a dumb monitor.

I think we are still a few years out from having to worry about TVs that need a constant internet connection - I connect mine to the internet whenever there's a firmware update that interests me, but for the most part I leave mine disconnected from any sort of internet.

Quite glad that this isn't available in the UK or Europe yet, hoping that our laws will prevent it !

My Specialized Diverge Comp Carbon gravel bike I'd say - I only purchased it at the start of the year, after riding a MTB for a considerable amount of time.

I've already put 1000km of riding into it - it's an absolute pleasure to ride and always puts me in a much better mood in the days after having ridden it.

Thanks for the tip, just purchased one of the eBay refurbs - always happy to buy manufacturer refurbished items.