Re. The last paragraph, that's what confuses me the most about all of this. LG has virtually held a monopoly of the entire OLED TV market for the past ~15 years, selling (arguably) one of the TVs on the market and being the only thing I've recommended people buy in about as long. They could have done literally nothing but update the hardware every other year with a newer SoC, HDMI version, etc. and done just fine. Now, I don't think I could see myself buying or even recommending any LG products going forward.
There *has* to be some complex math involved. It's insane that there's more profit in duping your users to spy on them and sell their data/information, than there is just making and selling a great product.
I just bought a house and this was the conclusion I came to. A cheap PoE-capable multigig switch and a single Omada access point cost about the same as a cheap WiFi 7-capable router would have. I did opt to run the Omada Controller software on a Raspberry Pi instead of buying a hardware controller (to save a few bucks); maybe if I had a lot more hardware it'd make sense but for my one AP it's more than capable. So far I'm quite pleased, it gives me the peace-of-mind knowing that WiFi upgrades are effectively plug-and-play - plug in the AP, adopt it in the controller, add it to the site, and the existing network is already being broadcast - no more router reconfiguration every few years!
How often are you still receiving physical cheques that mobile deposit is an essential feature? I could probably count on one hand the number of cheques I've deposited or written in the past ~15 years, nor can I say I've been so desperate to access said money that I feel the need to deposit the cheque within moments of receiving it.
> Canadian TikTok is now also being similarly moderated for content unfriendly of your administration.
I feel like this has to do more with the consolidation you typically see international companies do with their North American operations than anything. More often than not do things have to go across the border for warranty repair. Even when a 'local' Canadian presence exists (like Asus has), they themselves generally act as a middleman between you and their 'parent' operation in the US. It would not be surprising to find out that TikTok US operates the Canadian version as well.
I don't know, maybe it's the way I was raised, but to me it just seems like common sense that a privatised monopoly is going to be worse in literally every metric imaginable, than maintaining public ownership - not just with regards to water and/or similar critial-to-life infrastructure, but everything in general. Highway 407, the most expensive toll road on the planet, is a prime reminder to Ontarians why privatisation is objectively bad.
> Anyone will hopefully lend you a phone if you're in a pinch
I honestly wouldn't count on it, at least not where I'm from, not anymore anyways. IME, having been in that situation (and knowing the numbers I need to call) it's rare for someone to let a stranger use their personal device for something as mundane as a phone call due to risk of theft, scams, or other criminal behaviour, not just on the part of the person borrowing the phone, but the person on the other end being contacted from an unknown number. While the chances of something like that realistically happening are incredibly low, it's a surprisingly easy social engineering method that's got people wary of trusting others to handle effectively their entire life in one device. A lot of businesses don't even let customers make personal phone calls from their landline for the same reason.
And honestly, that's my biggest gripe. Identical search terms on different systems, or even the same system in different physical locations, almost always return different results from one-another. Telling someone to "Google it" stopped being a reliable way to share information.
The author's complaint(s) stem from the ads that "just keeps downloading" which in approximately five minutes downloaded "almost half a gigabyte" worth of information.
This is a prime example of why many people use adblockers, it's not just to make the majority of the web actually usable, but it prevents excessive data transfers that we never asked for. For what it's worth, the same article is just a hair over 8MB when ads are blocked and a hair over 9MB when you scroll down (loading the thumbnails for the other articles).
I feel like an easier solution to having six different email addresses is to use Gmail aliases - I've caught a few less-than-honest companies either selling my email address, or been breached without disclosing such, simply by using an alias along the lines of '+service_name'. If any alias starts to receive spam you can setup rules to automatically delete everything that comes in with that. You also get the added benefit of significantly easier and more accurate search.
Your dates are a little off - Rayman Legends released in 2013 and saw a remaster in 2017. Rayman Mini was released in 2019, but it's not exactly a main-franchise title...
> Keep in mind that the US auto industry is also very much a Canadian one.
As someone who's worked in the auto industry (in Canada) I have to 'hard disagree.' The big three have proven time and time again that we (Canadians) are second-class citizens when it comes to how they operate the facilities built here. Even before any of this nonsensical tariff nonsense, billions in government money has been given to the likes of Stellantis and GM over the years in an effort to keep jobs in Canada, with them putting in the bare-minimum effort to satisfy people in the short-term and thanking us by continuing their movement of production out of the country. Instead of trying to talk the president down from his pointlessly harmful tariffs, or doing what Toyota/Honda have done in pivoting to building worldwide models beside the domestic ones, the big three are gleefully taking the opportunity to expedite the closure or downsizing of facilities here.
Outside of the chuds who 'need' a pickup truck to satisfy their fragile ego, sales of "American" vehicles are starting to drop, with buyers choosing domestically-produced where possible (like the Toyota Rav4, Lexus NX/RX, or Honda Civic/CR-V).[0]
> It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive.
Sounds like they should be banning their sale and/or production then, just like many jurisdictions have been with plastics and other non-recyclable items. These devices are not an essential-to-life item where the waste produced is justifiable, especially when you consider the LiPo batteries, which are a borderline-environmental disaster from the moment the lithium is mined to the day that battery finds its way to a landfill. Why single-use disposable vaping devices exist in the first place is somewhat perplexing given permanent/re-fillable ones are also available, often right beside the disposable ones, and generally offer a significantly lower cost of ownership.
What burned me was that there was no updating from WP7 to WP8 - After playing around with one and genuinely enjoying the experience, I convinced myself to buy a Lumia 900 in April of 2012, just for Nokia/Microsoft to effectively say "that was stupid, wasn't it?" when the Lumia 920 and WP8 launched just 7 months later. Releasing a so-called flagship device that they knew would be incompatible with their upcoming OS, effectively killing software support before the year was even finished, really doesn't inspire confidence in the longevity of a product.
It's pretty easy to accomplish the same using virtually any 3D printer, even something as simple as an Ender 3 can be set to pause at a set layer in GCODE where the filament can manually be changed to the next desired colour. Realistically, this is only practical for things like signage, where you start with the base colour (such as yellow or green) then switch to the next for text and details, and if done properly with compatible materials, can look incredibly well-done.
This seems like an incredible disingenuous take. There's a marked difference between collecting information to freely share with the rest of humanity, and collecting information to feed into algorithms under the guise of "artificial intelligence" with the pretense of enriching their finances and putting others out of work.
I don't even get calls from my doctor anymore, everything is done online/through a portal, I just get an email with a link to my doctor's "secure portal," enter my DoB, and all our "conversations" are right there, neatly organised by topic.
If anything, if I'm getting calls from anybody in my family (or if I'm calling them), it's just assumed that it's a life-or-death problem that *genuinely* needs to be dealt with right now. Very few things in this world are so urgent that they need to be addressed right now.
> But where I live, winters could be a big issue. These vehicles could coat the roads with thin black ice.
I never even considered this as a problem. Is the exhaust liquid water though? Because my understanding of the process is such that is still creates an appreciable amount of heat, causing the exhaust to leave as a vapour (much in the same way water vapour is already expelled from catalyzed ICE exhaust, or people breathing).
I was thinking the same thing; the city I'm in isn't even that large (approx 450k pop.) but I could probably go through my list of contacts that live in-town and rattle off at least two-dozen area codes that aren't native to the area (on top of the dozen or so that are), with at least half of those being out-of-province. The slow death of long-distance billing, which also finds itself competing with the likes of FaceTime et. al., coupled with the highly-mobile nature of cell phones, have just made it a hassle to go through the process of changing your phone number for anything other than moving to another country (or a wicked discount).
Not necessarily my own use, but I built a few tools (that I volunteer free for use on a perpetual license) for my day job to make life a little easier in a few departments. Nothing impressive imho, they're mostly 'basic' calculators for various parts of the wiredraw process, from basic reduction-of-area to full-blown multi-pass die calculators (all fairly basic math and algorithms). In all honesty they're the kinds of semi-basic tools that the company should already have after >50 years of continuous operation, but stubborn blue-collar workplaces can be set in their old-fashioned ways, no matter how inefficient (honestly it's somewhat nice seeing others using and appreciating something I built).
Realistically, it's been possible on and off for quite some time. Chrysler's UConnect system received quite a bit of flak some years back over just how easy it was to take over full control of a vehicle[0]; not just locking/unlocking doors, but full control over the climate system and wipers, all the way up to starting and stopping the engine or changing gear in the transmission.
Given GM's commitment to actively removing the most popular and asked-for feature in the automotive world from their own infotainment systems, I'm not even surprised. This is a company that has proven before and continues to prove that they simply don't give a fuck about technology, they've realized they can keep throwing gimmicks or buzzwords at consumers and maintain just enough mind-share to stay relevant. It's no shock to me that a company with that sort of culture willingly bought into the same kind of flashy demos and mosaics of buzzwords that they themselves take part in.
In many cases the coils were integrated into the casing of the battery, and the back panel of the phone was thin enough to transfer sufficient power through.
Being one of those weirdos still using a proper receiver and 5.1 speaker setup on our main TV, but a stereo pair on our other TV, it's incredible the difference the lack of a discrete center-channel can make. It seems like Netflix et. al are more interested in pushing a 5.1 Dolby mix to everyone instead of detecting whether or not they have hardware capable of playing it properly. My more unpopular opinion is that they (the streaming services) should all be pushing a stereo track by default and have a/the surround mix as a selectable option, because it's become obvious that down-mixing on user's devices doesn't work as intended.
For what it's worth, we keep subtitles on for the stereo TV nearly permanently, while the main TV rarely is a problem - nothing a small boost to the center channel can't fix anyways.
It's become wildly prevalent the past few years in Canada, to the point where co-workers whom I've thought were decent people for the past ~10 years are actually inhuman pieces of shit, they've just never felt 'free' to air their grievances in public. But you don't only see this ignorance in the way people talk, it's extended to everything, from the way they drive, to the way they navigate a store, it's almost like nobody exists in their world except themselves, you're simply an obstacle in their day-to-day,
IME, COVID was a real turning point that pushed a *lot* of people into a more selfish mindset, and the "trucker" convoy/occupation of Ottawa really seemed to shed any remaining social decency that still existed in many of these people. Now that cost of living is spiraling way out of control (housing is a prime example, my $100k income virtually assures I will never be a homeowner), it's really galvanizing that selfishness in many while fosting in many more.
I think, for me, it satisfies some kind of hoarding instinct. I have a hard time keeping 'random junk' laying around my apartment, but I have absolutely no problem keeping a copy of a DVD I ripped 15 years ago that I will probably never watch again, and would probably be upset if it disappeared for some reason.
A friend and I were able to phish passwords from nearly the entire school we went to with VB6 - the school (board) used active directory for logins on a shoddy network where some switches would often just drop all traffic to a random port for any length of time, meaning a PC would lose connection to the AD server at random. The kicker was that attempting a login after the connection was dropped greeted you with a "could not connect to //SCHOOL_BOARD//SCHOOL_NAME/PC_NAME" to which the solution was reboot the PC and it would work again (99% of the time, anyways). The other kicker was the background image and login domain were the same for every single computer at a single school. We exploited this; we created a full-screen/un-exitable UI with the same background image behind a form simulating the normal login screen. We would first login to our own account and run the program (there were no login limits either), at which point someone else later through the day would sit down and try to login. The credentials that got typed in were added to a .txt in my own user folder before the user rebooted the "non-functional" system. Of all the dumb shit we did, that's probably the only thing we never got caught doing, and probably because we never did anything nefarious with them.
For gaming you need $$ for CPU as well. It's all fine and dandy if your GPU is capable of rendering/filling the ~1 gigapixel/s of 4K120, the trick is keeping it fed with enough data so it can render all those pixels.
It still wouldn't hurt to have as an option for, say, a swap disk in RAM instead of the SSD, or expose it as storage to macOS for use as scratch disks, or even just use it as a buffer/cache for the flash storage. There are all kinds of use cases where it would be beneficial to have a wicked-fast storage medium working between system storage and memory.
Unfortunately, a lot of vehicles these days, mostly high-end, do not come with oil dipsticks anymore[0]. I know that Audi starting switching to sensors-only around 2012, and I believe BMW started even earlier than that.
That about lines up with my Jellyfin experience ~18 months ago, although I was coming from (and switched back to) Emby at the time, which Jellyfin was forked from (still evident by all the Emby/MediaBrowser references in folder and file names). Which, IMO, was really interesting, because the codebases were very close to identical for some time yet Emby was orders of magnitude more reliable. I have more and more family accessing my server each month to the point I've almost run out of 'devices' allowed by an Emby 'license,' making Jellyfin a more attractive offering going forward... assuming they've fixed the problems they had at the start.