That’s crazy, I don’t know how you do it. When my SO and I got back together after I had gone vegan she tried it for me and has stuck with it ever since. I can’t imagine having to fight against my SO or watch them eat meat every day.

Sorry, I know you’re not commenting for relationship advice. I’m sure there is a world where two people could have different beliefs on this and still coexist, but yours sounds… hostile. I’d really ask yourself if they’re worth it.

I’d they’d bring back the headphone jack and sell them in North America then they might have something.

It would win the “will it fit nicely on a keychain” by a landsline.

However I doubt it would suit OP’s needs as the contacts are exposed so durability may be suspect, and seeing as it is generic I doubt the performance is up to his standards.

I wish Firefox would build a tablet/scalable interface. It’s horrible on a tablet and breaks on DeX.

That’s a good practice, and I think you’re right that is what they’re going for. I don’t think that means you shouldn’t consider them, but it does lower their value proposition as the bundle is the better deal.

I haven’t jumped yet, but the Proton suite is looking more and more appealing. I’ve been eyeing them as a Gmail replacement, but I’ve been happy with my VPN and password management providers. As this reduces the bundle makes more sense.

Not defending Apple for bad design, but this has happened before with displays from different manufacturers. The ribbon cable burning from a tight bend was also what killed my first LG Ultrawide.

This is actually a very good comparison because restaurants use this argument all the time, except for wages:

“I can’t make money running my restaurant if I have to pay a living wage to my servers, so you should pay them with tips. How else can we stay open?”

These business that can’t operate profitably like any other business should fail.

Absolutely. It sounds ideal for something like that.

The issue is they sit in this odd place from a price perspective. I can get an N4000 based stick PC with 4GB RAM and eMMC storage for $140 CAD, or a vastly better performing N95 based mini PC with 8GB RAM, real SSD, and additional outputs for $50 more.

The stick PC really only makes sense if you need that form factor, or if you’re on a really tight budget. The improvements for $50 are just too much to ignore.

Your wishlist sounds almost identical to mine. As frustrating as the limitations of streamers are, they are easy to use. HDMI CEC makes single remote setups possible, easy volume changes, input switching, etc. Apps are vetted so they “just work”.

As for casting, most platforms support running Miracast or AirPlay receivers. Google is the stickler here that won’t let you run a Google Cast receiver (or at least I haven’t found one) and also doesn’t implement Miracast on Pixel devices. It’s such a shame because I vastly prefer casting the URL to the TV and letting it source the content than mirroring my phone all the time.

Yeah, those were on my radar as well. I haven’t yet had a chance to look into what the Linux compatibility is like, but that sounds promising that you were able to do it.

The big downside I see is that while the power consumption is low, they’re running a really old SoC, usually based on Intel N4000 (launched late 2017). Looking around it seems to have h.265 decode which is the most important one to look out for. It doesn’t support AV1, but that’s mostly streaming services and not that common (I think?). There may be other disadvantages I’m not thinking of at the moment.

What was the performance like for you?

I do have surround sound, but I wasn’t aware of that being an issue with a PC solution. Have you encountered issues getting that to work?

All my current self-hosting is running off an N100 mini-PC. OPNsense, NginX, Home Assistant, Unifi Controller, Docker host, etc. They are fantastic, it just seems a bit overkill for sitting behind the TV and playing Plex/Jellyfin and the occasional web stream in a browser. There’s really not much competition though as all the products below it offer a lot older processors that don’t have very up to date HW decode.

If you’re coming from Windows I recommend Fedora KDE Spin. If has a similar look and feel and is very up to date while remaining stable.

My apologies, I missed the word Musk. I think what I said still stands that regulations can only hold back some of the damage, and that GenAI is still a big issue in and of itself.

With that said, you’re right about Musk. He’s a wildcard who is only out for his personal interets and he has way too big a following. He’s a large problem to be sure.

The cat’s out of the bag unfortunately. I can download stable or unstable diffusion on my home PC and make it generate all kinds of stuff. It’s open source so you can’t really stop that knowledge from spreading.

You can however recognize that the majority of people won’t do that, and write rules around software that is delivered as a service or for a fee. That would stop 90% of it.

So while regulating GenAI is possible, it’s not full fix. GenAI is kind of still the risk.

I mean, yes? I’m obviously using VLANs here. I’m not running a separate switch and AP for each network…

All I want is higher resiliency SD cards. It must be a technology limitation with being unable to fit a good controller in there or something because I would gladly sacrifice speed and capacity for something reliable in a lot of my applications.

There’s a whole documentary on this. Check out American Factory (2019). It goes over the same issues outlined here.