I don’t know if it’s still the case, but smart TVs were a bit cheaper than “dumb” TVs at one point, since the cost of the TV was subsidised by all the streaming platforms that paid to be included on the TV manufacturer’s OS, and have a customized Netflix or Amazon logo button on the remote that opens their app.
I don’t know if this is done anymore since there are hardly any dumb TVs out there being made now.
I admit, I took the bait for a while and subscribed to a few streaming platforms. A few bucks a month to not deal with the inherent risks of pirating, or headaches trying to find a bootleg stream that works? Why not?
Then came the price increases. Shows abruptly moving to other streaming platforms with little to no warning. Ads with tiered services (“pay $10 more to see just two minutes of ads instead of five!”).
Suddenly pirating started to look good again.
I used to do that at the Burger King that was next to my old house. I’d prop my laptop up by the window the faced the restaurant and start downloading.
Then at some point they added something to the WiFi that, after you’ve been connected for like 30 minutes, disconnects you. You wouldn’t be banned or anything, it would just cut the connection until you go back to the captive portal and click “I Agree” again.
I feel like a lot of public WiFis these days have data caps and throttling to circumvent downloading.
White House to prison pipeline.
I never got why they don’t attach these flares to some boilers to generate extra electricity or heat homes in the winter. I mean I know that creates problems of their own and it would still do nothing about the CO2 pollution, but it makes a little more sense than simply burning it.
I “love” when a show like Law and Order has a scene where the cops go to arrest somebody who is later proven to be innocent, and it’s always at their workplace, or a busy family function, or a restaurant. The cops proceed to loudly accuse the person of the heinous crime right in front of their friends/family/neighbors/coworkers.
Then later on, the actual perp is arrested and no mention is made again of the innocent person they practically eviscerated in public or in front of their loved ones.
It’s like these shows exist to subliminally train you to passively accept cops treating you like shit, even if you’re innocent.
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I need to get back into OSM. Pokemon Go was the reason I initially started contributing. The game uses (used?) OSM map data, and certain Pokemons will spawn near certain biomes (water, woods, etc).
My little cousin played the hell out of PG around 2017-2018, and they mostly played it around the big park in our town. At the time, the park appeared on OSM (and by extension PG) as a featureless green polygon with a few roads and footpaths. In reality it has a bunch of woods, streams, a pond, playground, public pool etc. So I did a quick readup on how to add stuff to OSM and I gave the park a digital makeover. I even walked around the footpaths with my phone and marked them out with the GPS so that they would appear in the map more accurately.
Unfortunately it was quite a while before Pokemon Go updated its OSM database, and my cousin lost interest in the game by then. But I kept at contributing for quite a few years, adding random stuff in spurts and stopping for a month or two
I have Batocera (Linux-based emulator platform) on a 2011 Mac Mini.
The only caveat is its weak integrated graphics chip that struggles to emulate fifth generation (PSX, N64, etc) and newer consoles, but since I pretty much only play 16 bit and older it’s been a solid machine.
I remember when Apple first switched to using Intel processors, people talked about being able to install Linux and other operating systems easily. I guess Apple didn’t like that.
This is in a lot of shows and not just sitcoms, but I hate contrived argumentative dialogue that’s set up so that the protagonist always gets the last word with “witty” responses/comebacks. It’s like watching a “I’m the attractive Chad and you are the ugly NPC” meme in real time.
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I wouldn’t say “completely fucked”, but for a few years I noticed YouTube on Firefox has this occasional quirk where videos will quit playing and infinitely buffer at the exact same timestamp. Like there’s no way around it except skipping about 30 seconds ahead with the seek bar, or doing a Ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) and starting the whole video over. Opera GX doesn’t seem to have this problem at all.
But it’s still not a big enough deal to make me give up Firefox completely.
Oh god, the browser bars.
Years back, I was fixing my grandpa’s laptop, and he had one of those browser bars in his Internet Explorer. Out of habit, I disabled and removed it (since they had a tendency of installing themselves). I finished up, hung out with him and talked for about half an hour and left, and when I got back home I found my mom on the phone with him. She immediately hands the phone over to me, and he sounded uncharacteristically livid. He tells me that I “broke” his email and he can’t access it anymore. So I drive all the way back and it turns out he was using the deleted browser bar to access his email. Even after trying to explain to him that he can still access it by going to a bookmark or just typing in the URL, he insisted that I put the browser bar back on. So I do.
That was probably the last time I ever helped any family member (outside our house) with tech issues.