For a lot of people in the world, it would be cheaper for the governmet to buy their rural property, bulldoze it, and then buy them a house in a town with internet service – than it is to run a line to their property.

of course that would be cheaper if the government is paying for it…That would also be cheaper than just buying comcast for someone even in suburbs of the US…

I used it in my car on the daily until it was removed from the phone. Then i went, in quite frustrating fashion, through a series of cheap aux/jack bluetooth dongles to maintain handsfree and music in the car.

Finally the radio in my truck started going out. So i replaced it with a wireless carplay/android auto model. And it IS nice.

But there are still times i would prefer a wired set of headphones. I still use them on my laptop from time to time. But will use airpods as well. One of the issues i have with my airpods is that often 1 side will be signifigantly louder than the other.

These have already seen active combat. They were used in the Armenian/Azerbaijan war in the last couple years.

It’s not a good thing…at all.

There definately is something. They have a ton of products. I’d have to look through my list as well. The CSS runs switchos lite, but honestly its fine. I can do CLI configs (brocade, cisco, cisco smb etc) but its whatever.

At my parents house i have been using a Mikrotik RB260GSP since about 2016 on their net. It also runs swos and im not doing anything crazy on it (in fact i never bothered with VLAN’s there though i probably should setup a guest vlan. But its been fine for years now.

if the firewall can be updated regularly then sure.

Mikrotik makes perfectly acceptable switches at a reasonable price with a variety of features, vlan compat is pretty common. A MikroTik CSS610-8P-2S+in will give you 2 10 Gb sfp , 8 x 1Gbe with PoE+ and vlans for under 300 bucks.

I have a mini-pc running a plex vm. And all the TVs are Rokus. So can watch anything, including live broadcast tv. And the roku is so simple kids can operate it, and do.

The only reason I keep Netflix is kids.

We don’t really watch it otherwise.

Even my in-laws are now pirates using hacked amazon fire sticks that are being hawked around their retirement community.

My mother in law is like “I get every streaming service and channel for 1 dollar a day, isn’t that great”.

I’m all “if it’s simple and works for you yeah, absolutely. “

When i ordered mine, they didnt have a US version. So i ordered a German model, and a keyboard (the German Model was overstock and discounted). And just swapped the keyboard.

It took about 30 minutes and probably 100 screws but it was simple.

Yeah displaylink depends on the use case. For my day to day work, scripting, spreadsheets etc. it’s fine. I can understand why some may not like them. They are great for lower end MacBooks because they can bypass the silly monitor limitations on the “slower” chips

At home I use an eGPU to drive 2 monitors and tv but that’s more to play games.

I THINK a thinkpad dock has 3 outputs. 2 DP and HDMI and is only limited by the horizontal resolution your laptop can output. A lot of intel onboard graphics are limited and if you are trying to output to a 4K+ 2x 1080p monitors you are gonna have trouble.

Any random thinkpad dock is like 200. A dell d6000 is a displaylink dock (so needs a driver) but will work for 160 bucks.

You really only need TB to extend pcie speeds to a peripheral. For most wfh stuff like spreadsheets you can do it for a LOT cheaper.

Yeah. Their expenses to try and add streaming was a waste. Plex did much of the same.

I bought Roku for the set top box replacement. They should continue to focus on that, though there really isnt too much more to do there either. They gotta innovate somehow i suppose and that means taking risk.

I will say they keep adding that goddam roku streaming channel to my list. I have exact an even number of lines of apps. It keeps throwing it off and its annoying.

I saw this graph floating around

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/QKdmNvH8KqrZmnnqRDiz6k-970-80.png.webp

I saw a graph yesterday that put them squarely between the nvidia 4000 and the latest AMD gen in terms of performance. M

Edit: I have bad memory. Here’s the graph. https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/QKdmNvH8KqrZmnnqRDiz6k-970-80.png.webp

For me, this was because the PS4 uses USB 2.0 that caps out at 480 Mbps. It was basically doing checksums of the backup files vs the restored and it just took time, even when the backups I had it running on were a sata SSD.

Would agree. Especially re:Nintendo.

One of my biggest annoyance is when you have multiple switches on a family account. If you use cartridges local co-op (or whatever it is called) requires two copies of the game (a cartridge in each). If you have the downloaded versions/digital download, then any device on the Nintendo account (ie: 2 switches for kids on a family account) can play against each other locally.

I don’t think you can cache/save a cartridge to a device to be able to do their local play feature (ie via ad-hoc connections in a car)

I have backups of my games on a PS4, which is air gapped (because the USB interface took a shot of lighning and no longer works).

I have been able to restore them and play games/saves on this console.

Here: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps4-back-up-and-restore-with-external-storage/

FTA:

PS4 console data you can back up Backing up your data regularly is a great way to ensure that important data is saved. You can back up the following types of data saved to a USB drive.

• Games and apps
• Saved data
• Screenshots and video clips
• Settings

All user data saved on your PS4 console (excluding trophies) is included in the backup data. When you restore your backup data, your PS4 console is reset, and all data saved on your console is erased. If you want to return data without restoring your console, use USB extended storage or cloud storage.

I have backups of my PS4, with games downloaded from the PS store that say different.

Heck any Playstation disc games tries multiple times to get you to save it to the HDD.

Not to mention that as long as it’s a digital download, you don’t own the game - you lease it at a flat rate.

not true all the time. Plenty of games once you have the files are easily able to run. KSP is one such example. I can just copy the KSP folder to any computer and play the game.

Its the devs choice to require things like Steam to validate the game etc.

You download them and back them up. What happens if the disc is scratched or your buddy drops a blunt on it?

I do similar. For laptops and docks, especially if they change setups it can be a pita (though you just need to copy files around).

Also the DE monitor config (ie that you use to login) is logically different to a users x config. So you gotta copy that over to make sure the primary monitor etc is right.