The local community college has(d?) a good rock station with no ads but I am just out of range of their transmitter since we moved so I have not been able to listen for the last couple years.

In the US, the HD stations also don’t play as many or any ads, I don’t know how they are funded but its pretty cool. Mostly deep cuts or out of vogue genres. There are a couple of cool local jazz, blues, oldies or others.

I mean, soft power doesn’t really matter to a dictator that insists on using hard power.

What’s that?

I bought one of these from Flirc but never used it.

A totally valid option I had not considered. Imo, the solution needs to be controlled by a standard remote. I tried for a couple years to get my family to use a media pc that used a media keyboard and no one would touch it. I turned it into a server and streamed to emby and now they will use it but only after I showed them it works even when the internet is down.

No doubt. The market is shriveling up for people who want a new tv that isn’t garbo. Outside of commercial displays which are like 3-4x as expensive and have lower image quality, I don’t know of anyone making dumb tvs in a 55" plus size. Yes, you can opt not to hook them up to the internet but in a house with non-tech people, its a huge hassle to get them to want to use anything other than the built in apps. Even diy set top boxes running on a pi or shield are not as user friendly for kids or grandparents.

I basically left it vanilla after switching the launcher and borking the updates. We use emby for our home streaming but I am always looking for extra functionality

I will 100% jump over to it if that does turn into a thing

Oh cool, I’ll have to checkout those other tools!

I have a HiSense TV and use ADB AppControl to disable/remove the telemetry or forced updates, and Projectivy Launcher to get a home screen/launcher that doesn’t show ads. Both are free and work really well. I don’t see trash on my homescreen anymore.

I have 1, 10 ounce cup of black coffee around 7:30am every day. More than that I get jittery and have trouble sleeping. The last time I had an energy drink was probably 2019 and I could only have a couple sips of it before I felt like I was going to take off into the air.

For context, there is a BUNCH of potential issues with OpenClaw. This recently happened and then ARS used fake ai quotes of the author when publishing an article about it.

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/

Good, keep up the momentum.

I’ll allow that with a big asterisk, if you consider Mexican Coke as coke then yes, its one of the best sodas. If not, there are way better options.

It really depends though, if you want to do analog in or out, relay control, or use existing hats, you are bought/forced into the ecosystem. If you are just using it as a small computer, yeah roll with whatever. To me, it’s always occupied the void between an arduino and a sffpc or when I wanted to do compute and analog/digital control on something.

The really unsettling one for me was Beyond the Aquila Rift

I saw it on Love, Death, and Robots and it really creeped me out.

Are the superchargers lasting longer on the new doo’s? I’ve been out of the loop for a while but I never really cared for the rotax supercharger setup. Kawi made the ultra fugly on the last update though.

I had an 8350 machine with 32gb of ram when if was in season and while it never really left me short of power, the intel 4770k and 4790k were better performers. That may not be the case anymore with stuff being more multi-core optimized but at the time, the intel single core performance was so much better than the 8350s which made a bid difference in gaming.

My old rig was an 8350 overclocked to 4.5 on liquid, crossfired 3gb 7950hd’s, and 32gb of matched corsair dominator ddr3 all in a corsair 230t chassis with the bright orange paint and led fans.

I was told that I gave one of our young engineers a “crisis of conscience” for telling him about how a product we were developing needed some more work and testing because we didn’t have enough data on it to release it for use.

Somehow management decided that I was poisoning the company and was toxic for not releasing a partially tested product that could either get people sick or set things on fire and then get people sick.

I was told to get on board and apologize to the young engineer for being a bad example or leave. I started polishing my resume, then turned in my resignation.

I spoke to the young engineer in a friendly and non-acusatory manner and he denied staying any of that to management, he claimed he understood what I was telling him and he agreed with my statements. We still keep in touch.