391–400 of 477 posts
makes me happy. Hope a lot of people can leave behind those low paid high effort jobs thanks to this 2 shitty years
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> without resorting to casting from my phone I am curious, why is that undesirable for you? I'm assuming there's something more than lack of individual app support for casting.
It's fairly inconvenient to have to use your phone as the remote, especially when you want to do something on your phone (or watch something else) while the kids watch netflix. We have disney+, and my TV apparently thinks we're not subscribed. My phone does, though, and I can cast from that. Yes, we can watch Encanto again, but it's very jarring when the normal interactions with the TV don't work.
But when you cast from an application with integrated chromecast support (as e.g. Netflix) then the phone is free to use as you wish while the kids are watching. I do this all the time. I start the cast, then use my normal TV remote to pause, for volume control etc. You don't need the actual app for most things and you can use the phone/tablet for other things (I have to find translations for my wife, for example, while watching).
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The remedy to that is that the thing will stop working after a while - like how Intel x86 CPUs turn off after 30 mins without their precious spy co-processor[0], or how Diablo 2 Resurrected discontinues working after 30 days of being offline[1]. Of course another remedy is that you're free to buy a similar thing from another manufacturer, that's not completely dropped the ball on the issue. That is, until all of the…
I don't know what scares me more, the fact that all manufacturers might go down this path, or that our society might reward them for doing so.
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This pattern is pervasive. I also dislike needing an app and an internet connection for the most basic functionality with some purchased device. At some point, we need to own the things we buy and that line keeps getting pushed back further and further. Anec-data: I purchased a cooking device for my parents in December and it has a single button to turn it off. The only way to use it is with an app which requires a l…
I'm assuming you are talking about a sous vide device. This is one of the few (unrooted) smart devices I actually appreciate. You can easily configure it for a specific task (steak? chicken? brussels?), get push notifications when it's done and even turn off it's warm setting remotely if needed. And given that most of the thing is immersed in boiling hot water, it makes sense to not put controls on the device itself.
And whether a device has controls doesn't matter with regards to hot water contact. It has to be properly sealed either way and capacitive buttons work fine for this (not worse than the low-quality buttons they'd use otherwise). The main feature you get with Bluetooth is another point of failure thanks to connection problems, at least that's my average experience with BT.
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That's exactly why I personally try to stay away from as many of these things/devices as I can reasonably do. TV: just don't buy an actual TV. Buy a monitor and hook it up to a Linux box with something like Kodi. You can hook up your cable box if you have that or stream from Netflix and such. Sure, even Netflix makes it hard as you can't get 5.1 surround but I'll take that and 2.0 -> 5.1 upmix over buying a Smart TV…
> TV: just don't buy an actual TV. Buy a monitor and hook it up to a Linux box with something like Kodi. I simply bought a non-smart TV. I just made sure it had a number of HDMI ports. I plug my various media sources into the HDMI ports. A "smart" TV must be the most un-smart TV possible - you're stuck with whatever's there. The "smart" part (say, a Pi or a Chromecast or both) must be detached from the display device…
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That's exactly why I personally try to stay away from as many of these things/devices as I can reasonably do. TV: just don't buy an actual TV. Buy a monitor and hook it up to a Linux box with something like Kodi. You can hook up your cable box if you have that or stream from Netflix and such. Sure, even Netflix makes it hard as you can't get 5.1 surround but I'll take that and 2.0 -> 5.1 upmix over buying a Smart TV…
For TV, get a short throw projector. It’s a dumb screen, and it’s fun to play retro games projected on the wall
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I'm assuming you are talking about a sous vide device. This is one of the few (unrooted) smart devices I actually appreciate. You can easily configure it for a specific task (steak? chicken? brussels?), get push notifications when it's done and even turn off it's warm setting remotely if needed. And given that most of the thing is immersed in boiling hot water, it makes sense to not put controls on the device itself.
I recently got an Anova -- with touch controls, and it works great both with and without the app. The top is a big bigger to handle the screen and touch controls. Making an immersion circulator app-only is likely a BOM-reducing measure, which is fine (given that active time is probably at most a few minutes like twice a day). And you can get smaller form factors too with app-only control (e.g. Ember Mug).
I like it, but now leave it pre-set to 135°F lest I set it elsewhere and then lose the ability to adjust it, so I think they dropped the ball on the design.
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Does it even matter if we read these contracts? No one's going to negotiate terms with the billion dollar company and only lawyers will have a full understanding of the implications of what's written in these things anyway. This last fact alone should be enough to invalidate any consent. I mean, we're actually talking about "buying" games here. That's how insidious these things are. The few people who read this fine…
It matters. You can click decline. If more people read the contracts and clicked decline, perhaps they'd have to change the contract.
People just don't care until they personally get a kick in their face. We all know that and companies bet on it.
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Genuinely curious, did you feel anything was missing from Apple TV besides a web browser? I feel it’s perfect for our uses but I always like to know if I’m missing something. Personally I don’t like web browsing on TV but AirPlay fills that gap when it’s needed.
I have to say that Apple TV sucked less than the alternatives but it's also the most inflexible in the sense that it's harder to "jailbreak", so for example if Apple decides that the home page will now be filled with ads rather than icons, I won't be able to do anything about it whereas in Google TV and Fire TV you can sideload an unofficial launcher if you want. Compare this with my current solution where I can just…
That’s fair, if that’s what you want and if that works for you.
For most users however that would make the TV impossible to use with a regular, simple remote and thus be a major downgrade in user experience.
Basically what it seems like (to me at least) is that people who buy “smart” devices don’t want them to be smart in terms of having advanced capabilities. Rather they want the devices to be smart enough to do the right things in a simplified UI, allowing the user to get the same things done, but with less effort.
Basically smart devices are smart to allow the user to be lazy, dumb or both ;)
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It's a tangent, but it's incredible to me that people used to ship video games and other software on physical media and it worked fine. Now you can drop a big turd on the steam store initially and it's just business as usual. Cynicism aside, I really do admire the dev and QA teams that pulled this off. It's such a different world now.
It cuts both ways, games would take half decades to get done or only cover a thousandth of the ground current games cover. Imagine what Minecraft would be, shipped on physical media. We also wouldn't get games like Goat Simulator who basically set a low expectation bar in exchange for low cost, best effort game play. I'm kind of ok with more "garbage" if we also get more weird/low budget games that wouldn't exist oth…
...which is still true today. It's common that large titles take 4+ years in development if they're not built on an existing game's engine and actually release in a finished state. Activision was able to release a new CoD every year because they cycled through 3 studios of which each had 3 years time for a game that's mostly a mod of the previous one with slight improvements to the underlying tech. And even then it's now almost expected that it'll take another 3+ months to get in a state that the game was meant to be released in.
> only cover a thousandth of the ground current games cover
That may be true if you go back to the Atari era, but even ~30 years old RPGs can still hold up well in terms of content. It's great that now we don't always need publishers to create & ship games and can release updates online, but that's no excuse to sell incomplete products.