Check out Infuse, it’s a pretty good front end for a home media collection.

Probably safe to assume that the streaming app on your phone is collecting the same data about your viewing habits, whether or not you Chromecast it to another device.

Or literally never, ever connect your TV directly to the Internet (seriously, don’t do it).

My Apple TV does an infinitely better job than the half-assed built-in native apps; more services are supported and for longer, features are properly integrated, and the additional smart phone functionality (AirPlay, AirPods sync etc.) is a godsend in a busy household.

Plus the added bonus of not risking my network getting compromised, and one less company collecting and selling data about me to unscrupulous marketers and shady middle-men.

I honestly think it will not live up to the levels of hype that the community will build itself up to.

Coupled with my suspicion that the single-player game will be as barebones as possible, with the goal of funnelling as many players into the next iteration of GTA:Online as quickly as possible, to sell more Shark Cards.

The good news is that in the end I’ll either be proven right, or pleasantly surprised.

Cheap yes, but a person should also be asking “would it pass with the same ENCAP safety ratings as the above?”.

Well, at least you can expect it to be a long supported, overpriced accessory! 🤣

If/when it happens, so be it - I’ll eat crow. But for the time being, Apple at least has long set/surpassed the standard for support lifetimes.

At some point, you just have to have a little bit of faith that not every company is going to immediately screw you over the first chance they get; otherwise you’ll never end up buying anything (new or otherwise), with the fear that the moment you do - they’ll drop support.

I mean, some companies do deserve that level of scepticism - but honestly, for all their other faults Apple is not one of them.

There are a lot of legitimate reasons to hate on Apple, but not supporting their products long-term is not one of them.

Eventually they stop providing new OS updates, but they don’t brick/abandon devices.

Hell, I turned on my old iPhone 5 recently for the first time in over a decade and it happily connected to Apple’s servers and updated to the last supported OS version.

Even now that my Apple Watch isn’t receiving any more major OS updates, it can still interact with my up-to-date iPhone 14 without any issues.

I’m still using an Apple Watch 3 that I got in a bundle with my iPhone X from my telco.

I need to charge it twice a day for ~30 minutes each, but it’s still chugging along.

I think I’ll finally upgrade to the new generation this year, but at that point it will be 7 years old - which is commendable for tech.

Is it the same muscle that lets you wiggle your ears? Because I can do that, and I get a similar roaring.

Wait, isn’t this just the plot of that Sam* Rockwell movie - Moon?

In general, I would love for any OEM to step in and provide similar build quality to a Mac… doesn’t even have to be Lenovo (who IMO are a pale imitation of IBM’s line of laptops).

RTS are inherently limited to PC.

I agree with everything else you said, bar this. I first got into RTS’s on the PS1.

To me, RTS’s peaked around Red Alert 2 (pre-Yuri’s Revenge); I just wish I could find more voxel-based 2d RTS’s with that same ‘arcade-y’ feel.

I know this is WhitePeopleTwitter, and not a direct ask; but the easiest way is to tackle it from the wake-up time, rather than forcing yourself to try and fall asleep at 10pm.

Pick a day with few responsibilities, (e.g. Saturday ) that way you won’t be too negatively impacted if you don’t get enough sleep. Set MULTIPLE alarms to 6am to force you out of bed; proceed with your day as normal, minimise screen time and bright lights after 9pm, and go to bed at 10pm.

Make sure you keep waking up at 6 am and don’t nap/go back to sleep; brute force your body to adapt. It should work as quickly as in 72hrs.

You likely just need to enable TPM through the BIOS (each manufacturer calls it something different).

I’m in a similar boat, but am going to use W10 EOL to probably jump ship to Linux - if not at the very least switch to Windows 10 LTSC.

It’s because most game devs are owned by publicly traded companies; shareholders searching for constantly improved earnings man’s that games are rushed out the door, incomplete and packed to the gills with monetisation.

Balder’s Gate 3 is a perfect counter-point to this mindset; games can only launch once - so launch it properly.

As an aside; I do wish that there was a millennial billionaire who grew up playing some Konami classic titles, and were in a position to take over the company, take it private and focus on restoring it to its former glory. But there is no such thing as a benevolent billionaire, so it’s just a pipe dream.

But your government will (try to) protect you from foreign influences That’s what this is, though.

Take a step back and consider for a moment the absolute mayhem TikTok was able to cause through one single push notification to their US user base (>170m, over half the adult population). That is not a power that should be wielded lightly, and definitely not one in the hands of a foreign adversary ready, willing and capable of weaponising it at their whim.

Think of the power that affords them to put their finger on the scale when it comes to the critical upcoming Presidential election, not just directly - but through slight manipulations of the algorithm to engage one political cohort and disenfranchise another.

We can agree that there is at least a slight difference in having your own (or a friendly nation’s) Government tracking you, versus allowing a competing nation to have direct access to over half of the adult US population (as per their recent push-notification stunt), as well as a robust collection of their interests and preferences.

There is a reason China has banned most US-based software in the mainland (Meta, Google, etc.); in favour of self-developed alternatives. This is just treatment in kind; it’s not an outright ban, rather a forced sale to prevent more of that user data falling into dubious hands.

5 (6?) 3.5in floppies to get Dune 2 loaded on my Amiga 2000; at least I could take the time between disks to go to the bathroom, grab a snack, read a book etc. 😅

Yes, over 2.5 years of heavy use; Including ~8hrs of spreadsheets and SQL (Mon - Fri), in addition to waaay too many hours of WOW (fixed HUD) than I’d care to admit.

Consider also then, that Wulff Den ran an OLED Switch for 18,000 hours (two years straight) at max brightness, on a relatively “cheap-quality” (his words) panel: YT link

Additional point: My iPhone Xs was my daily driver until 18 months ago, and now has been relegated to a baby monitor duty (static video for ~18hrs a day) and also does not have any burn-in visible. The brightness on it isn’t cranked all the way to 100%, but neither I would your desktop.

LG and Samsung (the key W-OLED & QD-OLED manufacturers) have implemented firmware-level optimisations to ensure that burn-in is minimised, if not outright eliminated in real-world situations. Again, refer to the Wulff Den video for the amount of effort he had to go to in order to cause the burn-in he did.

All I’m advocating for is not taking “the Internet says” as gospel, as a LOT of the OLED information is either outdated or irrelevant (cheaper/seconds OLED panels from tertiary manufacturers who omit maintenance cycles from their firmware).