Can’t wait for all this yellowed epoxy bullshit to be at the thrift stores for me to disappointedly shake my head at.

Oh yes they are. Well, we are I should say.

Ugh yes, finally. More time to doom scroll the feeds, numb to the real world. I just need enough dopamine to keep swiping.

Flash a stripped down rom like LineageOS with minimal google services. De-crappify it. They are well supported and documented on XDA.

Ive never used a chromecast. Can they be flashed and de-googled?

I like Android overall, but I try and avoid as much google as I possibly can.

I made the mistake of using the LG smart tv features for like 2 years. I set up a pihole to block ads and eventually WebOS just quit working because ads and trackers did t work anymore. I factory reset the tv and switched over to a Roku stick. That worked well for nearly 4 years. Now I’m on a $19 ONN 4k streaming stick from Walmart. It’s actually kinda beef for what it is. Made by Asus and flashed LineageOS on it. Audio drops out and requires a reboot every few days. I want to move to a Nvidia shield but haven’t had the funds for it because I’m in a kitchen remodel.

I’m so glad I was able to find a place with municipal internet. It was one of our criteria , but one we were prepared to give up on as we were getting more desperate in our search for a house.

I lived just outside of Tucson, AZ during Covid. When we bought our house, we were assured that xfinity was extending service to our house and beyond shortly. We tried getting the service and they sent out a truck to do a site survey. Xfinity said “lol no”. Our options were CenturyLink dsl with top speed of 3mpbs down and 768k up or a narrow band wireless repeater service from town. None of those were able to even support a 480p stream of tv, let alone the needs of having to switch to 100% remote. We wound up having to use a shitty 4g LTE router that used some sort data plan through AT&T. 150gb data cap and beyond it throttled down to 3g speeds. At the time starlink was accepting people into a beta but not as far south as we lived in the desert.

Luckily we were able to sell that place and relocate to a much better place. We now have municipal broadband with no caps and a static ip. They are building out fiber services to the underserved rural places around town first and then building here and I’m excited to someday have fiber.

Hell yeah there is. The only billionaire news I care about is some future article that talk about how they lost all their wealth because they finally had to pay their taxes or some shit.

I’m in a small rural town in the south Puget Sound area of the Pacific Northwest in the good old USofA. I’ve only been here two years, having previously lived in OR, WI, and AZ. Back in OR there was a neat old western saloon building called “The Clubhouse” that housed a whole bunch of neat stuff. There was an arcade and a snack bar. A restaurant and barber shop on the top floor. Lots of big rooms that could be booked for events and stuff. It was free to hang out and socialize in and then food and drink etc cost money.

Since then, I have not experienced anything similarly and it makes me sad. Everything outside my house is monetized except the public library and who knows how long that will last.

I wish we could have a “community rec center” or something like that. It’s far too easy to remain disconnected from the communities in which we live and that’s super sad.

I made that mistake when I first bought my LG tv. The ads and bloat got too bad. Luckily I was able to factory reset and then never connected it to the internet. Use a cheap little 4k android streaming box made by Asus.

A buddy of mine was so proud that he had the entirety of The Simpsons on his TiVo (at the time). He was soooooo pissed when lightning hit a utility pole and fried a bunch of his electronics. The tivo was wrecked.

Let’s see

PDA: I mostly dodged this one. I did have a blackberry phone before I got my first Android.

DVD Recorder: Nope. I had a reader and a burner in my PC and I occasionally copied like that. My buddy had a 6 drive dvd duplicator though and that thing was amazing. Source disc I. The top, 5 blanks in their burners.

WebTV: No also. My mom almost bought a Philips 3DO but bailed at the last second crushing my hopes and dreams.

3D TV: I had a set of active shutter glasses from MSI that worked with a pair of 32mb Voodoo2 video cards in SLI. Each card rendered the image for an eye. I remember playing TONS of Quake 2.

RaspPi: Yes and it’s still in use running my 3d printer.

Internet Radio: I streamed a ton of internet radio on iTunes. Worked as a graphic designer for a newspaper and that was the only way to not hear my bosses breath whistle through her teeth.

Any TiVo veterans?