Wasn’t that actually on the cards at one point?

There’s a name for everything. There’s probably a name for there being a name for everything.

Oh, cool, an excuse to trot out two of my favorite videos:

How to Be a Pirate Captain

How to be a Pirate Quartermaster

Yeah. They went from counting pixels by rows to columns. A 16:9 widescreen 1080 display is 1920×1080, and most manufacturers are happy to call 1920 “2K”.

The YAVNXLT unit offers “elegant and productive for optimum serenity”, but the WZNGLPO says it can “bringing security for the family, business and happiness”.

When you’re not home it becomes part of the alarm system. When you are home it can turn on the lights or heating (or extractor fan in the bathroom) and you can aggregate it with other sensors to measure occupancy to turn those things off again. If you use Home Assistant (or something like it) you can use it to go anything that can be inferred from a door being used.

Don’t listen to him. Sure it may take a few hours a day over the course of a month or so to get right, but with the time you’ll save from all that automation you’ll break even in a few hundred years - and then it’s all gravy!

I switched to Qobuz about six months ago after also trialling Deezer, Tidal, Apple Music and YT Music. Highly recommended. Their curated playlists are excellent and I can’t believe what a different the higher quality and lossles bitrates makes. They pay artists way more than the other platforms though, remarkably, they’re the only (major) platform to actually publish per-stream figures, even if they’re only averages. Based in France if that matters to you. They only offer paid plans but do have free trials and provide users with a code for a third-party migration service to bring your playlists over.

+1 for Home Assistant, and then with Add Ons it can also do other useful home network stuff (network ad blocker, VPN, *arr, etc).

These people are actively willing George Orwell’s nightmare into being.

The Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population went barefoot.

You’ll pay through the nose, but look at digital signage panels. They are bristling with I/O, configurable to the nth degree, wonderfully over-engineered and utterly free from bloat.

It’s called “eliminating competition”.

Counterpoint: DEGAUSS

Bwoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyonnnnnggggghhhhh… CLONK

Yeah, you know what, I’ll say it and I’ll say it right to you: “fascists” shouldn’t have a “c” in it. It just doesn’t look right when I read it and seems to unnatural to type. I get that it’s a loan word, but still.

Look on eBay for USFF PCs. They’re mini computers the size of paperback books that are designed for use in large organisations, and they’re made by the usual suspects - HP and Dell mostly. Because they get replaced regularly they’re cheap but they’re just regular desktop PC hardware. A ten year old i5 can handle being a 4K media centre no problem and can be had for €/£/$70.

Put this on your desk with a spigot on the side, and the humidifier on the other side of the room. Congratulations: pipeless pipe.

Another updoot for Qobuz. Very happy with it, and the migration process was even better for me than as you describe it. Also, I didn’t think I’d give a shit about it the higher-quality codecs but they’re actually amazing. Big fan, A+++, would Qobuz again.

at least since digital video

Right. Even back in the eighties UK broadcasters were “upscaling” American NTSC 480i60 shows to 576i50. The results were varied. High-ticket shows like Friends and Fraiser looked great, albeit a bit soft and oversaturated, while live news feeds looked terrible. If you’ve never seen it, The Day Today has a perfect example of what a lot of US programmes lookd like converted to PAL.

In Enterprise: manageability. It’s hard to overstate how powerful Windows Group Policy is. Being able to configure every single aspect of the OS and virtually all major applications, Microsoft or otherwise, using a single application that can apply rules dynamically based on user, device, user or device groups, time of day, location, battery level, form factor, etc, etc. Nothing on Linux comes close, especially when simplicity is a factor, and until it does most large organisations won’t touch it with a barge pole.

Yeah, of all the things to criticise the EU for the DSA is a bizarre pick. Challenging techbro dominance with simple and technically-sensible demands on the gatekeepers is a win for the average person in my book.