I’ll start: printers.
I bought an HP in March 2020 when my job went remote and HP bricked it remotely after only 100 pages because I wouldn’t sign up for their subscription program. Ended up trashing a perfectly good printer.
Luckily my library’s close by and I can print there remotely.
Televisions.
I will not have any “smart TV” that has access to the Internet, spewing ads and harvesting data in my house. I currently have two older dumb models and when they ultimately fail, I will switch to projectors. Chromecast and a Raspberry Pi server can handle everything I want, without ads
I’ve got a typical Samsung, software-bloated smart TV, only I’ve never connected it to the internet so it’s effectively just a dumb TV. With modern smart TVs, the price is effectively subsidized by advertisers that expect to turn you into a recurring revenue stream. That’s why dumb TVs typically cost more (if you can find them anymore).
In my view, advertisers paid for part of my TV, which I happily connected to a mini PC that is ad-blocked to the fullest extent, and all of the shows/movies I watch come from my arr stack and Plex.
Only downside is the TV still has a ~10 second nag popup at the bottom telling me to connect to the internet every time I turn it on. In my book, that’s still less annoying than a TV powering on to a system menu instead of an input source.
This is the way
This is why I lean more toward pc monitors. TV speakers tend to suck anyway, so I like using basic wired pc speakers with them anyway.
I hadn’t thought about projectors!
I have a dumb TV and two smart TV’s, which never get connected to the web. One of those smart TVs is a second computer monitor.
I may need to get a projector though. That’s a great idea.
Projectors put out a lot of heat depending on what you’re looking for.
Any direct view screen at the size of your typical projected image will put out just as much heat. Those 80" panels do not stay cool.
When I bought my current house, the previous elderly owner’s sons had outfitted it with Ring doorbell and security/monitoring including Alexa in a few rooms…even had a piece of paper stapled to the ceiling above his bed that said “ALEXA EMERGENCY”. It was Probably good idea to keep an eye on their dying parent.
The day I closed on it…I ripped out the panels, unplugged anything Alexa, and disconnected the ring doorbell. The only things ring-related still here are a motion sensor and 1 or 2 door sensors…but all the wiring has been disconnected.
Fuck Ring.
I ended up putting in Eufy with a Home Base, zero subscription.
Pretty much anything that doesn’t run on foss. Game consoles in particular. When they all started requiring a subscription for basic online functionality, I moved all my gaming to PC and now also those retro bootleg handhelds. Love my Retroid Pocket 5.
I didn’t know game consoles were requiring subs now. Wild.
I’m mostly a PC gamer, though I do have a Gen1 Switch.
They don’t require subs. They have advantages if you get them but they don’t require them. I have multiple game systems that I don’t have subscriptions to and they all work just fine.
“Advantages” like being able to play a multiplayer game. Well where I’m from, the ability to play the multiplayer game is implied in the purchase of the multiplayer game.
I can play quite a few multi player games without a sub. I was playing pool blitz and destiny 2 just last night with no subscription.
I understand the autistic need to split hairs in an attempt to find the absolute truth, but in this case it has you defending some outrageously odious practices. You very well know that most games require the sub to play multiplayer, across all console systems.
So yes, you are correct. A few select games let you play multiplayer without the sub. Overall though, the vibe of the subscription is not “optional benefits”, but rather what should be core functionality. Many many many more multiplayer games require it rather than not.
Dude. How many computer games also require a sub to play. Seriously this is an idiotic argument against console games.
A fraction of a single percentage point. It’s literally just some MMOs, not even most of them. Have you never had a PC?
You’re taking a lot of offense at this. I love console games. I’m in no way arguing against them, but you’re taking my very specific critique, as an affront to all console games. Which explains why you are so passionately lying about the current state of how their multiplayer is mostly paywalled.
I’m sorry if you have no choice but to deal with it. You shouldn’t have to pay to play, or be resigned to find the good side in the fact that you are being left out by the paywall.
Only F2P games can be played without a sub online on consoles, as far as I know.
The first comment in the thread literally said basic online functionality one of the things a subscription is needed for for paid games only though IIRC.
I got an Epson printer to replace the HP that stopped doing email/app service because HP seemed it too old. The Epson just takes ink from a bottle which is really cheap to refil. The Epson has a tiny screen (which makes sense when you realize Epson is just a sub brand of Seiko). I fully expect the app to stop working some day.
HP did not break your printer because you wouldn’t sign up for the subscription service something else happened to it. Quit spreading lies and idiotic statements.
They are shit printers and are extremely hostile to their consumers though. There’s no reason to give them your money/support.
This I’ll agree with. But saying the company bricked it after 100 pages is just being disingenious. Say they are shit, yes. But say it truthfully so it can’t be disputed.
Quit spreading lies and idiotic statements.
No u.
If you buy a HP printer that is registered under Instant Ink program, which is a monthly subscription, and then stop paying, it stops working until you pay HP more money. It’s a definition of breaking.
You need to either break the law by jailbraking it, or throw away perfectly good cartridge (fucking insane) and buy another different one, and then beg HP to release you printer, what they actually can refuse if they don’t believe your new cartridge is legit, and they regularly do that regardless of where you bought it.If you cancel you will need to purchase a set of retail ink cartridges for the printer to be able to use it, as the ones provided under the subscription will not work if the printer is not enrolled in instant ink.
I mean not sure the hell sounds like it’s just dealing with that particular type of ink cartridge that they’re using. Not necessarily anything to do with the printer itself. If you’re paying for a subscription and you cancel a subscription you would expect the subscription to just run out. I mean I don’t think you can really purchase a subscription cancel it and expect to be able to continue to use it. Again the answer literally says if you just go purchase or retail ink cartridge then your printer still works.
Bricking a functional ink cartridge you already paid for is actually insane though. This business model of theirs is completely amoral. Maybe OPs take on the situation isn’t 100% accurate and they should have said cartridge instead of printer but what HP is doing is not defensible.
*immoral.
Amoral means it is completely removed from a moral framework, immoral means knowingly doing bad things (often for personal gain).
Sharks are amoral killing machines, corporations are immoral profit-chasers.
Separating a printer and a cartridge in this scenario is also arbitrary.
It’s normalised because it’s printer and it’s always shady, but imagine it’s like that with any other thing you have. Imagine Ford decides that from now on, you need to pay $700 per month to them on top of the price of a car you already paid, but they in exchange allow you to fill up at their gas stations couple of times per month. Now imagine you just got full tank and stopped paying subscription. Your car immediately shuts down, wheels blocked, dead in the water. You now need to replace the whole gas tank, fuel lines, and part of the engine, and buy some on some market and get it installed (but don’t worry, they made it easily replaceable). Those that you had are unusable, if you put it in other car it stops working, and if you try to syphon the gas the whole thing explodes.
If we go back to the printers, a printer without a cartridge doesn’t exist, so if a perfectly physically working product (a printer with a cartridge full of ink) you had, stops working until you give company more money on top of already paid money, it’s indefensible no matter how you spin it.
The answer literally says “we bricked your device, but if you pay us more money and buy a spare part for it, we will unbrick it”. It’s extortion.
If I buy subscription for whatever, let’s say food, they deliver me first month of food, and I cancel subscription, I have reasonable expectations that I still can eat my food and it doesn’t spontaneously combusts.No. This would be like if you bought a Ford. Opted into the voluntary subscription. Let’s say it’s 350$. It lets you fill up your gas tank once a week. If you were to fill out up without that it would cost 450$. Let’s say half way through the month you cancel your subscription. The gas in your tank needs to be replaced. It’s a 2 minute job to siphon it, and you immediately can replace it with more expensive gas. But the truck works fine without the sub.
Then you go online and bitch that the gas costs more, and your truck had to be refilled with more expensive gas before it worked again. So you instead choose not to buy the gas and you blame the subscription for bricking your truck. Because you opted into a fully voluntary program and got used to it.
The scenario you described will still be an insane anti-consumer scam if it was true. The real scam is worse, but how can you be OK with what you described is already insane.
I just don’t recommend doing subscriptions. I don’t really recommend HP either. I prefer brother printers, but they all suck. And again, it’s really not a scam. It’s a way for people that print a lot to save money. I don’t understand how people don’t understand the basics of these types of programs. But hey, you get angry all you want. It’s no skin off my back, and I refuse to service home users anyways, because it’s a pain in the ass regardless what tech they own.
It’s not a scam in a sense that the rules are kinda explained. It’s a scammy behaviour by a scammy company however.
Cars. Basically every new model is always online, connected, and streaming who knows what data. Not to mention the awful UX of touchscreens.
Why should a car be connected to the internet? The infotainment is justified but should be controllable. And this includes EVs. Just because your wheels are moved by electric motors it doesn’t automatically mean the entire car is “tech” and must be connected to everything and anything.
If I had to get a car I would by an old clunker and pay someone to convert it to electric.
Yes I would like a fully electric 1957 Bel-Air please.
Old cars sound like fun, until you experience the safety features (seatbelts and crumble zones optional), missing rear visibility with tiny mirrors and the hassle to find matching spare part replicas.
And you think there is not much electronics or fancy extras in them to break, but the older cars where expected to last for 100.000km and maybe 10 years tops before the rust would eat everything up, so a lot of parts where designed cheaper and would fail sooner than today’s cars that are expected to last at least twice as long.
Sweet spot is Japanese cars from the '90s and '00s. They are more reliable, more fuel efficient, have safety features and spare parts are often still available. Rust remains a topic but not as much as with older cars.
Yeah. Find a Honda or Toyota from the latter half of the 00’s with a reliable service history and they’ll last another 10-20 years if you take them to a decent imports mechanic.
Rust is always a problem in some places hahaha
Visibility out of something like a '57 Bel Air is excellent. Back then visibility was something people cared about, and having the pillars be as thin as possible was highly desirable. In comparison, modern cars have horrible visibility with thick pillars, high belt lines, high hoods, and tiny rear windows. Of course, the whole thin pillar thing did come at the cost of a weaker roof, less crash protection, and basically no rollover protection so there does need to be some balance, but with modern cars I hate how I feel dependent on things like backup cameras and blind spot monitors because I can’t effectively see out the car.
The 1970s fastbacks had terrible rear visibility because they don’t have rear windows:
https://smclassiccars.com/uploads/postfotos/1972-dodge-charger-coupe-red-se-4.jpg
The driver is essentially blind in he 3-5 o’clock visibility range when you have to do a left turn, and the intersection is not at an 90 degrees angle, or you try to merge into the highway. All you can do is floor it and merge in behind some car in front of you that you can see.
Well in the 70’s you also have the AMC Pacer which is like driving a fishbowl.
As a styling thing it does go in cycles. Late 30’s-40’s cars also had high beltlines and small windows. Then the big airy greenhouses in the late 50’s-early 60’s. Many 80’s cars into the 90’s tended to have good visibility, though part of that also just came from the squared off styling. The poor visibility of today’s cars is partly from safety features, but a lot of is also just styling.
That sounds sick as fuck. Makes me wonder if that will become a service in the future? Instead of everyone buying new electric cars, just replace the engine* with a bigger battery and electric motor. Any car-ologists able to chime in if this is viable?
Certainly is: there was a group of people doing just that at the University of Calgary(?), but it was years ago and they have almost certainly graduated by now. If others are still doing so, I am not certain.
afaicr the most difficult part was the infotainment system. Installing the motors and stuff was easy, to engineering students at least haha.
I kind of hate infotainment systems anyway. I just want a mounted screen to cast Apple Drive Mode or whatever it’s called. The default GUI they put there is fucking awful. I tried to use the inbuilt GPS once and actually gave up and just went on a spiritual journey instead. Surely it can’t be that complicated just to have essentially a mounted iPad?
Great to hear that cars can be saved though. I was worried I’d have to sell my perfectly good car because I want an electric motor… I was thinking like, the rest of the car is fine it doesn’t need to be trashed at all
Same, they are always useless to me because I just use my phone anyway. All I would need is an audio jack and a usb port for charging. I imagine a simple sort of shelf with a ‘seat belt’ where the screen would be.
ijmuawn
I just make up acronyms, why not?
Iirc is a thing, why not use that instead of making people spend time figuring out what afaicr means? I assume I figured it out, yes, but I’ve never seen that before.
It’s been in fairly wide usage for a long time, and it’s literally only two characters off from an extremely well known acronym that has also basically been around as long as the internet (afaik). IIRC was also just made up by somebody too, not that that’s even what OP was doing.
I have seen iirc thousands of times, don’t recall ever seeing this one before. Yeah they get made up, yet it’s silly to make a new one up that means almost the exact same thing as an established one.
Don’t worry, I understood what you meant
:)Wait a minute… you’re not OC! (Original Commenter)
Convertible in Tropical Turquoise and India Ivory?
Most definitely.
Ideally you just look for a Honda or Toyota from like 20 years ago, assuming you want gas powered. Look for only like 1-3 owners, regular service history. Those things will last into 600k+ miles if they received regular service and parts are dirt cheap.
If I did that I would just be another selfish, ignorant asshole complicit in the destruction and collapse of the natural systems that allow me to breath and eat. No, it would have to be electric. Even then I wouldn’t really want it because of the tires and the raw materials needed to create it in the first place.
Alright well I’m going to continue surviving. You have fun doing whatever I guess.
good luck lol. ur gunna need it (literally like fkin miracle). o7
Touch grass, dude.
Open your fucking eyes, dude. Everything’s dying. There won’t be any grass to touch, in our lifetimes.
OK, convert a 20 year old Toyota or Honda. Way easier to find one than thinking you have to go pre-fuel injection era to avoid wireless connectivity. Either way, you’re probably going to instantly trash a working engine apparently.
Yep, that’s the plan. Maybe soon, more people will realize those engines are one of the main reasons millions of people have already died from catastrophic climate change. I doubt it though… most are too focused on themselves, their own comfort and “survival” to realize or even care how much of an impact their actions have and even then can easily blame some rich asshole so they can keep being just as selfish as said rich asshole.
An acquaintance from NHTSA says the cars save audio from the interior of the vehicle in a type of black box that can be accessed by investigators after wrecks. They frequently analyze this audio, but it’s SUPPOSED TO BE A SECRET.
My recent purchase was a Mazda specifically because the infotainment was not a touchscreen, but instead controlled by a rotating knob joystick.
Nothing quite like the twist of a good knob.
Honestly that seems a bit worse
It’s really quite nice. I was just in a rental car with a touchscreen and hated how hard it was to hit buttons while driving because your finger is bouncing from the road. With the knob you stay leaned back in the seat and rotate the knob and slap it down to activate things. Don’t have to worry about missing the target. The only thing it’s not great for is scrolling a map.
At least it’s a physical interface
Infotainment ain’t justified, at least not up front. Put all that shit in the back if you gotta have it, but the driver should have as few distractions as possible. A simple radio, climate control, and the instrument panel. That’s it.
Utterly insane that we ever allowed glorified tablets to become standard equipment in dashboards.
How many cars were you buying
Like most people who drive, they probably would be buying a new car every 5-10 years. Is that far fetched? I’ve know several people who spend half their money on cars, buying/trading them every year or so. Most fediverse people would be saavier than that, but still.
Well there was period where I changed cars every 2 years. For a total of 3 cars, and then I didn’t need one any more. Not the most egregious example but I did like changing them. It’s like any other toy, it’s easy to get hooked on upgrades and trying out new models.
Yeah, that’s pretty normal I think. I tend to keep my cars a long time but I’ve still had 4 so far, which may surprise the OC here.
I drive them until the cost of fixing them significantly exceeds the cost of getting a new used car. Accounting for it being a pain in the ass to shop for cars etc.
But yeah every 3-5 years sounds about right for typical middle/upper class families. My parents did pretty well when I was little and I remember them doing 2 or 3 year leases.
I don’t buy cars anymore. I didn’t used to buy them either.
Any hardware associated with Facebook.
And software, while we’re at it. Web plugins included. Basically just Facebook.
It could’ve stopped at “Lets people share things with friends and family” but they’ll never be satisfied,
untileven if they have the entire world’s money, attention, and data in their clutches.What they’ve done to VR pisses me off to the core.
I never understood why people think VR can be a mass market product. It’s literally single user. It cannot be looked at by two people at the same time. Such a silly concept. It’s good for gaming, some work, robotics, remote access, etc. But mass market? iPhone-killer? Price-accessible to all? I don’t get it.
Yeah I definitely think AR has a better opportunity for that… But then unfortunately we know what they do as soon as there’s a camera attached to anything
I sat in an uber the other day and the driver had meta ray ban sunglasses on. It was a very uncomfortable ride.
Honestly, using them as an uber driver might be the singular applicable use case in my eyes. It would be less intrusive than a 360 dash cam which I would want to use to protect myself. Accidents, false claims, etc. There is a lot that can go wrong and a lot of shitty people and a “paper trail” of events is VERY useful in court.
“Less” intrusive? A 360 dash cam will store everything on a memory card. The meta glasses uploads video directly into Zuck’s brain.
There is some open source software that is associated with Facebook, like compression with Zstandard, a very common and useful compression format. Don’t care that it’s from them in that case.
What hardware is associated with Facebook? The Oculus?
Latest is the ray ban glasses, but also portal tv, oculus.
Oh yeah, i forgot about the doxx shades
Brother laser printers don’t do that. The unfortunate thing is that the word is out, so the prices have skyrocketed. But for me, if I ever need to buy a laundry machine, I’m looking for a decades old, used one. One with a spin cycle and that lets you start and stop it in demand.
laundry machine, I’m looking for a decades old, used one. One with a spin cycle and that lets you start and stop it in demand.
Smart.
Get a Brother washing machine. Got it!
A good shower can wash you, your brother, your sister, and your parents! Usually only one at a time though.
And definitely don’t get an inkjet washer, they cost you a fortune in detergent cartridges.
Talk about it. My washing machine that was just 2½ years old, luckily within extended warranty period, had worn ballbearings. Those were luckily replaced, but it took repair shop and required paperwork 2+ weeks to even come and pick it up, they did offer replacement machine during the repairs.
That wasn’t the worst part, i could still run the machine as the ball bearings were just starting to wear out.
It came back from the repair shop and 2 bloody weeks later another part failed, a fucking simple sensor and the machine no longer runs at all. I removed the side panel and i can see the sensor, 2 screws and a simple plug. I’m not going to contact the repair shop and insurance for that, it’s going to take them longer to get back to me than it does me to find a supplier and order the part myself.
In the meanwhile I’m forced to wash my clothes by hand.Though that made me realize i need to buy a spare washing machine and keep that in the basement for when main one breaks again.
How’s the second hand brother market?
HP printers don’t do that, either. All sources I could find were random reports from people with zero evidence.
HP has terrible scummy business presences and sucks, but this post is straight up misinformation and everyone is just like “oh yeah that’s true they do that”
https://www.hp.com/us-en/printers/hp-plus.html
When you activate the HP+, HP permanently disables the printer’s ability to use 3rd party ink. Model numbers that end in “e” require HP+ to function. While other model numbers don’t require HP+, someone who is not already aware of it could be prompted into signing up for it without understanding they’re permanently disabling their ability to use third party ink.
Thank you for the source! Not a great look on HP’s part, and they’ve always been against third party ink which is shitty. I remember a friend of mine having a giant ink reservoir next to their 02 HP photo printer—ink was free forever basically. Amazing printers. That’s prolly why they stopped the 02s… way too easy to make them awesome by tank-feeding.
I still contest OP’s “they bricked my printer”, it’ll still print with HP ink. Moreover, printers have had chips for decades that allow them only to print with first party ink… you can circumvent the chips, but still. HP didn’t brick yer printer if you fell for their subscription ink grift (also who does that, sorry) they just make it so you need their own ink… like… they have been doing since the 2000s.
I stopped using a smart watch I used to use all the time because Samsung started requiring location services to be on to use it. Immediately made me drop it and I stopped buying anything Samsung after that. Not only would I never be okay with having that on all the time, it’s fucking insane to start making that a requirement for a device that never required that out of the box.
As a bonus one, I’ll never buy anything Playstation ever again for obvious reasons.
About 12 years ago I bought a Samsung tablet that had an IR blaster function so I could control my TV and audio equipment. It was a primary reason I chose that model. Less than a year after purchase Samsung discontinued their app and remotely disabled the tablet’s IR blaster.
It was less than $5 for a replacement app that could be configured to get it working again, but the fact Samsung thought it was just fine to remotely remove a feature that was one of the primary reasons for my purchase is not something I’ve forgiven.
Since then I’ve bought lots of consumer electronic products but have not (and probably never will) consider another Samsung product.
I never understood why they got rid of that. I always thought it was a cool feature that they could have really leaned into. I had a tablet with it and I never used it much because I don’t watch TV, but it felt like something that could have been super useful to someone who did watch TV a lot (and I also had fun setting it up for my family TV and then casually sitting in the background adjusting the volume, changing the channel, and tweaking other settings and watching the chaos that ensued while I oh so innocently appeared to be oblivious and busy playing games on my tablet)
If I remember right it’s because they outsourced that feature to a third party called peel
It started as a dumb remote (which was everyone wanted) but they had some monetization ideas like full TV schedules and “suggested” (aka: sponsored) content.
The same for Xiaomi. A simple ir remote app in the mi 5, but no, in the next updates they had to bloat it until it imploded and nobody used it anymore so they could say “see? Nobody uses it, we can save the $0.05 ir LED”
The Samsung IR app also was used for their streaming service. They could have easily updated the app to allow it to run without connecting to their servers once they killed the service, but it was easier to tell their customers to pound sand.
What the fuck! That’s egregious, that’s so anti consumer it’s basically malicious
This should be made illegal
What a disgusting practice… as if I needed more reasons to hate Shamsdung ugh I cant wait to ditch my phone
For some reason this user keeps telling people you can put graphene OS on Samsung devices, but that’s not accurate, graphene only runs on pixels
You replied to my comment with this. Are you referring to me? If so you’re mistaken.
Not a mistake, I am pointing out the other user to reply to your comment (saying you can put graphene on Samsung devices) is incorrect, in case you didn’t know.
That sort of crap is why I specifically buy older Samsung hardware like that tablet. I love a Samsung Galaxy S10e for my phone, because I can flash Graphene onto it and not have to deal with their firmware. If that tablet had/has an IR blaster, it’s old enough to do the same thing and rip all that Samsung software off of it, flash it with a FOSS ROM, and enjoy your hardware.
The PS5 is my last Sony device. I’ve even considered selling it because I don’t want to give them any revenue from future digital purchases.
They suck and they’re actively ruining physical media gaming.
@Guitar That sucks. I use a PineTime. It has few features, but the battery life is pretty good.
Company apps.
Every business you deal with has an app these days. Grocery stores, restaurants, etc… Just install and scan to get your discounts and track your points. Yeah… No thanks.
I don’t house any apps from any companies, restaurants, shops… The people who have shit like McDonalds, Zara, whatever else installed on their phone by the dozens actually seem crazy to me. And not even for privacy reasons (although those are a part of it). Those people also seem to be always complaining about running out of space on their phone (and %50 of the time what they are running out on is actually their iCloud/Google Drive from auto backups but they dont know the difference…)… why dont you try deleting the 50 different fast food apps on your phone? What’s that? It gives you a coupon for a %20 discount or a 6 pack of nuggies/small fries every 2 months? Well then, everything is fine and dandy. Time to keep it in your phone 24/7.
I also never give my phone number out to stores when they ask. Its crazy how normalized it is for stores to ask you for name, address, phone number etc. to make an “account” for you without even explicitly saying that they are making an account for you at checkout. And people do it!!! It enrages me. I just want to give you my money in exchange for goods and services, no unnecessary fluff on top, HOW HARD CAN IT BE???
I hear you on the phone number thing. That’s another stupid thing I don’t really do. I have a separate VoIP number that I use for any business I need to deal with. No way are they getting my real number.
And speaking of friends and their apps and my phone number, I rarely give anybody my phone number too. I don’t need it being harvested by the load of apps they have installed. You’re only as strong as our weakest link, and most people don’t give this stuff any thought.
ditto. fuck that app shit.
Running Calyx and don’t have the play store installed so guess I won’t be using your app.
Anything smart or iot, or that requires a subscription to use.
A windows license.
Games consoles. (I would consider a stream deck to be immune from this as it’s just a handheld PC)
Android phones, Apple phones.
Wireless earphones.
A modern car.
Wait, why wireless earphones?
Hazarding a guess, but wireless earbuds means your Bluetooth has to be active, and your Bluetooth radio is something that can be used to track you
Ugh, yes, good point. Bluetooth is not the height of security.
bluetooth got real fucking creepy once you had to start having location enabled to use it.
What device? Never heard that before
Samsung Galaxy phone, admittedly years ago, cause it made me stop using bluetooth.
But a quick sanity check, to make sure i was remembering correctly, by doing a search for variations of bluetooth cant be used without location on do return results showing that I was not out of my gourd and that it does happen.
Thats absolutely insane. Have they ever bothered with an explanation?
For real? I just tried on my P10 Pro XL running GrapheneOS and I could pair, forget, re-pair with location turned off.
I replied to another user about this, but aside from Bluetooth being a privacy nightmare, there’s also the limited lifespan, the bad quality dacs, the lithium batteries and increased e-waste. Not to mention the expense. For $500 you can get genuinely very good wired headphones that will last the rest of your life. For the same price you can get mediocre wireless headphones that will eventually fail to hold a charge and become useless in X years
idk, my $90 earbuds that I use for meetings in the office and occasional personal use are almost five years old and doing fine. can’t say I’ve noticed an issue with the battery life because they live in the charging case and only get taken out for use periods that are max a couple hours. and the quality is more than good enough.
I’ve got some nice proper headphones. they’re not the right tool for that use case, for me.
Track me with what? The pigeons don’t actually have Bluetooth tracking readers on them
Lol, we’ve known about Bluetooth tracking for YEARS. Apple released the iBeacon in 2013, so this isn’t even remotely a controversial statement, unless you’ve been living under a rock. Add on the BT tracking we hear about for LPRs, and you can easily see why someone wouldn’t want to keep the radio active
Also curious about wireless earphones, if it’s an audio quality thing, I can understand that.
Please also reply to me so I can get a notification to see your answer
I got fed up after the battery died on my 4th pair of AirPods, and the 20+ year old Shure IEMs I have, still work good as the day I bought them.
I have 4 pairs of AirPods on my nightstand where only one ear works, and the other ear gets maybe minutes of usable time, or is crackly and awful sounding. To be fair, one pair went through the wash. But even then, I’d rather wash a pair of 25 dollar wired headphones, than another 250 dollar pair of AirPod pros.
I’m not OP, but here are the downsides I’m aware of:
- Poor reparability
- BT always active
- Codec support
- Latency
- Some need apps for full control and they can come with ads/tracking
Foggenbooty pretty much nailed it.
Poor repairability, but also, why would I use 2 cheap dacs (1 in each earbuds), when I would use wired earphones and have 1 good dac. And the fact lithium needs to be mined for 2 batteries is super problematic considering the conditions lithium miners face.
Of course then there’s the issue that everything with a battery has a limited lifespan. Those batteries will die one day and render your wireless earphones useless. My headphones will last for the rest of my life, meaning less e-waste is generated.
BT being active is a privacy nightmare, and the ones that require apps is also a privacy nightmare.
But then also they are just inferior to wired headphones in every way. So yeah, I’m not gonna buy an objectively worse product for way more money than their wired counterparts, that also exploits lithium miners and our planet and is also a privacy nightmare.
I’ll start: printers.
Boy, do I have good news for you!
Thank you! I’m okay with walking over to the library to print, though.
It’s fun getting to express my socialist sensibilities in that way.
[rant]Same; however, my local library has the shittiiiessssttt system in place for paying. Half the time the cards don’t work and they’re not reloadable so if there’s like 5 cents left you have to print one single page to use it up. I have 4 or 5 cards now with less than ten cents left on them. They say there’s a new system in the works but I think they only have enough money to pay one person to do it because it’s been a really long time.[/rant]
That’s aggravating. It’s paid for by our taxes here in KC. Each user gets an allotment. (I think it’s daily, but not sure.)
For responsible printing that’s wonderful.
At our library I quickly learned that people want to just print entire reams of nonsense, like web pages that were clearly not made for printing and waste entire pages on like one graphic, and then 35 pages of comments because this person didn’t know how to select certain pages or use “print preview”
…So they pay 10¢ a page. Lol
For some reason the open printer uses HP ink cartridges, so I’m sure it’ll be great right up until HP decides to jack up the price and/or discontinue them.
No, they use the generic refillable cartridges as well. They just use that style of cartridge, not a specific brand.
All hp printheads are “refillable”. The problem is that the printhead itself is not designed to last more than a refill.
HP doesn’t sell those standalone, all the generic refillable cartridges compatible with HP are hand picked from e-waste in some third world country, then cleaned, primed and sold as “new”
You can buy generic new versions of the cartridge. They are not washed. They are not reused heads, they have never seen the inside of a printer. I have been using them in my printer for over a decade and have never used a rebuilt cartridge.
EDIT: Sorry for the link, these are the cartridges I use in mine. The manufacturer listed them as new, not rebuilt.
https://i.postimg.cc/MKq4VZSf/IMG-20260712-091512.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/m2BqCZsz/IMG-20260712-091519.jpgDOUBLE EDIT: Thinking about it more, my HP printer is very old so perhaps there’s a mechanic implemented in newer printers and cartridges that I don’t have to defeat, which would make my argument incorrect for that cartridge.
This sounds great! Except nowhere do they say how much one will cost, they’re currently in the “drive demand before campaign launch” phase.
I bet it’s gonna be like five hundred bucks. That’ll suck.
Printers are a loss leader for selling ink cartridges. I have done my recent printing at Walgreens. It’s about 25 cents per page and I don’t need it very often.
Video games. I stopped buying games because they started requiring a monthly subscription to play.
Well… It seems to me like you were just picking bad games to play.
Yea lately I’ve been playing a bunch of Quake and Doom mods/wads/paks. There are probably tens of thousands of hours worth of free content available for both of these games. Kinda makes it hard to justify buying a new game when I could go download some masterpiece Quake campaign for free.
Printers are a loss leader for selling ink cartridges.
Not quite — a loss leader is also sold at loss, so similar pricing concept, but that’s to get you in the store, where (statistically) people will buy more.
What (many) inkjet printers do is the razor-and-blades model.
The razor-and-blades business model[1] is a business model in which one article is sold at a low price or even given away in order to increase sales of a complementary good, such as consumable supplies. It is different from loss leader marketing and product sample marketing, which do not depend on complementary products or services. Common examples of the razor-and-blades model include inkjet printers whose ink cartridges are significantly marked up in price, coffee machines that use single-use coffee pods, electric toothbrushes, and video game consoles, which require additional purchases of accessories and software not included in the original package.[1]
Laser printers tend to be less prone to this. You can also get inkjet printers that aren’t using locked-down cartridges, will take tanks of ink and don’t try to keep out competing ink vendors — but keep in mind that while the ink will cost less, the base printer will also cost more than the razor-and-blades model printers. Canon’s “MegaTank” line is one such example.
Monthly subscription? You mean like PS+ or something?
Yes, also World of Warcraft, anything like that with a subscription. PS+/Xbox Game Pass was the death blow for console gaming for me. I want to buy the game, play the game. Not be paying each month.
Yeah, MMOs are a special case. Realistically WoW or XIV are a better deal than most games. I’m probably in the tens of thousands of hours in WoW since 2004. Pretty crazy value for money.
I agree paying for online in consoles is dumb but that’s always been their strategy - cheaper and easier to get into than computers and they’ll nickel and dime you since you don’t know any better.
If you’re a daily player, sure. But I’m the kind of person who can play every day for maybe a week, but then I’ll take a month or four off before I pick it up again. The monthly billing system does not align with how I like to play games.
You can just… cancel the sub…
I’ll take years off between playing for a couple months here or there.
My complaint: I don’t want to pay every month
Your solution: Play for only 1 month
Problem not solved. I’d much rather buy a game where I get to play as long as I want.
Idk man you’re making it out to be a lot bigger problem than it is. There isn’t a single “buy once” game out there that is even remotely close to beating WoW or even XIV in terms of playtime or playtime:cost. As long as you’re having fun playing them and have stuff that you want to do in them, they are essentially an unbeatable value.
Even terraria and FNV don’t come anywhere close to matching the playtime I have in those MMOs, although terraria is so cheap that it probably beats everything on cost value.
Micro$oft. Everything from them. Windows, Office, etc.
Only yesterday I bought a piece of hardware, an old surface tablet, and immediately installed Linux on it to make it usable and safe.
Windows is fine. But it’s a lot harder to justify when “for brainless morons like me!” distros like Bazzite are so readily available and robust and SteamOS is right there too.
But like. It’s fine. You can turn most of the annoying stupid shit like copilot off.
But like. It’s fine. You can turn most of the annoying stupid shit like copilot off.
you can turn most of it off… by hunting the internet for the right tools for that. Because built in settings certainly don’t allow disabling the majority of it. until they turn them back on with an update.
and the rest you just can’t turn off, or can’t reasonably discover.windows is not fine. that ended with windows 7.
I haven’t needed a single tool to turn off the junk in w11 that’s annoying, replace the dumb icon-based UI with the previous text, and so on.
W11 is fine. It’s not good, but it’s fine.
only thing that means is ypu don’t know what else is it doing in the background. you are operating in “what I don’t see doesn’t exist” mode
I agree with both of you. Windows is not fine. But it can be made fine with an easy privacy modification.
I recommend ameliorated.io to everybody who needs to use windows. It makes it a viable OS, stripping out the junk, and setting better defaults for security and UI. I run it in VMs whenever I need it.
That seems like a pretty useful tool. Thanks!
But why is its website written like it’s trying to sell me something?
I never thought of it as salesy before, but I can see that.
They are not selling anything. The tool is free to use. The playbooks are free too. Or you can make your own, but I’ve never done that.
I’ve used this since I learned about it on multiple machines, and never need to think about it again other than when recommending it.
Probably the only “bad” thing is you need a legitimate, activated instance of windows.
Hello, I run an easy privacy modification modified windows installation as a dual boot with Arch. Windows is still not fine. It still manages to enrage me every now and then.
It’s definitely a lot more usable and acceptable than a vanilla install (god forbid using an out-of-box windows installation), but Arch is still so much more stable and sensible.
Also like every update just decides to go ahead and undo a “make windows usable” modification so its kind of a constant uphill battle if you dont completely turn updates off. I have completely turned updates off and now it always thinks there is an update available and bugs me to reboot to apply it, only to end up not applying any updates because updates are disabled.
I understand that switching to Linux (and especially Arch) requires a lot more “dealing with stuff” until you get used to it, but the amount of dealing with stuff is not a whole lot nowadays with “easy” distros and after you get used to it and find your groove the dealing with stuff just kinda stops, unlike windows. Not to mention that the way you’re using your OS isnt some kind of weird hack coupled together with a few different debloaters. I really can’t see how much more difficult installing and getting used to something like Ubuntu or Mint can be compared to setting up a good debloated windows install.
I use Windows 10 with unatendedwinstall and a few more tweaks added on top with cttwinutil. I’d reccomend it.
I’m coming from the same place. My windows updates are off (that’s one of the mods that ameliorated makes) and I have not had a problem with it for a few years now.
I’m not saying that windows should be the choice, but I am saying that when I have to use it (there are legit reasons) then my ameliorated version is fantastic.
I use windows at work daily so I am very well aware of out of the box experience. No way I would ever use that for my personal computing.
Ameliorated is something I always recommend and it sounds like while what you are doing is pretty good, there are some shortcomings. I don’t know, maybe ameliorated won’t work for you either, but its worth a try.
Thanks! I didn’t know about this tool before. I’ll look into it :)
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Don’t let your own stopping reading confuse you. I told the solution right there.
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Robot vacuums, I’ve always hated how they were all cloud-connected, but now they have cameras too.
Yeah I know about Valetudo.
Good news, there’s an open source vacuum project called Oomwoo, which allows you to build one yourself with off the shelf parts and a 3D printer
https://makerspet.com/blog/building-an-open-source-robot-vacuum-meet-oomwoo/
This is vapor wear.
Maybe it will be something sometime, but the post is just about an idea.
Have you seen any mowers that do that? Our back yard is mostly dead, but having it go out once a week would be so cool. I’m a little intimidated by the thought of putting this together, but also want to do it.
Edit: Looks like the vacuum is sold out.
A quick search for open source robot mowers pointed me to this: https://openmower.de/
As for Oomwoo, they’re still working on assembly instructions, so I wouldn’t immediately jump in unless you’re fine with a lot of tinkering. Also, it looks like right now they’re only considering parts kits, not fully assembled bots, and that seems to be a future add.
I personally still think it’s cool and will be keeping an eye on it
Very cool, thanks.
You don’t have to get one with cameras though. I send my floorplan to china. But its worth it.
The ones without cameras are fewer and fewer, especially since using cameras is cheaper than lidar
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Lol no. The first roomba just bumped around until it ran out of power, and hopefully it’d have covered the whole floor. After that came the Lidar robots, which mapped rooms and actually thought about where they went. No cameras there.
The most viable option is to manage your own firewall and block the outbound traffic. Only suggesting as a work around for those that want a robot vacuum.
