oh my god Pokémon! For sure. This is just making me think of more: the games from when i was really young, like leisure suit Larry, police quest, day of the tentacle, sam and max, the dig, grim fandango, that are ultimately like 1-2 hours if you know what to do but in the absence of a walkthrough take like 600 hours of trial and error with endless save hopping

Those old adventure games used to be punishingly difficult

Red dead 2, persona 5/royal, sekiro, Elden ring, Stardew, Skyrim, tekken 7 and 8, botw and totk, animal crossing games in general going back to the gamecube one. Sank a lot of hours into taiko no tatsujin too

That also makes me think of all the games that didn’t track playtime or where my saves are long gone. Like really that’s just modern era stuff. The snes and psx final fantasy games, chrono trigger, secret of mana, earthbound, parasite eve, etc are all fairly long and I’ve played through them multiple times. Then there’s games like streets of rage and sonic 2 that aren’t terribly long but i played them to death. Oh and stuff like street fighter 2 and tekken, mario 64, so many hours of my youth that I probably should’ve been studying

jokes on you buddy, I don’t go outside

Theoretically possible but someone would have to reverse engineer the protocol and write a new service that works based on that

There are some projects but all that I’ve seen are open source head units that either: are terrible and aren’t android auto/carplay (eg they only have the most basic of integration, can show notifications and play music via Bluetooth) or they emulate android auto/carplay without the necessary licensing/hardware (so you still ultimately rely on google/apple)

Every game for the year?? That’s crazy

Highlights:

Tears of the kingdom: amazing game, sunk an absurd amount of hours into this

Like a dragon: infinite wealth: so good, favorite franchise, rgg consistently puts out quality and is the only studio ill bother to buy full price games from

Tales of arise: really good

Hi fi rush: extremely good, but no jet set radio

Bomb rush cyberfunk: not as good, much closer though. actually felt like next gen jet set radio. just wish they bothered to improve the formula at all from 2000 or whenever

Dead space remake: I found myself having to push through the end of this, got very tedious

Silent hill free game on psn (I forget the name, the suicide one): so heavy handed, awful writing, awful voice acting, but it was free so whatever

Silent hill 2: pretty great remake but wish I waited for a price drop.

Persona 3 reload: basically same as above

Ff7: solid overall, really liked it

Spider-Man 2: not as good as the first one but decent

Unicorn overlord: really good

Forspoken: not amazing but not nearly as bad as I thought it would be based on the initial reactions

Tekken 8: love it even though I fucking suck

Smt: vengeance: great

Dave the diver: played on a whim without knowing anything about it, sucked me in

I know there weee more but that’s what I can remember off the top of my head

Excited to play metaphor, hellblade 2, Indiana jones, riven remake, erdtree dlc for Elden ring, cyberpunk dlc, Alan wake 2, god of war ragnarok dlc, new taiko no tatsujin, armored core vi, like a billion more

You are the stupidest moron I’ve ever encountered on the internet

You keep going on about the original post. I was replying to you dude, who said everything is mobile games and live services. I never said all games are movie games? I just said you are wrong and not all games, AAA or otherwise, are mobile games and live services. And you are still wrong, and that’s still true

Only some of those are movie games, sure. I was more responding to your “everything is mobile games and live services”, which is just untrue

The only one I haven’t played yet is wukong. Also I agree the spiderman games are totally awesome. I strongly disagree about fromsoft games though, sekiro alone is amazing

Every yakuza game, baldurs gate, every fromsoft game, the insomniac games like spiderman, Sony stuff in general like horizon, god of war, last of us, etc, black myth wukong, the endless remake games (some of which are very solid) like ff7, silent hill 2, persona 3 reload, etc, rockstar games even (rdr2 was 2018 and gta6 is supposed to come out this year, maybe). The sea of jrpgs like shin megami tensei v vengeance, trails through daybreak, granblue fantasy, unicorn overlord, etc. And that’s literally off the top of my head

Mobile games and live services dominate for sure bc they shit money and are easy to develop but decent games still exist (though tbf a lot of them are starting to pull serious bullshit too. Love yakuza but sega locking new game+ behind a $15 dlc. First yakuza game I didnt do a new game+ run on and the lamest one to platinum because you don’t have to beat the hardest boss or run it on legendary)

I have a similar experience with the am6b+ and a similar sized library. Even on the stock android browsing my iptv provider which has 23,000+ channels has no issue

But you mention cec - does the x4q+ power off and on with the original display remote? That’s my one nag about the am6b+. Ugoos locked the boot loader and refuses to unlock so cec power on doesn’t work, every other cec command does though.

I just have it wake on lan by having homeassistant send it a packet when it notices my avr turns out as a workaround but this isn’t the most elegant solution and like 1:20 times it hiccups

How is the x4q plus? I frankly dont care about av1 (I’m a store everything in remux/flac person) but the x4q, theoretically, should have a faster processor than my aging am6b+

One suggestion I would make is to copy your install of coreelec onto the emmc directly. In my experience that makes everything a bit “snappier”, it’s easy enough to do, and only takes a few minutes.

“SSH into you device; then run ceemmc -x; type in Y; then type in 1. Once the process is complete, remove your external media and enjoy. To speed up CoreELEC installed on the eMMC on Ugoos devices, go to Settings-> CoreELEC → Hardware → eMMC Speed Mode and change it to HS200/HS400”

While this is absolutely true effective supervision and competent management make a world of difference with this issue.

Lazy staff continue to exist because they are typically inadequately supervised. As a result the extent of their behavior is not clear to management. So that needs to be corrected. But if that’s corrected (it could be) management needs to respond to the problematic behavior with appropriate consequences (eg constructive feedback, warnings, corrective action, firing) to shape the behavior going forward.

There’s a lot more to it; a huge part that is often overlooked is that management should also be providing ongoing consequences in a positive sense to entice the desired behaviors. Fear of punishment isn’t really a great consequence for operant conditioning. So we look at some other options: how do we create motivation to make people want to do their job tasks? How do we build morale? How do we build enthusiasm? This can be as simple as “if you get [x] done consistently you get [special privilege]”. Corrective and punitive action should be a last resort for when these systems are failing, even if you’re adjusting them to try and make them work

This is a cultural problem in the us (and many other places) though. We have this view of “I gave you a job and I’m already paying you so you should be so fucking grateful to me”. We love the hierarchy model. The idea of management and ownership taking care of workers is something that’s laughable or, at best, paid a pittance (here’s a small bonus, keep working a lot). It’s only very recently that companies have started giving a shit about industrial and organizational psychology/organization behavioral management/etc and even when they do it’s usually lip service to buy street cred

But ultimately it’s managements job to create an environment that makes employees want to work. The frustrating part though is that this isn’t really a problem to most management because the financial impacts are hard to measure. They’re definitely there and sometimes they’re more directly measurable, stuff like increased turnover as you burn through staff, but more often than not it’s stuff that’s far more subtle and difficult to measure like decreased utilization and productivity.

ugoos box with coreelec. I use the am6b+. Only format it can’t play is av1

stock runs a stripped down version of android with 0 ads that is very barebones so if you just want streaming apps this is for you. I use this part for my IPTV client but basically any streaming app available on the play store or that can be side loaded with an apk works

You can also flash coreelec and run kodi natively. You can just use the android build of kodi but using the coreelec build has many advantages; it can boot directly to kodi, it’s much snappier within the ui, and most importantly there are far less (basically no) issues with content playback. This option can basically play any file you throw at it natively. You can also set it up to stream files from a pc/nas with jellyfin/plex/emby but this is really the setup for weirdos like me that refuse to subscribe to streaming services (aside from an iptv provider).

Notably the ugoos is the only device, currently, that is licensed to playback Dolby vision content and actually does so properly.

Literally every other option, amazon stuff, shield, chromecast, appletv, pc directly connected to tv, the internal players of TVs, etc don’t play back Dolby vision content correctly in some way. Either they fail at playing certain profiles, they have issues with color accuracy, they flicker, etc. obviously this depends on your setup though, if you have a Samsung dv is meaningless unless you plan to get an oled at some point. That said even if dv is pointless for you it still does hdr/hdr10+ and all the lossless audio stuff/audio pass through

If Dolby vision and av1 are important to you the coreelec team have extended their work to other devices that have av1 support. Do research though because not all of them are fully supported, like some you need a usb Ethernet/wifi adapter which is dumb

Downsides are that it’s tough to set up, like you should be a tinker type person. This is a bit more of a pain than an apple tv or a shield. Also it’s not the easiest thing to get support

But if you’re like me and you’re super paranoid about streaming services harvesting your watch data and selling it, plus super frustrated that they continually fragment and want yet another $17 to access another library that you only want 3 shows of while increasing prices every year and still shoving an excessive amount of advertising in despite having you pay for the service, I would highly recommend just pirating media and using kodi/jellyfin to locally stream.

As an added bonus you get a noticeably higher image quality if you download stuff sourced from physical media because most (tbf not all) streaming networks have shit quality, much less likely to have issues with buffering or the stream dropping from 4k to 480p because the bandwidth wasn’t there for 4 seconds, often can get much better subtitles that are timed and syncd (and in the case of anime like animated and shit), etc. plus no ads, ever, no data harvesting (disconnect your tv from the internet so it doesn’t use brightness patterns and power usage to determine what you’re watching!), no corporate censorship (my collection has Daria with the original music and not the “soundalikes” because mtv couldn’t be bothered to relicense the music. It also has all the blackface episodes of various shows like community and it’s always sunny because I can decide whether something is offensive or satire for myself without netflix or disney to act as a nanny)

What you say makes sense but when people can see that there are decades of precedent for what you describe literally never happening it becomes much more understandable that people start to conflate vigilantism and murder with justice.

If the system consistently fails to provide consequences for an elite class at the expense of an entire generation what options are left? If you fail to stop a child from poking a dog you can’t really blame the dog for biting the child; you fucked up by failing to provide consequences at any point before the situation blew up.

No. For every one freeze dryer that is sold 1000 microwaves are sold. The consumer demand simply isn’t there outside of niche communities like survivalists

I’ve done a few of these and it’s possible to do it much faster without pulling the board

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHaw6w_Iw70

That said I would not recommend doing this if you’re not really comfortable doing this kind of work. It’s not a terrrrribly difficult repair if you’re good with working on repair unfriendly modern laptops but if you’re not good with that it can be quite challenging. It’s not as hard as it looks though, the main pain in the ass is the goddamn battery adhesive

Keep in mind that a slipped tool can be devastating (torn ribbon cables can be a nightmare and costly scenario, scratches on the logic board even more so), if you’re impatient while prying the battery and haven’t used enough solvent it can actually be quite dangerous, even stupid shit like if you push down too hard on a stubborn screw to gain torque you can break the lcd (which is easily like $300+ and a much more involved repair)

It’s also verrrry difficult for anyone but Apple to source a legit Apple battery (and people will shit on apple for this but literally every company does it; try to buy an oem battery for any laptop or phone. It’s not that Apple is good, it’s that they all deserved to get shit for it). Keep that in mind. A lot of third party shops will use whatever they can find and those batteries from aliexpress/ebay often have significantly inferior management controller boards and spot welds. You’ll never know but they’ll fail faster (and sometimes spectacularly). This is a fucked up situation and I don’t know what to tell you; you can try and find someone selling oem batteries pulled from units broken for other reasons but these generally are $$$ for batteries with questionable life. Plus there are a ton of sellers that are happy to say they are selling oem batteries with counterfeit labeling (and will often have “warranties” that say if you remove their counterfeit labeling to prove it’s fake you can no longer return it)

The big things are to somehow indicate to manufacturers that it’s not absolutely critical that a device has to be the absolute thinnest thing in the world. More importantly by far parts need to be available, especially things that absolutely will wear like batteries. This needs to happen via political pressure and regulation because Apple, hp, acer, dell, etc have shown consistently that they will not do this. They will produce those parts for a limited period of time internally and they will almost never make them available to external suppliers (exceptions of half hearted efforts like apples self service program, which has parts purposely priced just high enough to make it so it’s about the same as just getting the service from them).

This won’t happen. It’s consistently failed. Political machinations in the USA (where many of these companies are based out of) consistently favor corporate interests and lobbying

the answer is basically all TVs are subsidized to some degree. A list is somewhat pointless because they all do some sketchy shit and as lg has recently shown they reserve the right to change the terms years after the fact with firmware updates, even if you buy a flagship model that cost 3-5k

Basically you need to use it intelligently. Either don’t connect it to the internet at all, only connect it to an intranet/isolated vlan, or (least effective) block every suspicious outgoing request with your router or a dns thing like adguard/pihole.

The alternatives are to buy a non consumer display (eg something for signage or for like a meeting room in an office) which are usually more durable but also often far more expensive (no ad subsidies), the panel quality is generally noticeably worse (unless you’re buying a mediocre tv), and you lose out on enthusiast features (earc, vrr, etc). Or you can get a solid projector; the cheap projectors are usually kind of junk but nice ones are quite nice and often (but not always, they’re increasingly “smart”) have barebones ui/os. This can be pretty impractical for your living situation though

In some less common scenarios you may need the ftdi or ch34x drivers. Support for these is usually already in the kernel but if not the ftdi comes with the arduino sdk and the ch34x drivers are available

You would generally only need this for older or super cheap printers, and even then you would generally only need this if you need to reflash the firmware for some reason or refuse to print from an sd/usb. but don’t refuse to do that, even back in the days before wireless printers it was a dumb idea to print via usb

That’s good to hear. I have a zigbee stick but haven’t found the time to repair them that way yet. I definitely agree they’re good products, it just left a real bad taste in my mouth when after years of using them I got a notification in the app that soon I’ll be required to put them online, which is nonsense

Just fyi for anyone who would care about this: while hue bulbs are built well they are moving towards a model that requires you to put them on “the cloud”, even though they were sold for years and years without that requirement. The update will be mandatory whether you want it or not as part of Philips security being integrated into the app. It’s unclear what will happen if you don’t create an account and sign in at that point

So if you’re like me and put all your iot shit on an isolated vlan without internet access they may not be the best option for you. Or if you just don’t want to support a company that wildly changes the tos years after purchasing their (expensive) product. I don’t want my home shit on the internet, I don’t trust Philips to put enough cash or effort into securing their servers, etc.

The bulbs do work with zigbee though and that seems to be a viable alternative to using their hub/app although I haven’t tested it fully. This also means if you’re using them via HomeKit you’ll need some kind of bridge like home assistant