You know that the smart box IS doing that, but you’re able to make the choice of which one to get. And it’s not coupled with the display so you can choose the best options in each category instead of being locked in to whatever OS is installed on better displays.
Smart TVs are a curse (from a consumer perspective). A separate smart device makes much more sense.
People usually replaced their TVs when they broke, which could be 6-8+ years. Nowadays as their already slow hardware becomes even more obsolete, streaming apps are no longer updated and start to break, new ones are not released, etc. they go ahead and buy a new one.
You also have to accept all kinds of crappy agreements, so you can be spied on and get served ADS (?!?!).
Not to mention even the most expensive TVs come with baffingly slow hardware and software. $2k devices can take 10+ seconds to load the menu with 4 options, where you can modify picture settings. Incredible.
A TV should be a display with inputs and nothing more IMO.
Smart boxes are cheap and much faster than even the most expensive TVs, and they can be replaced inexpensively when eventually they become obsolete.
For a long time I pulled the network cable from my TV after I got tired of getting bombarded with changed ToS agreements, firmware updates and home screen ads. Now I have it on the network again just because I wanted to control the source from my PC, but it's still blocked from the internet on the firewall. Go ahead and make snapshots you stupid little TV.
> Not to mention even the most expensive TVs come with baffingly slow hardware and software. $2k devices can take 10+ seconds to load the menu with 4 options, where you can modify picture settings. Incredible.
Yes it's really curious how much worse technology has gotten in some dimensions in recent decades. Analog TVs would respond to inputs effectively instantaneously - if you changed the channel, the very next frame would be drawn from the new channel. My TV now takes multiple seconds to change channels.
Analog tvs would change in the middle of frames if you swapped channels.
Digital tvs are cursed to wait for the next key frame in the video to start displaying and providers are a-okay with very long waits for key frames as it improves their encoding efficiency and thus allows them to squeeze more channels on the lines.
> Digital tvs are cursed to wait for the next key frame in the video to start displaying
If they chose too, couldn't TV decoders pretend to have a all-gray keyframe as a starting point and apply the streaming diffs to that until the next true keyframe came? That would at least give some garbled image before snapping in. I'm sure most consumers would consider this "broken" though.
It doesn't need to be that bad if they cared about it. If channel is on the same band as previous one it could keep previous data in the buffer and decode it at once when switching.
While a separate smart device makes more sense from an ecological perspective, it won't save you from ads, tracking, screenshots etc., as long as the same OS that would be running on the TV is running on the device. And, if you want to install apps from streaming services, you need one of the supported OSs - AFAIK most smart devices use Android TV?
One benefit of a separate device, especially a small one like a Roku or Firestick, is you can take it on holiday with you to access all your services while away (assuming your destination has a TV with HDMI).
With smart boxes you have much more options. I'm thinking a stipped down android TV box doesn't make screenshots and track you like most smart TVs do, they also don't serve random ads on the home page.
Apple TV is really your best option if you want privacy. Google is primarily an ad company that wants to learn as much about you as possible to target those ads.
Just because Apple promises? There is actually zero evidence that apple is any better for privacy. Your absolute best option is something like a raspberry pi with an open source OS.
When companies have a privacy policy that says “we will spy on you and sell your information to whoever will pay us for it”, and then they do exactly that, that’s one thing. That’s the Google Experience™.
When companies have a privacy policy that says they won’t do that, and then they do, that’s an entirely different thing. They lied, and that puts them in legal jeopardy. It also hurts their bottom line.
Is it possible Apple is sneakily spying on you and selling your info to third parties in secret illegal deals? Sure, I guess? But I don’t think it’s super likely.
I mean... they tell you right on their webpage that track you and and use your private information (such as: location, current app, locale, device ID, ...).
Sure, it's a "random" identifier, ... tied to your exact location, soooo random.
The TV will still spy on you, and may even send frames for upstream classification. The only way to make sure is to never connect it to the network. And even then, I'd try to remove any wifi antennas.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, automated content recognition and analysis and advertising will apply to anything on your screen no matter the input source
Ok but if the tv has no internet access what is the smart tv going to do with all these nice screenshots? First rule: never provide Internet access to your smart tv.
There was some talk lower in the thread about devices being able to form mesh-networks with other devices that do have internet connection (for ex. your neighbour) and share data that way, there hasn't been any links or sources to the claims yet however
I mean, I remember people saying similar things about Google scanning Wi-Fi SSIDs to track their location. There was a point in time where people were saying that was conspiracy theory thinking.
Sure, it's practical, that's why most people don't have a separate smart box. That's why I called it a curse, because most people are being nagged with ads and being tracked on a level the article talks about.
Smart boxes can communicate with the TV (HDMI-CEC), and you don't have to ever use the TV's remote. If the box turns on, it turns on the TV and switches the source. Same with turn off. If you cast a youtube video to the box, the TV also turns on, etc. So it works completely seamless (at least in my case).
Oh wait, I just remembered regular TV channels exist, I guess you will still need the TV's remote for that.
Presumably you could just cut it off from the internet by dns filtering or setting up a vlan to only allow it to communicate to your locally hosted plex/jellyfish instance.
Yeah no, that's exactly what I mean (in context of the parent to which I've replied): streaming devices are likely capturing and phoning home screenshots of their own display output, too.
But yes, a smart TV programmed to do the same is even more unscrupulous given that it can 'spy' on everything it displays, to presumably include the input of connected devices.
The default debounce algorithm in QMK also introduces a minimum of 5ms delay, and the default usb polling rate another 10ms.
To mitigate the debounce algorithm delay, you can put "DEBOUNCE_TYPE = asym_eager_defer_pk" in your rules.mk file.
What this does:
asym: use different debounce algorithm for key-down and key-up events.
eager: the key-down is registered instantly at the first signal, instead of waiting 5ms for debounce
defer: registering key-up will wait for the debounce delay, this will make sure you won't get multiple key-downs registered before a proper key-up
pk: per key debounce timer, uses the most resource but you have plenty on your rp2040. although I don't completely understand how this works, this is supposed to be the fastest.
To increase the polling rate, this can be defined in config.h:
#define USB_POLLING_INTERVAL_MS 2
It's in ms, so 2 is 500hz, 1 is 1000hz, IMO the latter is overkill.
Together, you save a minimum of 6ms, maximum of 14ms of delay, which is orders of magnitude more than you save by not scanning the matrix.
Yes, on all my keyboards. No double presses so far. On the keyboard I use for gaming, I actually use 1000Hz polling just to get that sweet placebo effect.
Windows 10 support ending in 2025 is really scary. Literally billions of computers are not eligible to install Windows 11 because of artificial limitations, all of these are supposed to be trashed? That would be an enormous amount of e-waste.
Realistically one or a combination of the following will happen:
- Microsoft extends the deadline
- There will be a paid long term support update channel, and hopefully a registry edit will enable this (happened a couple of times before)
- Most people will continue to use it without security updates (most likely)
I guess Microsoft will agressively tell you that your OS is not safe, etc, so hopefully a single tool will exist that hides all of these messages and switches to the long term support updates.
I got a DIY basic kit, and was pretty surprised when I saw that after 8 hours of sleep the CO2 level was 3600 ppm in the bedroom. My wife still jokes about the way I woke her up. I immediately said "We're basically suffocating". Maybe it was a little bit too dramatic sure, but kind of true.
The levels go above 1000 ppm in less than an hour with both of us in there.
Opening the windows to ventillate doesn't really solve this, as you'd need to keep opening and closing them every hour. I'm thinking about installing a HRV system, but struggling to find a model that could be integrated into Home Assistant. (ERV not necessary as I live in a european country with temperate climate, the humidity is mostly OK)
In the meantime I have two windows tilted open permanently in another room with the doors open. This keeps CO2 under 1000 ppm, but pretty bad for energy efficiency.
Overall pretty happy with the product, definitely made me much more aware of the air quality. I want to build a portable one with a display and logging to check out the car, the office, maybe the hotel rooms on a trip, the plane, etc.
I don’t believe co2 is as statistically significant of a problem as you are making it out to be. I believe some of the originally literature around this really made it overblown.
I do believe the science is out in areas like the described, it could very well impact high cognitive tasks and can easily imagine that being true. I still don't believe it is suffocating the brain like described by the poster.
> I immediately said "We're basically suffocating". Maybe it was a little bit too dramatic sure, but kind of true.
Carbon dioxide is one of just a very few air quality problems for which you have strong inborn biological detection systems. If you don't feel like it's suffocating you, it isn't.
Of course, these CO2 levels are smaller by at least one order of magnitude than what could cause suffocation. I overdramatized the fact that the air quality was really, really bad.
Based on every article I found, above 1000 ppm clearly affects sleep quality, cognitive performance, it causes headaches, etc. so 3600ppm is generally considered really bad.
Even if CO2 would be harmless in itself, it is a good indicator for bad ventillation.
> Based on every article I found, above 1000 ppm clearly affects sleep quality, cognitive performance, it causes headaches, etc.
Sleep quality and cognitive performance are often difficult to perceive in yourself.
Headaches aren't like that at all. If every article you found states that CO2 above 1000 ppm causes headaches, that should reflect poorly on everything else in all of those articles.
> Even if CO2 would be harmless in itself, it is a good indicator for bad ventilation.
I checked UELI out. It looks nice. But call me old-fashioned, I don't need electron based launcher sitting there idle using 169Mb of RAM while doing nothing. Launchy is doing roughly the same in 5Mb of RAM.
I hear you, that's the #1 issue people have with ueli. Even though it's electron based, I feel like at least it's properly made performance wise. Bringing it up and the listing is both instant. I also really like that it does fuzzy search, and a ton of plugins by default (windows 10 settings, currency converter, etc).
I was really surprised how futuristic the shopping experience in Decathlon is. Every item has a unique rfid (or something) tag, and all you have to do is put them in a box at checkout, and it scans them automatically.
Most of their items has this tag inside the regular tags, I guess this would be much harder to implement in a regular store.
> I guess this would be much harder to implement in a regular store.
Also very uneconomical. RFID tags have a cost, while printing a barcode on a package that is anyway printed is totally free. Unless there's a clear economical advantage that compensates for the lost revenue, this is a no-go for less expensive items like what you find in a grocery store.
