This is actually a very good comparison because restaurants use this argument all the time, except for wages:

“I can’t make money running my restaurant if I have to pay a living wage to my servers, so you should pay them with tips. How else can we stay open?”

These business that can’t operate profitably like any other business should fail.

Absolutely. It sounds ideal for something like that.

The issue is they sit in this odd place from a price perspective. I can get an N4000 based stick PC with 4GB RAM and eMMC storage for $140 CAD, or a vastly better performing N95 based mini PC with 8GB RAM, real SSD, and additional outputs for $50 more.

The stick PC really only makes sense if you need that form factor, or if you’re on a really tight budget. The improvements for $50 are just too much to ignore.

Your wishlist sounds almost identical to mine. As frustrating as the limitations of streamers are, they are easy to use. HDMI CEC makes single remote setups possible, easy volume changes, input switching, etc. Apps are vetted so they “just work”.

As for casting, most platforms support running Miracast or AirPlay receivers. Google is the stickler here that won’t let you run a Google Cast receiver (or at least I haven’t found one) and also doesn’t implement Miracast on Pixel devices. It’s such a shame because I vastly prefer casting the URL to the TV and letting it source the content than mirroring my phone all the time.

Yeah, those were on my radar as well. I haven’t yet had a chance to look into what the Linux compatibility is like, but that sounds promising that you were able to do it.

The big downside I see is that while the power consumption is low, they’re running a really old SoC, usually based on Intel N4000 (launched late 2017). Looking around it seems to have h.265 decode which is the most important one to look out for. It doesn’t support AV1, but that’s mostly streaming services and not that common (I think?). There may be other disadvantages I’m not thinking of at the moment.

What was the performance like for you?

I do have surround sound, but I wasn’t aware of that being an issue with a PC solution. Have you encountered issues getting that to work?

All my current self-hosting is running off an N100 mini-PC. OPNsense, NginX, Home Assistant, Unifi Controller, Docker host, etc. They are fantastic, it just seems a bit overkill for sitting behind the TV and playing Plex/Jellyfin and the occasional web stream in a browser. There’s really not much competition though as all the products below it offer a lot older processors that don’t have very up to date HW decode.

If you’re coming from Windows I recommend Fedora KDE Spin. If has a similar look and feel and is very up to date while remaining stable.

My apologies, I missed the word Musk. I think what I said still stands that regulations can only hold back some of the damage, and that GenAI is still a big issue in and of itself.

With that said, you’re right about Musk. He’s a wildcard who is only out for his personal interets and he has way too big a following. He’s a large problem to be sure.

The cat’s out of the bag unfortunately. I can download stable or unstable diffusion on my home PC and make it generate all kinds of stuff. It’s open source so you can’t really stop that knowledge from spreading.

You can however recognize that the majority of people won’t do that, and write rules around software that is delivered as a service or for a fee. That would stop 90% of it.

So while regulating GenAI is possible, it’s not full fix. GenAI is kind of still the risk.

I mean, yes? I’m obviously using VLANs here. I’m not running a separate switch and AP for each network…

All I want is higher resiliency SD cards. It must be a technology limitation with being unable to fit a good controller in there or something because I would gladly sacrifice speed and capacity for something reliable in a lot of my applications.

There’s a whole documentary on this. Check out American Factory (2019). It goes over the same issues outlined here.

I have a trusted network, an IoT network (where the CC would go), and a guest network.

I know most people aren’t going to have the time or knowledge set up network segmentation, but it’s still good practice.

We’d need a suitably powerful APU upgrade in order to make running a 1080p screen viable. Most of the reason the Steam Deck performs as well as it does is because games are only rendering at 720p.

My wishlist for a Deck V2 would be a

• Higher res screen (if it makes sense as I mentioned above)
• Higher refresh with VRR (partially handled by thr OLED 90hz but no VRR)
• Second USB-C port supporting USB4
• Fingerprint reader
• QoL improvements like smaller bezel, modern wireless chipset, etc.

AND a Steam Controller v2 as a companion with the exact same buttons/sticks/touchpads as the Deck.

Love my Bolt. Naturally it was discontinued :)

Pixel phones have some of the best alternative OS support around and have always had unlockable bootloaders with no hoops to jump through. GrapheneOS should satisfy you there.

The headphone jack, microSD card, etc? Google’s official response is “get bent”.

They do have staggered releases, but it’s a bit more complicated. The client that you run does have versioning and you can choose to lag behind the current build, but this was a bad definition update. Most people want the latest definition to protect themselves from zero days. The whole thing is complicated and a but wonky, but the real issue here is cloudflare’s kernel driver not validating the content of the definition before loading it.

That’s a relatively sophisticated attack though, and like you said is dependent on versions of WPA. It’s easier from a hardware perspective but more complicated software.

A 2.4 and 5ghz jammer is just simpler. Turn it on, everything fails. Even stuff that doesn’t talk Wi-Fi like Zigbee. Throw 400 and 900mhz on there too and now even residential security sistems will be frozen. It’s just simpler to use brute force for something like this.

Of course they could, this is a software limitation. However consumer friendliness is not in either companies interests. Apple prefers to keep total control over their ecosystems so they aren’t going to do Google any favours, and Google likely doesn’t care much either way seeing how long it’s taken them to even attempt a similar network.