• 1 Post
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: March 20th, 2024

help-circle
  • DABDA@lemm.eetotechsupport@lemmy.worldSubstitutes for a TV?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    4 months ago

    I also endorse the RPi+OSMC route. Another thing to mention about controlling Kodi [the underlying software used by things like OSMC or LibreElec] is that you can generally use any input method you prefer.

    • it supports a directly connected keyboard, mouse or controller
    • when using a RPi and connected to a television via HDMI, usually CEC will allow you to use your normal remote control - but if your particular TV isn’t supported there’s also things like Flirc you can plug into a USB port and then customize for your remote
    • you can use a web browser from any computer on the network
    • there’s a bunch of different apps for your mobile phone. On Android the official (free) one is Kore, I prefer the extra features provided by Yatse but after migrating away from using Google Play Services I’ve had issues keeping the purchased “pro” features unlocked; but it’s still a better experience even without them.

    And it’s not an either/or scenario, you can use all of the above simultaneously without changing any settings.




  • There was a TED talk by Zeynep Tufekci in 2017 (“We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads”) – (YouTube*: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI) that briefly talks about this:
    (*I’m aware of the irony in linking there)

    So in 2016, I attended rallies of then-candidate Donald Trump to study as a scholar the movement supporting him. I study social movements, so I was studying it, too. And then I wanted to write something about one of his rallies, so I watched it a few times on YouTube. YouTube started recommending to me and autoplaying to me white supremacist videos in increasing order of extremism. If I watched one, it served up one even more extreme and autoplayed that one, too. If you watch Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders content, YouTube recommends and autoplays conspiracy left, and it goes downhill from there.

    Well, you might be thinking, this is politics, but it’s not. This isn’t about politics. This is just the algorithm figuring out human behavior. I once watched a video about vegetarianism on YouTube and YouTube recommended and autoplayed a video about being vegan. It’s like you’re never hardcore enough for YouTube.

    So what’s going on? Now, YouTube’s algorithm is proprietary, but here’s what I think is going on. The algorithm has figured out that if you can entice people into thinking that you can show them something more hardcore, they’re more likely to stay on the site watching video after video going down that rabbit hole while Google serves them ads.

    These days it might also be about politics, but the motivation to capture attention to serve ads is still the priority.








  • The Amazon situation was the first I’d heard about this problem so I assumed it was the same reason it happens on WM (and elsewhere). And while I certainly don’t expect Walmart to actually read reviews, I would think they would be concerned about potentially losing sales due to projecting a bad image and try to at least (poorly/cheaply) implement a system to address it.

    Assuming it’s not like an email based feedback system but something with an asynchronous connection, it can’t be too hard to look for a handful of keywords (dent, missing, broken, spilled, delivery …) then throw up a Clippy-style message - “It looks like you’re talking about a problem with your order, would you like customer service to assist?” and then route the message/user in that direction.

    I know I’m expecting a lot from our primitive technology in 2025 but I refuse to stop dreaming, dammit!








  • My tech skills are rusting horribly but I tried to briefly take a look at this…

    I’m seeing the same behavior with the Firefox save-as file extension being .m4a vs the displayed URL showing .mp3.

    Opening either extension in VLC and viewing the codec info (Tools->Codec Info / Ctrl+J) shows the actual encoding to be ‘MPEG AAC Audio (mp4a)’.

    I didn’t try grabbing a file from the torrent, but if I use the media tab in Firefox ‘Page Info’ (Ctrl+I) to “save as” the embedded IA player file it suggests a matching .mp3 extension with the displayed address (but the codec is still mp4a).

    The main thing I’m not following is what you mean by having parse errors in Mp3tag. So far I haven’t seen any metadata included in either the .mp3 or .m4a downloads (I only tested the first file), they both play audio fine, and if I browse to their directory in Mp3tag (vers. 2.57) it doesn’t seem to show anything unusual to me (empty metadata, no error/alert messages). What exactly is the parse error or how is it behaving differently from what’s expected?


    I also just wanted to say “THANK YOU!” for an awesome support post. You posted it to the right community, gave it a short but very descriptive title, gave lots of info about what you’ve tried and the results you’ve experienced – and did so politely :)