That was the traditional meaning of the word, yes. However it has been horribly misused to push headlines and in the legal arena it has been used to push for harder penalties on what would be considered traditional weapons.

It’s a pet peve of mine because it dilutes the word, but home made preasure cooker bombs have been called WMDs in the US and people seem OK with it.

You think someone stupid enough to make all the above mistakes would be savvy enough to build PKI and a RADIUS server? You’re giving her too much credit.

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.

I assume this is the result of “water heater” and “hot water tank” being merged together.

Valve has not yet put in the effort to create a generic version of SteamOS because their focus is on the Steam Deck right now, but the community has.

Bazzite has been made to look and feel almost exactly like the Steam Deck and can be installed on any PC (AMD GPU recommended). Give it a shot!

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.

The distain for people isn’t the reason, it’s the side effect. The goal is profit, profit above all else. The problem the US (and most everyone) has is it’s very hard to put the cat back in the bag.

After WW2 many countries were decemated and people banded together to help each other. This became the basis for social healthcare. They didn’t have huge corporate interests to fight against as so much was already dismantled.

The US however came out on top with healthy industry so there was no “start from scratch” point. Because of this any attempt at socializing healthcare comes at the cost of destroying the profits of all the companies that have been built on the back of the current system. Capitalism is built on investment and investors do NOT like losing profits. Therefore maintaining the status quo so that investments remain stable is priority #1.

The sad truth is that things have to get bad, really bad, before people consider a complete reboot. Up until recently it’s only been really bad for the poor, now the shrinking middle class is starting to feel it. Eventually it will become to much to bear, but until then there’s still more sweet profit in the next quarter.

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.

Love my Bolt. Naturally it was discontinued :)