Honestly the bigger thing is sponsorblock, blocking youtube ads is a big deal but it’s so much nicer to be able to circumvent the internalized advertising. Youtuber spends 4 full minutes plugging a vpn service? Automatically skipped seamlessly

Rooting ranges from very easy (literally go to a webpage, very unlikely you’re on a firmware this old), to medium (put stuff on a usb and try to play some music, may have to try a few times), to very difficult (connecting hardware to the tv), and in some cases is impossible. Don’t update your tv if you don’t have to, lg rarely fixes issues and never adds new features

https://cani.rootmy.tv/

Jellyfin for kodi is pretty bulletproof for me although it wasn’t always that way; when I first changed to this setup (bit over a year ago when Coreelec added dolby vision support) there were some headaches because kodi was changing how the db worked at the time (change from kodi 20 to 21 and Coreelec was using the kodi 21 nightlies for dv stuff that hadn’t been brought into final version)

Once the 21 final came out and Jellyfin for kodi was updated it’s been smooth sailing.

That does remind me of another downside though: there’s a minor slap fight on how db management should occur between kodi and jellyfin devs. Like many open source projects they simply can’t agree on anything so each project just does what they think is right. So kodi 22 or jellyfin 11 might cause another scenario like above if they decide to revamp the db again (especially on the Jellyfin side; I would not be surprised if someday they will overhaul the lackluster music portion of Jellyfin)

If you ever do revisit Jellyfin for metadata administration I would suggest posting about your issues on the github for Jellyfin for kodi. I’ve never used Jellycon so I can’t speak to that but Jellyfin for kodi’s github is overall helpful although fair warning that the dev can be a bit curt, especially if your issue has already been addressed and is configuration related. Things may have changed but at least ~ a year ago it was solely developed by one person who did the majority of the support as well. But if nfs is working then why break what isn’t broken?

You can root webos depending on what version you’re running but that more just lets you run homebrew (which is handy for youtube with Adblock and sponsorblock)

As others have said the best thing you can do is bypass internet connectivity altogether. I use the youtube app so I keep it connected with lg services and tracking blocked:

||snu.lge.com^ ||su.lge.com^ ||su-ssl.lge.com^ ||snu-dev.lge.com^ ||su-dev.lge.com^ ||nsu.lge.com^

(Formatted for adguard dns)

But it’s easier to just disconnect entirely. Let it collect data but if it’s disconnected it can’t do anything with it.

For a box I use a Chinese google tv box - ugoos am6b+. It can decode almost any video format (including dolby vision and all lossless audio, can pass through) except av1 basically and there are some newer versions that can do that as well. Google is awful right? The ugoos is stripped back pretty hard though it does retain the play store but still block the following:

||androidtvwatsonfe-pa.googleapis.com^ ||androidtvchannels-pa.googleapis.com^

Probably not necessary but just in case. Anyway, the Google tv side is just for streaming services (if you use them) and IPTV because Jellyfin and kodi are garbage at IPTV, tivimate on android is leagues better

Anyway flash the box to use Coreelec and copy Coreelec to the emmc, takes like 10 minutes and is pretty easy, just need an sd card. Now you use kodi as your Jellyfin app (or plex/emby but fuck plex/emby) by just installing the Jellyfin for kodi plugin in kodi and in jellyfin. Sign into your Jellyfin instance in the plugin, your library will import (can take awhile the first time if you’re like me and have a huuuuge library with like 1,000 movies, 10,000 episodes, and 300,000 songs)

Then look around on the kodi forums for a decent skin that looks nice for you bc the default one is butt, configure the menus to match your setup, adjust the skin settings to your liking, etc. backup your settings!

Now you have a Jellyfin client that plays back media directly without transcoding 99.99% of the time (assuming you have an avr that can play lossless audio), is far more mature than any of the shitty Jellyfin client apps (development started in 2003), handles stuff like subtitles far better, still syncs watched status, etc. and the worst part of kodi: library management and administration, is now handled by jellyfin, which does it much better.

If you have remote users or other TVs/phones/etc they can still use the client apps too

Downside is that you lose most plugin support. Like back before they started to roll intro skipper into Jellyfin or jelly scrub, those are useless to kodi. And a weakness of kodi is that with the rise of plex/jellyfin addon development for kodi has dropped off significantly so no introskipper plugin for kodi. Navigation features work well (pressing right on the remote skips forward 10s) so that’s close enough, or just download good quality rips with chapters

There was only 1 utopia boot disk (the spinning reindeer). The second was the same thing but modded by scene group to change the background image (kept the reindeer) and force vga mode even if the game didn’t support the official vga box, which didn’t work sometimes

https://cdromance.org/dc-iso/utopia-boot-cd/ has screenshots of both, the bottom with the little alien fella is the original

The weird part is the vga patched one didn’t actually support vga mode itself so when you used it that way you had to boot the console, your screen would be blank, wait, change disks after a minute, then if it worked and the game booted your screen would pop on. You basically had to be used to the process with a/v cables and do it blind, which to be fair if you were a 90s kid that grew up on disk swapping ps1 backups was pretty much a given

But then like a few months later (I think it was) echelon started releasing self booting games so no one cared anymore and soon after you could vga patch the games directly

The utopia bootdisk, the second patched version that forced games into vga mode even if they didn’t support it, was the shit (when it worked and didn’t break the game haha)

Also just a crazy time where standards were much more oriented towards the consumer. I remember I wanted a vga box but they were $50-100 at the time and I couldn’t afford that. So I just made one. They were deadass simple to make. The only exotic parts were an octal buffer (at the time and still now like $1) and a connector for the Dreamcast av port. Otherwise it was just standard shit, a small handful of cheap and very easy to source resistors, caps, diodes, a basic switch, and a vga cable. You could also give it s-video out very easily with 2 caps and and the standard din connector for s-video, which was easy to source back then (radioshack would have most of this at the time)

https://gamesx.com/grafx/dricas.gif gamesx still has the schematic I used up (just in case you thought I remembered all that shit haha). Super simple.

Nowadays that kind of thing is impossible. You simply want to add a device between your console and tv to capture video or extract audio? It’s a goddamn nightmare because hdcp and drm are baked into everything. Prevents absolutely no piracy btw, every single streaming show, bluray, 4k uhd bluray, dvd, etc has been ripped and posted in full quality, but it’s absolutely necessary to have this even though it drives up complexity and costs

I remember vga patching all my Dreamcast games to play them in glorious 480(i?) on my 19” acer crt back in like 2000

Soul caliber was the best

You’re making a false equivalence between billable hours and personal hours. You’re paid 29.90 because you’re doing a specific task at a specific time, outside of those hours your time has a much different market value depending on what you are you able and willing to contract (which I assume is often nothing given you already have employment).

The value of your work is contextual, basically. Mine too, everyone’s is.

I skipped it because that’s spurious reasoning. I’d like to be paid $100 an hour for backbreaking labor but no one will pay me that. No one will pay me anything for it.

The only thing this can possibly do is cost me. It is a question of whether it costs me money or time, sure, and I get that you’re making the argument that one is the most precious resource hustle culture pay yourself etc, but in the real world I have a (relatively) fixed amount of money and have to stick to a budget just as much as I have to budget my time.

Buffalo gets on average 56 days of snow with 10 of those being heavy snow.

26.33 one day isn’t bad but 400-600 dollars annually? That’s a different story. I suppose you could just limit use for heavy storms but that’s still 250-300. Average operating costs appear to be 300-800/yr which probably varies wildly based on geography

And this of course glosses over the gigantic cost of installing the driveway, which apparently can cost from 3,000-25,000 and averages 4800 for a small one car driveway and 12,500 for a 2 car driveway. The systems typically last 15-20 years. The good news from what I’ve read is that in a boiler system the pex tubing should last 40-50 years so the 20 year service life wouldn’t be as costly since you’d just be replacing the boiler/pump and not the entire system. The electric systems seem to last slightly longer (~25 years) but the cabling can fail and then the driveway needs to be torn up.

So if you have a small one car driveway that cost goes up $240 a year and $625 a year for a 2 car driveway, most of that being a bulk up front payment. And this assumes you have the resources liquid to make such a payment, if you’re financing those numbers probably go up since you’re paying interest.

Also environmental perspective: use a decent amount of power (though not as much as you’d think, about as much as a clothes dryer unless your driveway is huge) and tbf this can be mitigated by having clean sourced energy (eg a house with solar). Another concern is a hydro system developing a leak which would leak antifreeze into the soil (though if this happens you’re screwed bc the driveway generally has to be tore up)

I absolutely hate shoveling snow, I literally dropped $600 on a snowblower, but I can’t fathom investing in something like this unless you’re obscenely wealthy. Huge up front costs, pretty noticeable annual operating costs, costly appliance replacement cycles added onto my home, etc

That said if you were my neighbor and had one I’d probably be a little envious as I trudged through the snow looking at your clean ass driveway. Not enough to drop 4-12k + yearly fees on a new driveway, but enough be like “that must be fuckin nice”

Watching this video of someone in buffalo ny who has one:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W-x9o5IEtMo

It definitely seems to keep up fairly well with what looks like very heavy snowfall but struggles quite a bit, especially towards the end (around 9m).

Statistics posted at the end as well; $26.33 for this storm. In buffalo that could add up pretty quick.

Though granted looking at the snowfall on the minivan I would much rather be this person than the person next door with god knows how much snow to dig through. I have a snow blower and even with that the really bad storms are a nightmare to deal with. Tbf I only have a weenie blower because 80% of the time snow around here is 3-6” at worst, only the really bad storms bring 12+ and we haven’t had one of those in a while

Do you get heavy snowfall? How does it handle 6” or 12” or more? Does it ever get overwhelmed?

I have no interest in getting such a thing but am curious as to function

I would think if you’re getting heavy enough snowfall it would outpace the heating effect. I don’t know, no one around here has one.

It seems like it would only be close to “reasonable” to run in a place where snow is so minimal that you don’t even need to bother dealing with it.

But if you live somewhere like where I live, where a bad storm is 10-14” of snow, that’s gotta take what, days of running the system?

“Optimizing for things people love” aka talking to you like an hr team building seminar

It’s frustrating, or maybe it’s a good thing given the tendency for some people to form weird pseudo social relationships with LLMs, to see the evolution of chatgpts language processing

Public chatgpt only had the 3.5, 4, and 4o model but you can play with earlier models like 2 and 3 on huggingface. These were far weirder, often robotic and stilted but sometimes mirroring more natural colloquial English more based on the input

Rather than make something that is authentic and more natural to interact with they instead go for the ultra sanitized HR corporate speak bullshit. Completely bland and inoffensive with constant encouragement and reinforcement to drive engagement that feels so inauthentic (unless you are desperate for connection with anything, I guess). It’s mirrored in other models to some degree, deepseek, llama, etc (I don’t know about grok, fuck going on twitter).

3-5 years until it’s ruined by advertising, tops. If that

In addition to this I didn’t even touch upon the resentment towards stupid bullshit outside of defense

Like I like in Pennsylvania and the amount of tax dollars that are spent propping up fossil fuel industries. Like I want to spend money on developing energy infrastructure, of course. But I want that money to go into putting power lines underground (my power goes out every six weeks minimum and 2-3x a year for over 24hours, sometimes over 72), nuclear, solar, hydroelectric, etc

But what do I get? Fracking, propping up the coal industry, etc. fucking ridiculous.

Road quality decreases and yet no public transportation expansion. It’s garbage if you have a car and if you don’t it’s impossible if you’re outside of a city.

So that stuff too

The problem is the adhesive does serve a purpose (mainly vibration/keeping the battery in place). Depends on how much you travel with it and the design overall (I’m not familiar with the steam deck but looking at the ifixit it appears ribbons are fixed to it so having the battery bounce around could be a problem)

That said you can buy those pull tab strips and could probably use them here. I hate those things but why not? Better than what was there, I guess. Especially bc the off brand ones can be fairly weak adhesive

Ehhh I’ve had some nightmare experiences with Samsung, LG (back when they made phones), Xiaomi (edit not Xiaomi, huawei), etc. a lot use pull tabs and when they work they’re perfect but when they’re old or you go just a bit too fast and they break you’re fucked and have to either heat it a ton, drown it in solvent, or slide a thin wire to cut it, all options suck

Funny enough the new apple phones actually have this weird electro conductive adhesive that’s crazy simple to remove. The pull tabs are now terminals, you connect those to a standard 9v battery with alligator clips or whatever, and after a short bit of time (30 seconds iirc) the adhesive just releases and you can lift the battery out

There are videos of it on youtube, it’s pretty cool and the one adhesive I can potentially get behind. though I would want to see what people say about it after a few years of actual use. The initial teardown videos when the 16 came out made it look impressive but who knows if it holds up after 5-7 years

They also don’t use it for laptops so far. They didn’t even use it for all versions of the iphone 16 so it’s not exactly applaud apple time but if they roll that out to replace the nasty adhesives they were using for batteries across their product line it would be a great step in the right direction

Isn’t battery adhesive the worst thing ever?

I remember fixing a few macbooks that had batteries like this. The batteries were gigantic and the adhesive was crazy strong. Dumping acetone behind them with a syringe, heat, and gently prying eventually got them out but it was quite nerve wracking. I guess you can’t dump solvents in a steam deck though

It’s so dumb. Adhesives make assembly easier but fuck over repairability. The only advantages are even distribution of pressure and vibration dampening, which are notable, but are not worth making the main wear item completely inaccessible and a nightmare to replace for the majority of people who don’t have experience with heat guns and sliding cards/thin metal to cut the stupid fucking adhesive that could’ve been replaced by a screw making the product 0.5mm thicker and 0.1g heavier (if that)

I became more aware of how much tax I was paying when I became self employed because instead of paying a bit out of each check like a w2 worker I have to pay it in lump sums quarterly.

I run a low overhead medical practice so I don’t have a tax cheat llc, I take the standard deduction every year and as a result my taxes are pretty much the same as they ever were. Even though it’s roughly the same amount (slightly more actually, now that I cut out the overhead of medical systems stealing 30-60% of my labor) there’s something psychological about paying the amount in a lump sum

I think paying taxes is important and I want to do. However I feel conflicted about spending this money because what I feel paying taxes are important for are generally not what my tax dollars fund, and increasingly so. I want to pay and gladly will for community enrichment, better public schools, access to healthcare, infrastructure like roads, power lines, sewers, moving away from fossil fuels, better handling of trash and recycling programs, rehabilitation programs for criminal offenders, mental health programs including interim programs like community supports and mobile programs that exist in between outpatient and inpatient, social welfare programs that give people access to housing, food, electricity, etc

But instead my taxes pay for these things increasingly less. About 20% of my taxes go to military and defensive spending and while I do think some amount needs to go to this I think it’s absurd. Most countries spend 3-5% on defensive spending. Even China, the second highest after the US, spends 6%.

So I don’t resent paying taxes but I do resent how much when roughly 1/5th of that goes to defense contractors to launder billions from taxpayer and Israel for genocide. I also resent that my tax burden continually increases despite making roughly $60-70k a year while the services around me continually decrease.

I remember reading a conspiracy theory that this key was purposely put in by a liberal employee who believed everything should be free and that’s why the first 5 digits are FCKGW - fuck George w - and that it was the volume license for Lockheed Martin or something

It’s not true but interestingly this key was leaked before windows xp even came out, like a month before, and it’s suspected to be a VLK from dell

Nowadays they’d probably say leftist