midori matcha

The FOSS community should work on a firmware-replacement solution like OpenWRT on routers, but for printers! Call it something like OpenPrint? It would be based on Linux!

It would unlock a printer’s potential and cancel out the cartridge DRM, continue printing regardless of unused ink color levels for the job, be totally freed from proprietary corporate bloatware that comes bundled with the printer, offer integration with personal cloud services (wanna scan that document? Boom, now it’s on your NextCloud RAID NAS, your iPhone, and your grandmother’s desktop), and other quality of life printer features that would significantly improve a country’s happiness and life expectancy.

It’s going to be a crapshoot at first. Printer drivers are a nightmare to write for each and every model. Hardware requirements to make this work are probably going to be limited to the most expensive and fastest octa-core printers. But a jailbreak community will emerge, and people will try to push the movement onto more and more printers, and develop workarounds for older models. Then, someone will develop a printer that ships only with OpenPrint, which will probably be kinda expensive at first, but all the parts will be user-replaceable, and the ink/toner will still be cheap to refill, which is the main goal. Big Printer would have to compete to make their printers more user-friendly, or die from the weight of their own greed.

I wanna believe ~♥

A smart TV nowadays should only be treated as a computer monitor loaded with a bloated, spyware-ridden OSD.

I’ve connected a Samsung and a Roku TV to my WiFi one time, and they each routinely make hundreds of thousands of advertisement and data collection requests over the network daily.

Take advantage of the deals if you must get a TV, but never connect it to the internet, only navigate the UI to switch display inputs, use external devices only, and always, always, always turn off motion-interpolation!

This review would have had a lot more credibility if he at least disclosed his affiliation with Plex. Instead, he posed as some unbiased rando while advertising Plex Pass. This is textbook gaslighting.

If you look on Plex’s review page in the Play Store, it’s receiving overwhelming amounts of negative reviews over the new UI changes, reliability/performance problems, and how the Lifetime Plex Pass purchase is a lifetime of regrets as they watch Plex getting worse every month by enshittifying itself.

If Plex is resorting to leaving fake reviews to save face, then this company is in deeper trouble than I thought.

Sometimes memes are the only way we know how to cope

Won’t somebody please think of the advertisers??

“THE JOY OF NOT BEING SOLD ANYTHING”

I know someone who recently flew with Philippine Airlines that got an email exactly like this, after booking the cheapest possible economy seats. It’s a Wild West bidding war against other passengers for maybe a “premium economy” upgrade that gets you three economy seats in a row for yourself, so you can lay down and sleep on all of them during the long flight. It’s telling of an airline when this flight booked almost a year in advance wasn’t ever going to be a full flight.

That being said, if you’re ever flying to the Philippines, take any other Asian airline but PAL. They’re stingy with drinks, they have strict overhead carry-on weight limits that forces you to check bags in for a fee, their food is school/prison cafeteria quality, they delay flights without taking responsibility for screwing up your connecting flights, and you’re overall treated like cattle when in economy.

It’s overcomplicated because it’s not immediately easy to keep the smart functionality totally local to your own network.

Almost every company that sells an IoT product wants you to make online accounts, download their special app, sign up for subscriptions, download useless firmware updates, and have all the hardware connect externally with their mothership cloud servers in order to function, all because they want to run a data harvesting racket disguised as an “ecosystem”.

I’d use mechanical switches in the house, but at the same time, yelling at Siri to turn on my lights for the third time is the closest thing we currently have to sexbot servants. I only have so many years left on this planet, and I wish to embrace the future now.