Kid_Thunder

For the big products, I think Google Assistant will be next followed by barely doing anything further with Android Auto until it dies a few years after GAS starts getting pushed out while it probably either won’t or will stop supporting ‘legacy’ Android Auto apps, so AA dies ‘because developers aren’t supporting apps anymore – totally not our fault and we’re sorry to see this happen.’

Former Googlers have always said that the big issue with sustaining products at Google is that it is highly competitive and Google rewards new products, not sustaining current products. So, most people want to continuously join/form teams for new products leaving little resources for current products. This has been the way since Google started becoming a large company – so decades now.

This makes sense as to why Google puts out applications that seemingly do the same thing as something else but ever so slightly different and why there are sometimes cool new products that die on the vine years later and if there was no slightly different thing available it just dies or if there is then there is a half-assed migration.

In the Reddit AMA the Google Home team answered a few questions and only the very few softball ones. One interesting comment they made though is that because of the Nest products and generally new products, they believe it is a challenge to support the older hardware, including integrating Google and Nest hardware, so basically you get features removed to make it all work. Of course, there was the promise and supposed internal roadmap that puts these features back eventually, but we’ve seen that kind of promise over and over from Google and it rarely happens. They are trying to replace Assistant with their Gemini AI which you can do now but it comes with even less features (but parity is coming – they promise!..one day!). Is that parity with current Assistant which seems to be supporting less and less and working worse?

Google is losing a lot of consumer trust in products I think and it’s going to get worse for them as this trickles to the general consumer-base.

As much as he may have a case so long as he didn’t act against store policy and actually attempted to he probably has a case, even in an at-will state.

The problem is that it will likely be difficult to get an attorney to represent him without an actual retainer because these cases usually draw out for a long, long time and are difficult to fight. Unless there’s a legitimate case for a class action, then the chances are slim that anyone can afford to fight the case, even if they ultimately could win because no attorney is going to devote years to this for a ‘maybe’.

The only route there may be a hope of winning here is for him to apply for unemployment and if he doesn’t get it, to appeal himself. He may get that as small of a win as that is.

Just clarification here, a NAT is NOT a firewall. It will drop packets originating from outside the network if the ports aren’t forwarded to an IP simply because the NAT has no idea which device on the network to send the packets to. A forwarded port is you telling the NAT to assume packets coming into a specific port should be forwarded to a specific device. It is acting as a security measure simply by coincidence but not by design. Unlike a firewall it will not inspect any packet payload or attempt to make a security decision on outbound packets. It only routes based on the packet headers.

A firewall on the other hand actively will reject or drop packets because it is an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). This is why if your router has a built-in firewall, your NAT will still drop the packets – because it isn’t a firewall nor is it what is being referred to if you disable it.

Port 6667 is a typical IRC port. It is sometimes used by remote access backdoors for command and control via a channel (chat room basically) on an IRC server, however, if that port isn’t forward OR you don’t have your PC set as the DMZ Host (you should never do this), then you probably have malicious software on your system.

If it isn’t forwarded, then your NAT would drop the packets and Malwarebytes would never see it because they wouldn’t be there. Malicious software can forward ports via uPNP and you should turn that off on your router or router/modem combo. It can also make it through if the connection is starting from inside of your network for TCP, which is the protocol that would be used for 6667 normally.

Pretty much sounds exactly like I was thinking of doing for the DIY. miniATX/ATX for all the expansion potential + SATA ports + large case to handle it + a CPU with 6 to 8 cores at least. Case would probably be a rack form factor but it doesn’t really matter. Probably 32 GB of RAM + a Quadro GPU/Some cheap AMD GPU or something cheapish like that strictly for encoding + Proxmox + TrueNAS or perhaps just unraid. Probably no desktop environments unless something really needs it for some reason. Not sure if I’ll go with a motherboard with an ILO/IPMI with its own NIC + vlan or not.

I was going to mix SSD/NVME for performance (if I mix these two, it’d be two separate performance tiers) and HDDs for capacity. Probably two 1+ Gbps NICs bonded and maybe a LACP port channel down the line. VPN with killswitch of course.

I could def. go cheaper on the hardware if I just wanted to use docker/podman mostly but I want VMs too. I’ll probably manage updates and backups of what I really care about off network via ansible + rclone + restic repos. I might would use zram + lz4 for most of my VMs because why not.

I appreciate the advice! I am thinking of Synology or perhaps DIY with either TrueNAS (Scale likely) or Unraid. Synology would be cheap, small, easy on power and thermals too though and I’ve been looking at the latest and previous gen DS2XX lines.

Also I appreciate the Jellyfin mention. I’ve been using Plex so long and was thinking about something else like Jellyfin especially but I’ve never worked with it before.

This and the rising costs plus adding ads to ‘basic’ tiers and attempting to create limitations (resolutions, “screens”, offline downloads) is what might push me to build a nice, large NAS. We don’t want Cable again.

You set your brush type in ASCII/ANSI characters, set your size and color and then you paint using something like PabloDraw.

Think of opening something like paint, selecting the brush tool and a color and then painting shapes. Well, they do the same but instead of a solid or gradient brush color, the do the same except the brush uses character sets that you can select.

That’s Magic Earth Navigation & Maps and the results are that app’s fault.

You can tell from both the app icon and it’s the exact same Burger King logo it uses (Google Maps uses a different one).

deleted by creator

This is a TCL TV. It is a budget TV. Of course, they’re going to make it as cheap as possible, otherwise it wouldn’t be a budget TV.

Frankly I doubt this TV is more than $150 USD when NOT on sale. Surely not over $200.

I don’t mean to be offensive about any of it. It is perfectly fine to buy a TV within your budget but this definitely fits within the expectation of this kind of TV.

It is also very likely not going to have Roku support 5 years past the model’s initial manufacture date either.

There should be absolutely no surprises here.

I didn’t know that ansible-galaxy had a comic