Check out Infuse, it’s a pretty good front end for a home media collection.

Probably safe to assume that the streaming app on your phone is collecting the same data about your viewing habits, whether or not you Chromecast it to another device.

I honestly think it will not live up to the levels of hype that the community will build itself up to.

Coupled with my suspicion that the single-player game will be as barebones as possible, with the goal of funnelling as many players into the next iteration of GTA:Online as quickly as possible, to sell more Shark Cards.

The good news is that in the end I’ll either be proven right, or pleasantly surprised.

Well, at least you can expect it to be a long supported, overpriced accessory! 🤣

If/when it happens, so be it - I’ll eat crow. But for the time being, Apple at least has long set/surpassed the standard for support lifetimes.

At some point, you just have to have a little bit of faith that not every company is going to immediately screw you over the first chance they get; otherwise you’ll never end up buying anything (new or otherwise), with the fear that the moment you do - they’ll drop support.

I mean, some companies do deserve that level of scepticism - but honestly, for all their other faults Apple is not one of them.

There are a lot of legitimate reasons to hate on Apple, but not supporting their products long-term is not one of them.

Eventually they stop providing new OS updates, but they don’t brick/abandon devices.

Hell, I turned on my old iPhone 5 recently for the first time in over a decade and it happily connected to Apple’s servers and updated to the last supported OS version.

Even now that my Apple Watch isn’t receiving any more major OS updates, it can still interact with my up-to-date iPhone 14 without any issues.

I’m still using an Apple Watch 3 that I got in a bundle with my iPhone X from my telco.

I need to charge it twice a day for ~30 minutes each, but it’s still chugging along.

I think I’ll finally upgrade to the new generation this year, but at that point it will be 7 years old - which is commendable for tech.

Is it the same muscle that lets you wiggle your ears? Because I can do that, and I get a similar roaring.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to alias out each place you submit an email address to, so you can see who sells your contact details or otherwise gets hacked?

Eg: changeorg@yourna.me, netflix@yourna.me etc.?

Wait, isn’t this just the plot of that Sam* Rockwell movie - Moon?

In general, I would love for any OEM to step in and provide similar build quality to a Mac… doesn’t even have to be Lenovo (who IMO are a pale imitation of IBM’s line of laptops).

RTS are inherently limited to PC.

I agree with everything else you said, bar this. I first got into RTS’s on the PS1.

To me, RTS’s peaked around Red Alert 2 (pre-Yuri’s Revenge); I just wish I could find more voxel-based 2d RTS’s with that same ‘arcade-y’ feel.

You likely just need to enable TPM through the BIOS (each manufacturer calls it something different).

I’m in a similar boat, but am going to use W10 EOL to probably jump ship to Linux - if not at the very least switch to Windows 10 LTSC.

It’s because most game devs are owned by publicly traded companies; shareholders searching for constantly improved earnings man’s that games are rushed out the door, incomplete and packed to the gills with monetisation.

Balder’s Gate 3 is a perfect counter-point to this mindset; games can only launch once - so launch it properly.

As an aside; I do wish that there was a millennial billionaire who grew up playing some Konami classic titles, and were in a position to take over the company, take it private and focus on restoring it to its former glory. But there is no such thing as a benevolent billionaire, so it’s just a pipe dream.

But your government will (try to) protect you from foreign influences That’s what this is, though.

Take a step back and consider for a moment the absolute mayhem TikTok was able to cause through one single push notification to their US user base (>170m, over half the adult population). That is not a power that should be wielded lightly, and definitely not one in the hands of a foreign adversary ready, willing and capable of weaponising it at their whim.

Think of the power that affords them to put their finger on the scale when it comes to the critical upcoming Presidential election, not just directly - but through slight manipulations of the algorithm to engage one political cohort and disenfranchise another.

We can agree that there is at least a slight difference in having your own (or a friendly nation’s) Government tracking you, versus allowing a competing nation to have direct access to over half of the adult US population (as per their recent push-notification stunt), as well as a robust collection of their interests and preferences.

There is a reason China has banned most US-based software in the mainland (Meta, Google, etc.); in favour of self-developed alternatives. This is just treatment in kind; it’s not an outright ban, rather a forced sale to prevent more of that user data falling into dubious hands.

Switch emulation is not going anywhere, and will likely continue to be built off the foundations laid by Yuzu.

The biggest takeaway from this is I imagine Nintendo had the devs dead to rights on promoting piracy directly, rather than focusing on only communicating how to play legitimate back-ups only.

So going forward any smart dev-team would make sure to wait for a game to launch before producing an updated version to support it, as well as being vigilant that all communication through official channels avoids any discussion that enables piracy or directly links to a secondary source that does so.

To steal a term bandied about when talking about AI; this is the worst it’ll ever be again.

Yes, it’s an absolute mess - but with a passionate enough community, someone will develop a front-end to automate and streamline this process.

Getting the data was the biggest challenge.

Probably because BYD recently overtook Tesla as the world’s largest EV manufacturer.

If/when that realisation hits Wall Street, Tesla shares are going to take a massive hit.

I’m running a rusty old QNAP NAS (10+ years old), and access it via Infuse on my iPhone / Apple TV.

It provides a very Kodi-like interface, and requires near 0 set-up. Just point it at the root network folders and it’ll pull all the relevant metadata (movie posters, cast lists, series info, optional subtitles etc.).