I’d they’d bring back the headphone jack and sell them in North America then they might have something.

It would win the “will it fit nicely on a keychain” by a landsline.

However I doubt it would suit OP’s needs as the contacts are exposed so durability may be suspect, and seeing as it is generic I doubt the performance is up to his standards.

That’s a good practice, and I think you’re right that is what they’re going for. I don’t think that means you shouldn’t consider them, but it does lower their value proposition as the bundle is the better deal.

I haven’t jumped yet, but the Proton suite is looking more and more appealing. I’ve been eyeing them as a Gmail replacement, but I’ve been happy with my VPN and password management providers. As this reduces the bundle makes more sense.

I wouldn’t count AMD out. The whole reason the Steam Deck is so successful is because of AMDs Mobile GPU, not necessarily it’s CPU. AMD has been able to make some very efficient GPUs lately, so I do belive with a couple new architectures and die shrinks we will get the generational leap they’re talking about.

ARM sounds nice, and it might one day be, but getting x86 translation working flawlessly WITHOUT performance/battery costs at the same time as proton is just asking a heck of a lot.

ARM does best when it’s doing ARM things. Since all games are built for x86 with nobody having any intention of compiling for native ARM, I don’t really see the point. The whole reason i like the Steam Deck is to play older back catalog games, and those are all x86. Apple pulls it off because they only translate x86 when they have to.

Yes. There are a couple different ways to do that.

That’s exactly what the GSMA is saying. Universal interoperability means not having to use Google’s encryption method, therefore iPhones and all other phones including customized Roms should work.

Now, they could absolutely get in the way of this, but I would hope that they would think it’s not worth the effort.

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.

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.