plenipotentprotogod
@plenipotentprotogod@lemmy.world
- Comment on Anon buys a TV without researching 4 weeks ago:
I’ve been trying to solve this problem for a while. I’ve not yet found a really good solution, but I can summarize what I’ve learned, partly for your information but mostly in the hope that Cunningham’s law will finally put me out of my misery. Here are suggestions I’ve seen, organized roughly along some axis of easiest/most popular to hardest/least popular:
- Get an NVIDIA Shield TV. This isn’t really what you asked for. It’s just a commercial smart TV box, but it’s generally considered the least annoying and highest quality of the lot. The unfortunate fact is that when dealing with DRM controlled media, having a big company like NVIDIA behind the product goes a long towards simplifying things.
- Install Kodi. Kodi (formerly XBMC) is the elder statesman of the FOSS smart TV world. You can run it on just about any hardware, including a SBC like a Raspberry Pi. You can even get it pre-bundled with a Linux OS like LibreELEC. It’s got a clean interface and good community support, BUT it’s primarily oriented towards viewing media from your own collection. If you’re a person who consumes content via streaming services then you’re gonna have a rough time. Apps (mostly unofficial / community made) do exist for many popular services, but installing them can be a pain, and you may have trouble streaming in high quality (DRM issues).
- KDE Plasma. Great concept, not maintained any more. See my comment here for all the gory details.
- Clean build of Android TV. I’m not aware of any major independent android distributions (Lineage, Graphene) providing official builds of the android TV operating system, but this site seems to provide relatively consistent lineage OS based releases. You can run them on a Raspberry Pi. I haven’t done this yet, but it will probably be the next thing I try.
- EarlGrey TV. This one is a deep cut. EarlGrey TV mad a very small splash in the FOSS news cycle a couple of months ago. The concept is simple: install your favorite Linux distro and configure it to boot directly into a browser displaying a static webpage with links to your favorite streaming services and/or local media folders. The implementation is extremely basic, but the upside is that it’s easy to tinker with if you’re so-inclined.
As for remotes, there are some decent options on Amazon that connect via bluetooth or a USB dongle and basically act like a mouse and/or keyboard packaged in a remote control form factor. I bought this one a while ago and it’s been fine. Nothing special, but fine. The play/pause/volume buttons on the front read on the receiving end like the media buttons on a keyboard. The air-mouse functionality isn’t for everyone, but this model is one of the few with a little track pad on the back if you prefer using that. Honestly just get anything with a full keyboard. So much easier than using the arrow keys to click-click-click your way through an onscreen keyboard.
- Comment on Evan Almighty and flushed away 2 months ago:
For me, probably Big Fat Liar. “Starring” Frankie Muniz and Amanda Bynes, but the real highlight is Paul Giamatti as the villain chewing the absolute shit out of the scenery for an hour and a half as the kids subject his character to a series of increasingly elaborate pranks.
- Comment on Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Lower Decks | 5x03 "The Best Exotic Nanite Hotel" 3 months ago:
Oh no! It’s a ~1~ ~2~ ~3~ ~4~ ~5~ ~6~ ~…
………………~ ICOSAHEDRON!Every episode seems to have one joke that really gets me. In this one it was Mariner stopping mid exclamation to make sure she correctly named the platonic solid that’s about to eat her.
- Comment on BIG GEOLOGY 1 year ago:
- Comment on And this is why I no longer have cable. 1 year ago:
Youtube in has done a remarkably good job carrying the torch of high quality documentaries and educational content beyond the realm of traditional media. Science, art, technology, history. It’s all there, and much of it meets or exceeds the quality of anything the old guard of cable TV channels ever managed to produce.
I’m actually only now realizing that some of the most established channels have been reaching a wide audience with consistent and high quality content for the better part of a decade, and yet I can’t think of any who have successfully broken into more “traditional” media such as television or or even streaming services. That seems exceptionally strange to me. I mean, last month there were headlines about Netflix giving $55 million to an unproven director who proceeded to blow it all on expensive cars instead of filming the show he was hired to make. Who decides to hire that guy over any number of youtube creators who have spent the last ten years cranking out a short video a week along with occasional longer form projects, all with a small crew on a shoestring budget. I can imagine three possible reasons for this. No idea which one(s) could be the real reason, or if there’s something else entirely going on.
- Hollywood^1^ is so insular that they don’t even realize these people exist.
- Hollywood is so stuck in its ways that they refuse to believe these people could be successful running a larger production.
- Offers have been made, but those offers have been so restrictive that any number of youtubers have turned them down despite, one would assume, a large amount of money being on the table if they go along with it.
That last one in particular seems unlikely, but I do recall that the popular Primitive Technology channel went quiet for a year or more before abruptly coming back to life. Rumors swirled that he had been hired to turn the concept into a TV show, but the production company kept trying to change things and he eventually gave up and went back to doing it his way on youtube.
^1^ used here as shorthand for the more corporate and structured entertainment industry at large.
- Comment on The History Channel, now in the fantasy section. 1 year ago:
I read something a while ago that really put all these “ancient mysteries” into perspective: Modern humans with modern brains have existed in our current form for at least tens of thousands of years. During that time we’ve seen huge advancement as a society thanks to the accumulation and sharing of scientific knowledge, but any individual human today has no brainpower than one living 10,000 years ago.
In other words, if we can sit around today and brainstorm a dozen different ways to build a pyramid with nothing but ramps and levers, there’s absolutely no reason to think that the smartest builders in ancient egypt couldn’t have come up withl the same ideas or better.
Attributing these achievements to aliens, or divine intervention, or anything other than raw human ingenuity is a disservice to our ancestors.