Yup, it’s a process of continually improving.

Battery backup is pretty far down my personal list of priorities, but it may be at the top for someone else.

We have underground cables in the neighborhood, and above ground cables along the main road. The city does a good job trimming the trees, so branches falling on lines isn’t really a thing. We’re also a desert climate, so there aren’t that many trees anyway.

That said, I grew up in the PNW (near Seattle) and we only lost power 2-3 times, though the outage was often for a few hours or even all night.

100v instead of 110v, or sometimes a surge of 129 for a brief period

Wow, that’s a crazy spike! I got a beefy surge protector, so I think I’m good, but I could see a UPS being worthwhile if your data is mission critical. Mine is just video games and some coding projects (which are backed up elsewhere anyway).

You can support content creators without streaming services. I buy and rip DVDs and Blurays, which directly supports them.

I don’t bother. The last power outage we’ve had was something like 10 years ago and lasted 30 min. Keeping my network up during that time was not a priority at all…

So I just put a surge protector in front of all my PCs and call it good.

I don’t remember the last time we had a power outage. I think it happened once like 10 years ago and lasted 30 min or so. The time before that was like 25 years ago, and I honestly don’t remember the details.

If we lose power, my network will be the last thing I’m concerned about…

I’m with you on the first two, but disagree on the last. To each their own I guess.

That’s his natural state.

If you’re hosting a website or a game server with a lot of active users around the clock, you might want to look into more professional hardware.

Honestly, that’s going to be pretty far down the road. Use what you’ve got, and fix issues as you go. Professional hardware is rarely needed, but it is pretty cool.

Or just… don’t. Self hosting video content isn’t that hard, then you have full control.

If you have some technical knowhow, you can configure your router to let things like Netflix through, but not the rest of the OS. Or you can try your luck with PiHole or similar.

You been getting that noise too?

TL; DR - No. But actually maybe, depending on what you’re looking for and what you can put up with.

Are you looking to access streaming services? Or are you okay with self-hosting?

The FOSS solutions that support streaming services are pretty janky IMO because they don’t have support from the service, so you’re probably better off hooking up a laptop running Linux and access stuff in a browser. I had Netflix working through Kodi on a Raspberry Pi, for example, but like I said, it was super janky. Maybe it’s better now, idk, but check out OpenELEC and Kodi. You’ll need some hardware to run it on.

If you can self-host your videos, Jellyfin is pretty great, and I think there are a couple more options. You’ll need to get the content yourself though and connect it to the TV somehow (e.g. the Jellyfin app if you have a smart TV).

But is it a lie?

Here’s what I’ve seen so far:

1. Rossmann reports on claims about Brother blocking third party cartridges on auto-updating firmware, and not providing older firmware
2. Brother denies intentionally blocking third party cartridges

There’s still the claim about the older firmware. If it was available, it would be pretty easy for customers to prove that a change in the firmware caused issues w/ third-party cartridges:

1. cartridge works fine
2. upgrade
3. cartridge doesn’t work
4. downgrade
5. cartridge works fine

That doesn’t prove it was intentional, it just proves it was the firmware update that caused the problem. If users want to stick w/ an older firmware, they should be allowed to, because Brother shouldn’t be able to decide what firmware they use.

The broader point here is certainly valid though, I’m just unconvinced that it’s applicable. Why should we trust Brother on this when they make the way to prove the issue nigh impossible?

Sure, but they don’t need to be proof of anything. Rossmann reported on some users (I think there were multiple?) claiming something to be the case, and provided one bit of verifiable evidence: no access to older firmware.

Brother claims they don’t intentionally brick printers that use third party cartridges, but that’s not verifiable. Brother also didn’t mention anything about why older firmware isn’t available. That’s a significant concern, since that would be a way for customers to prove that the firmware itself is the issue (printer works -> upgrade -> broken -> downgrade -> printer works).

I think it’s 100% fair to raise the concern. It’s certainly not enough to warrant any kind of legal action, but it is enough for customers to investigate the claims for themselves. I think that’s worthwhile.

My main concern here is that they (allegedly, I haven’t confirmed) remove old firmware. If customers want to try out older firmware to see if that fixes their problem, they should be able to. It doesn’t cost much, so why not?

Yeah, voiding a warranty because the customer used something that could cause irreversible damage makes sense. Removing access to older firmware does not.

Mistakes happen. He comes with receipts, and sometimes those receipts are misleading. I don’t think he’s being intentionally wrong here, he took information from various communities reporting negative experiences, and extrapolated that there may be an issue there.

And it’s not clear he’s actually wrong. We have the company claiming they don’t do it, but then what about the accusation that older firmware isn’t available? Surely if they don’t intend to break third party cartridges, they’d keep those available for people who want to downgrade. Maybe there’s a good reason for that too, idk, but my point is that Brother could be hiding something, it’s still unclear and we need more data.

he lives on outrage and the money it generates

I don’t think he makes much from YouTube, and he’s said as much. He just uses it as a platform to push pro-Right to Repair sentiment, and he’s right way more often than he’s not (with a healthy dose of hyperbole most of the time). Any miss here is because he didn’t bother doing a bunch of research, because he doesn’t really have an incentive to do so.

He owns a repair business and works for FUTO, that’s where his money comes from.

Hey, this is a Python project, use underscores.

It is Latvian. It’s also Russian. It’s also Singaporean. It just depends on who you ask and how much you want to look into it.

But yeah, that’s a large part of why I use Collabora instead of OnlyOffice, it’s just a lot less sketchy.

Its distrubuted so you don’t lose your content if something happens to one location.

Right, but you’ll lose your content if enough people lose interest in the network. That’s absolutely a thing in the crypto world where things move fast. Relying on the network effect to secure your data sounds… sketchy.

which is needed in some form if it’s distrubuted

Sure, and the easiest way to do that is w/ public key cryptography, sign your encrypted stuff and you can always prove ownership. A blockchain gives you that, but it’s hardly necessary to have consensus around that.

include credit cards

It probably uses some cryptocurrency. Lots of cryptocurrencies work well for micropayments (e.g. LiteCoin, Monero, or even Bitcoin w/ the lightning network).

I just don’t see the need for a blockchain here. Bittorrent has been doing content-based addressing for ages, and it doesn’t need a blockchain, you just ask for the data at a given hash and you get it. Or you can use IPFS. If everything is properly encrypted, you’re good to go!

What the blockchain does offer is a way to pay for storage. So the more you pay, the more likely your data is to still be there after some time as people leave the network and nodes drop and whatnot. All in all though, it seems really risky to put anything important on it, and you might as well just pay for a storage provider from a legal entity that you can sue if things go poorly (and maybe two, so you’re not screwed if goes bankrupt or whatever).