Yeah, I actually bought mine just before the VI models were available for purchase when I found out at 5 VI was not going to be produced. Its a big hole in the segment imo.

Sony Xperia 5 V

Great camera, small size, excellent battery life, removable storage, IP rated, and has a headphone jack. The only thing it is missing is a removable battery.

No it won’t. The problem causers can afford air conditioning.

No one makes a 65+" oled monitor so before anyone suggests “just buy a monitor” you can’t, I have looked.

Up until last year, I would have said get a good quality projector but even projectors have started getting infiltrated with smart “features” now.

Digital signage was also an option but oled options are basically non-existent and they often have matte screens that make the colors kind of mushy.

From what I have read online, the Sony tv offerings seem to be pretty unintrusive and don’t really care if you hook them up to the internet. The smart software is android tv based and can potentially be modded/stripped of google services. I have to do some more research though so don’t quote me on the above.

Our current TCL/Roku tv is dying and has turned out to be really bad smart/privacy wise and has gotten consistently worse performance wise over time. I’m currently evaluating options for its replacement and the Sony 65" oled is looking like the best one so far.

I just learned about the vpn thing a few days ago and its annoying.

John Dies at the End is a good b/c/campy movie. It is absolutely not 1:1 to the books (which are good) but its a weird fun movie.

Is it the flavor of the orange fruit or the flavor of the color orange? n o o n e k n o w s

If it was setup properly, you just us an if statement like, “if communication lost to control for t>5 seconds, release balast” or something like that. I had 0 issue with the controller being an ots consumer good. The rest was an idiotic design, I won’t even say it was engineered.

Its got some older fiberglass in the attic but it needs to be replaced as well since it is mildly compacted. Trees are in the plan too but that is waiting on the soil to recover a bit and the temps to drop off. Solar is a long term goal for cost and backup power but that may be a next house thing depending on how long we stay here.

I know where the losses are, the house and windows are from 1980 and there is a sunroom on the house that are just huge heat sinks. We are just waiting on funds to correct that stuff. We had some awesome shade trees but they were Ash trees and fell victim to beetles and disease so we had to have them removed so they didn’t fall on the house.

We added a radiant barrier when the roof was redone in 2016. The ceiling penetrations were all sealed and all the can lights were replaced with sealed LED fixtures.

The ac is a newer variable speed high efficiency one with new ducting that was installed 3 years ago and other than needing a minor room rebalance made a big different in our electric bill.

Between 14.7 and 15.4c / kwh. Gexa in Texas. My last bill was $285. We have a gas stove, water heater, furnace, and dryer. Our gas bill is about $50/mo. The lowest our electricity goes is about $90 in the winter.

It would be funnier if there wasn’t a sizeable percentage of people who support the cheetoh. There is still a real chance of that demented racist pos winning come november.

A lot of them are adding that stuff. I looked earlier today actually.

Basically the only option I have found for a non-connected/smart/spyware tv in the last few months are commercial displays. They must price in the ad revenue to the consumer stuff because the price of those commercial displays is ~4x.

It’s how you keep them passive while holding them.

I swam to the bottom of the first chute st Jacobs Well. The cenotes in Tulum Mexico were also pretty cool.

Google made lots of stuff that I used and enjoyed, then slowly made them worse or outright killed them off. Hangouts was imo the gold standard of simple chat programs, their podcast app was excellent and ad free. Both are now gone.

They also have been ceaselessly working to wring every last cent out of their products at the expense of the user experience. The products and services were fine and they were making loads of money even with adblocking and tracker blocking in place but they knew they could make more money and most people would just accept the inconvenience so they said fuck em and ran with it.

The awesome thing is that those marks can be counterfeit and you only know by looking up the number.

Is there a way to disable it on mobile? I have not seen anything yet.

Did you see any Bort license plates at the gift shop?