paulcdb

I think people have lost the disconnect.

Yet, it makes BILLIONS and companies spend billions on it,

The question is where does THAT money come from? And then ask yourself why everything is so expensive… because ad money isn’t plucked out of thin air. It’s added to pretty much EVERY product you buy.

So until people boycott ad products more than buying then nothing will change and everything will just keep getting more expensive as they all outbid each other for ad space because they don’t care how much it costs them because it’ll always get taken out of your wallet!

I’ve never been against most micro transactions. At least runscape have monthly costs so helping to cover them is ok.

The thing I take issue with in all games is they aren’t ‘micro’ to begin with. 99p for some gimmicky furniture/clothing and i’d probably buy it to support the game. The moment you start charging £5+, thats when i’m out. And sadly thats the problem with all games, greed! No amount of profit is ever enough and you’d think more people would vote with there wallet but here we are! 🤦‍♂️🙄

Its why i quit eve online, think i still have a pilot with like a trillion isk but they got greedy and went down the micro transaction route on top of nerfing all that was unique about the because it annoyed a few rich vocal players. Should probably login and take an expensive ship into lowsec for shits n giggles! 😂

Well, in case anyone thinks of torturing yourself building doing, don’t use SD cards!

Set everything up but there was a little stuttering and no amount of offloading to ram eliminated it so now testing an NVME drive thru USB. Again, not ideal but I’m not in a rush to pay inflated PI prices so while I have a 2TB NVME hat, I don’t have a PI 5 so… make do where you can! lol

My plan was to get a 2-3TB but thought it’d be too much so tried shoehorning it before remembering I already had the drive! 🤦‍♂️ 🤨

I run my own unifi setup so network stuff spread over a number of devices so don’t really have much of an issue. The zero’s only do audio streaming though on minimal os that can’t phone home or update and they seem ok so far but atm i’m still breaking stuff while i tweak stuff, lol

But when i leave them alone to play they seem to do fine. I mean they should all cache a few seconds of audio so drop outs aren’t an issue, the problem with most wifi is likely too many devices on 1 AP or poor reconnect coding which unifi seem pretty good with. 😎

I’m in the process of building a multi-room audio system atm.

Snapserver/snapclients for the streaming audio, 1 audio stream with mpd to be set as 24/7 music, 1 for podcasts, 1 for alerts.

Alerts interrupt both streams to play the alerts. PI 4 for the main audio stack, first speaker, 2nd PI zero w/pirate radio hat/2 5w speakers for the portable speaker that should run most of the day on battery.

PodFetch gets the podcasts, script creates a playlist each day to play the oldest podcasts first. Although kinda surprised PodFetch doesn’t seem to let me do this.

Once it all runs smoothly i’ll put PI Zero W’s/Speakers in the other room and then going to build a 7” esp32 display to allow selecting which speaker plays which stream. Maybe later do something where each stream plays a different genre.

It sounds a bit like they can just magically connect via telepathy to their home base if you phrase it like that.

Its not that difficult, scan for open wifi, if detected, connect, phone home to spy central.

The more sinister, each tv that successfully detects a connection to spy central broadcasts a 2nd wifi that the tv can scan for and connect similar to mesh networking.

There are tons of reasons to want a network connected monitor, the problem is no-one seems interested in producing one without the spyware. I’d love a 40”+ device that supported rtsp, etc but until enough people step up and boycott all this spy crap it’ll never be worth producing better devices. 😞

does the system wait for electricity to flow in before it flows out?

Basically, yes!

If you unplug the micro inverter, it’ll cut the power within milliseconds of it detecting no electric signal. AC alternates around 50hz in the UK which the inverter detects and starts generating. Once it losses the hz signal it stops.

I really question the ROI on this sort of thing

Depends if you do it right.

In the UK, you can buy 2 ~400w for about 140, then £100 for the micro inverter. I have 4 295w panels mounted on a flat, raised frame on the side of a shed and they cut my bill from £150 down to around £70 last month. So yes, they can pay for themselves pretty quickly.

And once they’re paid for, it’s all free electric! And we’re now seeing batteries with plugin style so you can store the electric to run white goods, saving even more, etc.

Also, unless you get a solar tracker, “optimally aligned” isn’t really possible. The sun moves inclination every day depending on where you live. Here in summer you’d want a more horizontal position, in winter a more vertical position which is why solar fencing is actually becoming a thing because they generate more in winter.

It really amazes me that people don’t understand this when governments have done it time and time again but hey ho, hopefully I’m old enough that I might at least die before the worst hits because clearly people are to ignorant to do anything to stop it! 😳

And what do you do when its a requirement to buy food, submit tax returns, get healthcare?

This is the problem people don’t understand. We have the same issue now in the UK. People think a voluntary system is easy ro just ignore until everything you rely and need forces you to starve or submit.

And its not going to stop at just age verification, it’ll continue until all you get to enjoy is maybe a loaf of bread, and some pond water! 🤦‍♂️

How do i get in on this?

I feel if they marketed AI better they’d get far more subscribers. Right now they seem to be focused on ripping off businesses which seems very short sighted.

I’ll offer all my marketing insights for just 10% of all new subscribers under my marketing campaign! 😎

Its not hard to see what they’re doing…

First they add negative comments, then follow up with a positive post to seem like they’re being Impartial!

It’d be interesting to see how often the negative comments are put before the positive comments though because i’d guess it’s a lot higher than the reverse!