I was not referring to smart shuffle.

basically just full of ads disguised as recommendations

Sell ad-free subscription. Include advertising anyway but make up another name. PROFIT!

I haven’t tried to set it up, but It looks like Tidal Connect is alive again and there are several ways to use on Linux, including WINE. When my Spotify subscription runs out I’m going to give it a try.

I looked at a tital a year or so ago and it wouldn’t work for me. Will look again, maybe they’ve improved it.

My “Made for You” has occasional popular artists but most of the songs are from people who are relatively unknown. The only way I listened to a podcast is if I clicked on one by accident.

Even the Spotify shuffle feature is built to maximize profits and to hell with the user experience.

I have almost 2 thousand songs on one playlist and Spotify plays the songs from minor artists (who don’t get paid much) constantly, while songs from major artists (who get paid a lot more) are never played. I’m actually surprised to hear those songs when shuffle is turned off.

They’ve also recently added “Video Episodes for You” to my home screen with no way to turn it off. It takes up 1/3 of the screen with helpful titles like “Session 105, Hillory Duff”, and “Reinvent Life from Rock Bottom and Become Unrecognizable.” I have never watched a video or listened to a podcast on Spotify.

When it comes to enshittification Spotify’s got it down.

Maybe someday one of the other music services will create something like Spotify Connect.

In the past few months our electric rates went up 14.5%, our heath care costs more than tripled, and grocery and necessities prices have shot way up.

Guess what we’re cutting back on? The kind of stuff Amazon sells.

We’re just starting to see the Trump economy.

I have both running right now. Mint on my laptop and media server. Debian only because it was previously required for Home Assistant support, (support which they’ve now dropped.)

Both distros are extraordinarily reliable, but I much prefer Mint. Debian is more focused on security and some of the design choices focus on that over usability. My LAN is completely locked down and only accessible via Wireguard and the physical systems are only accessible to me, so IDK how much better security it provides in my situation. Mint has every package I’ve ever needed prebuilt while I have had to build some packages for Debian.

Bottom line: As much as I like Mint, for me there is not sufficient reason to switch from Debian to Mint or visa-versa, but if I were installing from scratch I’d choose Mint every time.

Probably is an accurately limit as you say.

I just looked and my LG washer pulls 7 watts when not powered on and my Onkyo receiver pulls 2 watts in standby. I save a whopping $19 dollars a year by powering off the washer completely via automation when it’s not in use. Not much, but better in my pocket than the electric company’s. (I have a sensor on the laundry room door that turns the washer plug on when the door’s opened.)

You could work around it by sending an immediate notification when the washer starts. If you don’t get one you know your washer’s messing with you again.

Edit: Just looked again and after a few minutes the washer’s down to 10MA in standby. Power button on pushes it to 7W. Not saving any electricity after all, but hopefully the washer will last a bit bit longer if it’s powered completely off between uses.

idle wattage is measured as 0.0

That’s odd. I have multiple Third Reality smart plugs and they measure at least a couple of watts of standby power for everything that has a power button.

We occasionally forget to press the washer’s “start” button and only realize it an hour or more later. An automation sending a notification when the washer’s powered on (with a low current reading for a few minutes) but not started solved that. A “Cycle Complete” notification is sent when the current goes from > 1A back down into the low MA range when the wash is complete.

If you stick a Zigbee vibration sensor to the dryer you can set up the same “cycle complete” notifications even if the dryer’s 220V.

Shelly makes tiny smart switch modules that fit inside any switch box and are cheap enough to put at each door. In combination with the Bermuda BLE Trilateration integration they can detect where in (or near) the house you are. Ours are used to turn on lights and disable camera alerts before they can trigger. It’s amazing to have the inside and outside lights come on when we’re 30’+ away and haven’t even stopped the car or when we get close to the house after taking a walk. They provide some great functionality in addition to BLE for less than $20.

Nomachine with local & Wireguard access only.

I think Anydesk can be trusted as much as any company. They did notify users when a breach occurred a couple of years ago. By contrast Teamviewer was hacked and blamed their customer’s “password reuse” for years before finally admitting they had a breach. The company cannot be trusted.

I use Anydesk occasionally to help friends but never leave it running if it’s not actively in use.

The battery limiting capability was an absolute requirement and I also ended up with a Dell. Having a display and keyboard always available is also great for some tasks.

I had a similar failure while I was out of the country for a month. My Raspberry Pi didn’t come back after a power blink. Home Assistant, Wireguard tunnels, security cameras, Jellyfin, Syncthing backup and DNS all failed until I returned. After looking at possible solutions I ruled out buying redundant hardware because of the cost, and more importantly the time and complexity of implementing and maintaining everything.

Instead I bought a small, relatively inexpensive laptop and a router with plenty of processing power and memory. I moved my Wireguard endpoints, DHCP and DNS server to the router and everything else to the laptop and disconnected my UPS completely.

If the router is up, WG connectivity, DNS, DHCP and wifi are up. The router does reset on power failure, but my ISP has no local power backup so Internet is out until power is restored anyway.

This laptop loafs along at 10 watts and costs about $2 per month to operate despite our high electric rates. My old UPS drew 75 watts most of the time even when there was nothing plugged in and cost more than $16/month to run. The laptop’s battery is firmware limited to a 70% charge so the battery will last years without degrading and making other battery issues unlikely. It provides 7 hours of operation if power fails compared to an optimistic 20 minutes for the UPS. Power blinks (and there have been plenty) have no effect on the laptop at all.

I’ve been happy with this configuration. It has worked flawlessly for almost 2 years.

In keeping with Musk’s Swasticar theme, the new Model S will be the called the SS.

Bought a Pixel 10. After the last few days I’d only give it a C- review. Google uses their customers as beta testers and leaves all kinds of ridiculous bugs for their customers to deal with. The hardware is nice overall, but Android 16 needs lots of work. This is probably the reason so many Google employees refuse to use Android and buy Iphones.

The bugs Google has knowingly released include a broken volume control that requires the screen to be unlocked and the application be open for some applications, sleep schedules not working reliably, “helpful” nags ignoring the sleep schedule and waking me up in the middle of the night. Last night it was their “Find Hub” (renamed from “Find my Device” for some reason) waking me at 1:30AM to let me know I should set it up. A week ago it was my phone warning me at 3AM that Location was turned off and Accident Detection would not work. There have been more and right now I’m wishing I bought an Iphone. Google doesn’t deserve our business.

I bought a OP 9Pro just before Oppo decimated the company. They moved from Oxygen OS to a poorly camouflaged version of Oppo Color OS and stripped out some of the features that made Oneplus what it was. Oppo also almost completely stopped fixing bugs, even some really serious ones that had been long documented. I recently bought a new phone and didn’t even consider Oneplus Oppo.

It seems to me that the only reason Oppo would do this is to preserve the revenue they get from selling customer data that should remain private. Otherwise why would Oppo care what OS people run on their hardware?

I’m no security expert and my biggest concern with self-hosting is making a configuration error in the OS or some app, or missing a critical update that allows someone access to my personal data. In order to reduce the attack surface and management requirements my network can only be accessed through Wireguard. The random open WG ports do not respond to unauthenticated packets, so someone would have to have access to my configurations to be able to get past my firewall, at least in the absence of some yet unknown vulnerability. Of course that won’t prevent mistakes being made on PCs (especially Windows) but it’s one less thing to worry about.

Wireguard clients on our PCs and phones make connecting and accessing media and files a breeze. There are no third parties involved so enshittification by some company’s security breach or sudden monthly fee isn’t going to happen.

I have a Bosgame mini-PC that is completely inaudible unless you get close to it. Power draw is <15 watts under light load meaning that even with the high electricity rates where I live it costs less than $3.50 a month to operate. I’ve avoided hard drives because I don’t want to listen to them whine, so no comment there. Two simultaneous 1080p Jellyfin streams increase CPU utilization by less than a percent and it still is under 5% with a couple of other Docker containers running.

Good luck setting everything up to your liking.

Let’s give credit where credit is due - This is what the GOP wants. They have complete ownership of ICE’s terrorist activities and applaud what is being done.

Republicans could reign this in in a couple of days if ICE didn’t have their blessing. The same is true if our corporate/billionaire media began referring to what’s happening as GOP, rather than ICE activity.