Why do I have the feeling that I will end up in that nightmare with my privacy focused and ad-free Browser setup. I already end up in captcha hell too often because of it.

Exactly! I just don’t want constantly have to fight my devices. It tires me out and sucks the fun out of them.

I’m still agonizing over it. However, I stopped caring as much and decided to focus on picture and capabilities. I’ll use it as dumb tv and try to beat whatever streamer will follow my shield into submission. Saves me getting a new dac for my hifi as well as none of my possible choices seem to support usb audio passthrough.

My biggest problem right now is that I always end up in the premium oled section ;)

I think it is a drama, because it’s not just the tvs doing that. Almost everything is getting more and more annoying and restricting. Things are starting to constantly nag you one way or another, shove things into your face you don’t care about, take away functionality and generally worsen user experience… It’s just mentally exhausting.

And yes I know you can reliably turn that data collection stuff off (at least in the EU) but hopping through those hoops each and every time for each and every device and service can and will hollow out your resolve (and you have to find all the buried options every time…). Thats how you get masses that just don’t care anymore.

I’m in the market for a new tv and all this crap just makes me want to scream in frustration. But prolonging the decision will just make it even worse.

On top of that my 2017 shield is starting to show its age and there is really no comparable 4k (streaming) alternative thats not a security risk. I feel more and more pushed towards piracy, so that I can use my linux box and decide how and where to watch content. I hate it…

Aw shit! Thought there was nothing left that would keep me from completely ditching windows (htpc, pihole, homelab … everything but my workstation is Linux already). I recently got a headset tho and quite enjoy it… What a bummer :(

Tell that to my IBM 10GB 10.000 RPM U2W SCSI from back then. To this day I have never witnessed a noisier harddrive… But that PC was pretty epic, including the biggest mf of a mainboard I ever had (the SCSI controller was onboard).

Yeah, the tinkering is part of the fun. Right now I’m still perfecting my OMV NAS/Homelab but after that I might look into custom routers. I’m still hoping to get fibre in the foreseeable future, but right now it’s not looking too good in my area…

That’s the problem with my router… I can’t. I’ve seen it done with OpenWRT but I chose the wrong model for that…

I wanted to do that as well, but I can’t redirect outgoing traffic on my router, just block it entirely. Sadly it was the only device of that series not supporting OpenWRT (sigh)… Next one will either have to support that or be a DIY project… Have been starting to self host my stuff already and I’m not planning to stop there!

Doesn’t help if the device has a baked in DNS address and just ignores your settings tho. Amazon and Google devices seem prone to that. After blocking everything on the common DNS ports except the PiHole, some of my devices have been acting kinda sluggish.

Mine was a first generation one and as it was dying the first articles popped up about how bad they and the following generation were failing. Didn’t bother with warranty… wasn’t fond of gambling with the failure rates. Irony was that I named the drive Deathstar when I got it (I have the long standing tradition naming my drives after space ships).

Gonna remember that for the next drive failure. Isn’t condensation a problem with that trick?

You might want to look at snapraid. I’ve recently overhauled my own NAS and love it. It is snapshot based (so not perfect safety) but it is highly configurable and provides parity and scrubbing for corruption even with a JBOD array.

The only one that didn’t die because of my own fault (two externals and a laptop one sigh), was one of the infamous IBM/Hitachi Deathstars.

I use Syncthing to automatically keep the database up to date and usable on all of my devices. Autotype on PC is such a nice feature I wouldn’t want to miss (and it increases security on top of that).

That’s the same company that has this on their ‘about us’ page:

“Haier company history: since its creation in 1984, the company has been run by the same CEO, Zhang Ruimin, who has always had a clear objective: to build high-quality, reliable products. Within the first year of his appointment, in response to complaints about faulty fridges, his radical action of smashing the fridges with a hammer in front of employees has been recognised as an important cornerstone of the brand.”

I call hypocrisy!

And of course they won’t compete over which service provides the better app\features\catalogue but will try the same exclusivity game the video streaming platforms started… No thanks!

With Firefox on mobile I can use my personal uBlock filter list to deshitify the search results. That alone makes it superior to Revanced for me (still use it from time to time, but every time I search for something I feel the urge to puke).

And then everything comes in separate packages with different parcel services anyway… Amazon really has become shit.