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 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.

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.

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.

Fair point, I can only speak directly about my local experience. Maybe I am too idealistic in thinking that you can partially teach or learn this kind of stuff away.

Realistically, the standard of living has been falling for a while. I work the same type of job my parents did but in real money terms, I bring home less than they did at my age. People look for someone to blame for that kind of stuff and will listen when someone validates their feelings then points a finger and says “they fucked you but I’ll help” even if they are problimatic.

Imo, a big part of what I am seeing now stems from a lack of proper history and or civics education. I went to school in Texas, my whole education up to college we were taught that the U.S. was this beacon of good and positive things, there was an intentional effort to misrepresent Texas and U.S. history in a way that minimized slavery, racisim, and the genocide of the native population of the U.S. In short, it was a bullshit whitewashed fantasy novel. We should be saying:

“The United States did some really horrifying shit in the distant past, the recent past, and is still doing it today, those are the facts. We should try to do better than we are doing, and part of that is recognizing where we as a country came from, good and bad, so we can do better. You students are not bad people by default for living or being born here but you need to realize that fetishizing this country as the greatest country in the world and intrinsically linking YOUR identity to that of a false vision of a flawed nation, is hugely problimatic, especially when you base that identiy on the ideals of manifest destiny or other weird and/or rascist ideals.”

When you separate the current individual from the history, and say this was/is the U.S. but it doesn’t have to be YOU or the U.S. of the future, people are more receptive of hearing the bad. That is not to say we should minimize the awful things in our past and current, just that if a young kid is shamed, intentionally or unintentionally, they are more likely to fall into fringe and radical ideas and seek validation for them.

That doesn’t help the brainwashed/backwards people who want to revert the country to the good ole days though.

The other thing that was really fundamental for me from good history teachers and professors was the way that they linked historical events with current events. That has been explicitly outlawed in Florida iirc and likely Texas too, this state does so much backwards shit though, I can’t keep up with all of it.

We probably also need to remind people that facts don’t care about their feelings, there isn’t a such thing as alternative history, and that’s just the end of it, there is no room for denying the horrors of slavery, the Holocaust, or any of the other numerous fucked up things in history. They happened, we have to remember that to prevent it from happening again.

Just to add on, I am using an Xperia 5V on tmo us with no issues either.

Derp, I missed the “media” in the title… My bad Its been a morning already.

Nestlé

Monsanto

Does the tv tuner and tv guide work? I tried a few alternatives a few years back and they were garbo. Wmc always just worked.

Windows media center alone is worth resurrecting win7 for.