It was a few years back, but after it hit ChromeOS EOL I’m pretty sure it just got some KDE distro; I don’t think I even used LXDE. Didn’t need to do much.

I was mostly using it for web browsing, forums, spreadsheets, documentation etc. Nothing particularly strenuous.

I did have one really fun time of modifying PDF engineering drawings by opening them in Libre Office Draw which it handled kinda OK.

It did get a 240GB SSD but everything else was soldered.

I got a surprising amount of use out of a similarly configured C720 as a general purpose portable machine.

Waze is of course owned by Google…

It’s pretty common to own a domain but not actually host the email server; doing on-premises email is a security PITA and most providers simply blacklist large swathes of residential and leasable (e.g. VPS) IPs.

Unfortunately, if you get someone else to host your email, they often charge by the account, not by the domain. Setting up a new mailbox is therefore irritatingly expensive.

A catch-all email works well, though, and is free from most of the hosting providers. Downside is you get spam…

Jane@JaneDoe certainly seems more common than mail@JaneDoe.

I’ve certainly never heard of a chicken ranch, but plenty of chicken farms.

Yeah, I have no idea either, but it’s been around for more than a decade so it should be fairly easy to find a library that duplicates it.

I would be wary of AI-based solutions. There’s a risk of it picking up e.g. satirical/spoof sponsorships as actual ads, and perhaps not detecting unusual ads.

I’m slightly terrified of the day someone starts getting AI to reword and read out individual ads for each stream.

Indeed, the US has a major lack of fixed-line competition and lack of regulation. Starlink doesn’t really help with that, at least in urban areas.

I’m not familiar with the wireless situation. You’re saying that there are significant coverage discrepancies to the point where many if not most consumers are choosing a carrier based on coverage, not pricing/plans? There’s always areas with unequal coverage but I didn’t think they were that common.

Here in NZ, the state funding for very rural 4G broadband (Rural Broadband Initiative 2 / RBI-2) went to the Rural Connectivity Group, setting up sites used and owned equally by all three providers, to reduce costs where capacity isn’t the constraint.

You definitely would have legal issues redistributing the ad-free version.

Sponsor block works partly because it simply automates something the user is already allowed to do - it’s legally very safe. No modification or distribution of the source file is necessary, only some metadata.

It’s an approach that works against the one-off sponsorships read by the actual performers, but isn’t effective against ads dynamically inserted by the download server.

One option could be to crowdsource a database of signatures of audio ads, Shazam style. This could then be used by software controlled by the user (c.f. SB browser extension) to detect the ads and skip them, or have the software cut the ads out of files the user had legitimately downloaded, regardless of which podcast or where the ads appear.

Sponsorships by the actual content producers could then be handled in the same way as SB: check the podcast ID and total track length is right (to ensure no ads were missed) then flag and skip certain timestamps.

Starlink plugs the rural coverage gaps, but in urban areas it’s still more expensive than either conventional fixed-line connections or wireless (4G/5G) broadband. Even in rural areas, while it’s the best option, it’s rarely the cheapest, at least in the NZ market I’m familiar with.

It also doesn’t have the bandwidth per square kilometre/mile to serve urban areas well, and it’s probably never going to work in apartment buildings.

This is a funding/subsidisation issue, not so much a technical one. I imagine Starlink connections are eligible for the current subsidy, but in most cases it’s probably going to conventional DSL/cable/fibre/4G connections.

I expect they are talking about the ‘irrevocably’ part, as one of the core tenets of GDPR is that consent can be withdrawn.

I couldn’t say whether or not that applies here.

Aggregate bandwidth now rivals or slightly exceeds gigabit wired connections.

Where that aggregate bandwidth is shared amongst large numbers of users, bandwidth per user can suffer dramatically.

Low density areas may be fine, but cube farms are an issue especially when staff are doing data intensive or latency sensitive tasks.

If you’re giving employees docking stations for their laptops, running ethernet to those docking stations is a no-brainer.

Moving most of the traffic to wired connections frees up spectrum/bandwidth for situations that do need to be wireless.

Secondhand stuff can be really cheap if you know where to look, but the drawbacks are usually power and noise.

I wouldn’t start worrying until 50k+ hours.

There should be a way to view SMART info and that includes an hour count.

Bear in mind many models also have voice recognition, and the Bluetooth can potentially pick up the MAC on every phone in the car.

Biggest question to me is why you need an IP in the first place?

It honestly seems like these are questions that don’t need asking.

You’ve provided no context about what you like and don’t like, so you won’t get any kind of a personalised response.

What are you expecting to get out of asking this as a question, that you don’t get by simply going to Rotten Tomatoes?

This would be a waste of commenters’ time, and that’s why it’s being downvoted.

It’s most likely that it’s related to the original manufacturing. These will be machine wave-soldered, not hand soldered, and having quality vary across the board isn’t impossible if the setup/operators were less than ideal.

Local AdBlock (UBlock Origin) should be fine for anything browser based. It’s really only consoles and smart TVs, where you ‘own’ the hardware but have no control over the software.

They should for most purposes. YT has started to try and make it much harder to block their ads, which I think has made Pihole ineffective for that.

Connecting the Pi up to the TV and using it as the player should be an option.

You’re also potentially blocking a seat that could be used by a paying passenger, and the operator will statistically run more/longer trains at higher cost to cope with increased demand.