In my experience the only thing we buy regularly that hasn’t substantially increased in price in the last year is gasoline. Just about ever kind of food is substantially more, electricity has gone way up. Clothing prices are significantly more and as everyone who’s renting knows, rents have gone nuts. There is no way we’re spending 3% more than a year ago, it’s more like 8%.

Bottom line, I don’t believe anything that’s coming out of a Trump controlled agency is remotely accurate. He is already claiming prices are down by 300%-3,000%. I’m just waiting for him to say, “There’s no inflation if we don’t count the prices that have gone up.”

There is only one Bureau of Labor Statistics in the world and it’s in the US.

I’m apparently living on another planet.

Google Safe Browsing looks to be have been built without consideration for open-source or self-hosted software.

IMO Google Save Browsing was built with consideration for open-source and self-hosted software, but it has nothing to do with user safety, just like blocking Android apps from 3rd party sites has nothing to do with user safety. The harder they make it to move away from their products by making using alternatives difficult, the more money they make and money is now the only objective. Even if this only adds a fraction of a fraction of a percent to their profit it’s something Google will implement.

The old social contract of businesses being of benefit to the community as a whole in addition to making a profit is long gone.

Yes. I had them blocked via my firewall because of the constant traffic they generated and blocking Internet access causes constant bulb resets. The resets are known to TP-Link and according to a couple of sources they created a private firmware release that fixed it. TP-Link failed to publically release that firmware, and last time I checked deny it ever existed. I replaced the bulbs with 3rd Reality Zigbee bulbs that work perfectly.

I didn’t get that far. When they demanded I log in I just removed it. Jellyfin is working OK without having to figure out how to bypass defaults.

When I was in the market for bulbs Hue was just starting that BS. They lost that sale and I’ve been in the process of removing network access for everything possible and severely restricting it when not. My old Honeywell wifi thermostat is gone, smart appliances are disconnected from wifi, and TVs are blocked by my firewall when they aren’t actually being used. Next up, Graphene OS.

Sometimes I’d like to move to a tropical island with no news or Internet at all.

This is why it’s a great idea to refuse to install everything that’s possible, including smart switches, cameras, lights etc. that rely on the good will of some company to keep running.

Honeywell wifi thermostats worked great until they didn’t. Now their servers are often slow or down. TCP-Link smart bulbs reset regularly if their Internet access is blocked because TCP-Link desperately needs to keep track of when everyone’s lights are on and off. Plex wants us to log into their servers to watch content we’re hosting ourselves. Too bad if their servers are down. Security camera companies have been disabling local storage options without warning for years.

Logitech actually planned to introduce a subscription mouse. Hopefully at some point people will get sick of this shit, refuse to put up with it and their sales will tank.

I had something similar happen with Google a few years ago. Even though I had my password and access to my email they decided I was trying to hack my own account and locked me out. Like you I immediately started to look for other solutions.

Syncthing file sharing is really easy to install and use. There are no ports to configure on your router and everything is encrypted in transit. I have my phone’s DCIM directory set up to sync to my home server and PC so new photos are backed up and available everywhere in a few seconds. I installed Syncthing intending to move to another solution eventually, but it works so well (aside from one or two files that occasionally don’t sync) that I’ve just stuck with it.

For passwords Keepass & KeepassXC work really well on just about every platform. I share the password file using Syncthing and in years of doing this I’ve never had a problem that I didn’t cause myself and those were minor.

You can get both of these up and running with very little effort and quickly limit your reliance on Google, then move to other solutions if you find they’d work better for you.

Well folks, the brainwashing’s complete on this one.

According to you an ad is not an ad when you or Amazon use the word “promotion”.

I’m curious, in your opinion when does something like this become an ad? Is it an ad if they they pop it up mid-show every hour? No? How about every 10 minutes, is it an ad then?

Marketing departments attempt to bend reality and public opinion to benefit their company. Their efforts have obviously been effective with at least one commenter on Lemmy.

Gotta call BS. I didn’t go anywhere and happen across a promotion, Amazon pushed this ad into my home, despite charging me a monthly fee not to do so. Why not go all the way and call it a public service announcement?

This is just like cold calls from local contracting companies claiming that they aren’t violating the “Do Not Call” list because they aren’t actually selling new windows, just informing the public of their new promotion.

Yup.

Amazon: "Oh, we didn’t mean those ads. That’s clearly stated on page 112 of the user agreement under “Enshittification.”

I have them installed in 2 houses, one 120V and one 127V. Electrical panels in NA are pretty simple (although not as simple as the UK) and have the 2 phases split on the 2 sides of the box. The breakers for 120V or 127V circuits on the right are on one phase and those on the left are on the other.

The panel wiring wasn’t something I thought about when I put the power line adapters in and they were plug and play in both locations. I’m guessing some brands work much better than others and these Netgear adapters have worked flawlessly. Or maybe I got lucky.

That said, I’d have Cat6 cables installed if it didn’t require tearing apart the walls and ceiling.

My experience has been different. Wifi extenders were not very reliable. Wifi devices were better, but powerline extenders have been rock solid. Ping times are right in line with wired Ethernet too.

In my experience powerline extenders are a reasonable alternative to Ethernet for home users in places where running a cable isn’t an option.

I had very similar problems with Realtek wifi on an HP laptop.

A possible fix:

Run “iwconfig” and check your adapter power management setting. If it’s on turn it off: “iwconfig [interface] power off”.

This solved most the wifi problems on my system.

I’ve read a few accounts of people who’ve attempted to become completely self-sufficient. Even those with lots of land who spend all their time farming/fishing/hunting find that it’s pretty much impossible these days. If you did achieve self-sufficiency at some point, you’d likely only be one failed crop from starving most of the time.

Some of the specific products and manufacturers are listed in the article.

It’s just part of living in a corporate hellscape.