So glad I switched from Fitbit to Garmin. Google has done everything possible to lose me as a customer.

Speaking as a motorcycle rider, ebikes are dangerous. Not because of the bike but because of the riders. They often don't wear safety gear, they don't follow traffic laws, and many bikes top out at 70-80kph. It took considerable effort to get my Class M. A bike going that fast should require licensing and safety courses and helmet laws. Most people don't realize they can squid out on the road on an ebike just like you will on a motorcycle without proper gear.

I just installed Fedora 44 on my old Win10 laptop. Because Microsoft made sure this perfectly good laptop with 16gb RAM could not run Win11. And Affinity Suite runs great on wine now. And no obnoxious telemetry tracking. Oh yeah, for games: steam and lutris too.

Yeah yeah yeah, linux linux linux

still, Microsoft is in self-destruct mode.

To me the hoops that smoothbrains will jump through to avoid IPv6 and stay on legacy IPv4, especially when hosting, is pathetic. NAT, port forwarding, tunnels, blah blah blah blah.

I have something like ~1.2 trillion times the number of routable addresses that the entire IPv4 space has. Not all are reachable, of course, just the services that need incoming access and they're each on their own isolated DMZ.

Forgot to add: if you enable IPv6, be sure to use the browser extension IPvFoo. It shows a small 4 or 6 in your URI bar to let you know what protocol you're connecting to. Once enabled, you'll see just how much stuff out there actually is IPv6.

Started the move about 18 months ago when I decided to get off my lazy ass. My ISP gives out a /56 prefix, so that lets me run 256 /64 subnets/VLANs in the house, currently there are ~10 in use. Everything get a GUA through SLAAC and I use RAs (Router Advertisements) to give ULAs to everything. Any external facing services get their own VLAN and /64 for the system(s) as needed. Firewall blocks all incoming as they usually do by default and I punch a hole for the external-facing systems. They can't reach back into the network, they only answer the phone. All the systems update DNS dynamically if the prefix or full address ever change.

I have an SSH bastion set up. In all this time there has not been a single SSH attempt from the internet. On IPv4 it was constant background noice.
For those legacy IPv4-only systems on the internet, I set up NAT64. I have an IoT VLAN and IoT 2.4 GHz wireless network that are only IPv4 because a lot of IoT network stacks are junk.

I'm still farting around with it, but man oh man, there's no way I'd go back to IPv4. It was one of the best moves I've done in ages.

Per TFA:

These adjustments stem from Sonyâ(TM)s ongoing efforts to manage backend services and data feeds that support enhanced guide features on its Google TV-powered BRAVIA lineup.

It sounds like Sony is losing (or is not renewing) the contracts with their data brokers who providing the listing services for their TVs? In which case this is not necessarily expected, but it is par for the course.

There is no truly free source of OTA TV listings and other metadata in the US. The stations themselves do not provide this data over the air as an adjacent data stream (which is what a rational person would expect), so the only way to get listings is from third party providers such as Gracenote. Which as a technical solution works, but it means someone is always on the hook for paying for that service. And no one wants to pay for OTA metadata services, since the hallmark attribute of OTA TV is that it's free.

This is a problem that goes back to the earliest days of TiVo. Someone needs to pay for TV listings, but TVs and other STBs last too long; hardware manufacturers eventually tire of paying for an ever-increasing bill - it costs them money they don't get to make back if they give away the listings for free. And thus you eventually end up with required a monthly subscription just to have an OTA DVR.

The eventual death of linear TV should finally put an end to this nonsense. But until then we're all going to keep experiencing the same non-free listings issues we've had since the late 90s.

Huh. I am surprised to hear that Microsoft SQL Management Studio doesn't run. The usual problem children are either programs that are using specific x86 instructions (e.g. games with AVX2), or programs that need kernel mode drivers. MSMS doesn't fall into either of those categories.

This is an especially bad example.

The SN850X has been rebranded multiple times as SanDisk has slowly split from Western Digital (taking all the SSDs with them). They still sell it as the SN850X, but the full model and SKU numbers have changed over the years. As a result, prices for the old models have been volatile, as some vendors treat the newer iterations as the same product while others don't. Which means that for the latter, they see the old models as an item they aren't getting more stock of, and raise prices on the remaining stock accordingly.

Oldest Model: WDBB9H0020BNC-WRSN (The original Western Digital WD_BLACK product)
Mid Model: WDS200T2XHE-00BCA0 (The WD_BLACK By SanDisk product)
Newest Model: SDSP81200TAH-000E0 (The current SanDisk product)

The SN850X has been a very long-lived product from a manufacturer who supplies their own NAND and controller, so I can see why The Verge would want to use that as a tracking point for SSD prices. But the brand/SKU changes make it a poor choice. Samsung's drives are probably a better point of comparison here.

Here in British Columbia we just changed our clocks for the last time and will remain on UTC-7 indefinitely. Parts of B.C. (the northeast part) have been UTC-7 all year for a long time. The southeast part has been Mountain time (UTC-7/UTC-6) for a long time. Neither are changing how they do time.

I applaud losing the time change but I'm not crazy about permanent DST. People obviously haven't thought this through, what it's going to feel like come November.

...laura

Near-lifelong B.C. resident here...

People have grumbled about time changes as long as I can remember. Pick one. Stick to it. Just do it.

I can't say I agree with their choice. Not so much the crazy late sunset in the summer - we're used to that - but the very late sunrise in the winter. The sun will still set by 5 in December and January. So what?

...laura

"Please" and "thank you" are relics of a bygone age to most people.

The one that pisses me off is the habit of customer service people addressing men respectfully ("sir"), but not addressing women with respect ("ma'am" or equivalent). This isn't an issue in places like Texas, but it's very much an issue here in Canada.

...laura

It's a bit of a moot point. Systems that aren't receiving general OS updates wouldn't receive updated bootloaders anyhow. So they wouldn't need the updated certificates that allow for bootloaders signed after June 2026.

It gets a bit tautological, but only systems that are getting updates need updates.

I'm not seeing a paywall on the site. uBlock Origin must be doing something.

The UHF app on our Apple TVs & iOS devices and the UHF Server in Docker to act as a PVR gives us everything for a few $ a month paid in crypto.
We haven't had cable since ~1999-2000. Downloading and the *arrs have kept us happy, but the better half wanted to check out some live sports. So IPTV it was.