So far all the Roku TVs I’ve tried will let you skip setting up Internet on them and then default to a dumbed down mode where the Homescreen is just TV inputs, and you can access the settings menu. Haven’t had a chance to test a recent Android/Google TV.

Update: Seems Sony, TCL, and maybe some other Android/Google TV makers allow using the TV without linking a Google Account.

https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00115361

https://support.tcl.com/us-androidtv-common-questions/do-i-need-to-have-a-google-account-to-enjoy-android-tv-58

https://support.tcl.com/can-i-just-use-basic-tv-on-a-tcl-google-tv

Update 2: Samsung seems to let you skip logging into their TVs during setup via a Skip button in the top-right corner, but it’s unclear if you can skip connecting to the Internet at all.

Mostly. None of the browser extensions work on Windows, which is really annoying.

That tip of a handle bar that makes you wonder if that square counts or not.

Yep, had basically a throw away account for the occasional thing that basically required a Facebook account, and then I guess because I never posted anything they locked my account and demanded ID. Hell no.

I’m wondering the same thing for Valve and Gabe Newell.

MSF2020 runs offline too, it’s even sold on discs in certain regions. You just don’t get any of the satellite imagery or live weather. Obviously that means a degraded experience, but it still works.

At least, not this case. AI music is its own can of worms that hasn’t been decided on in court or law yet.

But the main issue in this case is that he was scamming listens from the music services. So if he’d just let people naturally discover the AI songs somehow, and he earned money just like other Music publishers, then he would’ve been fine.

Mustard actually just did a video on the first attempts of this by the Soviets/Russians.

https://nebula.tv/videos/mustard-the-man-who-built-a-spotlight-in-space/

In the US at least it’s still fairly common for the card to be taken by the employee of the Drive-Thru/Restaurant to be run through their POS.

There needs to be a ban on any judge presiding over something within at least one or two degrees of separation of relationships with said judge. Any direct relationships, either direct relatives or friends or direct investment, and possibly second degree relationships like a relative or friend being invested, or a relative/friend of a relative/friend.

I mean, if this is basically Twitter’s Community Notes feature, but for YouTube, I’m all for it. Bit of a balancing act, but it’s the last thing that hasn’t been completely wrecked now that Twitter became Xitter.

Let’s Play Wack-A-Mole! Select Game:

1. Sue Hosters -> Found New Hosts
2. Sue Domains -> Found New Domains
3. Sue DNS -> Found New DNS
4. ???

Also it’s better for Devs than buying grey market keys bought using stolen credit cards.

Another issue I’ve had with Snaps is just increased boot times. Something to do with mounting all the virtual images involved or something, makes boot take noticeably longer. I’ve tested having an Ubuntu install with Snaps, and then removed the snaps and snapd while installing the same software via Flatpak, and had a noticeable boot time improvement. Hopefully they’ve been working to improve this, but it just soured me on them even more.

As for another install method, mostly for CLI tools, but working with a lot of GUI apps too now, there’s Distrobox. It has a bit of a bloat issue, because you’re basically installing an entire extra headless Linux Distro with it, but it for example allows you to run AUR inside an Arch based Box, and then you can integrate the app you installed with AUR into the host OS, running it near seamlessly, while keeping its dependencies contained in the Box which you can easily remove. By default apps in the Box will have access to the host’s filesystem but you can mitigate this if you want. Distrobox is especially great on atomic read-only Distros, where you can’t directly touch system directories, by allowing you to install apps that expect such access from things like AUR.

In the past yeah. I still had formatting break in some cases.

I just wish compatibility was better. Even if I save in ODT format in either Word or Writer, opening the file in the other program almost always results in formatting errors. Not to mention using DOC/DOCX.