cerebralhawks

As a grown adult, I don’t care what people think about phone brands or multi billion/trillion companies when compared with more of the same. But it’s like sports teams. It doesn’t mean much but it can be fun with friendly rivalries. People who take it seriously though? Not to be taken serious.

I use one because I value privacy. I also have an Android phone from 2019 I like more for a few reasons. I like both. I also like both Xbox and Nintendo. And I don’t hate PlayStation. I don’t use Windows, I use Macs, but at work I’m unofficial IT, people come to the Mac user for help with Windows 10/11 because I know that too, it’s just not what I use at home. I still have like 30 years of experience with Windows. I also have a favorite (gridiron) football team. And I’ll tell you why they suck but I’ll never stop rooting for them. (Don’t have a favorite (association) football club.)

I think tribalism is for people who use things to identify themselves. When you stop doing that, tribalism starts to look dumb.

Right, business, and using tech most consumers don’t have. So that is definitely a thing. What I’m saying is, most families have access to it with consumer grade stuff.

Right, the part I don’t get is, the video of you isn’t going to include what you’re looking at. And if it does you can say they faked it. They could put anything there. They don’t have a shot that includes both you and the screen. They can get sound though, so they can match sound, but that can be faked too. Strip out the audio. Separate the sounds of what you were really watching from the ambient sounds (and the grunts/moans from you) and then dub those sounds over the new audio and it should be passable.

Also, I just wouldn’t do anything embarrassing with a camera pointed at me. I’d cover the camera or point it away from me. Even sitting on the toilet browsing, back cameras point down at the floor, front camera points up, maybe gets the top of my face? Nothing private is seen by the camera by my best intentions. I just do this naturally. I guess others don’t?

In theory that should work if the app can access a USB port on the TV and use the webcam. I haven’t heard of it being done though. The Apple solution works and it’s intended to be used like that.

But really, a lot of smart TVs run Android and Android has a surprising amount of supported devices (I suppose due to it basically being Linux). I bet you could hook a DVD burner up to an Android phone, and I’m sure a third party file manager could read files off a disc. Burning though? Should be possible but you’d need an app to talk to the DVD writer. And that, I’ve never heard of. You’d think a webcam would be easier but I think the software stack in an Android phone would only use its internal cameras without an app. The camera app for example is only going to look at the installed ones. It doesn’t know to look at the USB interface for more. But a third party camera app might.

I have a USB C hub and I do have an old Android phone (Galaxy S10, 2019). I do not have a webcam or DVD writer though.

That said, now that I think about it, if you hook a Samsung phone — not sure about others — up to a TV with USB C to HDMI, it kinda becomes a little desktop computer with the TV as monitor. I wonder, if you initiated a video chat, if you could do it with just a Samsung phone. Or really any phone that will display mirror to a TV.

Thanks. Seeing the writes helped. They blend in well.

Not really a metal guy. I like beautiful music. I remember asking people why people who play metal don't play beautiful music. And I got no good answers. No one introduced me to Iron Maiden, who would have fit the bill. As someone who does not like metal, I can listen to every minute of "Brave New World" (2000) and enjoy the whole thing. I also like Number of the Beast and Powerslave from the 1980s, and the one that released between them.

The metal band I really love is Nightwish. They're from Finland, but I think they only have one song in Finnish? The opening to Imaginaerum. Over the Hills and Far Away is not only a cover, but it's about The Count of Monte Cristo... sort of. It's not exactly the same, but it's basically the same energy. Love triangle sends an innocent man to prison. Except in the book (and many films) the girl was his and it was the jealous lover who set him up. In this song, he messed with his best friend's wife and that's why he set him up.

And if you wanna hear how they sound live — the true indicator of what a band can do — here's Wishmaster from their final tour, I think, before they changed singers for the first time. Their composer/keyboard player is a bit of a drama queen, much like Eddie Van Halen was, and similarly, his personality would clash with diva singers over who "leads" the band. Neither of them can keep a singer. Not taking a side — incredible talent all around. Just band drama keeps them from having a consistent lineup. It happens to the best of them (see: Fleetwood Mac). So you enjoy what you can as it comes. But sadly they basically suck now. Their second singer was good too, but their third singer either isn't working for them or they're out of ideas, because their last few albums have been duds.

The entirety of their Imaginaerum album is good, but it's a bit weird. It was always meant as a companion piece for their movie, which never saw distribution in the US. So you have to watch it online. I won't help you do that, but if you're savvy, you can find it. Or maybe you're in Europe and you can just pick it up. I think you absolutely should if you can. For a while it was on YouTube (unofficially but in HD), not sure if it still is or not. Worth looking for, and it's just under an hour and a half. Much like Pink Floyd's The Wall, it's about how a musician has been driven crazy. Here, his adult daughter tries to reconcile with him before his death. Watch the movie trailer here

I'm not religious, but it seems like a fair deal. The phone companies like to install their antennae on tall towers, they usually make them or have them made by contractors, I suppose. Having them affixed to an existing structure just makes sense. It doesn't particularly matter that it's a church, except the phone companies whose networks are served by those antennae (which I admit I can't see in the photo) would be paying the owner of the building/land, and we left-leaning folks generally don't like money flowing into churches and whatnot, but it still makes good business sense. Tall buildings come with costs, and if those can be mitigated by leasing the height to cell phone companies, I don't see a problem. It's not like the church is censoring (or even monitoring) cellular communications routed through those antennae. Most likely they don't even have access to the data.

We're so close. My dryer turns all my stuff inside out. I feel like if it can do that, it can fold the stuff too...

The viewscreen from Star Trek. It's actually real but nobody really wants to use it.

Phones, tablets, and laptops have had video chat for years. Apple brought it to actual TV a couple years ago. The idea is you use the Apple TV set-top box, and you get a squared-S-shaped clip that mounts an iPhone to the top of a TV so the rear camera array can point out into the room. You pair the two, and your whole TV turns into a viewscreen, just like on the starship Enterprise.

I've explained this to a few people and the reaction is usually "okay why TF would I wanna do that?" So imagine a Thanksgiving or Christmas, or other "big family holiday" thing where you have that one person who won't participate because it's their partner's family's turn to see the kids or whatever... so, the Apple TV is like $100. And somebody is gonna have an iPhone. And these days, everyone has a TV, at least in the west, and they're 55" or bigger. So you get the TV in the corner of the room and you set it up so you're broadcasting the whole living room and maybe part of the kitchen or dining room, and you connect it to another family/part of the family who is doing the same. And your TV is now a window into that other living room, and people can go up to the screen and interact, or wave from across the room. Now if it's like Thanksgiving and it's based around eating, you could even run the end of the table up to the TV (so the TV is basically sat at one end of the table with no one in between) on both sides so when you look down the table, you're looking into that other room.

Yes, Widget Locker! I used that too. Now there's KWGT (I think that's how it's spelled) and also KLWP and KLCK. Kustom is the brand and their apps make widgets, live wallpapers, and lock screens, respectively. But Widget Locker came first IIRC.

It's not even the 6th yet! ...which tells me he's in Europe and that makes Nova a little cooler.

iPhone guy but of course I have Nova Prime on my backup phone. I wanna say I had a couple other apps he made, too? Tesla Coil sounds familiar. But it's been almost 10 years since an Android phone was my main phone.

So Nova should be usable for a few more years at least... but... what's everyone gonna replace it with? For what I use my S10 for, it should be good enough. I mainly need the launcher to support custom grid sizes, larger icons, and custom icons since my Android phone is a cosplay prop. (It's meant to look and act like the NookPhone from Animal Crossing. It's fully functional — you open Nook Music and it's Apple Music which I'm subscribed to, as long as it has WiFi it will play, and it has a lot of stuff downloaded. And of course the browser is Firefox with uBlock Origin — it's just Redd the fake art purveyor on a globe rather than the red panda we all know and love.)

I read all the Jack Ryan books. Jack Ryan has a daughter (cisgender) and I think she's a teacher like her mum. He has one son, Jack Ryan Jr, ego isn’t trans either.

I don’t know about his real family. No minor characters spring to mind.

Also a bunch of people write as Tom Clancy now.