I didn’t know about Canada and after thinking about it for a minute the United States does something similar for the States with .gov. Many, if not all, States have their own subdomain such as wyo.gov, montana.gov, and nebraska.gov.

Honestly it’s always seemed wrong and somewhat confusing that non-country specific TLDs, such as .gov, are dedicated to the United States.

I’m assuming .io just stands for Indian Ocean in this case

British Indian Ocean Territory, it was just shortened to .io so it would fit into the naming scheme.

That’s a great question and the answer can be found in the wikipedia entry for the .uk domain.

In a nutshell the volunteer “Naming Committee” setup back in 1985 established a rule that entities needed to register into specific subdomains based on entity type such as .co, where the .co part stood for “Company”. They did this to make managing registrations easier and to provide an “at a glance” way to see what kind of website you were visiting (commercial, government, charity, etc). The “Naming Committee” was extremely strict about ensuring that domains were registered to a specific entity and in the correct subdomain.

By the mid-90s the volunteer “Naming Committee” was entirely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of domains being registered so that volunteer group was replaced by Nominet UK. Nominet didn’t open the .uk TLD to registration until 2014 and by then the subdomain thing (.co.uk) was so embedded into the United Kingdom’s internet structure that it had become tradition and NOT using was confusing to many people.

There’s more subdomains than just .co as well and both wikipedia articles I linked list them.

tl;dr .uk absolutely exists in the UK, it’s just used differently than almost anywhere else in the world.

<facepalm>

Dammit! Why did I mistype that?

Obviously it should be RHPS. Sigh.

If you ever decide you want to see it please for the love of Tim Curry don’t watch it on TV.

The only way to experience the RHPS is at a theater, movie or stage, with a floor show. Without the floor show you will not get what makes RHPS an adored Cult Classic. Seriously, the floor show is what makes (or breaks) the experience.

If you walk into the show and you’re not surrounded by people in costumes spouting weird lines, or if you don’t see them in the aisles within the first 90 seconds of the show starting then you may as well get up and leave.

Edit: Fixed my typo’s as pointed out by @shiny_idea@aussie.zone

I’m so tired of the “e” word. Most of the people tossing it around, like the commenter up above, apparently don’t even know what it actually means.

Here’s a tip: It doesn’t refer to something that got more expensive and / or moved services around in existing tiers like MS did with GamePass. You can read Cory’s Book or check out the wikipedia page for the actual definition. Go read one of them and then Stop abusing the fucking term!

For so many of my use cases the Echo and Echo Show products by Amazon are exactly what is needed. For instance in the living my full sized echo is ideal for voice commands and playing music but in my bedroom a Show 5 / 8 is what you want in order to see the time, play music, and have wakeup alarms. I wish I could either find a company building a generic version of them or find a way to reload them to work with HA instead of Amazon. :/

I’d buy Android tablets and run the HA Companion App on them but it still doesn’t have wakeword support.

I could build a small fleet of rPIs in touch screen cases but even then you have to bolt on a microphone and speakers so they still wouldn’t have a finished / polished look.

I have no problem spending a reasonable, or even maybe unreasonable, amount of money to get a nice looking Wyoming Satellite but I’ll be darned if I can figure out HOW. I’m actually kind of astonished that no over-seas manufacturer has started making something like a gutted Echo / Echo Show that you can slide a raspberry pi board into.

I’m fine with NPUs / TPUs (AI-enhancing hardware) being included with systems because it’s useful for more than just OS shenanigans and commercial generative AI. Do I want Microsoft CoPilot Recall running on that hardware? No.

However I’ve bought TPUs for things like Frigate servers and various ML projects. For gamers there’s some really cool use cases out there for using local LLMs to generate NPC responses in RPGs. For “Smart Home” enthusiasts things like Home Assistant will be rolling out support for local LLMs later this year to make voice commands more context aware.

So do I want that hardware in there so I can use it MYSELF for other things? Yes, yes I do. You probably will eventually too.

“Enshittification” isn’t simply raising prices and moving features between service tiers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Yeah, it was pretty obvious that this was going to happen sooner or later. It doesn’t meet the definition of “enshitification” though. The platform, Xbox Live, isn’t losing functionality it’s just getting more expensive. There’s also no obvious shift to favor business customers.

It’s a pretty standard price hike with a small side helping service tiers changing features.

I’m not HAPPY about it of course.

When I opened the page in FireFox I was prompted to manage cookies. I clicked on that and then clicked the “site vendor” tab.

I got the latest version to work on Linux Mint but don’t ask me how because I can’t tell you.

I’d like to read the article but holy hell there’s over 700 companies in their tracking cookie policy!

Luckily there’s an archive of it: https://archive.ph/Yrcda

What are you referring to when you say "when can we use the weather forecast on our dashboards? "

I’ve probably got the simplest and most “Out of the Box” dashboard stuff going on you can imagine and I’ve got forecast data showing with automations that run against it. What am I missing?

I wouldn’t expect HDMI 3 given the HDMI group are openly hostile to open source implementations of HDMI 2.1.

It just takes a company with sufficient market power, like Valve, to get involved. For example Android had this same problem in the early days, then Google realized that their OS required it for market adoption and found a way to get it done.

I understand that it may not be possible but that doesn’t stop me from wanting it. :)

Something tells me that here in the United States of Greed, such a thing is ‘un-possible’, legally speaking.

It’s not only possible it happens reasonably often. So often in fact that the “poison pill” idiom was created by companies who were doing just that.

Here’s a Harvard Law paper on it.

I don’t know if there’s any pre-built scripting out there (yet) for this but it’s relatively straight forward in Windows to use powershell and either look in the registry for the assigned dhcp options ( HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dhcp\Parameters\Options) or check the routing table for illogical routes.

Assuming that you aren’t using split tunneling you could also have powershell check your external IP address for the expected result.

Another possibility is to grab the dhcp test tool from Github, run it in non-interactive mode and then parse it’s output. Something I find VERY interesting is that Andrey Baranov specifically added Option 121 to that tool in March of 2023!

With any of those it’s a matter of what you want to have happen when you detect the problem such as warning the user and disconnecting the vpn or attempting to mitigate the problem by reconfiguring the routing table.

I should point out that Option 121 is a legit thing and it does have valid uses so you can’t assume something nefarious just because it’s being used.

I’ll probably be scripting up a remediation over the next few days, I’ll try and remember to come back and share what I did.

I know you are making a funny comment but my Wife would be exceptionally displeased if I did that while she was watching “Outlander”. People who live alone don’t have this concern but for the rest of us a TV and it’s attached streaming box are not single user devices. :)

4K, Dolby Vision, and Dolby Atmos to start with. Then it needs an HDMI 3.x port along with support for a regular TV style Remote.

I meant it when I said I would like a “user customizable, privacy respecting Xbox.”, so basically any capability that an Xbox has (aside from Live obviously) is what I’m looking for and why I want Valve to officially bring back Steam Machines.

What are the missing pieces you’re still looking for?

The addition of JF or Plex, even with a Steam Dock, doesn’t turn a Steam Deck into a user customizable, privacy respecting Xbox.

For starters it needs integrated streaming apps. I don’t WANT to have to use a web browser to access streaming content. Next up those streaming apps need Audio and Video support for 4K resolutions, Dolby Vision / HDR, and Dolby Atmos. My Wife doesn’t want to watch Outlander in 1080p with stereo sound on a 65" 4k television and I don’t want to do it when I’m watching shows on Disney Plus.

How about an HDMI 3.x port? (Steam Dock is only 2.x).

It needs support for a normal tv style remote control. Game controllers are great but I’ve yet to find a half decent one that has volume and mute buttons.

The last time I checked a Steam Deck wouldn’t automatically start in a 10’ interface.

Please understand that I’m not bagging on the Steam Deck with these comments. It’s a damn capable device for mobile gaming but it wasn’t mean to be an HTPC and because of that its never going to function quite right if you try and make it be one.

An Xbox Series X absolutely murders a Steam Deck as an HTPC when used with commercial services but its not user customizable nor privacy respecting. That’s why I want Valve to bring back Steam Machines.