I have to recommend 9v instead of AA, there’s an extra little kick to it

I’ll reiterate that I’m in a half dozen living rooms every day, and most of them are senior citizens. I’ve been doing this for years. They all have smart TVs, whether they use the features or not.

I’ll also reiterate that they flat out will not even use a TV sometimes because they’re defeated by the smart TV features that prevent them from getting over to their Comcast box. Did you even read my comment?

They get suckered by the cheap TV in middle of the aisle at Walmart or Costco and buy three. You can’t even go out and buy a TV that isn’t a smart TV without specifically looking for it. They don’t even know to begin to look for these things.

Do you think they’re still on an old CRT with a VCR hooked up via RCA? They had to go down some weird upgrade rabbit hole that they still don’t fully understand because they ended up with a DVD of some classic movie, went and got a DVD player only to find out they didn’t have HDMI ports so now they had to go buy some garbage TV thats subsidized by advertising companies. Again, I’ve seen this exact scenario play out a hundred times.

The fact of the matter is that your fix reeks of ‘I got mine’ energy, and it doesn’t fix anything. Large swaths of people will still get these ads in their faces and these companies won’t stop. Quite the opposite, they’ll keep looking for more ways to fuck their customers.

Your grandma does.

I installed her TV and internet last week. She barely understands the concept of switching TV inputs, and her Roku smart TV doesn’t let you rename inputs from HDMI1 to [ISP NAME] unless the thing is connected to the internet. It also defaults out of the box to show the smart TV bullshit every single time you turn it on, instead of just showing the last used input before the TV turned off. So she’s completely baffled how to watch simple television channels unless I spend 10 minutes reconfiguring this garbage so it’s usable.

Go visit your grandma, everyone. And reconfigure her smart TV. I’m joking but I’m not. I can only visit so many grandmas per day.

Ex smoker, hate the smell.

The only time I legitimately cherished the smell was when I stepped into a portapotty that had previously smelled like death for the entire week. That day though, some hero decided to chain smoke in that thing and you couldn’t smell the shit anymore.

We’ve tried the trees you put on your rear view mirror, we tried cans of febreeze, only cigarettes hide the portapotty smell. Please, Cigarette smokers, be the heros we need you to be

your daddy was a rich man

It’s the biggest religion on the planet. Everyone believes the lines protect them. As long as everyone believes that, it works. But when you need help the most, it does nothing to protect you. It’s just lines on some pavement, the people are the ones with all the power.

I used to work for a company that would put temporary cameras out to record particular intersections or stretches of road. It was all temporary traffic safety studies, not an active search or dragnet surveillance, so my conscience was mostly clean. It was still wild to see how much technology can be quickly put out to record and track drivers.

On top of cameras we had Bluetooth sniffers that would get put up on every leg of a 4way intersection and just collect Bluetooth hardware addresses. It doesn’t identify you, but it is able to tell which direction you took at that 4 way because your Bluetooth address only showed up on two of the boxes.

One of the more surprising methods for hiding cameras were those big orange traffic barrels. When they stack on top of each other, there’s a 6-8in gap between the tops where you can stash stuff. If you ever see two of those barrels stacked on each other, look for a little window cut out near the top of the top one. There might be a camera sitting on top of the bottom barrel and hidden by the top barrel. They’d point it to capture back license plates, so you don’t see it when driving towards it.

Honestly, to me the ironic part is the power lines in this artwork are unappealing to me because of the artist not the subject matter. It seems they don’t know what all the lines are or where they go or how they work, so when I look at it and do know what it’s supposed to look like, this just looks like a mess that makes zero sense. The artist has created some sort of electrical fire hazard.

I’ve had some hideous collection of ABP, ublock, and some extension that hides all shorts all on chrome and I’ve somehow completely dodged all the drama in the past year. I’ve never had to manually update or fiddle with any settings. I’ve seen all the crap everyone else is getting, and I constantly think its right around the corner, but nothing. Sometimes the page loads funny and just shows a black rectangle, and i think welp they finally got to me, but an immediate refresh always fixes it. Maybe one day I’ll have to deal with it

If you dropped an original iPod that still had a hard drive in it and it stopped working, the fix on every forum was to just drop it again