I built a small set of scripts to decrypt when the initrd starts and can load from a file in the initrd (from separate volume), EFI, or various combinations of passphrase in GRUB. The main intent isn’t to keep out somebody with physical access to the machine and sufficient time but rather makes it a lot easier to make the data unrecoverable when the drive is disposed of.

Yeah that was my first thought. Better learn about corporate greed from a “smart display” then a >$1k appliance (but better not to buy them at all).

A lot of people will probably just continue using Windows 10, but yeah now I’m wondering what the best models are that don’t quiiiite support 11. I’d love to snag an decent tablet-PC

I much prefer owned media over subscriptions, but this is perhaps one area where they’re actually good. A bad business decision that drives away customers can have a pretty immediate and visible impact on revenue. It’s not “hey nobody bought our latest release, blame racism/sexism/wokeness” or whatever other whipping-boy they choose to bury their heads in the sand with, it’s “we did a thing and within days to a month people were leaving us.”

In many cases, this drives them to actually pay attention to customer reactions. We’ve seen the same with Disney in regards to Kimmel and I wouldn’t be surprised to see recent changes to Gamepass have a similar impact. I hate to say it, but subscriptions like this really do allow customers to vote with their wallets.

Which is also why many are probably going to try to lock more customers in to longer terms, add gimmicks, and generally make it harder to unsubscribe. Kinda like phone companies. We’ll likely end up with a “streaming sign-up/connection fee” and offers like “**free Frozen tablet with a two year Disney+ subscription”

** regular price $599, applied as a discount from your regular bill over 24mo

Generally, most of the tools in the house are considered “mine”, and yes I do often break out in a dry sweat when my wife wants to borrow them.

This isn’t because I don’t think she could learn to use them, but rather because the only time she picks them up is when she’s in “get it done” mode in which case a fuck up is costly in terms of time and money to fix… we me usually being the one to fix it. I’m pretty sure she similarly shudders when I grab a needle and thread from her office. We have a truce on laundry and dishes.

Thing is, I’ve got a shop full of bits and pieces where I fucked something up. BUT, I generally fucked it up on the inexpensive test projects until I was happy I could do a reasonable job, or where the cost of failure was just generally not too high. I don’t believe that my wife couldn’t similarly become a good carpenter or whatever, but rather experience says that she doesn’t have the interest of patience in learning to do so.

Yeah I’ve had more than a few things where the ONLY thing that shows is the ad, and then the content roll fails and/or it just keeps looping ads with no content

A Bollywood-style IJ movie would actually be pretty awesome. Wouldn’t be that hard to beat Crystal Skull, and Ford - though a great actor in his prime - has mostly been running on name-power these days.

Maybe they can have an Indian version where a certain political cult is trying to sacrifice people

“Well heck, the guy stayed alive an the heard was still beatin when they ripped it out in the YouTube video. Jed, you sure we got the words right?”

That’s actually pretty clever

In that case the easiest thing is not to buy a Samsung or any other “smart” fridge

Good marketing absolutely works on nerds. We will literally share cool ads (funny world best) with each other in the same way with memes, which is part of “viral marketing”.

At the same time though, those lame ads using low-grade, overused memes (usually the comic ones) trying to be edgy pretty much make me want to pass on a product. Crappy AI-gen ads are even worse.

But next time I go to Japan, I absolutely still want to try a Sakaeru gummy because THAT marketing campaign was just brilliant and entertaining

( https://youtu.be/LQsMp4Oo6xM )

I’ve also seen a few cool tech things in ads that I’ve looked into. Generally nothing I’ll grab right away but they often end up in a list of things that I potentially buy later when I’ve some free cash or the need. Aliexpress is pretty good with this as it tends to suggest neat tech things that are a cheap to add and fill that “free shipping” gap.

What DOESN’T work is cheap/lame broadside marketing with little to no product details. I don’t want a video as an ad - especially not one from an influencer who has no clue but looks pretty - but I’m happy to look up an actual product demo that includes key features/points.

Honestly though, the best thing is if the product demonstratibly works. This is especially true for FOSS-based products that have stuff I can try for free at home (personal use) or ones where the main product is usable for limited seats etc and has a commercial/premium license with value-add like AD/SAML group integrations or SSO/MFA.

That said, any asshole who cold-calls me pretending an existing business relationship to setup a marketing meeting is going on “the list”, and vendor “demos” that are just marketing slides aren’t far off on that either