As many others have said, not allowing inbound WAN connections into my LAN is an important step. I also run k3s on my server with Calico as the CNI and make heavy use of network policies to keep anything I’m running from misbehaving. That, along with easy ingress makes k3s worth it for me over Docker Compose. I use OpenWRT on my router and force certain devices to run through a VPN and block other devices from the internet entirely.

I think paid open source like GPL Blender addons from BlenderMarket, Gumroad, etc. is a good option. You pay for it to support the devs while also owning what you bought.

I haven’t really compared the specs of between them recently, but I have the Pro, and the main decider for me at the time was that it was $50 more and has Ethernet. That being said, I added a USB Ethernet adapter to an Onn device and it works, though the first one I tried didn’t work. It was worth the $50 at the time not to deal with that for the Shield.

Anyone successfully installed LineageOS on Nvidia Shield or Onn devices? I ran the Konstakang AndroidTV build of Lineage on a Raspberry Pi 4 a couple years ago, and it was nice in how uncluttered and non-spywarey it was, but I ended up buying a Shield because hardware decoding never worked well and the frame rate drops were unbearable.

I don’t want any device for my TV that makes it hard to install free apps like Jellyfin without logging into an account. I tried fake accounts with Apple devices in the past and ended up with a couple devices that were basically bricked when the fake email account I used got disabled due to lack of activity.

Same. I think it’s also possible to flash them with LineageOS, but swapping out the launcher and using adb to remove anything superfluous is all I’ve done so far.

I currently use rclone with encryption to iDrive e2. I’m considering switching to Backrest, though.

I originally tried Backblaze b2, but exceeded their API quotas in their free tier and iDrive has “free” API calls, so I recently bought a year’s worth. I still have a 2 year Proton subscription and tried rclone with Proton drive, but it was too slow.

I don’t see a problem with thumbnails that accurately portray the contents of the video, since only a small number of characters can fit in the title and a screenshot of one frame from the video doesn’t say much, so it can be difficult to get a sense for the video at a glance otherwise. I do get really annoyed with thumbnails that are deceptive in any way. If the thumbnail seems like it might be deceptive, I’ll usually read the comments before watching the video, or quickly scroll through it to see if it’s BS or not. Sometimes, the thumbnail advertises something that happens at the end of a 20 minute video that could’ve been 30s, in which case, I’ll scroll usually through to the end instead of watching the whole thing. If it weren’t for the thumbnail, though, I might not have watched it all.

Although I think Steve Jobs was a real piece of shit, his product instincts were often on point, and his message in this video really stuck with me. I think companies shoehorning AI in everything would do well to start with something useful they want to enable and work backwards to the technology as he described here:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48j493tfO-o

I love me some self-hosted ML models, such as Fooocus.

Convincing your employer to reduce AWS costs, or better yet, go with a different cloud provider would likely have more financial impact than boycotting the portion of the company that represents a smaller percentage of their operating profit.

Wait until the 15th to order everything you were going to order this week. That will show them!

I considered something like this at one point, but I ended up installing OpenWRT on my existing router instead because what I ultimately wanted was more flexibility, and was concerned about a single point of failure. Now, I have the ability to do things like always run certain devices through a VPN, block specific devices from the internet with a firewall, as well as DNS for self-hosted stuff.

What I don’t like about ATV and the Apple ecosystem in general is the lack of ease with sideloading. Ha, I’ve created throwaway accounts with fake emails in the past and then lost access to the email account followed by the Apple device basically being bricked a result. If it’s so “private” then why not let me install free apps from the App Store without an account?

I’ve also been meaning to do some debloating on my Shield as shown here, but probably worth disabling some of these first and testing a while instead of uninstalling just to make sure nothing important breaks.

The Onn debloating recommendations above only uninstalls bloatware and not system components, so it’s less concerning.

The Shield can supposedly be updated with LineageOS instead of stock, but I haven’t tried it. I also have a couple Onn 4K streamers that I debloated and swapped in FLauncher, and it’s on my TODO list to do the same with the Shield. My concern with stock OSes is of course any telemetry I’m not aware of or can’t disable. I usually setup Netguard, although I still get ads on my Shield, so its effectiveness is fairly limited.

Edit:

I found this Reddit post helpful for the Onn 4K devices:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidTV/comments/12rya0t/change_launcher_debloat_the_new_onn_4k_streaming/