thehatfox @ thehatfox @lemmy.world

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469

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626

Joined

2 yr. ago

The entire chain of Disney stores in the UK closed years ago. A bunch of other narrowly branded shops have gone too.

If the likes of Disney didn’t think stores were worth it, I’m not sure how Netflix thinks it could work. There’s can be decent margin on merchandise, but also a lot of cost in running physical retail.

Those weren’t necessarily seen as inconveniences at the time, because people had not experienced the “easier” alternatives to compare to. They were just seen as the way things were, and people made the best of them just we do with day to day activities now.

Going to the video rental place was part of the weekend routine for me, blended in with shopping etc. One of the rental places I used to go to also sold music, and tickets for local events. They also had a bunch of posters and notices up about local happenings. Customers would often bump into friends and acquaintances while browsing. The rental place also had a letter box that returns could be dropped in when the store was closed, so rentals would often be returned Monday morning on the way to school/work.

Media distribution has now changed a lot from then, and it’s become easier and more efficient. But it’s also changed how we interact with media, and with our communities, and perhaps not always for the better.

It's far easier for most people to just throw them in the bin though, and the past of least resistance is the one usually followed.

Even then, even if electronic waste handling was more accessible disposable vapes would still be an enormous additional volume of waste that doesn't need to exist in the first place.

East Anglia has the same problem. Large housing estates built everywhere with small towns and villages rapidly expanding, but no supporting infrastructure to match. Schools are overcrowded, doctors and dentists often impossible to find, roads gridlocked and trains packed.

The town I currently live in has nearly doubled in size in recent years and even the local supermarkets can't cope, there are trolley jams in the aisles.

It doesn't help that some local councils here will seem to rubber stamp housing proposals, but endlessly block anything else. Nor do they seem that interested in making developers keep their promises on services. We've had several estates proposed that were supposed to include schools, surgeries etc which then never appear.

I support increased housebuilding but it has to come with matching infrastructure. Failing to do so both fuels NIMBYism and harms local communities.

One of the reasons kids can find math so dull is because it's not taught with enough relation to the real world. Maths teaching is often reduced to only doing sums for the sake of doing sums, which is not going to be interesting with most kids.

What makes maths interesting is how it can be used to understand there working of the real world, and if that connection isn't made it's very hard to create a lasting interest in maths among students.

The protestor was from a group called People Demand Democracy, which claims to campaign for electoral reform. Their policies include proportional representation and creating a "House of Citizens" in parliament.

I've also seen reports that they are also somehow affiliated with Just Stop Oil. They certainly seem to have the same proclivity for stunts and protests judging by the actions today.

I have a few of the Aqara leak detectors and they have worked well.

They also have screw terminals that you can attach wires onto to extend the detection area/range. I’ve also seen people attach contact or pressure sensors to them, they are nifty devices.

The British right wing have been eagerly watching what’s been happening in the US, and making notes on what they think will work here.

Expect more of this to come. The cultural differences between the UK and USA - particularly the less religiosity, makes me think it won’t take off as well here.

The Guardian article about this suggested it would apply to both, but that may be The Guardian’s own supposition.

Like most of their policies I doubt the government have thought about the details.

There's plenty of real life examples of why overarching surveillance is a bad thing. The Stasi, the Gestapo, the Chinese social credit system, the myriad of Western domestic spying programs revealed by whistleblowers.

I found one in the back of a drawer a few weeks ago, it turned on straight away. I didn’t have the right size SIM card to try and use it fully sadly.

Come the apocalypse there will just be cockroaches and old Nokias.

One problem with relying on a phone to receive emergency FM broadcasts is that the phone usually needed wired headphones to be connected to use as the FM antenna.

Most smartphones today don’t even have a headphone jack. Even if they did bring them back, many people have embraced wireless headphones/earbuds and so wouldn’t have any wired ones to hand during an emergency.

There are possible ways to have an integrated FM antenna but it would have greatly reduced range - so not great in an emergency either.

That’s been going on for years. I had a Nexus One back in 2010, it had the radio hardware but no software support in the stock ROM. When I installed an alternate ROM the radio worked just fine.

Removing headphone jacks is more about saving internal space and pushing Bluetooth headphone sales than a ploy to stop radio listening though.

Firefox become popular originally because it differentiated itself from other browsers (well, mainly one particular browser) by offering great useful features that the others didn't have. Many of them were targeted at power users who went on to evangelise Firefox to others.

These days Mozilla only seems to get publicity and attention for gimmicks, or for removing features. The few useful ideas it has produced, like Containers, languish in obscurity. In the face of Google's aggressive moves with Chrome, Firefox has withered has a result.

A change of direction is sorely needed.

Because the automobile and oil industries have plenty of political influence, and they are very afraid of a less car centric future. They will lobby, astroturf, and otherwise manipulate as much as possible.

Like the sudden appearance of outrage over "15 minute cities" amongst the conspiracy brigade. Urban planning theories don't attract much interest from the public usually, but will if spun in to the right narrative and whispered in the right ears.

I have a Broadlink RM4 Mini, it only does IR but it has worked well so far. The hardware is discreet and compact, so can easily placed somewhere discreet while still keeping line of sight. It has worked very reliably m.

Setting it up in Home Assistant is a bit cumbersome, it’s a bit time consuming to get all of the IR codes programmed. But once I had mine set up it’s worked fine with my TV, stereo, satellite box, and some IR remote controlled lights.

It can also be run fully locally. I have mine on a VLAN with no internet access and it runs without issue. There is also a Python program that can do initial setup to avoid the Broadlink app.

Flashing the Sonoff RF bridge can be tricky. There are different hardware revisions of the bridge, and not all can be flashed.

Both the WiFi chip and RF chip need to be flashed for full functionality. The newest version can’t be flashed, and the older version I have I could set up Tasmota but could not find any working way to flash the RF firmware.

Others have had no issues at all though, so results vary.

It probably was, but I would imagine a lot of the dedicated users of old are also those who have fled Reddit recently. Reddit might feel there would be less backlash to removing old now.

They aren’t directly connected to a social network and promoted with vast marketing resources however.

I remember playing with one of these about 10 years ago that looked like a car key fob, it recorded somewhat subpar footage in a weird format to a microSD card. A neat novelty but not very practical to use unless you really had a need to do covert surveillance of something, which most people don’t.

However if it’s made to be effortless to push watchable footage to social media, and people are heavily encouraged and incentivised to do so and it’s a different proposition.

How would banning these be enforceable though? They are only going to get more discreet, they will eventually appear completely indistinguishable from regular glasses.

There are certain ways to detect cameras, such as monitoring for infrared, but that would not work for all camera tech and could be hard to triangulate to exact people in crowded areas. There are also ways to detect electronic devices on a person but doing so could quickly become just as invasive in other ways.