whitehusky

chasm said:

Thanks for this eye-opening article. This is a lot more information than I would have guessed smart TVs collect. We watch, but we are truly being watched as well.

One alternative way to minimize this issue is to use the Apple TV hardware device rather than your smart TV's interface, which is usually ad-cluttered and poorly-designed anyway. The Apple TV's interface is far more pleasing and doesn't offer any direct ads, though it does show images and previews of shows for various services (including Apple TV+) at the top. This can be

I don't have one of the brands profiled above, but it's likely that some degree of what's detailed in the article is probably happening with most other brands, or soon will be.

If you don't have an Apple TV box, get one. If you can't get one for some reason, disconnect your smart TV from the internet after first checking for a firmware update and allowing that if one is available. Most cable companies now offer services like Disney+ and Netflix (et al) through your cable service rather than you having to subscribe directly, and in some cases that works out cheaper (and consolidates those services into one bill).

You can reconnect the TV to an internet connection on an annual basis to check for firmware updates, but I'd suggest leaving the TV "dumb" as much as possible for your situation.

This is what we do - the TV is not connected to the internet/wifi, and we watch literally everything through all Apple TV box. Maybe one a year or so I'll look online to see if there's a firmware update and update it manually. I just want the TV to be a dumb monitor and Apple TV to be the box I watch everything from.

There's also a great app that I stumbled on a month or so ago looking to backup my parents photo library, when their Mac doesn't have enough storage space to hold the full library. It's called Photos Backup Anywhere - link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photos-backup-anywhere/id6463139425?mt=12 I'm not the developer, just found it very useful. It uses Apple's built-in methods for accessing your Photos library, not some undocumented way that might go away, and for libraries where you're only keeping thumbnails, it'll download full-resolution originals from iCloud and save them on any folder or external drive of your choosing - and keep them in sync with changes you make to your library! So, on my parents Mac which is only 256GB, their Photos library is set to keep originals in the Cloud, but they've got an external 1TB drive that Photos Backup Anywhere keeps a full copy of their whole original library on, which also gets backed up. Very nice and elegant solution!

This is really bad reporting. When the series first started, they based it on a 3 book series, and they said UP FRONT that Book 1 would be season 1 & 2, and then Books 2 & 3 which each be one season each, for a total of four seasons. It's not ending early, or being cancelled, and the cast and crew are not being stopped from wrapping up the story. It's being renewed exactly like the plan was form the very beginning.

This makes a TON more sense than the current design - a bar like this allows for greater separation between the two cameras used for spatial photos (closer to your eye separation distance, though not quite there) to take better 3D spatial photos & video. Even better would be to align them vertically.

RonnyDaddy said:

Well, Apple should use some more recent maps, for every inches of the world, frequently.

They're using very recent satellite imagery where I am that what's even in any of their apps, which is a little odd. Imagery on iPhone/iPad/Maps.app from here is from prior to 2016, but this new beta site's images of my area are from July/August 2023. I can tell because you can see our new deck which was built in July last year, but some trees we had taken down in late fall are still there, and an outdoor table we added in September's not there yet, so must have been July/August 2023. That's pretty recent. Wonder why I can't see that on the iPhone/iPad/Maps.app yet, though.