There any custom versions you can point me to? I’ve been looking for a custom Android OS to install on my Insignia Fire TV.

I turned off that AI stuff as soon as I saw it. Click the gear icon in Notepad in the upper right to open settings and turn it off.

From the SmartTube GitHub:

install Downloader by AFTVnews on your Android TV, open it and enter kutt.it/stn_beta or kutt.it/stn_stable, then read, understand and confirm the security prompts. (You can also enter 79015 (for beta) or 28544 (for stable), but this requires an extra step to install the AFTVnews Downloader browser addon if you haven’t already.)

The AFTVnews Downloader is available on both Google Play and Amazon Fire TVs. After installing SmartTube, it can self-update on its own without needing another app.

It supports casting via the YouTube phone app (or YouTube ReVanced app).

Kodi—It can connect to a media source via FTP, so I was able to effortlessly connected it to my online storage to download shows and movies from it to watch on the fly, and on my TV no less. Without that, it’d be a huge pain just to get the file onto my TV.

SmartTube—It’s an ad-free YouTube video app for Android TVs, and it has Sponsorblock included. You could say it’s YouTube Vanced for Android TVs.

Discord bots—I’ve setup my own personal Discord server (no other humans allowed in it) and set it up with various bots that do things ranging from posting tweets/ posts from Twitter/ Bluesky to letting me know when specific channels have uploaded a new video on YouTube or gone live on Twitch. I’ve also got another bot monitoring some RSS feeds.

I recently discovered I can just have Kodi on my Fire TV use SFTP to login to my seedbox and download my shows from there.

“Wait, it’s an oligarchy?”

“Always has been.”

I know Steam itself says it doesn’t track your playtime while you’re playing offline. Not sure about the Steam Deck, though.

Windows accepts either one.

Wow, they really sued the Wikimedia Foundation instead of trying to find a reliable source to refute the article’s claims. I looked up the edits they made. They removed content, citing various Wikipedia policies that govern how the article should be phrased.

In general, so long as the information is presented in a neutral, matter-of-fact manner and cites a reliable source, it can go in the article. Wikipedia’s job is to summarize what reliable sources say about a subject.

So all ANI would’ve needed to do was find a reliable source (preferably more than one) refuting the claims they want to refute. The most they’d likely be able to do is put both points of view in the article rather than removing one point of view entirely from the article, which is what they were trying to do.

Instead, they went to court about it.

Linux, politics, and the occasional meme that doesn’t fit in either of the other two categories.

but yet keep buying it.

Probably because they’ll keep repairing it themselves anyway. Making it legal would just make it easier for them to repair it without triggering the tractor’s version of DRM (can’t remember what it’s called).

I won’t be happy if they integrate federation. Ever heard the phrase “embrace, extend, extinguish”? It’s a tactic used by large companies to squash growing competition.

Google used it, for example, to squash a growing open-source chat messenger protocol called XMPP. (Think of XMPP like ActivityPub.) Google allowed its Google Talk application to integrate with people using XMPP. (They embraced XMPP.)

Then, they added their own proprietary features that wouldn’t work with normal XMPP users. (They extended, or built on top of, XMPP.)

Then, they cut support for XMPP integration, leaving it effectively dead in the water. XMPP users suddenly had a list of Google Talk users in their friend list who would never appear online again, whereas Google Talk users maybe had one or two people in their friend list who looked like they’d moved on from Google Talk. (They extinguished XMPP.)

Now imagine that happening with Threads. You, a Mastodon user, follow a bunch of people who just happen to be on Threads. There are some things Threads users can do that you can’t, but you don’t really mind. It works well enough. Then, one day, Threads stops working with Mastodon. Suddenly, over half of the people you followed are no longer available to you. The only way you can follow them again… is to join Threads.