Nom Nom Nom

I have been doing home automation for almost 30 years. I started with x10, and still have a few x10 devices deployed in my house, so I think I’m in a position to know what I’m talking about here.

There are a few major advantages Zigbee and Zwave have over x10, namely:

• The Zs are fast. X10 takes a quarter to half a second at best to travel through the house and activate the device. If there is noise on your powerline, it takes longer. Sometimes messages are missed. This is old tech, and there isn’t a lot of error correction or signal ack.
• Phase Bridge. X10 uses your house power line to send signals. You may or may not know this, but (at least in the US) your power is split into one or more electrical phases. The X10 signals are absolutely terrible at crossing from one phase to the other, and it isn’t always obvious when you plug something in which phase that outlet is on. This leads to a lot of troubleshooting. Things like phase bridges exist to solve this, but they aren’t terribly reliable.
• Wireless. The Zs don’t need to be connected to your powerline to function. There are no powerline x10 devices that run on batteries for obvious reasons. This allows for a lot more versitility.
• No setting house/device codes. If you have ever actually used X10, you know each device has its own house and device code that needs to be selected (usually with a tiny screwdriver while crawling on the floor in the dark, but I digress). This is all handled digitally and is more or less plug and play with zigbee and zwave.
• Encryption. Any idiot with an extension cord and some free time can connect to a power jack on the outside of your home and turn whatever they want on and off with X10. There is no authentication whatsoever. Ironic, considering the company most known for X10 devices sold security equipment.

Now there do exist some wireless battery powered x10 devices (the MS16A motion sensor, for example or the DS10A door sensor). These are actually fairly solid devices, and I still use a good number of them in my home. (I have many DS16As that have been in daily use for more than 20 years)

It isn’t all bad, and there is no reason to throw it all out if it works for you. However, if you are buying new gear to automate with, there isn’t really a compelling reason to go back to X10. the modern solutions are cheaper, faster, more secure, and easier to work with.

Kate is fine if you are already running KDE. If you are using a different wm, you need to install half of KDE to use it.

I use ICE’s Cyberspace and throw out everything that slows down the story. Works well enough. It was written before most of the world was online, so still has a lot of the quaint charm of early cyberpunk.

I am still waiting on cyberpunk. Is it ready now?

Not op, but I have been doing this for years with a userscript. Getting rid of SEO garbage, pintrest, quora, etc links makes more room for the helpful results.

It is also a good way to ensure you don’t land on any recipe sites that are built more for wasting your time than helping you cook.

I just got into the habit of permabanning any site that had anti-user patterns, annoying popups, right click/back button blocking, or clickbait headlines. I don’t see a lot of that stuff anymore. Makes the net a bit more useful. Or at least less frustrating.

Gitaroo Man is fantastic. We need more games where you can defeat enemies using the power of your rock.

Brutal Legend also, although not the same genre by a long shot.

I could probably even settle for just being able to take the logo out of it. Last thing I want in my personal data device is to have a corporate logo of an ad company staring me in the face all the time.

(…)that’s not a studio anymore, that’s just a bank, a crappy bank that charges insane interest.

You make a good point there. I hadn’t considered it from that perspective.

Whatever the solution, the ratio between executive pay and the pay of the people actually getting their hands dirty should be a lot closer to 1. Right now it is tragically far from that.

I agree they have some serious issues and inequality to work out, but I also concede that the sorts of productions we are talking about (science fiction in particular) tend to be expensive to produce. Having a large entity with deep pockets (like a studio) to foot the bill until money rolls in makes this easier.

We really need to get the powers that be to stop pretending that me consuming media streaming on my phone is somehow different than you consuming the same media OTA on television, or Alice watching on a laserdisc, or Bob on his home IMAX theater. The studios are either making content or they are not. They are either distributing that content, or they are not. And they are either paying the people who generate that content a fair, livable wage…or they are not. It really doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that, and anyone who claims it is likely has a profit incentive in the current system to do so.

I’ll miss new trek, but it is more important that the people who make it are able to secure a living. Hopefully the studios will get their heads out of their asses soon.