I don’t know if it’s still the case, but smart TVs were a bit cheaper than “dumb” TVs at one point, since the cost of the TV was subsidised by all the streaming platforms that paid to be included on the TV manufacturer’s OS, and have a customized Netflix or Amazon logo button on the remote that opens their app.
I don’t know if this is done anymore since there are hardly any dumb TVs out there being made now.
I used to do that at the Burger King that was next to my old house. I’d prop my laptop up by the window the faced the restaurant and start downloading.
Then at some point they added something to the WiFi that, after you’ve been connected for like 30 minutes, disconnects you. You wouldn’t be banned or anything, it would just cut the connection until you go back to the captive portal and click “I Agree” again.
I feel like a lot of public WiFis these days have data caps and throttling to circumvent downloading.
Ah, so that’s why AT&T stopped fiber upgrades in my town in 2022 or last year. Which is disappointing to say the least, and I live on a main road too.
Hopefully this won’t lead to Spectrum (my current provider) shuffling their feet on implementing high split service, now that their main competitor is opting for inferior 5G home internet for half their customers. High split would allow for symmetrical upload/download and higher than gigabit speeds.
I need to get back into OSM. Pokemon Go was the reason I initially started contributing. The game uses (used?) OSM map data, and certain Pokemons will spawn near certain biomes (water, woods, etc).
My little cousin played the hell out of PG around 2017-2018, and they mostly played it around the big park in our town. At the time, the park appeared on OSM (and by extension PG) as a featureless green polygon with a few roads and footpaths. In reality it has a bunch of woods, streams, a pond, playground, public pool etc. So I did a quick readup on how to add stuff to OSM and I gave the park a digital makeover. I even walked around the footpaths with my phone and marked them out with the GPS so that they would appear in the map more accurately.
Unfortunately it was quite a while before Pokemon Go updated its OSM database, and my cousin lost interest in the game by then. But I kept at contributing for quite a few years, adding random stuff in spurts and stopping for a month or two
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Oh god, the browser bars.
Years back, I was fixing my grandpa’s laptop, and he had one of those browser bars in his Internet Explorer. Out of habit, I disabled and removed it (since they had a tendency of installing themselves). I finished up, hung out with him and talked for about half an hour and left, and when I got back home I found my mom on the phone with him. She immediately hands the phone over to me, and he sounded uncharacteristically livid. He tells me that I “broke” his email and he can’t access it anymore. So I drive all the way back and it turns out he was using the deleted browser bar to access his email. Even after trying to explain to him that he can still access it by going to a bookmark or just typing in the URL, he insisted that I put the browser bar back on. So I do.
That was probably the last time I ever helped any family member (outside our house) with tech issues.