It’s pretty cool how things we purchase can just lose functionality at the drop of a hat.
A $2/mo subscription for a fucking screensaver?!
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Samsung already did this for their Frame TV, and charged around $5.99/month
Samsung Art Store | Art For The Frame TV | Samsung US - https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-frame/digital-art-store/
Digital photo frame as a service. Wow thanks big tech, so innovative, I can ask it about the weather.
“Now fetching the weather, but first a word from our sponsors!”
Some people really are that dumb. I guess the silver lining is that there weren’t enough dumb people to keep this dumb service alive.
So I bought one of Spotify’s Car Things when they were flushing them after realizing nobody knew fuck all about them.
The device itself works alright for it’s purpose, but is basically just a fancy way to change tracks or answer your phone. There’s no GPS or messaging integration that you’d get with CarPlay. It doesn’t even tell the time. Still, it works and is useful.
A few months ago, Spotify sent out emails that, as of December, they will be bricking all of them and to dispose of them via whatever recycling service you have.
Pretty shitty that we’ve entered an era where companies can just destroy something you paid for because they want to… There need to be laws against this.
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In case you didn’t know, you can contact support. D get a credit to your Spotify subscription, usually in the amount that you paid for the Car Thing. You’ll just need your receipt.
Crap like this is why I stopped buying things.
Here’s to hoping the development of a good local replacement from Home Assistant. Like the Lenovo teams screen thing.
Just as a little tip, in the US if you switch your Echo’s language to US-CAN it displays way less ads :)
Ah, similar trick works with some viruses. If you set the keyboard layout or timezone to Russian, the ransomware will not encrypt your files.
Those things have ads? Why would you intentionally buy an advertisement billboard for your house?
It’s a toss up, but it pretty much only shows just photo/link ads. The one that they’ve really been pushing recently is that Disney platformer game on the Switch for some reason.
Yea but you still willingly put a little billboard in your house and you even paid them to do it 🤷♂️
I love paying a faceless corporation that hates humans to remind me everyday that capitalism is killing me!
Sorry, what I meant was that the ads are extremely easy to ignore, and you can immediately swipe through them if you want to. I use mine exclusively as an alarm clock anyways.
That device has gullible written all over it.
Oh look, more e-waste.
Companies should be forced to pay per pound of their shit that people throw away before a certain time
Man, Amazon is giving Google a run for their money on enshittification and product cancellation.
This is more hilarious because the spy device not only cost more for the ability to show you photos, but it ALSO had a subscription fee to do so on top of that.
I’m completely befuddled as to what the hell they were thinking, and why they think replacing family pictures with more ads is somehow going to make people do anything other than Ron Swanson these stupid things into the nearest dumpster.
mhm, is there a way to root the echo show?
I kinda doubt it, since Fire TVs can’t be. Then again, FireOS is just a remux of Android. Edit: it seems like Echo Shows can in fact be rooted, but it’s a difficult process. Side-loading seems to be the easier option in this case. XDA Forums link: https://xdaforums.com/f/amazon-echo.6148/
oh nice, thanks for the link. I gonna scourge that forum now.
time to open fraud complaints with your credit card company
Now you’re talkin’.
I’ve noticed that threatening to do that works extremely well with Amazon. they recently started charging $8 for a UPS pickup when you do a return, and all I have to do is tell them that I will initiate a fraud complaint if they actually charge me for it and they just refund me
Unless the ads are being served by the same server as the photos, this is probably trivial to block using a Pi-Hole or other type of network-level ad-blocker.
I do wonder if it’s unable to pull up ads, if it just reverts back to showing photos. Would love to get one secondhand to test it out. Sure as shit never going to pay for one.
You shouldn’t need a fucking subscription to display your photos on your hardware.
The subscription is for the 25gb cloud storage space… Of course a 64gb USB Stick would be cheaper and doesn’t rely on an online connection.
This is a good reason not to buy a kindle, or another one if you have one already. If they’re doing this they’ll just as easily steal the books I bought when they randomly decide to.
There was a bunch of noise over a book that they rescinded from Kindles a couple / few years ago. I don’t recall the details, but it made headlines.
It was 1984. Surprise!
Agreed. Its really annoying since i love the Paperwhite. But I just don’t trust Amazon as a company.
Jokes on them, i actually own my epubs
Gotta love Calibre.
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I only buy authors that refuse to DRM their work.
They already did. 1984 of all books, too.
Huh, I never knew this existed, or I might have bought a couple.
I’ve been thinking of digital picture frames both for myself, as my kids go off to college, and my Mom, as her grandkids go to college. However I’ve never been happy with how easy they are to manage
- I want mine to just work, and incorporate new pictures as I take them
- my Mom is not very tech savvy, so it really has to just work regardless of what she does, plus I need to be able to update it remotely
I see a variety of digital pictures frames and see how they try to make updating them easy, but I don’t see why they’re not completely automatic.
My phone automatically detects faces as I take pictures: I have a kids album that’s automatically updated whenever I take a photo of my kids. That’s how easy I want it
A Google nest is that easy.
I’ve heard it works for pretty well for androids, but I’m in the Apple ecosystem so it requires extra steps
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