Makes sense! I have noticed there’s a huge difference in lumen, and wondering if 700 a lumen projector is good for anything. I guess if it has high contrast in a dark room on a good screen it can still look fantastic.

For me though I need it to remain somewhat portable as I move between different countries relatively often, and I also just want something that disappears as much as possible when not used, hence my preference for projectors over TVs in the first place.

Good to know! And I guess the 3D feature is something nobody really wants at this point, so it might not make a huge difference in price level. I’ll set up an alert for the next time it’s on sale and hope for the best. :)

Thank you! It seems to sometimes be on sale for a little less than €900, which is a lot but if it’s the only decent alternative out there I might have to consider it.

It does have features like resolution well above full HD and support for 3D though, both of which are completely lost on me. But it seems you’re right there’s not much to choose from at a lower price range without opting in for a bunch of anti-features.

Laser sounds ideal, but all the ones I can find are either very expensive or very cheap and shipping with Android TV. I might end up getting something created for displaying powerpoint presentations in office settings, as the consumer market seems to be perfectly divided between products for rich cinephiles and cheap trash.

Thanks! That’s very useful in order to know what to look for. The Epson 3200 seems to be a solid recommendation, but it doesn’t appear to be available in Europe and also seems to be a bit on the expensive side I’m afraid.

I should absolutely have specified price in the post - I underestimated how fancy set-ups people get for home use. Paying more than around €600 would start getting painful for me. Maybe that’s unrealistic, but I was hoping there would be some option on the market where I don’t have to pay twice the price in order not to have smart functionality.

I don’t care too much about picture quality - my old projector was more than 10 years old and more than good enough (except that it was too old for HDMI) - I just want build quality.

The Epson 3200 3LCD seems to be a popular choice throughout the responses here, but it’s on the expensive side. It also doesn’t seem to be on the market in Europe, which is another difficulty I didn’t forsee. The only affordable-ish Epson 3LCD I’ve found without Android for sale in my country so far is the EB-X49 XGA, and I’m not entirely convinced it’s great.

I find the disagreement between Cohn and Stewart towards the end to be fascinating. I find it hard to agree or disagree with either. Cohn is looking out for places like the Fediverse - she knows that if the platforms are subjected to regulation that is impossible to live up to for small actors, this will only serve the capitalists. In the US the law would for sure end up serving this purpose because it would be designed by the billionaires themselves, and they would design them in a way that monopolizes the internet even more as they discuss earlier on.

On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.

I think the EU has reached a reasonable compromise. They regulate very large online platforms - platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU - separately from smaller platforms. So your obligations increase with your number of users. Furthermore, EU regulation has exceptions for open source not-for-profit development, to avoid regulation aimed at big tech from hurting free software.

Interesting enough I keep seeing people on the Fediverse attacking the Digital Services Act as though it’s gonna mean the end of the Fediverse, even though the Commission is actively posting about it on their own Mastodon instance and the EU is actively supporting the development of the Fediverse through NLnet. It seems to me that even in these spaces people fall for big tech propaganda.

I should probably have been more precise about budget, but more than a thousand dollars is a bit outside of my price range. Seems like a great projector though, thanks!

I’ll use a separate sound system in either case, so no built in speakers is more of a feature than a bug. Will check it out, thanks!

“I don’t want residents to think we’re giving a stamp of approval to Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat and all their oligarch owners,” said City Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler at Monday’s meeting. “There’s no ethical social media companies under capitalism,” he said. “We can try to use the ones that are the least bad and reach the most Cambridge residents.”

Somebody tell this guy about Mastodon.

Also worth noting that this article is about the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, not Cambridge, England nor the University of Cambridge. They still apparently thrive in the gutter.

A lot to unpack here.

She said the people she chatted to often seemed “really nice” but were obviously lonely, making the whole process feel sad, especially as she was not the person she was pretending to be.

I feel like this summarizes the time we’re living in. Some poor bastard somewhere sitting on his computer chatting with some lady he believes he is paying for attention, but in fact he is just being pitied by some unnamed underpaid worker in the Philippines. Meanwhile they’re both filling the accounts of an online influencer and some onlyfans tech bro, both of whom are surely completely miserable in their own right.

As a GNOME user since forever, I find it fascinating how much time KDE users spend thinking about GNOME. They seem so obsessed with customization, yet seem incapable of understanding that people could have preferences different from their own.

I find I mildly interesting that X is still launching new features that are technically unrelated to declaring itself to be mechahitler and generating non-consensual pornography of unknowing women and children.

I was interested in getting some, so checked out the website of Shokz. On the positive side they are very dedicated to openness—their slogan is “be open” —, but on the negative side they define openness narrowly as “not covering your ears”.

I was hoping to find information about sustainability and repairability, and for a second I got my hopes up. Oh well.

Hopefully we’ll see some less crap products in the future. I feel like the technology is promising. Will be watching this thread—I don’t have suggestions, I just found their dedication to openness to be amusing.

Well, yeah, they’re run by a corporation, which I guess means they need to show infinite growth to return value to stockholders. If so they can keep growing on subscriptions for a while, but eventually they’ll turn on their customers. So fair enough.

I think that’s part of my problem with them honestly. They seem to always want to grow and do more, but I would rather have seen them focus on search and make the subscription more affordable. But as they need growth I guess that’s not possible.

Yeah, this is not the case as they run on a subscription based model.

I used Kagi for a while. I stopped because it’s prohibitively expensive, and rather than prioritizing lowering prices they kept giving me AI features I did not want at all - hell, it’s the kind of shit I was paying to get away from. Mix direct support for Russian companies into the mix, and you have an expensive AI fueled multi-purpose web monstrosity that supports war crimes. No thanks. I just wanted a search engine.

Their search results were good though. I wouldn’t mind supporting a subscription based model, but I’m sick and tired of tech bros and their bullshit.