It does seem like a huge gap in the market somehow. There is just not one thing that supports both gaming and media well with modern features.
The oudated 2019 NVIDIA Shield TV Pro is still regarded as the best in class - despite not supporting many modern things like AV1, HDR10+, HDMI 2.1 or Dolby Vision.
I ended up using a Homatics Box R 4k Plus for everything video-related which _does_ support all of the above quite well, but it unfortunately has so many software issues which prevented me from using Steam Remote Play or Moonlight which is why I ended up settling on just using a docked Steam Deck for that use-case.
I switch between the two, which is pretty annoying!
Steam Link is very oudated hardware which does not support modern codecs.
I have tried both Smart TV and Android Streaming Box hardware to run various setups - both of which are theoretically capable - but in practice fall short compared to the Steam Deck experience (which I already had lying around almost gathering dust)
If you already have Ethernet at both ends I cannot recommend enough game streaming. With the right setup it is almost identical to having my computer plugged in physically, and I am very sensitive to input latency.
I can get 4K HDR 120Hz running over gigabit Ethernet without visually sacrificing too much on bitrate, but you can squeeze more bitrate at lower fps or 1440p (obviously) if that is your preference. You can also tune these settings per-game with the setup I have which is quite useful.
Hardware wise, I'm using a Steam Deck as the streaming client in a docked setup (ala Nintendo Switch). It seems to handle everything I can throw at it, and it has the bonus of being able to run simpler games without streaming anything.
I have a third-party (UGREEN) dock providing power, USB and gigabit Ethernet, display (though unfortunately no HDMI-CEC to turn the TV on automatically (I worked around this using a janky automation script)). The official dock has HDMI-CEC but costs ~2x as much with less IO. I'll deal with my jank script.
For software, I'm running MoonDeck for game streaming via Sunshine on my gaming PC. The Steam Remote Play streaming is good, but not quite _as_ good, sadly.
Reels are non-stop dopamine hits, just like TikTok. It's incredibly addictive to scroll through. That is by far the worst part of Instagram for anybody.
Everything else outside of reels is the usual social media fake life facade, and everything amplified to the max for engagement to get it pushed to feeds via "the algorithm" (note: Interactions don't need to be positive to promote it to feeds)
I mix British and American English all the time. Subconsciously I type in British English but since I work in American English, my spell checkers are usually configured for en-US and that usually means a weird mix of half and half by the time I've fixed the red squiggles I notice.
That's a tad frustrating,.since Imgur is now blocking all UK traffic. VPN is my main saviour these days for sites that don't also block the main VPN providers or data center IPs
It's not the default. You cannot buy a new house today without being on a meter. That is the default.
It's just our housing stock being so old and decrepit, where nobody can be bothered updating anything even if it's provided for free by the utility companies, that the majority of houses simply do not have a water meter!
There's a general sentiment that smart meters and metered water will make costs skyrocket or somehow hold you ransom to abrupt and unfair price changes, as if that somehow wasn't the case today...
This gap is filled by the likes of Couchbase where a single org controls the majority of the stack (spoiler/disclaimer alert: I've been working on Couchbase's Sync for 8 years)
You get local the document-level atomicity for sync. Multi-document transaction support on server side, KV access, SQL inside JSON docs or even across multiple documents, Full Text Search, and fine-grained/RBAC for document-level synchronization - but the cost is as much lock-in as it is financial. You can't mix and match storage, query or sync without pretty big tradeoffs.
This space is very much alive and well and I'm really glad there's more competition cropping up from smaller projects like OP.
Disclaimer: I have worked on a sync backend for a company in this space for the last 8 years. You can probably find out where if you look, but this comment won't be a sales pitch.
Competition like this has incredible value for communities with poor internet access but reasonable development capabilities. Think about travelling doctors in the lesser developed countries and areas of Africa for instance. Quite often entire villages get medical checkups done, with data being recorded on a tablet. This can be synced once the doctor gets to a town with internet access for follow-up. Of course, projects like the above do not have big budgets. Unfortunately they are priced out of using a lot of tech to solve these problems (my company included in this statement)
On the more enterprise-y side, which is where I mostly sit, a lot of airlines, cruise ships, retail and field-based industry use these technologies, since they are prone to periods of being completely offline or in a P2P mesh only. Cloud databases or even regular replicated databases running in-situ are a non-starter, since there won't be anybody around to administer it. Replication is a difficult problem at the best of times, let alone in periods of comms downtime.
UK tech job pay is very bimodal and unfortunately both modes suck in different ways...
In the major mode, it feels like 90% are gambling, crypto or traditional finance. The remaining 10% are US tech companies getting a bit more for their money over here. Not sure how much longer that last subcategory will last. Most of these jobs will leave you wanting a good scrub in a scalding shower. Even the US ones.
The minor mode are where you'll find roles at UK-based tech companies, non-tech companies requiring programmers, web developers, etc. etc. The scope is vast and the pay is meh... and maybe my sample size is far too small and time-biased here, but I find the people at these places are so much more down to Earth, operate in a wider spectrum of fields and life experiences, and are just way more interesting and varied day-to-day than endless tech hype drudgery.
You wouldn't have guessed, but for the last 7 years, I have not been in a job at a minor mode company... and maybe the greener grass is glistening rather brightly right now!
We have a pretty abysmal tech landscape really given our involvement in computing history. It has all been sold off and gradually moved offshore. Europe has a reasonably heathly and open tech industry, albiet at a smaller scale than US, but of course us British are not allowed to play with them any more!
I assume it had live data at the time of Black Friday, and the loading bar is showing progress towards them publishing a replay: "FINAL DATA COMING TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3"
I am (very) biased but Couchbase has a pretty solid Mobile offering for native apps. I have worked on the Sync Gateway component responsible for replication for the last six years.
Sync Gateway still maintains a CouchDB-compatible REST API, and PouchDB _mostly_ works thanks to that, but there are some corner cases and features that PouchDB does not support so YMMV with it. Our native app libraries have used a more performant websocket-based replication protocol for many, many years now, and I'd really love to have the time investigating a PouchDB adapter using this WS protocol instead.
Try searching at somewhere like wallhaven.cc[1], which aggregates wallpapers with good tagging, colour, size and ratio-based searches.
A lot of the wallpapers there come from other sources like Flickr, interfacelift, Reddit, 4chan (for better or for worse, /wg/ isn't too bad), or just direct uploads.
I wouldn't say credit is preserved particularly well at all times, which is a shame, but it is just a reverse image search away usually to find the original.
I like the look of wind turbines and even large wind farms. The UK has large fields of them offshore which are awesome to see on or even below the horizon.
I cannot comment on the auditory impact, as I have not spent a large amount of time in the near vicinity of one. But surely they're less annoying than a generator or the noise from ICE vehicles we live in daily.
The oudated 2019 NVIDIA Shield TV Pro is still regarded as the best in class - despite not supporting many modern things like AV1, HDR10+, HDMI 2.1 or Dolby Vision.
I ended up using a Homatics Box R 4k Plus for everything video-related which _does_ support all of the above quite well, but it unfortunately has so many software issues which prevented me from using Steam Remote Play or Moonlight which is why I ended up settling on just using a docked Steam Deck for that use-case.
I switch between the two, which is pretty annoying!