My NVIDIA Shield is getting old and slow. I can see this as a good replacement, because it supports HDMI CEC, so you can control it with your remote control.
Install Plex, JellyFin, FreeTube et.al. to it and you have a nice open source TV box.
You also get 4k gaming from Steam, GOG, Epic etc. and you get emulators. I've been wanting to build a computer like this, but CEC is hard to find and the adapters that exist don't support full 4k resolution.
The specs for this steam machine say HDMI 2.0, in the past I used a pulse8 HDMI CEC USB dongle with a computer which was also HDMI 2.0 iirc. I was using a 1080p projector with it but their website claims 4k support: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter
I recently replaced a shield with an Ugoos Am6b+ running coreELEC, which works okay and supports some stuff the shield doesn't but I miss being able to run some android apps easily. I wonder if the new steam machine will support DV.
If you want that you won't want this steam machine, HDMI 2.0 can do 4K60 HDR at 10-bit, but only with chroma subsampling (4:2:2 or 4:2:0) (not full 4:4:4).
That is an expensive fridge too. We just bought a new Miele fridge. Very high quality materials, an awesome fridge in every way. It was an expensive one, 1400 euros.
So in US you pay a thousand more for a fridge that shows advertisement?
We had a Samsung dishwasher before. It was about 500 euros and started leaking water after five years. Now we have an expensive Miele which was about thousand euros. Seems that they don't share the same issue.
Awesome. The only internet connection we get IN THE MIDDLE OF BERLIN is Vodafone Cable. Deutsche Telekom wants to build fiber here, but our landlord refuses to open the door to the cellar because he wants to kick everybody out and raise the rent for new tenants.
Deutsche Telekom is just as bad as Vodafone. IIRC the government stepped in and said they had to offer peering to everyone, so now they offer peering to everyone in some random hamlet in the middle of nowhere for 5000€ per month per gigabit, while peering at other locations and prices is still at their sole discretion.
> our landlord refuses to open the door to the cellar
The simple solution would be to make this illegal, i.e. require landlords to allow at least two competing wired ISPs to connect each household.
No need to make them pay for it; I suspect it would be more than enough to end their very lucrative arrangement of somehow rewarding exclusivity. (I don't have any evidence that landlords are getting paid for it by Vodafone directly, but I highly doubt that there's any above board reason for the status quo.)
Yes. It's the so called Berlin issue. If you're lucky enough to find an apartment, you have a good chance of getting a slumlord who does everything to make your life miserable.
I'd buy my own place, if there would be anything available. Probably need to move to another city or country.
How one can still buy into Berlin's hype in 2025?! Fuck their rental market, their landlords, three months deposit for completely empty apartment without even lightbulbs, copyright trolls, rundfunkbeitrag, rude customer service, schufa. Turn around and walk away.
You forgot the government who spends billions to 3km of motorway a few people uses. To an airport that is one of the worst in EU and almost a decade late. And of course now cut from arts because of all this.
And every single construction project takes forever. And costs a fortune. And it is impossible to build housing fast enough.
The reason to be in Berlin has always been its great art scene. Now they are actively destroying it. What's left is a few Rossmanns and an Edeka.
I have one memory departing from the low cost carrier terminal at Schönefeld. The toilets were broken and the security was saying in broken English to the passengers "this is what you wanted, it's your own fault". I'm not even interested in checking how that miserable place looks right now.
I regularly fly from Munich, indeed more often than from Berlin, and occasionally from Frankfurt. This doesn’t really help me understand what makes it “one of the worst in the EU”.
> completely empty apartment without even lightbulbs
This is such an interesting cultural divide. As a German moving abroad, I was shocked to find ugly light fixtures already on the ceiling. I’d wanna make the space my own and not live with my landlords decor choices.
This is what you get when you have rent control. Landlords are going to maximize profits somehow, and if they can't increase rents, they'll decrease costs and try to find ways around the rent cap to squeeze tenants anyway. There's a gap between market price and regulated price, and that tension causes a lot of issues. Not that non-regulated pricing has no issues either, but at least it's a bit more up-front about the way in which you're getting squeezed.
Also how bad the Berlin government is and has always been. It's almost a crime how they sold almost all the public housing to private investors. The outcome of this has been slow regression of Berlin. From an interesting and pioneering artist haven to a boring and ugly catastrophe. Like, what's really left when all the interesting things are gone?
Money and jobs. But yes, the government really took cheap housing for granted and made no effort to keep it that way. Actually they took measures to destroy unused housing. But that's government for you. Even left-wing government hates cheap housing.
RA is the biggest site for electronic subculture since forever, and it's an excellent resource to find out the cool stuff that happens in your city. I don't know why you consider it small, maybe it's a US thing? In Europe, RA is the best resource to find about parties and electronic music in general.
They are all over Berlin as rentals, which you can rent from your phone, and pay per kilometer. People can test drive them easily, and they are not super nice cars. We much prefer the Audis, Toyotas, and Volkswagens that are also in the pool.
The VW group sells 13 different vehicles built on the MEB platform. The id.4 alone sells comparably to the Tesla Y, but if you consider all 13 the same car they are far and away the best selling car in Europe.
Considering all 13 the same might be a stretch, but if you just take the 6 that are the same size as the id.4 you still end up with the same result.
The VW, obviously. With most parts shared across 13 models and all models static for at least a year and usually longer. Plus VW has a good history of parts availability.
Tesla on the other hand is famous for both making minor changes to their vehicles pretty much continuously and a bad history of parts availability.
1M cars over 13 models mean you’ll have no parts at all. 10M identical cars means there’s massive third party supply. Parts are already cheaper than Toyota’s.
I have hosted the models (mostly regression and random forest) WV use to predict missing part availability at their dealership in 2018-2020 (considering sales in the area, average fabrication/delivery time, likeliness of the part having to be replaced, probably others).
I guarantee you that even if I don't like their car, their dealership will very likely have the part you need around the time you need it. It's not the only car-adjacent company that does something like this (Valeo for sure does it too, i worked with them also), but I'm pretty sure it's the only one who has an internal data scientist team working on it.
... What makes you think a VW ID.4 is obscure? I think it's usually the best-selling electric car in Europe. You see way more of those with recent (last few years) registrations in Dublin than Teslas.
Install Plex, JellyFin, FreeTube et.al. to it and you have a nice open source TV box.
You also get 4k gaming from Steam, GOG, Epic etc. and you get emulators. I've been wanting to build a computer like this, but CEC is hard to find and the adapters that exist don't support full 4k resolution.