Westinghouse TVs are made by a company licensing the brand, not a "Pittsburgh-headquartered company".
These seem like easy mistakes to avoid.
The whole article is pretty terrible.
Buy a cheap smart TV and run it in "store mode".
Brightness and saturation will probably be maxed out but with a cheap TV, it looks more like "normal" on a more expensive model. Hint: The main difference between cheap and expensive in some cases --- the color adjustment range is limited by software on the cheaper models.
Currently using a Hisense 4k model from Costco connected to a small mini PC --- Windows or Linux, your preference. The TV functions as nothing but a dumb display.
Use a small "air mouse" for control. On screen keyboard as needed.
Use a Hauppauge USB tuner for local digital broadcasts.
I use software called DVB Viewer to view local channels and IPTV. A browser with VPN for streaming in some cases.
In every case, I maintain full control of my data and the ability to block ads as I see fit.
Why does it have to be cheap? What if I want a killer panel without all the bs?
> Use a small "air mouse" for control
An alternative is something like 'unified remote' on it, then you can even type from your phone without any pain.
> A browser with VPN for streaming in some cases.
There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button. Not sure if something like this exists. It would be ideal to send all the browser context with cookies etc so that you are logged in too and can just start playing whatever you found on PC.
Any for of cast is not an option, rendering has to happen on the TV PC box.
It doesn't have to be --- but you may be wasting your money if you run in "store mode".
As noted above, "store mode" will usually max out the brightness, saturation and contrast while removing user control. This looks pretty "normal" with cheaper models. More expensive ones can become overbearing.
It appears to me that in some cases, the difference between cheap and more expensive is mainly the color adjustments.
In order to take advantage of economies of scale, they may use the exact same screen panel on multiple different models but limit the cheaper ones in software so it doesn't look as "bright" and "eye catching" in the store as their more expensive "killer" model.
You can send a tab to another device on Firefox. It doesn't come with all the browser context, but it's pretty handy.
> According to its privacy policy, the company gathers usage data, such as “data about your activity on and use of” Apple offerings, including “app launches within our services…; browsing history; search history; [and] product interaction.” [...] transaction information, account information (“including email address, devices registered, account status, and age”), device information (including serial number and browser type), contact information (including physical address and phone number), and payment information (including bank details).
Yeah, sure, that's privacy, Ars.
[1]https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/all-the-ways-apple-t...
1. Email address - you have to use an email address to have an Apple account. How are they not going to have your email?
2. Devices registered - you mean when you log into your device, they keep track of your logged in devices!
3. Transaction history - they keep track of what you bought from them!
Must I continue? Every single piece of data that you named is required to do business with them.
Also 'product interaction' is an euphemism to say "if you're sick, we'll sell this information for around 80€" (I think it's close to 200$ for Americans but I don't have any contact in this industry overseas). If you have a cancer and suddenly you see an increase in ads for pseudo-medicine and other scams whose only goal is to extract all the money you have left, and if lucky, your famil's money too, that's from 'product interaction'.
You can give Apple any age you want to. It’s not like it checks.
And I have no idea about the other topics you are going off on and what they have to do with Apple..
(/s).
Getting rid of ads on the streaming stick and various streaming services is an interesting challenge though...
The AppleTV supports CEC and controls the power and the volume.
No nagging
I keep avoiding the upgrade to keep the possibility open. At some point they force upgrade your firmware.
My barber and grocery store is a $9 Uber Ride each way. So I could get away with a car easily where I live now. My wife and I have been down to one car since Covid.
But when I was in the burbs if metro Atlanta where everything wasn’t so close, it would have been over $100 easy going from one side to the other or basically anywhere besides the grocery store.
My car insurance is only $176 a month for my wife and I. It doesn’t make sense not to have a car, even if you include the minor maintenance on a car that would be hardly ever driven. Even at a theoretical $400 car payment + $176 in insurance, it still easy to come out ahead.
#1) My personal DNS resolver, which I manually configure on each device.
#2) The much less restrictive DNS resolver which my DHCP server automatically issues to all other network clients, including all phones and IoT [0]
Individual hosts can then manually configure their DNS to resolve to the local network router (or third-party DNS), which effectively bypasses the PiHole (for that device, only).
[0] There is a method to use a firewall to capture all outbound DNS and force routing through PiHole (ifsense? I don't know), which may be necessary for hard-coded DNS-IPs. I do not know how to do this but it's not necessary on my network.
Sometimes I wonder if the people recommending pihole actually tried it. You get much better value out of ublock, smarttube, and so on.
Fine that you need to run ads and maybe partner with someone to sell those ads, but 226 of them?
I destroyed them and threw them in a dumpster like that Ron Swanson gif.
All to say, little cellular modems and a small data plan are likely getting cheap enough it's worth being extra diligent about the devices we let into our homes. Probably not yet to the point of that being the case on a tv, but I could certainly see it getting to that point soon enough.
Turns out they track the aggregate of everyone’s brushing and if every employee brushes their teeth, the plan gets a discount.
”Lower rate based on group's participation in Beam Perks™ wellness program and a group aggregate Beam score of "A". Based on Beam® internal brushing and utilization data.”
Until people start abusing these "features", they will not go away.
https://about.att.com/blogs/2025/5g-redcap.html https://www.t-mobile.com/news/network/5g-redcap-powering-sma...
Wouldn’t surprise me to see modems and eSIMs and embedded PCB antennas some day down the line.
Not to mention disabling the smart/ad features is an option on some smart tvs (ie. Sony).
> Dumb TVs sold today have serious image and sound quality tradeoffs, simply because companies don’t make dumb versions of their high-end models. On the image side, you can expect lower resolutions, sizes, and brightness levels and poorer viewing angles. You also won’t find premium panel technologies like OLED. If you want premium image quality or sound, you’re better off using a smart TV offline. Dumb TVs also usually have shorter (one-year) warranties.