Time for me to make another tech rant...

There's a new IoT technology out there, called Matter. You may have heard about it.
It promised to make all your smart tech work together and not need the cloud or all these hubs.

Then it launched. Everyone still seems to ask you to use their own app anyway, you still need hubs in your home, it still uses the cloud, and you might be wondering what happened.

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I thought I may as well make a blog post, given that the International Day Against DRM is coming up. You can go read the Defective By Design team's writeup, if you want to skip mine.

Essentially, DRM is a technology that was originally designed as a copyright protection measure. This sounds... not terrible, at least at first.

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I've always purchased music from Amazon, although for a few I'll have to get a Bandcamp account (mostly for songs from a certain fandom you might be familar with).

However, Amazon has been getting increasingly un-subtle about the fact that they want you to stream music, rather than download something to actually own. First the MP3 cart was removed, now there's a pass-through to Amazon Music before you can find the actual store page.

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I'd like advice, if you can offer any. Please scroll down to the RFQ section or read the whole article if you can stand my blather. Thanks!

I doubt most of you have noticed, but a little while ago, Google dropped support for third-party access to its APIs. Apparently they misplaced the keys or something, but suddenly bookmark sync in Chromium (the non-branded, open-source edition of Chrome) stopped working.

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My mother called me up to let me know about her experience with a certain infamous pandemic.

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So, this is a notification about a few important new updates (which you may have already heard).

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I am saddened to have learned today that Visions of the Poet has deleted his channel and music. I never got the chance to actually hear most of it when he was still around, but I had been planning to review and perhaps download some more of it. I never got the chance. Fortunately, his work is apparently still available at several archives, but I can

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Warning: The following blog will contain spoilers for the current incarnation of my story idea. Please DO read it if you are willing to bear that risk, and offer suggestions for how it may be improved or for things that would fit well. There are a few parts that I feel are a bit too much like crossovers or that might break immersion by being "Look, suddenly a ___!"

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I've been wanting to write an AU of MLP for a while, but one of the things that keeps causing me problems is humor.

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I ran across a video (see 1:23) that has a really cool fanart of Spitfire, possibly dressed as Artoria from FSN (or, given the source, one of the Smurfs -- I forget the proper name -- from Warhammer), on a heap of defeated changelings. I can't find anything via Google Images. Does anyone know where this is from? It does not help me that both settings are only familiar to me by hearsay, so if the image IS from either fandom, I can't tell which it would be, or if I'm altogether wrong.

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