Personal question: How old is your computer?

[freebeard]

Ummmm, how do you really feel? There's no law that says you have to make enough money to owe taxes, right?

I'm thinking what I could do is, since you can stack things on the Raspberry Pi GPIO socket, I could get one HAT for the neural chip and another for a TV tuner:

Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi TV HAT
The Raspberry Pi TV HAT has a DVB-T2 and DVB-T tuner on board, which allows you to receive and decode digital television streams on your Raspberry Pi. Sony CXD2880 TV tuner; Supported TV standards: Reception frequency: VHF III, UHF IV, UHF V; Documents. Raspberry Pi TV HAT product

Then I could use a local AI and the trunk-full of VHS stuff I recorded in the 1970s to data mine it for interesting stuff. My last computer with a TV input was the Mac TV.

[Piotrsko]

Wouldn't all your recorded tv stuff be analog?

[freebeard]

Whelp, it says VHF III, UHF IV, UHF V. Those are digital standards?

I misinformed. In addition to the Mac TV I have a Formac Studio DV/TV analog to digital converter (and software better than what El Gato shipped with it). Problem is it wants a Firewire port the RP5 doesn't have.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Ummmm, how do you really feel? There's no law that says you have to make enough money to owe taxes, right?

Half of US households pay zero (or less) federal income tax, so people respond to incentives, including ones to be less economically productive.

When someone chants "pay a fair share", I hear it in the voice of a comedian.

Originally Posted by Piotrsko

Wouldn't all your recorded tv stuff be analog?

DACs (digital to analog converter) are very affordable.

https://www.amazon.com/Converter-Dig...=sr_1_4?sr=8-4

Digitizing and editing VHS is on my round tuit list. After that is digitizing photographs.

[freebeard]

Flatbed scanner for photos. The Formac Studio is analog to digital.

Originally Posted by redpoint5

...people respond to incentives, including ones to be less economically productive.

Wikipedia
Tang ping - Wikipedia
Tang ping (躺平) means choosing to "lie down flat and get over the beatings" in a low-desire, more indifferent attitude towards life. It is a popular online trend among young people who feel disillusioned by the rat race and the official "Chinese Dream".

[vteco]

Originally Posted by Piotrsko

How does one run business software without updating? Quicken and turbo tax change daily, sometimes just fixing the fatal error they installed yesterday.

Then there's the mandatory win 10 uprgade.........

Even pihole wants to update all the time. That one I can turn off

I do taxes online, so only a browser is necessary. Updates are handled by the tax site.

Commercial software constantly updates, partly because it's such a juicy target to attack, and partly because it wants to lock things down and avoid re-use by other users without charge, and partly because it wants to scare users into the fear that they must upgrade to stay "safe" or "current" or "supported" and must not migrate to some other firm's software, or heaven forbid, to open source software, which is condemned as "insecure" or "unsupported".

I used to work in a Lotus Notes quality systems software house doing support. I've seen it all. A Windows and Win software user never knows whether the last update was real or bogus, or inadvertently flawed. You have NO control over your own computer or OS once updates are enabled. They are completely unknown alterations. And yet they are mandatory for avoiding the latest threat.

With open source, you know exactly what you are getting, as do thousands of others, including developers. It's open code

The massively layered result of constant Win updating becomes an easy security target itself. Patches on top of patches on top of patches.

The flip side of open source, is that you yourself are responsible for decisions, and you need to learn a little more about how things wortk than a typical blind user of whatever program update installs itself on a locked commercial OS computer.

Not everybody can do that, or wants to, so then the issues and expense of commercial OS's are necessary to put up with.

Browsers, in any OS do need continual updating. Open source ones are more subject to scrutiny than closed, nevertheless.

[vteco]

Originally Posted by cRiPpLe_rOoStEr

I've been willing to try Puppy Linux for a while. Maybe next year I'll do it, and if it serves me as well as switching from an old Nokia phone to Android, it won't take long for me to finally switch away from Windows.

I have a feeling you're probably going to like it. Particularly if you put it on an older computer that you might have given up on. It loves closet computers. For one of those, BionicPup or Fossapup would work great.

The latest and greatest computers are sometimes iffy to get working in all aspects, mainly because of the huge number of proprietary hardware bits stuck into them these days, complicated by programmable firmware, and closed BIOS's.

These sometimes take time to reverse engineer by the main upstream Linux kernel, so with a very new computer you might have to wait a year to find a Puppy linux the works in all aspects (speaker sound, or trackpad, or wifi, or printing are occasional weirdo driver specific. But often not impossible to figure out with help). But the really great thing about it is, there's a super support group willing to help get things going at the Puppy Linux forum.

And as I said, some version of Puppy linux will probably work out of the box for any computer more than say a year old. BTW Older versions of Puppy Linux, like Bionicpup are not "worse" than newer versions. They just relate to different periods and classes of hardware. I think Bionic is probably one of the best OS's ever written. Fossa, is good though, too.

Most recent is F96-CE, based on Fossa, mainly if a computer is very recent and isn't cooperating, it has the best chance of working.

But I'd actually run an earlier version by choice if I could. I like the included applications better.

If you do try Puppy, always just do a "frugal" install, not a "full" install (like Ubuntu, Mint, etc) A frugal install ,means just putting a few files on your computer, coexisting with whatever else is on there. Not rewriting your whole drive with Puppy. Absolutely no need for that, and in fact, it's not nearly as flexible.

The reason a frugal install is actually better than a full one is that Puppy loads the entire operating system into memory when it starts up. This includes its standard applications, too (word processing, spreadsheet, browser, etc, etc). So you really don't need to take over the whole hard drive. It doesn't run from the hard drive anyway. Those few files it does install are big and contain the entire OS. But they can just sit as regular files in your old OS. They can sit as regular files in Windows. Or on a thumbdrive.

Okay, I've said enough. But I've just scratched the surface....

[Isaac Zachary]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Being forced to "do taxes" is unconstitutional.

Why thanks for the information Mr. Political. I think I'll just add the numbers together and send in the paper. If they come up with a better system then good.

But in the mean time, it's easy math, who really cares? Probably today's youth. I've found more kids than ever who can't even tell time on an analog clock, let alone add or subtract numbers over 10. At this rate the IRS is going to have to figure out another way to get taxes out of people, that's for sure.

Originally Posted by freebeard

Whelp, it says VHF III, UHF IV, UHF V. Those are digital standards?

No. Those are frequency bands that could carry either analog or digital signals. ATSC 1.0, ATSC 3.0, DVI, ANSI/CTA-861 and Display Port are digital standards for digital signals, as opposed to analog standards like VGA, NTSC, PAL and SECAM which could be on signals that are RF, composite, Y/C (aka: S-Video), Y-Pb-Pr, RGB, DP, HDMI, etc.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary

Why thanks for the information Mr. Political. I think I'll just add the numbers together and send in the paper. If they come up with a better system then good.

But in the mean time, it's easy math, who really cares? Probably today's youth.

You've self-identified as an example of the problem, which exemplifies my point, and what was yours?

Folks who "like" your comment are also self-identifying as part of the problem, further exemplifying my point.

"Mr. Political" is a weak insult from an intellectually bankrupt person who has nothing to contribute on the subject except confusion to weak-minded or corrupt individuals. You're fine with a 3 million word tax code because it's easy for you to identify as the majority of households that pay nothing.

[Isaac Zachary]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

You've self-identified as an example of the problem

As someone who likes math? That's a problem?

Originally Posted by redpoint5

which exemplifies my point, and what was yours?

I don't know what your point is. Mine is it's not the end of the world if you have to fill out some forms. It could be better, sure. Is it fair, no. Does it matter, not really. Life is never fair anyway. You will never have a fair tax system. And blaming it on being "unconstitutional" just because you don't like doesn't mean it's actually unconstitutional.

Originally Posted by redpoint5

You're fine with a 3 million word tax code because it's easy for you to identify as the majority of households that pay nothing.

I wouldn't call paying some 28% of my income in taxes which seems to be increasing every year as paying nothing. Quit complaining and pay yours.

If you don't want a 3 million word tax code then go to a country where you don't have 300 million people wanting to add their own 2 cents to the tax code.