In principle it makes sense to give various electrical things in your house a way to talk to each other. For example we have a PV system with a small battery, a boiler connected to the central oil heating with a supplemental electrical heating coil and a wallbox. Before any excess sun is pushed back into the grid, our house will first charge the battery, heat our water (saving oil) and ask the car if it would like to be topped up. Additionally there are several smart power meters to keep an eye on the grid and various parts of the house. In theory we could also tell our washing machine to prefer homemade electricity, though when we want our laundry done we want it done now, so that’s not going to happen.

These are all systems from different manufacturers and need a LAN connection to talk to each other, and in some cases get other parts to do certain things in order for the system to work.
In our case that network segment is isolated from the internet, though that requires some above-average skills and dedication. Most PV owners just want a nice app with lots of shiny diagrams and can’t be arsed to set up their own IT infrastructure. Most manufacturers want the dumbest possible devices connected to a cloud solution because a) it moves most things that could break (buggy software) from the customer’s premises to them (never mind what happens if/when their cloud breaks), b) it makes it very easy for their app to access all data, c) it gives them a copy of the data, and d) it lets them sell you subscriptions.

So in a nutshell, it’s the same problem as everywhere a computer is involved - until after something really bad has happened, security is just that annoying thing that doesn’t add any value but makes things more expensive and more complicated for everyone involved.

But are you shivering with aantici…

It sadly is. Thank you.

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I don’t know Don’t Starve and have only played ONI for a short while, so the other answers are probably more helpful that mine, but at its core the game is about managing (and obtaining) limited resources. You start out inside an asteroid with a limited amount of oxygen and food and need to build a sustainable environment from there.

Silly fun also seems to be a big part of the game - one of the character stats (they’re called duplicants in the game) is the reaction to stress, and apparently one of mine is an ‘ugly crier’ and another one a ‘binge eater’. Two appear to have a crush on each other and spend the day avoiding work and exchanging heart symbols whenever I’m not watching.

As for the game itself - yes, I find it very overwhelming. There are short tutorials on how to navigate the map etc. and a lot of stats, but not an awful lot of info on strategy or what exactly is expected of you. So far it’s still fun though.

Metro 2033 Redux. Bought it a while ago when it was on sale on Steam and didn’t enjoy it much as it was incredibly hard and the performance was sluggish. Gave it another try this week with the new graphics card and now it’s actually a great cross between fighting, strategy and adventure.

Each chapter of the story has its own world, rich in details and atmosphere, often with several ways to advance and uncover new parts of the story. The controls take some getting used to - most keys do two different things depending on how long you press them - but once you get the hang of it, it all makes a lot of sense. The graphics are very well done and organic, and the engine chugs along at a steady 60fps at 4k and full settings on my Ryzen 5700X and RTX 4060 even during intense fighting out in the open. What more could one ask for?

My only gripe is that there’s no save button. The game will silently auto-save at certain points in the story, and when you die or exit the game you can restore to that last checkpoint (and only then will you discover where in the story that is). Everything after that point is lost.

I’ve had more unused time this and last week than usual due to a persistent case of Covid, so I’ve played Return to Monkey Island again. It’s so much lovelier than I remembered - it took a few “just average good” games inbetween to notice just what a piece of art this game is. There’s a billion of details you hardly notice: the pattern of the frame around the main menu changes every time, there’s so much going on even in the most obscure and distant corners of the background that adds nothing to the story but a lot to the atmosphere, and characters constantly hint at non-canon things that happened earlier in the game based on the player’s choices.

It’s also a bittersweet game for two reasons:

• It keeps confronting Guybrush (the protagonist) with the consequences of his actions on his quest to find The Secret - he destroys an ancient tree and makes the woodland critters cry, a museum is shut down because of him, a friend is abducted and his shop is destroyed, a kingdom falls into chaos etc., all just because he wants to find The Secret for the principle of the thing.
• It does a very good job of likening the changes in the game - new pirate leaders doing things differently than the old ones, practitioners of that new-fangled Dark Magic putting the Voodoo Lady out of business etc. - to changes in the real world, where the glory days of the Monkey Island series in particular and point-and-click adventures in general are all but over.

Still, for old farts like me who grew up with anything Lucasfilm from Maniac Mansion to Full Throttle, the game feels a bit like coming home - and as far as point-and-click adventures go, they don’t come much more brilliant than this one.

In other news, metereologists suspect the tornado near Unity HQ has been caused by furious backpedaling…

Not an entire game, but the freedom ending in The Stanley Parable is truly beautiful.

I just think of “normie” as the new “vanilla” - every group that uses it, uses it uses it to refer to people who are not a part of that particular group, so its meaning depends on the context but should be self-explanatory and not (necessarily) derogatory.

As a software guy I like the word for its simplicity and ease of use.

I agree in principle - on Windows it’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse thing between people building tools to disable Windows telemetry and Microsoft building ‘better’ telemetry. And don’t get me started on Edge. It really is time for the courts to force Microsoft to allow consumer choice once more.

Having said that, it does depend on what your objective (resp. threat model) is whether or not you consider Windows telemetry a problem. Microsoft will know that you’ve used this web browser for that much time, but not what websites you’ve visited (unless it’s Edge of course). It’s up to you whether that bothers you.

It depends on what you want to achieve.

Encryption (if done right) will protect you against people eavesdropping on your connection, but not against tracking by cookies, device fingerprinting or similar technologies. I.e Google, Facebook etc. will still be able to track your every move. A web browser with good ad/tracking blocking will go a long way here, but if technically feasible you’ll also probably want something like Pi-Hole to complement your browser’s ad blocker and also catch network traffic from other apps.

For better recommendations you’ll probably need to tell us about what exactly it is that you want to protect yourself against.