SwizzleStick

Both the mice I use are Logitech.

Marathon M705 in work. Bought in 2017 and still trucks away in my 9-5. Fantastic scroll and enough buttons for convenience. Batteries last seemingly forever.

M510 at home. Bought in 2022 and no troubles. Has done me well in the same non-competitive gaming role, but you might appreciate a few more buttons.

Both use the unifying protocol. Both are pretty cheap too.

RAID1 with 8 drives is definitely in the funsies department

It’s not, and it’s the bloody daily heil too.

Use a different service, or encrypt your data before upload & share password separately. For anything remotely private, should be doing that already.

For chaotic good, upload LLM poison to fuck with the training data.

To add, see here for a continually updated litany of fail:

https://static.xtremeownage.com/blog/2022/reasons-to-avoid-cloud-based-automation-products/

Hardcore, I love it.

Insane. At the core it’s no more than an extension lead with a shaped plug. Some basic brains for safety.

If I had to go that route, I’d wall it off from the main network/internet at large.

Sometimes they’ll even remove these kinds of feature. See: _Yeelink Yeelight removing LAN control from their bedside lamps, as a particularly egregious example.

The goal for me would be to not have to break out the programmer in the first place. The same way I have never felt the need to operate on my toaster, fridge, TV etc.

On a ‘good’ device, having that relatively easy to access is still a bonus though :)

If a device relies on any kind of external service to initially set up or function thereafter, do not buy. Regardless of brand.

Or accept that it has a finite lifespan that you cannot control. It’s not a matter of if the rug will get pulled, but when.

There is a grey area for things that can be reflashed or rebrained, but I prefer to not rely on this. Local access methods like ZigBee, Z-Wave and 433Mhz are immune to this kind of enshittification by design. Even WiFi devices can fit in here, with appropriate restrictions in place.

An acceptable middle-ground would be for EOL devices to be offered (with a big disclaimer) a final update that removes the reliance on the service but retains the core function. That’s a pipe dream though.

Of course, they happen the most when you are expecting something.

Back in the day it was an SMS or a call. Then maybe also an email if you had a good feature phone or a BlackBerry.

Now everything has an app and they just love notifications…

Nice :)

appleptic (apoplectic), iscream, coretheapple, thatsfruity, applewhy…

crapple probably too far in the moaning direction, despite being a classic.

Either way, watching this space :)

For every person like you that won’t take the shit, there are many more that will just give up. Just like unemployment and insurance claims - denial is the first step in protecting the bottom line.

If nobody accepted such bollocks, it would be more economical to actually investigate, provide service & improve processes - rather than trying to bin complaints at the first hurdle.

Prime (lol) example over here is with Amazon not making it easy to return shit after 30 days, by hiding all the easy return options at that point. You can still do it by contacting customer service and they will generally acquiesce, but just having the extra steps there is enough to save a ton of money by keeping the uninformed in the dark.

Fuck em. Make it difficult for them. Be the goddamn squeakiest wheel you can possibly be.

First block on my list ¯\(ツ)/¯

Arstechnica is a Condé Nast fluff piece machine.

Hackernews not so bad, but still owned by YC. They are investors in Reddit and seeded a lot of other tech startups.

You are not overreacting for wanting the services offered without the egregious data harvesting requirement. However, that’s the level of service your employer pays for. Price of admission.

Attempting to fiddle with the device when it is clearly externally managed is a bad idea, especially now you have put the gears in motion for a return.

You are overreacting by thinking that they will obtain anything valuable or anything that can be leveraged from it, if returned now in the state you leave it.

Your employer has already shared plenty of information about you with the provider simply by enrolling you in whatever health plan this is. That horse has long since bolted and the barn door is swinging in the wind.

The device data will add nothing useful to what they have already, unless you actually use it.

I assume the app is internet dependent & any self-sourced device using the app would just give up data regardless, or that the app would not function if you successfully castrated it.

In your position, the only way forward while keeping your scruples is to either convince the provider to give you the item without the bullshit, or seek alternative options.

If anything like how they were before - dead easy. I had one for my old HTC Hero that was just a chunky ass battery with a bigger back to suit. Wouldn’t put it past a manufacturer now to make it difficult on purpose though.

You can get ‘charging cases’ that are loaded with an extra battery, cover the phone, and plug into its charging port as a workaround for sealed devices. There’s usually a button that switches the case on and starts charging the internal battery from the external one.

Gotta boil the frog slowly I suppose.

Like an electronic lobotomy. Insert rod and wiggle around until the offending behaviour ceases.