I ran into an interesting new TV Channel on Pluto TV. Named “The First” for the First Amendment. Dedicated to the notion that freedom of speach matters and “cancel culture” is an abomination…
I’ve only watch a bit of it so far, but I like their attitude of rebellion toward the Socialist Repression of Progressives.
Pluto is free TV with some ads. Available on the Roku. Android and others. On the road, on my tablet, it is a great alternative to airport CNN. Or crappy basic cable in hotels.
So I’m watching The First for a while to see what they’ve got.
The First is FREE. No subscriptions. No censorship. It’s for people who are genuinely curious. People who value free speech and big ideas. If you want to go deeper and are tired of wading through the mainstream media’s tired talking points, then check out The First.
Watch on your TV, download the app, or watch online.
Then lists a lot of applications and devices where they are available.
Musings from the Chiefio 
Hi, somewhat tangentially to topic …
You have a bunch of devices and you intentionally distribute your media consumption among those devices so that one MAC/IP isn’t showing up with too many details in any single harvest of data. I think. You run “headless” devices from time to time — no monitor. I wonder what your set up is like and how you actually use it.
I’d like to learn how to “get” video and stuff on one device (usually a small one) and “cast” the display up to a big screen. Mirroring. MiraCast. In Win10 just “right click, Cast”. Wi-Fi Direct. Something. On the other hand, I can easily imagine spending money and effort to get it all working like I now envision and discovering I don’t actually like it or use it. I’ve been messing with a bunch of options and nothing is really working well for me except with various forms of HDMI cable — and given that the open ports on the big screen device are behind the screen that itself is literally bolted to the wall, cables are NOT convenient.
Is this kind of thing among the things you do? Do you like doing it? Does it work well for you when a family member shows up with a new device full of photos or home video?
Pluto is quite a Roku item and very diverse.
Whatever you do, don’t try the eyecandy channel on Pluto! ;-)
@Pouncer:
I “rotate the shields regularly” with a too large collection of devices (AND different systems / identites inside a given device – so for example I can boot the Raspberry Pi M3 in any of a 1/2 dozen OS types with 2 or 3 IDs on each of them…)
I have a particular image I use just for financial stuff. No reason for random web browsing to have any shared anything with paying a bill or shopping on Amazon.
I have a particular image used for building new systems. No reason to ever risk exposing my “Build Builder” to the internet for anything other than a software download from a known validated source.
I have a particular image for “dirty browsing”. (No, not porn, hitting random web sites with no clue how clean they might be. So someone says “Look at this!” and the URL is not looking friendly, I can do it on a disposable system).
I do general blog maintenance and browsing of sites I think are fairly safe on any of 3 different systems, including my tablet, which also goes about town and visits strange places with public WiFi. It’s about due for a retread / upgrade / replacement cycle as it has been in use long enough to potentially be “dirtied up”. That’s another thing I do. System resets after a long while.
I used to use a dedicated re-tread Mac for the out-and-about but it died so I doubled up use of the Tablet until I can get a replacement.
That’s the general idea. Though, frankly, I have too many. I don’t know the number…
Per “casting”: I’ve done it from the Tablet using Android Apps. It works nicely. I’m something of a Noob at it so can’t really say if my choices were good ones or not. On one occasion the neighbour was trying to “cast” their photos and they showed up on our LG TV… then after a couple of minutes went away… so I think the LG TV (quasi-smart) is NOT as smart or secure as the maker thinks it is…
I run 4 networks wifi in the house. One is direct attached to the boundary router from the Telco. It is the one with most of the TVs on it. It also has a “guest network” that is rarely to never used.
My Lab Router plugs into it, and then my desktop boxes all plug into the private side network on it. Yes, 2 levels of isolation from the internet spigot with 2 levels of firewalls. This, also, has a “Guest Network” on it. So my Wireless stuff can connect to either of those two networks. I put My TV on that network so isolated from my lab / desktops.
So you can see how this tends to break up the attack surfaces and ability to leverage one compromised bit to get into other bits. Then the fact that at any one time I’m maybe running 3 or 4 out of 20+ system images also limits the ability to spread compromise. (The FTP / NFS server with TB of disk on it is turned off unless actively needed, so all that data is protected 99+% of the time by being powered off.)
I’ve not done any video casting from Linux to the TV so can’t say what works there. My Florida Friend regularly uses his Apple gear to cast stuff to the big screen and likes it a lot.
My impression is that Apple works best and easiest, Android is not far behind, then Windows and that there’s some way to do it from Linux but I’m entirely unacquainted with it.
Hope all that helps more than confuses ;-)
FWIW, on my perpetual ToDo List is to simplify this lot in preparation for a move to Florida. Basically cut it down to a workable sub-set and box up a lot of it. For example, right now on my desktop are 5 computers, one Android device, one Android Tablet, 3 monitors, and 2 routers, along with 28 TB of disk, 2 x DNS / SQUID Proxy Servers, a File Server for NFS, and two general purpose headless compute engines. Seems a bit of overkill…
Oh, probably ought to point out that my web browsing goes through SQUID Proxy servers so as to reduce the stuff than can get back to me… So my desktop is in the lab network, it talks to the Squid Proxy server in the TV/house network, and that Pi talks out to the actual web sites… And I probably don’t need 2 of them running any more…
@Ossqss:
Which channel is the ‘eye candy’ channel on Pluto?
;-)
There’s so many channels I’ve not had time to look at even 10% of them all. I did spend a couple of hours watching the “Norwegian Train crossing Norway” channel … it was actually kind of fun ;-)
Ah, actually scrolled down past the news channels and there it was, number 594, hiding under the cryptic name “Eye Candy”. Who knew?
Apparently everyone but me….
FWIW, 597 is the “Slow” channel and the “All Aboard” show is the train around Norway. So clearly I was in the area before. Maybe it’s new…
Not Pluto, but still TV Related:
I’ve found Australian ABC News Live on Youtube on the Roku. Nice.
Not so nice, they did a summary of the Golden Globe participants who were Woke on Climate Change emoting over the fires in Australia and attributing them to climate. Not a peep about fuel load, laws forbidding clearing breaks and fuel, or failure to do prescribed burns.
Were fire the result of heat and drying, the Sahara would be an inferno.
California has a mild Mediterranean climate. Coastal Redwood trees are dependent on a moist humid fog influenced climate (think San Francisco and the city just south of it named Redwood City). They are also strongly fire adapted from millions of years of fires clearing the forest floor of accumulated fuel loads… Think about it…
@EM, on your fire reference. Don’t hear much on this item or the source of ones in Cali recently either.
https://summit.news/2020/01/06/nearly-200-people-arrested-across-australia-for-deliberately-starting-bushfires/
I thought the number was 95% from past reading.
I’m pretty sure the same Progressive Useful Idiots who populate Antifa and similar groups are being “motivated” to “enhance” the Global Warming narrative with direct action. In fact, the very laws forbidding fuel management are evidence of the desire to create a crisis to then exploit it.
For California, we have always had arson. We used to call them Fire Bugs. But, there is so much population here that many were caught. Hardly anywhere is really empty and remote. Folks notice stangers, especially if leaving in a hurry then a fire starts.
Is there still arson? Sure. But it is more single digits than hundreds. The central valley and hillsides are grass, farms, or sparse scrubby bits with occasional oaks. Fires there are rapidly extinguished and there’s lots of folks watching. The coastal area tends to redwoods (and marijuana) in the north, houses in the south… that makes it hard to do arson.
That pretty much leaves the more mountainous areas (Cascades and Sierra Nevada) and the scrubby arroyos of the south. The arroyos regularly burned for millenia, then we planted houses overlooking them. Trying arson there would be hard, but not impossible, though you will be on hundreds of traffic cameras, home security cameras, sattelites, etc…
Most arson, historically, was in the lower edge of mountain areas. It takes a LONG time to get to the farther places and locals don’t burn their own… This is a double edged bit. Anywhere inside a 5 hour drive of L.A., or 3 hours of San Francisco, has lots of rapid response fire fighting. Anywhere far enough away to have sparse fire equipment is a full day trip, possibly 2, and you will stand out when you get there… The logistics are hard.
As a result, most arson fires are put out at modest sizes and the perp is often caught.
The really big blazes, like The Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, are caused by either power lines, lightning (a very big cause) or vehicle crashes. Minor causes include campers, and decreasingly careless smokers (almost all smoker fires are grass fires next to freeways and highways from tossed cigarettes that never even make the local news as they are put out in minutes to a couple of hours). We have an extensive lightning monitor and localizing system to spot where they are likely to start fires as it is THE major cause. Wind lift up the mountains causing lightning storms in fall when fuel is high and things dry from summer.
It is very hard here to find someplace “away”. We’re at about 40 million people in a place about the size of New Zealand… I know where those “away” places are, but it takes a day to get there and I’ve lived here my whole life and grew up near them. 80%+ of the population has no clue. Just about everybody stays in the urban areas, flys somewhere, or drives on freeways to major resorts (like skiing). That doesn’t make it impossible, but it is hard. It would also take some stealth and technical skills to avoid being spotted or caught on monitors. (Any public access areas have entry kiosks or are heavily used by others, just finding a spot to fish that isn’t fished out, is hard.) Few folks smart enough to succeed are dumb enough to try…
Looking for some support for my beliefs and updating my understanding, this article confirms lightning as the big cause, but notes arson is increasing as population increased in some areas (I.e. arsonists per 1000 tends to a constant even as success decreases). Note the article points out the arsonists caught and describes the extensive post fire investigation efforst and dedicated arson police force…)
https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/crime_courts/2018/08/06/california-arson-how-common/912413002/
Note the very small size. The first fires can not have burned even a single house, so wildland, of about 12 miles on a side in total. The more expensive fire year is about 5 miles on a side with about 200 houses or less in it. Arson fires get put out quickly as they are not remote.
Basically, per the graph in the article, we get about 7000 to 10,000 arson cases per year (not all of them rural / remote) yet not many acres per attempt. 1.5 to 10 acres average, more or less.
Just a lot of rapid response, decent fuel management and fire codes, and plenty of enforcement, coupled with lots of eyeballs everywhere and arsonists not the kind to drive far…
If you look at in the long term, mother nature is doing the fire load control that government regulations and policies have made nearly impossible.
After a few years of this sort of fire behavior, mother nature will have created enough low fuel areas that future fires will be controllable for a while.
Here in the Colorado front range the natural fire cycle is about every 75 -100 year. We are due for a similar natural culling of all the standing dead in our forests.
Much of this traces back to the end of the 19th century when much of the front range was stripped of timber for mining and firewood. As a result most of the forest cover in this area is all the same age and is currently going into an end of life cycle where large numbers of trees are dieing from various causes including the Western Pine beetle.
I suspect that Australian forest and ground cover has a similar natural fire cycle which will enforce it self if the government prevents rational fire break and mitigation processes.