Turgid Sturgeon

If you go the route of downloading music or ripping from CDs, you absolutely do not need to stick with the over-inflated FLAC format. The files are absolutely massive, and you could easily convert them down to much smaller 192kbps MP3 (or AAC which is even better) and not notice any difference in sound quality. FLAC is for audio purists, and storage prices these days don’t really justify it in my opinion.

As to where to buy music, try DRM-free sources like Bandcamp or even Amazon MP3. If you don’t want to pay for it, learn to use BitTorrent or even Usenet…both while using a good VPN, natch! You can even download from YouTube Music if you have the right tool (though it’ll probably come in Opus format which is fine if your player can handle it).

The “end times” have been coming for 2,000 years now. You’d think after the first 500 or so they would have started reevaluating their prophecies… But religion is a helluva drug.

Yikes… I’m definitely not turning the wifi back on after reading that!

I don’t think internet was required for setup, but in each case I did want to get the latest firmware in case there were fixes to the UI or whatever. But I never use the built-in apps or anything, I have a media box for that stuff.

I had a 65" Hisense TV for just over a year, and a firmware update bricked it. It was stone dead, and Hisense wouldn’t even try to repair it. So I spent a little extra money and got a Samsung instead. And once it was set up, I turned off its wifi…just in case.

Hisense can eat a bag o’ dicks.