I work in the healthcare industry. Our hospitals have a line with the CDC, and are getting updated with live data. A public-facing website isn't the primary way of disseminating this data.
My TV is blocked from communicating outside my network by a MAC-based IPTABLES rule on my router.
I would just entirely disable WiFi on the thing, but guess what? Once you set the wireless up, there's no way to erase that data from the TV again. But allowing the TV to be on the network but not on the internet allows me to use some IoT features locally, so it's an alright compromise by me for now.
I would buy a dumb TV in a heartbeat, next time I upgrade. If there's one available.
Well, they're making phone games these days, and they made a bunch of edutainment PC games in the 90s (Mario Teaches Typing, Mario is Missing, etc.).
They didn't make the CD-i games. They did license out Zelda for it, though. The CD-i is a bit of a mess. There are YouTube videos of the games, they're quite atrocious :) There's also Hotel Mario [1] and the unreleased Super Mario's Wacky Worlds [2] on the CD-i as well.
It's quite common on country roads in upstate NY, too. I'm not sure why the author tried to posit it as something that could only happen in severely low-crime areas.
In the past, I've played around with them, making:
- A touch-screen enabled stand-alone SunVox synth
- A home audio server attached to my stereo
- An experiment to read MIDI files from floppy disks, also attached to the stereo
I have a couple spares laying around waiting for use cases... but I'm not really antsy to get to them. I'd love to build an OTTO (https://github.com/topisani/OTTO) when it's ready for prime time. I'm also considering building some sort of portable RetroPie.
As someone who has had music put out on tape in 2018 and 2019, and as someone who owns and regularly plays over 300 modern (post-2015) tapes, it's just a part of the scene for some genres. There's a certain object fetishization among underground/niche/extreme music fans. We like to cop the physical releases because they're a direct, tangible way to connect with the artist. They're easy to DIY (moreso than vinyl, perhaps less easy than CDrs, though), and they're an interesting medium to package for (I have releases that have come in everything from ziplok bags to custom-built wooden boxes).
So, yeah. We do play them. At least those of us who are serious about the format.