Nope. The LG AI bluetooth airmouse remote that came with my TV has 11 buttons + scrollwheel / dpad. There's another six dedicated to streaming apps that I can reconfigure to do whatever I want once the TV is rooted.
- Buy an LG OLED TV. They're as gorgeous as they are notorious. I just got a 77" LG C6 and it is crazy good.
- Root it [0].
- Install Glasshouse [1] and disable all telemetry. YOU now own the glass. Now you can chromecast to the TV, use Adfree YouTube, access IP TV, etc etc etc. No point crippling your TV by pulling the wireless module and voiding your warranty.
- Install a bunch of cool apps to your TV [2] (there are many more out there besides those listed here)
- Restore to Factory Defaults if you ever want / need to unroot and get back to stock e.g. a warranty claim
The only issue is that LG recently closed the vulnerability that made rooting possible so you don't want any firmware released after 2026-10-10 like 43.21.84. Hopefully a new exploit is found that makes rooting possible once again.
BTW, you might have heard of Dev Mode on these TVs but they don't allow anywhere near the functionality that rooting provides.
This seems excessive. Easier to disconnect it from the internet completely, and have it boot to HDMI1, hook up an external HDMI-CEC switch, and never think about it again.
With "Hotel Mode" you can make this effectively permanent and never see LG's UI again unless you want it.
Then just connect whatever HDMI-based box you want (Roku, Apple TV, Plex, Android, whatever) and use that for the content.
I used to work for an IoT connectivity provider (think SIM cards, eUICC etc); I know that some of the manufacturers of various devices have been investigating adding cellular and soldered eUICC (ostensibly for diagnostics, warranty etc).
So it's not even that it won't be long; I'm sure they already have designs and are just waiting for eUICC support to catch up.
Then they'll quickly discover how bad cell coverage is in vast swathes of the USA and they'll have to be a lot more tolerant of bad customer sat scores and high return rates than they typically want to be.
Vehicles already have them, you don't need a lot of bandwidth just enough data to identify the members household which can be done with a wifi access point map and bluetooth MACs.
I haven't seen an open WiFi network near any apartment I've lived in for more than a decade.
There has never been a shred of evidence for any TV model actually doing this despite how often it's speculated about in comment sections.
It's kinda weird how the most sensible, straightforward mitigation for the TV spying people claim to be concerned always gets this evidence-free FUD thrown out to claim it's pointless.
I have seen open wifi reachable from places i've lived on. Spotty and intermittent connection but there. Apartment buildings with businesses on the 1st floor are also common now, those businesses may have open wifi, etc.
Amazon sidewalk (I think that uses a hidden SSID so you don't see it, I can't check because I'm in Europe where they don't have it yet)
Or piggybacking through other TVs of the brand nearby. Might sound farfetched but so did subliminal audio watermarking to hear what kind of ads were played in the household and that was a thing too till they got caught.
Jfc all this spying and they don't even serve good ads. I would love for Netflix or my TVs home screens aggregator to know my tastes thoroughly. I will personally spend hours configuring it if they give me a dashboard. But only if they show me things I'm actually interested in and not just the next blockbuster or Pepsi ads.
Oh I always love seeing completely mistargeted ads. Lately I've been getting ones for cars and for baby nappies lol. And always gambling scams. Nonething that even remotely matches anything I will buy.
Yes, but you can choose your adventure here. Better than having to replace the entire TV if you find one that doesn't do what you want.
Not to mention that technology moves forward and you can replace these if new models come out that have better features or are more aligned with your privacy preferences.
Nope. The TV stores all the data it harvests and scans WiFi in search of an open network. Whenever it finds one (and LG could make commercial agreements with Telco operating open WiFi’s to use them) it will connect and exfiltrate whatever it found.
This has been mentioned in so many comments and there isn't a shred of evidence about it
It seems to be misconstruing the fact that TVs will scan nearby networks for fingerprinting, but they don't _connect_ to those networks. It would be very very easy for someone to reproduce if they did
I have a recent 60ish inch LG OLED that's not been connected to the internet AFAICT for over a year. It's not connected to a LAN and it's not configured for any WiFi network. I have never connected it to the internet at all. It's working like a champ. No crashes or other issues. I treat it as a dumb monitor. HDMI in, optical out for audio to my stereo.
> have it boot to HDMI1, hook up an external HDMI-CEC switch
That's not actually how HDMI-CEC works. HDMI-CEC switches aren't KVM switches that only do HDMI.
An HDMI-CEC switcher box (or devices with that functionality built into them, like many soundbars) doesn't act as its own isolated sub-HDMI-CEC bus, where the switch presents to its downstreams as the root HDMI-CEC device, catching (without bubbling) <Active Source> messages from said downstreams, selecting one downstream to be active in an internal sense, and then presenting itself to its upstream connected TV or what-have-you as if it's one leaf-node source whose video+audio signals just-so-happen to be those of the currently-selected downstream.
Rather, at an HDMI-CEC level, an HDMI switch is a lot more like a USB switch: it passes through all the CEC message broadcasts from all of its downstream source devices through to its upstream receiver device (and vice-versa), sometimes also interpreting them in turn for effect; and the root host device can actually see the whole tree topology, including any switches.
(Fun fact: HDMI-CEC devices have four-step hierarchical addresses, that look like IP addresses, describing at each step the physical socket-number offset on the upstream device that connects said upstream to the given downstream. The TV is always 0.0.0.0. Whatever's plugged into the TV's first HDMI socket is 1.0.0.0. If that thing is an HDMI switcher box, then whatever's plugged into its first downstream HDMI socket is 1.1.0.0. And so on. All of these devices can see and talk to one another using these addresses, at all times. It's a network!)
Importantly, this means that if a TV is plugged into an HDMI switcher box, which in turn has several source devices plugged into it, then the TV will still be aware of, and can still hear and speak to, all the inactive sources downstream of the switcher box, not just the active one.
Which in turn means that if your TV is really stupid in the way it handles HDMI-CEC (e.g. trying to "argue" with sources about who's supposed to be active on wake, with the TV trying to force the last-active source and the source that woke the TV trying to force itself as the active source), then putting an HDMI-CEC switcher box in between will by no means improve things. They'll still be arguing, now "through" the switcher box; and the switcher box will itself be doing additional things in response to seeing these messages. Where previously you had O(N) HDMI-CEC problems, now you'll have O(N log N) HDMI-CEC problems.
But hey, at least your leaf-node sources in this tree all show up in the TV's input switcher menu! That was definitely worth making all this mess, HDMI Forum! :P
I've never really dug into it but this does explain a lot of the strange and flakey behavior that I've seen with switches purporting to offer HDMI-CEC support. All I really want is auto-input switching and being able to control the volume through the device.
It doesn't seem like it should be so hard, but it has broken and fixed itself so many times that I really don't know what I should be looking for.
I think HDMI-CEC is just fundamentally broken (at least in all versions of the spec up to now.) I've played around with hypothetical workarounds, and I suspect so have many device manufacturers, and it seems like there's just no way to "stabilize" an HDMI-CEC network into behaving correctly while there's at least one bad actor on it, if you can't directly modify the firmware of that bad-actor device. You can't do it from a peer device; you can't do it from a "man in the middle" like a switch; and you can't even do it from the TV.
Why? Because the HDMI-CEC bus protocol, as it stands today, has no separation of responsibilities/phases between "request" and "response" messages, or between "command" and "event" messages.
Imagine how you or any other reasonable person would design HDMI-CEC. There'd be one "leader" device (probably the TV) whose opinion on the current active source / signal-path is canonical for the whole bus. Other devices would send command messages to this leader device to get it to change the active source. The leader could ACK or NACK these command messages. If the leader accepts the change, the leader would broadcast an event message declaring to the bus what the new canonical active source is. And if a device misses that message, it could also query the leader device to find out the active source.
But that's not how any of this works. Instead, at any time, any device on the bus can just outright say "I'm the active source now." And every other device on the bus that receives this packet, must then update their own internal HDMI-CEC state-machines to consider that device to be active. If something (the TV, say) disagrees with this assertion, it can't just ignore the packet, because everything else on the bus won't have ignored it. So even if the TV had logic telling it to stay on source 1.0.0.0 rather than switching to 3.1.0.0, the soundbar (3.0.0.0) connected to said TV might have switched from playing the eARC audio stream from the TV to playing audio directly from its downstream 3.1.0.0. And 1.0.0.0 might have gone to sleep in response to seeing the message that 3.1.0.0 is now active. Etc.
The only legal thing a device that wants to "prevent another device from making itself the active source" can do, under HDMI-CEC, is to steal focus right back to itself (or, if it's a TV, assign focus right back to the source it remembers.) Which means everything on a bus sees the active source flapping back and forth.
Which is where all the stupid "your TV takes 30 seconds to turn on because it's flapping between three inputs" stuff comes from.
> The only issue is that LG recently closed the vulnerability that made rooting possible so you don't want any firmware released after 2026-10-10 like 43.21.84. Hopefully a new exploit is found that makes rooting possible once again.
I mean if you think about it, you're "stealing" from them. They (probably) calculate the value of selling user data and use it to offset the cost of the TV.
If you take away the user data, you are "coming out ahead". I'm guessing the days of selling hardware at a loss are mostly over, but the margins are probably pretty tight.
make sure it’s a model where the latest firmware is rootable and never connect it to your WiFi until you have root
Everything you need to do to get root can be done with an Ethernet connected directly to the TV and your laptop. There may be modifications needed to the root toolkits but with good prompting, agentic Llm can figure it out.
If you bought one without root… you may have a chance never connecting it.
If it’s one on your WiFi that doesn’t have a root exploit the only safe thing to do is change your WiFi password.
Doing so likely tears through a sticker or something that tells them you've opened the TV and, in turn, voids the warranty. And you really want to keep your warranty with these things. Search for "panel uniformity" and "panel delamination" on /r/lgoled sometime.
Once you’ve rooted, pwnd,black holed, and decompiled everything, there’s not really much risk. And then you can have functionality like AirPlay etc back.
Why people subject themselves to TV operating systems (or chromecasts, apple TV, etc)? I just have a mini-ITX PC connected to my TV and a flymouse. You can even use pre-made mini-PC if you don't care about gaming. Using anything without ad-block is impossible these days.
Being able to pull out a full wireless keyboard+mouse when doing productivity work is great. Me and my wife regularly use the TV to plans trips, online shop and do spreasheet stuff.
Some of us rode the home-theater-pc wave back in 2003 and are sick of the jankiness of having to have a keyboard in your living room for the daily “occasional” thing you can’t do with the remote.
Yeah I agree no need for a janky setup like that these days. If you want control of your media, but don't want the dated HTPC setup, get something like a Ugoos am6b+ run Plex/Kodi/Jellyfin/Emby on a PC anywhere on your network and that can play all of your media using a remote and nice interface.
Because I have to go through it to get to my android TV and Linux machine, until glasshouse it was driving me nuts how poorly designed the LG home app was. I just want to click a button and get the input selector!
The LG G5 stock remote doesn't even have a input button... Or a mute button, But it does have, six apps I never want to use, a AI microphone button that isn't useful, an accessibility button (which wouldn't actually be useful if I needed those features, you have to hold it to get a useful menu, which I am sure is easy for people who have trouble with remotes.
I rebound the accessibility button (located top right, where you expect the input button to be) to trigger home assistant to send an IR signal to open the input menu, disabled the random apps (though I did consider assigning those to inputs) and made the ai microphone button a mute button.
Its a bit silky I need a WebKit vuln and a vibe coded homepage to get the TV to the same UX of 10 years ago, but I got there in the end.
All I want is to select my computer or streaming box and turn it off and on :/
I bought a Windows PC to run my TV before Android TV was a thing. It came with a remote, Bluray software, and a TV tuner.
The whole thing just felt half-assed. I'm not going back. MS really missed an opportunity, because if it wasn't for quality issues, it would have been halfway decent.
Prior to that I used a mac mini with a TV tuner. The TV tuner software was horrible; the UI for programming the DVR was like writing SQL queries. I have a degree in computer science so I could understand it, but there was no way I'd try to explain that to someone who wasn't interested in databases.
I went with a MacMini + MacOS + Safari back in the day since it was one of the few configurations that Netflix supported at its max stream resolution (1080p initially and then 4K when Netflix released that option).
When using Netflix, hit Shift + Control + Option/Alt + D in windowed mode and you'll see an overlay with the stream information. My system mentioned above is currently playing a 4K Netflix stream (3840x2160).
Sadly the audio is still 2.0 as you mentioned.
The other obvious issue is how much compression is used on the stream. For films I really care about, I'll buy the 4K UHD BD, rip it, keep the physical media as a backup, and enjoy a less compressed stream with better audio.
Another reason for going this route is the ability to calibrate your TV via a colorimeter. That was one reason I balked on the Apple TV hardware and instead went with a MacMini.
Back when I had the time, I'd use a colorimeter to produce an accurate display profile for my TV which would automatically be loaded by MacOS on the MacMini. For my displays of around 10 years ago, this would result in a noticeable improvement in quality, particularly for monochrome content where red push etc. is obvious.
The correct place to solve this is in a dedicated LUT in the display. This used to be the domain of high-end displays (medical imaging displays, professional-level displays for graphics designers etc) however I suspect it's hit the mainstream by now. My gaming display from 2025 came with a printout of the gamma ramp from the factory, so I strongly suspect they wrote it to the flash in the display and use it automatically. This does drift over time, though.
It'd be great to see whether the rooted LG displays provide a way to write a custom gamma ramp to the display, if this functionality is present.
I’m going to give an earnest answer. first, most people don’t care they’re being spied on, don’t know they’re being spied on, or lack the knowledge to do anything about it or find alternatives. Some people just want to watch TV. Another big reason is that it’s nearly impossible to stream anything higher than 1080p from the major content providers unless you’re using DRM ready systems. The solution to that is torrenting media and running a plex/jellyfin server, which once again most people don’t want to do
VESA mounted with a generic VESA plate "doubler" solved the aesthetics for me. Out of sight and all. Though I now need to replace its fan with the new one sitting in a drawer.
Because Apple TV is fine, just works, and I’ve been scared by Windows Media Centre. Oh and it never quite works cleanly, whatever the OS / HTPC interface.
most of the world has no clue what you are talking about, or they are too old to understand or they don't care. I'm not criticizing you I'm just saying they aren't even aware this is an issue
If I understand well the rooting process basically asks me to tell a website my ip and exploitable tv version... Is that not basically inviting them to make me part of a botnet?
I mean LG spies on me but I suppose it doesn't use my connection to ddos people, crawl for AI, or infect other devices on my network.
My question is basically how I can have reasonable certainty that the guys running the root site are not going to abuse it. Or is there also a way to do it offline?
Forget the calculus of the rooting site... Just leave it offline IMO... One's spying, sneaking LG TV is a genie in a bottle so long as it's never connected.
This works great if you live alone or otherwise are the only one controlling the device.
This may not work so well if you have other people around that may connect the device to the internet, such as kids or family members during a holiday.
Please correct me, but I can't see any indication that LG embeds Bright Data, they just aren't decent enough to block third parties from stuffing it in 'free' apps on the built in app store.
Thanks, I saw that. But I suppose nothing stops them from putting a remote connection also in the offline installer. My point was more - how can I trust these random anonymous guys not to do so? It's a bit like the old 'downloading a game crack' roulette, just that I probably cannot ever nuke the tv to get better to a blank slate.
No. Every linked tool in this guide is open-source. Check it yourself."
I'd imagine you could download all the bits from github and install everything from pristine github sources after a thorough code review, knowing that factory reset returns you back to stock if need be. Just think of it this way: the odds of anything getting past that level of scrutiny can't be worse than stock firmware.
"Easily", you would use this word for such activity, really? And what's the criteria for "weirdness"? Are you inspecting payload for every packet of legit apps for weirdness? How do you know they are not exploited? And for how low do you propose doing this "easy check", 24/7 forever? I'm utterly baffled by people suggesting things like that with a straight face.
If you are not sure what to look for, an LLM might help you set everything up including alarms when something atypical happens between the TV and its content sources.
You’d need proper hardware support and I’m not sure a vanilla Linux kernel can do that, but WebOS has its own Linux kernel and LG MUST publish the source (we all love the GPL, don’t we?)
The route seemed to vary depending on the is version, starting from using the built in browser to a few other options. But basically I worry can I trust the guys more than LG? Like is there a business model behind the service?
Had to come and say thanks! Hadn't heard of Glasshouse, and it's exactly what I wanted. Just installed it on 2 LG TVs on my lunch break and it's perfect.
I was blocking the telemetry in DNS previously, and my TVs were already rooted but weren't doing much with it. Now I've got a nice clean home replacement and all of the telemetry gone.
Exactly: If you're super paranoid, the best approach is to pick a quality TV, never hook it up to the internet, and use an external device that you trust.
Make sure your TV and device enable CEC. (Allows your device to turn the TV on and off, select the input, and control the volume.) I know the NVidea Shield can do this, and the Chromecast can do this.
Then hide the remote from your TV and only use the remote from your device.
It's a little slow, but for me, it's nice that I can turn on my Switch from the controller and it turns the TV on; or that I can put a disk in my Bluray player and it turns the TV on.
Yes, but that's hardly obvious. I was wondering if it triggered some kind of "update" that permanently altered functionality. Such things are not unknown.
Even if I never connected my TV to WiFi , Windows and my iPhone can find it somehow and connect, so there's other protocols that are exposed and probably vulnerable without updates.
In theory I could still see a hellish reality where a TV will automatically join any free guest WiFis (eg a neighbor’s) and update its firmware that way!
One less box. One less thing to get something like a Harmony or Sofabaton remote to integrate with. An interface of your choice (there are many frontends), etc. I see a lot of ppl in here advocate AppleTV but that assumes you're part of their ecosystem already.
Or think of it his way: get root for some powerful new features over the stock TV OS and get telemetry blocking as a bonus. I'm planning to set up lg-hue-sync [0] that can read the TV's framebuffer and control an ESP32 connected to a LED string for a dirt cheap AmbiLED setup.
Does this guide eliminate google play services? If not, then you still don't really control it. For reference, on my Pixel 6 Pro, GrapheneOS gets 2x the advertised battery life until you add Google Play Services back into a sandbox. At that point, it gets advertised battery life.
I assume the TVs Google backdoors are even worse (video scraping, etc, etc) since they are not power constrained.
If you'd never heard of WebOS (which sounds a bit like "eggs" in spanish), the story of how it was developed by Palm, then killed by HP and re-released as a TV OS after being acquired by LG is fascinating. It could do real multitasking on a tablet in 2010, years before either iPads or Android tablets could.
The battery drain issue looks like more of an issue with suboptimal power management in Graphene OS than Play Services. Or the sandbox interacts with them in a weird way, resulting in some kind of loop or bug that keeps the CPU alive.
You joke, but the IoT project I used to work on had a bootloader system that kept 2 firmware versions of our software in memory. If the "main" one entered a restart/crash-loop it would auto-revert to the old firmware.
If you don't flash the bootloader too you don't "own the glass".
EVERY well-designed IoT device works this way. It's absolutely required for any kind of safe OTA firmware updates, especially fro any kind of infrastructure equipment, where physical access to the hardware is not at all guaranteed.
Yeah, I am not sure if they use the same standards for consumer electronics though. In our case it was for trucks that could be in very remote locations.
buying expensive equipment to deliberately take advantage of a now-exploit is such a bad idea, and it's bit me more than once in the past few decades.
and ethically, what's the point in giving hostile corporate groups any money ? I get that you're breaking out of their mega subsidized and profit-locked walled garden, but 'sold units' is still a metric they'll use to positively enforce their strategies going forward, and as with all goods the vulnerabilities will get more and more exotic until totally pushed out of public availability much like the newest console gens.
The manufacturer will price in the value of ads and the such. So if you never connect it to WiFi, you get a good deal on the hardware. The same is true if you buy a tv and connect it to a traditional antenna (all tv’s in America are required by law to support this). You can always take it back if the firmware is not the right version to root.
Vote with your wallet though. If the price is not an issue (like the OP seems to be saying "I don’t mind paying a premium"), then there's no point in encouraging these kind of practices, even if they're pretty common for these kind of device.
Unfortunately though I think you are right and the best thing to do is just get one that has the specs you want never connect it to the internet and just get a companion device for the connected stuff like a Shield Pro (aging device but I did not catch up to what was the cool new things for those)
This is kind of an annoying platitude until you provide some vote that's worth casting. Who do you think we can buy from for a high quality, modern, privacy-oriented TV if you're so confident that it's just a matter of voting with your wallet rather than buying the device that lets you do what you want to with a bit of finagling?
Oh I absolutely don't have that kind of money, that's why I had no choice but to buy a crappy JVC TV that's definetly a spying tool rather than an actual device. But as I said, it does not seem to be the case for the person asking it in the first place as they are OK to pay extra for this...
> So if you never connect it to WiFi, you get a good deal on the hardware.
Until it becomes harder, or even impossible, to root the hardware, as even the guide states:
> DO NOT UPDATE TO WebOS 26 firmware released after 2026-10-10 like 43.21.84 (see the firmware list). Public root method got patched and this firmware currently cannot be rooted. If you will connect your TV to the internet to root it, first turn off autoupdate.
So if people continue to buy 'subsidized' TVs, companies will continue to produce them.
There needs to be an unsubsidized-by-ads option and people need to purchase it to show The Market™ that there exists demand for such a product. But the problem seems to be that all the current offerings are ads-based.
> sold units' is still a metric they'll use to positively enforce their strategies
Exactly, if we want change the sales numbers have to go down. That means don't by LG, Samsung and who have you, it also means telling friends and family to go buy something else... but what?
Organizing a national boycott would be a reasonable comparison to running for office.
In a capitalist system, most people primarily influence the expenditure of their dollars. In a democratic system, most people have their vote. In general the average person exerts an average-person-sized influence over the world.
It could be a loss leader where they make all their money with ads and spyware. I don't know if that's the case, but if it is, they'd lose money from the purchase and never make it back.
The one unit you buy is an insignificant drop in the bucket for them, and getting their actually good underlying hardware and display firmware is much more valuable for you in comparison.
If you're worried about giving money to these corporations, why don't you buy second-hand? It's not like a 9 month old TV model suddenly is obsolete. An excellent TV from 3 or 4 or 5 years ago is still excellent today. Resist turbo-consumerism and just buy second-hand!
Does VLC exist for WebOS? It's the only thing I really use on my TV, to play series from my NAS over Samba.
I looked at that app catalog and don't see it. I like the amazoff one though. I don't think something similar exists for android. I have Amazon prime but don't use it anymore since they introduced ads, I just have it for the shipping now. But if I could block them I might use it again.
I love this. Do simple procedures like this exist for every smart TV? For every smart device?
And how well does it work in practice? My experience with setting up my own media box suggests that online community solutions, no matter how well integrated, will always still have some rough edges that you don't see in commercial products (subtitle sync in my case).
I do think this kind of thing needs to become more commonplace, but it's clearly still going to be a steep barrier for most people.
One would think that TV manufacturers would provide the means the root TVs so consumer would still buy them. Our TV is kept offline and a fanless low power PC facilitates all content. We would have liked to buy a new TV, but being the real owner would be a hard requirement for that. And a new one would just need to be
able to do what the PC today already does.
Some TV already fail at just being a larger monitor and I think most products just suck.
The people running companies aren't interested in selling things with the intent for you to own them. Not when it is perfectly legal to essentially lease access to the metadata of your usage patterns.
I was literally about to remove the wifi/bluetooth module today on my C5 48 after reading about that in an HN comment a couple of weeks ago. I'll definitely be looking at this before I do that.
(It has never connected to wifi nor done any firmware updates, just my AppleTV and MacBook via HDMI. So I don't actually need to root it but I like the idea anyway.)
FYI, OP is wrong about "pulling the wireless module and voiding your warranty."
In the U.S., merely doing something like that will not void your warranty due to the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. Companies will lie and claim that, but in my experience, they immediately backpedal when you ask for that in writing (or if it was already in writing, thanking them for admitting to breaking the law).
The root is transient, and Samsung TVs also have Knox security which I presume you really don’t want to trip. Some parts of the file system are protected by SMACK which even root can’t access.
I’m working on reverse engineering the applications that run in that SMACK context to see if there’s any way to gain access.
I wonder if it’s possible to hack my LG remote to use local voice models like Parakeet hosted within the LAN…? To trigger home assistant light settings, adjust blinds, switch on and off AV devices etc
I don't know but perhaps you could do it the other way around. Glasshouse has a full blown Home Assistant bridge that lets it control the TV. It looks pretty sweet.
Is it permanently rooted? Or does it revert you if the TV decides to upgrade itself? Intentionally never upgraded my firmware, but it did it automatically once despite me not approving it.
Even stock firmware lets you turn off automatic upgrades. The blocking in apps like Glasshouse add another layer of protection by blocking LG's servers.
Rooting is "permanent" until you factory reset the TV which returns it back to stock. This is handy if, say, you've got a warranty claim and don't want rooting used against you.
A number of people have reported that root sticks across firmware upgrades but I don't think anyone should count on that always working. You never know if a new release might find a way to disable root.
Updates will revert it from my understanding. The homebrew app has a setting to block updates, but according to the rooting guide linked above apparently it's not reliable and it's recommended to block it with your router to be sure. https://tv.slada.sk/guides/blocking-updates
They all do it. LG is only the most notorious because of the Gamers Nexus investigation. They've bought other brands of TVs so they'll all have their day in the sun. I can't wait to see what they find with TCL TVs. Cheap TVs made in China that have been doing this forever? What could poosibly go wrong???
The Magnusson Moss Warranty Act protects against that kind of thing.
If you modify function A, and then make a claim for warranty service for a defect in unrelated function C and they don't want to cover that because of the modification, then: The onus is on the warranty provider to prove that your modification of A caused the defect in C before denying the claim.
And they know this. The first layer grunt on the phone or in the chat box may think it is some other way but the larger organization definitely knows what their responsibilities are.
To the best of my knowledge, changing software does not cause damage to the TV that could result in warranty being voided.
If the new software burned pixels or did something like that, which I am unsure is even possible from software, then I believe that would cause the warranty to be voided as a result.
But the reason would be pixels being burnt by using the hardware wrongly (i.e. through a bad software). Not merely by installing the software.
Might be dependent on where you live. But regardless, a factory reset puts it back to stock so they'd never know. If the TV is so badly fried that you can't reset it, they likely wouldn't be able to determine it in the first place.
People were up in arms (and rightly so) when the LG TVs were found out for their spying thanks to the Gamers Nexus investigation. At least LG TVs can be rooted and you can install apps like Glasshouse [0] to disable all the telemetry and add substantial new features that you can't do via the officially sanctioned Dev Mode. The vulnerability that enabled rooting was recently patched so hopefully another can be found.
Hopefully similar apps will come along for Samsung now that root on it can be achieved [1].
vocal people on the Internet are "up in arms" but does the general public care that some LG exec says they "own the glass"? I think that at best, they might care until they see the ad-subsidized price tags.
It doesn't fly, but the 2000 lbs of downforce on the McMurtry Spéirling Electric Hypercar means it can drive upside down. Sort of. A bit. [0] Top Gear took the car for a spin around the track in a very entertaining video, where a jaded car reviewer is in disbelief about the cars performance pretty much the whole time [1].
It's also 0.57 slower on 0-60 mph, but we also know that's with a human in it. Hopefully they're trying to build a version with two fans pointed backwards (and slightly up) as well to improve cornering. Though it remains to be seen if the weight penalty from that makes up for the added directional thrust.
What most impressed me was the precision control after the flip. It doesn't visibly wobble. The other flying car does. All systems, even RC EE circuits have a "wobble".
> Because I see design as a proxy to build quality and ergonomics
It isn't a good proxy. Couple examples: Apple sold laptops with wonky keyboards for years and still sells a mouse that charges from the bottom when the battery dies.
While I never owned these Macs with butterfly keyboards, I have used them, and yes. Apple botched bad on that keyboard. They made it right later, though.
While I also understand that Apple Magic Mouse looks atrocious with that port on the bottom, just charging it for two minutes gives you 8 hours of runtime. Why can’t people plug it in while going to get a coffee and unplug and finish the day with that quick charge? Then you can leave it charging for the night.
If you really want some bad examples, look at some popular cars. Many of them don’t care about your finger, and happily chop it off if you put it the wrong place at the wrong time.
I agree with your ordering of the various programs out there but FreeCAD 26.3 is now available as a release candidate with a wonderful collection of improvements. I'd think for many people, FreeCAD is now "good enough" for a lot of things. I'm building a virtual pinball cabinet and the whole thing is modeled in FreeCAD.
The FreeCAD wiki is very good. The release notes for 26.3 are at https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_26.3 and those entries link to relevant sections of the wiki that go into more detail. For example, changes to the Measurement tool on that page link to https://wiki.freecad.org/Std_Measure where you'll see notes like "introduced in 26.3".
The wiki tells you what the tools do. For learning how to use those tools to model something, YouTube channels like Mango Jelly's are a better bet. The pace of FreeCAD development has definitely picked up since the 1.0 release
In the past when I've looked there were a _lot_ of pages tagged as needing to be updated to 1.1 --- a quick search seems to indicate that enough pages have been updated that I couldn't quickly find any tagged as needing that for 26.3 which is a marked improvement.
I'm not patient enough for videos (though I have watched a fair number, they're just not clicking) --- I do far better with traditional documentation where I can walk through things at my own pace --- but I need for said docs to correspond with the UI of the application I'm trying to learn (hence my disappointment in the afore-mentioned text).
I hear what you're saying but good written stuff takes longer to produce than a video so there's that much less of it.
What I've found pretty handy for learning FreeCAD is finding an existing model and messing around with it to see how the original creator did stuff. That's where I started with my pinball cabinet. Once you get the basics down it is much easier to pick up on new features, many of which are enhancements to existing functionality.
The mcp integration may be seen as both a blessing and a curse but tbh, it’s very interesting :) and hopefully as folks post and comment on more models that are generated with it, we can get a better training set.
I actually still use the freecad gui because it’s cheaper but I can totally see how someone new might just wanna use the MCP.
You can take a regular CRT and rewind the deflection coils on the yoke to work as a vector CRT display. Arcade Jason has a good video on how to do this.
Then you need a vector generator if you don't have an OG vector game. This one on Github is pretty good and can be connected to either an oscilloscope or vector monitor.
If you use the vstcm to drive your rewound crt, you still have a problem. The deflection coils are very low impedance (around an ohm I think), so you need an amplifier stable at very low impedances that can generate a voltage sufficient to get deflection across the full screen in x and y. I think Arcade Jason was working on one of these too but I don't think it is out yet. ElectronAsh was working on one as well but I don't think he finished it.
$199 when it was introduced in 1982. It was discounted a couple times after that after Milton Bradley bought them and got down to $100. That's a pretty decent price considering the Atari 2600 debuted in 1977 at $199.
It was basically a whole arcade machine, just a lot smaller :-)
reply