[spitfire]

I already did, over a decade ago. I tell friends "No cloud services on this ship!". They've bought into it too, buying more CD's, records and dumb only TV's.

My current setup is an old 1080P Bang & Olufsen setup. Looks and sounds great. Similar with audio - B&O did airplay back in the 80's called master link. So each room in the house can play music from anywhere else.

The only things networked are actual computers and phones. That's more risk than I want to handle, no need to add more. Similarly I've passed over smartwatches for good quality Swiss watches that'll still be worth something in 18 months time. I swear I'm not some character from a William Gibson novel.

I expect at some point old school offline stuff will make a comeback like Vinyl has. Society lags a good 10-20 years behind the frontrunners. Sometimes more.

[stevewillows]

A guy in /r/buyitforlife posted a palm pilot (Tungsten C), and it got me thinking about heading back down this road (further than I already have.)

For portable audio, I'm using a souped-up iPod video. I'm thinking 2020 will be the year where I take another step in this offline direction -- at least with hardware.

[dwighttk]

I had bad luck with iPod hard drives... I’m surprised you’re is still working, or was there an SSD video iPod that I’m forgetting?

[ben1040]

I assume by “souped up” they mean they modded it. You can go onto Amazon and get adapters to retrofit HDD-based iPods with flash, and a replacement battery too as long as you’re cracking it open.

I did this with an old 5G video iPod and it was a 15 minute job. Worked better than new because there wasn’t the lag in switching songs from waiting for the HDD to spin up.

[stevewillows]

yeah, the 5.5 is the best. Such an easy mod, too. Combined with Rockbox and it's a near-perfect media player.

[stevewillows]

yup! You I replaced it with an iFlash Quad [1] -- it takes up to four micro SDs.

I also replaced the battery with a 2000mAh and keep it all in the 30gb case. I also replaced the headphone jack and lock switch so they were black.

Modding iPods is a breeze, too. Just be gentle when you're disconnecting the battery.

[1] https://www.iflash.xyz/store/iflash-quad/

[amiga-workbench]

You can easily retrofit flash memory into at least some of the older iPods.

[amatecha]

I'm somewhat the same way, but I've been looking at 4K TVs for ages and cannot seem to find a single one that isn't "smart". Maybe one day I'll find a good one that is dumb!

[the_jeremy]

I only had luck searching for monitors. There are 43" 4k monitors[0] (probably larger as well but this fit my use case).

[0]: https://smile.amazon.com/AOC-U2790VQ-3840x2160-Frameless-Dis...

[amatecha]

Hm nice, thanks. Yeah I have also heard that displays intended for big advertising installations are a good option, but those often have low refresh rate or long image persistence (or whatever the term is), so they're not very suitable for movies and gaming.

[thw0rted]

Also: many, many thousands of dollars.

[Accacin]

I think similary, I had a moment of weakness when I bought my house and bought some cheap IoT things to make my house 'smart' but this was followed by a moment of clarity so I decided not to use any of it.

I do however, use a running watch from Garmin. That's only used for when I'm excercising though, other times I'm wearing my automatic which is much nicer and doesn't try and track me.

I use my iPod video for music and Podcasts (big shoutout to gPodder and Rockbox for making this easy!). I do not buy and rip CDs though, as I don't like having to store them. I do by all my music from Bandcamp which gives me DRM free copies I can backup.

[lsaferite]

I use Insteon for all of the switches and fans in my house. Those are combined with an isy99 for automation. My thermostat is a Venstar T7900 which is WiFi connected, but doesn't need to connect to the internet and has a local API that can link into the rest of my HA setup. My home security system has a local network interface via an EyezOn module for integrating all of those sensors into the HA system. I also have an RPi running Home Assistant for tying a lot of these things together.

None of this _requires_ an external network connection. I have a hard rule that my automation needs to operate without a connection to the outside world.

That being said, I can easily connect this setup to Google Home or Alexa to add in voice control (which I have done). If a viable offline voice assistant comes along I'll 100% add that to my local setup.