Category: YouTube

OpenSuSE upgrade did not work – reinstalled fresh from a new ISO

Pro-tip you should have done a decade ago: add a second hard drive to your machine, and put /home on it. Then during the install of the fresh OS, do not format that disk, simply mount it as /home

In a previous post, I was whining that YouTube videos were not working. I also (rather mean-spiritedly) implied that maybe Google was screwing with the connection because I was looking for ad-blocking videos. That was wrong: this fresh install of OpenSuSE has fixed that problem.

Of course, never does a single thing change, and I happened to roll over into the new month, so T-Mobile doesn’t see me as over my “unlimited” transfer limit.

But for all that testing I did, what I hadn’t tried was Windows versus Linux. I saved off a problematic YouTube link to my NextCloud Tasks, and logged in to it on a Windows machine. It played perfectly.

D’oh! It’s my OpenSuSE machine that’s borked.

I’d done an Upgrade per SDB: System upgrade to Leap 15.4

So I downloaded the ISO and did an Install not an Upgrade, and now that problematic YouTube video plays correctly.

I’m still going to have to install all the packages that went away. But that is a trade-off I’m willing to make, for being able to see videos of how to open up the connection to Mariadb running on a Synology NAS (for example).

OMG shitty advertising

Do I want to watch television? Or maybe check out YouTube for a Home Assistant tutorial? I decided to try YouTube on the television set. I do the search terms, I find a video with more than 1 million views, and I hit play.

First, Google wants to play an ad. It is so fucking stupid that I’m out.

Back to HBO for me.

I suppose someone thought that being outrageous was clever. Instead, they just confirmed my suspicions that YouTube, on the television, is simply a waste of time.

I chuckled at a recent observation by someone: Google gets paid to put ads on YouTube. Then they put unskippable ads on YouTube. Then they offer to let you pay to skip those ads. “Get paid to create the problem, get paid to solve the problem. Genius.”