Vancouver Art Gallery Opens New Dedicated Collection Floor - Miss604

When Dan had had enough of his television, he threw a rock straight through the screen. The offence? His smart TV was downloading its third update in three days. “It drove me crazy with what seemed like daily software updates that never fixed anything and ‘features’ that never seemed to work,” says the 71-year-old from Illinois. “And of course, constantly trying to push me to subscribe to paid-for services when all I wanted to do was watch over-the-air TV, play a DVD or stream something from my computer.”Some may accuse Dan of being a luddite, but his master’s degree in computer science and decades of experience in telecommunications would suggest otherwise. “The tech is not intimidating,” he explains, “just increasingly enshittified.”The first smart TVs entered the market in the late 2000s, when companies introduced operating systems, media players and apps to screens that were becoming wider and thinner. In recent years, the luxury status of smart TVs has waned and increasingly affordable options are widely available. Tom Parsons, TV and audiovisual editor at the electronics magazine What Hi-Fi?, explains that these cheaper models can struggle under more advanced features.

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When the final episode of Ghosts was aired in December 2023, the sitcom felt as if it had reached a definitive conclusion. The show’s central relationships, between Charlotte Ritchie’s Alison and the ghosts who haunt her tumbledown inherited manor house, were neatly tied up, as they encouraged her to sell the place to a hotel developer. It was a tearjerker of an episode for the millions of people who watched it, as well as for the cast and crew behind the scenes. “We had stopped the series with genuinely no intention of coming back,” explains the show’s co-creator Mathew Baynton, who also stars as the callow romantic poet Thomas. “We were all in tears on the last day of filming,” he says, now perched on the uncomfortable end of a chaise lounge in a London hotel suite. “I was so upset that it finished,” adds Lolly Adefope, who plays the excitable Kitty, from the better structured end of the chaise. “It was like being at a party and you guys were leaving.”“It was a clear ending, and the guys felt like they had fully explored all of the characters,” says director Simon Hynd, “but I did notice a look of regret in some of their eyes.”All of which is to say that Ghosts is now back.