I feel like you’re taking this all a bit too seriously. Here’s a suggestion: if you don’t think the contests are fun or worthwhile, don’t submit anything and don’t look at the winners and especially don’t print any of the submitted designs.
At first I was with you.
Anyway. I’ve been finished on the toilet for a while now. Gonna go sit on the porch and drink coffee and listen to the birds and never think about the terrible, terrible injustices with Prusa’s contests again.
p.s. I think the contests are awesome and I love how Prusa engages the community and gets people thinking about new ideas.
I can appreciate both sides of this issue, but as a parent myself, I’m leaning toward mostly agreeing with you. It’s insane how much corporate indoctrination there is. Disney is the worst, but they’re all salivating for the chance to get their hooks into the brains of young kids, because they turn into lifelong customers. It’s the same reason why fast food chains have playgrounds out front. Even if you see an innocent playscape, the marketing is there.
I use Amcrest, mostly because the guy who makes frigate recommended them, and has affiliate links on his site. As a software developer myself, I have to say frigate (and HA) are two jewels of open source software and so I’m happy to support them however I can.
That being said, the cameras work well and are easy to integrate with both frigate and HA. They all try to phone home at first, but stop if you tell them to (I’ve confirmed this by monitoring the traffic on my dns servers).
I couldn’t find a privacy friendly wifi camera with a big enough battery to run continuously, so I ended up building my own with a solar panel, an inverter, and a 9ah lithium battery that sits on a fence post at the end of my driveway. It was a fun project, but I wish I could buy it.
Another small gripe is that the PTZ cameras from Amcrest all seem to be crazy expensive or have mixed reviews, so I’ve just held off on those for now.
Is fondant a cake?