If they are willing to torture you to get the data. Then there is also a very real chance that you would still get the same treatment or just killed even if you give the password.

I went into it without knowing anything except the trailer that played after I finished some other show. The cast flowing so well and was one of the few shows that had me after the first episode (so many these days don’t fully “click” with the first and require a few). Also was glad to start it after basically all the seasons had came out. Definitely one that is great to just keep going. It has become one of my current default shows that I can put on anytime I am not in the headspace for watching new or continuing other shows.

You might like Evil (2019). Aside from torrents, Netflix has the first three seasons, and Paramount+ has all four. It is pretty wacky and dark, also is about demons/demonic possessions/the Antichrist. Is mostly demon of the week for most episodes, but the overarching story is good.

That is a real problem which is why a smaller (or even a “mini”) version of phones does matter. Keyboards can be adapted to be smaller, which can be helpful (but gets clunky when I have tried using those options from one-hand typing to two-hand adding steps). It does seem like the options for folks like yourself are an afterthought that leads to having to pick between being comfortable or having all the features and uncomfortable. Apple is basically the only OEM that has real options in both smaller and larger sizes without losing as many (if any depending on the year) features.

I have been using Samsung phones since the S3 and while I personally like the larger ones, I do have a friend that has also had their phones about as long as me. And he always gets the non-plus version of whatever the S series is out when he upgrades due to liking the smaller size (similar to your experience). But I know he would love a small version of the Ultra for the extra features, but don’t see Samsung doing that anytime soon. Which sucks given how much they try to be the “Apple” of Android devices.

I personally like large screens due to being able to see more (do have to mess with scaling and font sizes to force browsers). Though I do find that I can only do “serious” work with actual PCs (even tablets don’t “feel” right). Some things make more sense as having a mouse and keyboard are easier to just do things. But other times I can only describe trying to use small screens (including my large phones and tablets) as kind of a digital “claustrophobia” of sorts. Though some of that is because of touch interfaces/UX can’t show as many options/menus and the keyboards take up more of the space.

Though I do hate that we don’t see more compact flagship level options for folks that like them or need them. Apple is like the best option as far as losing fewer functions, and Samsung does still make a point of having a non-plus version of their main yearly releases.

As far as the screen size impacting battery. I think that the opposite is seen from the times I have heard it brought up. The larger body allows for more battery space. I believe that when I was looking at smaller phones for a friend that was thinking that a small screen would help reduce his desire to distract himself from being always on his phone. That one thing I saw people/articles mention was how one down-side for smaller phones was literally how they needed to charge more often to make it through the day. I think the resolution and refresh rates make the most impact on battery. As I remember my S8+ could do like 2k resolution, but in the settings it would mention that battery life might be less than if I picked 1080p. Which would still be an issue if I had the non-plus version.

It is more leeching than sharing, but if it is actually torrenting then it should also be uploading while the “stream” is playing. So kind of like PeerTube. Just really depends on both how it is setup, and how popular the video is at any time. Though it sucks that there isn’t a good way to make sure connections happen.

There are lots of times that I get torrents the regular way that I would like to have uploading to other peers at the same time. But will notice that I get few to zero peers for uploading with popular files. There are times that I will leave it seeding for weeks without any uploading. So I end up deleting the torrent so I can move files or free up space because I already made a second copy to sort. Not always the case, but frustrating to not even see a few MB go to anyone. With PeerTube I see my upload working more consistently, but main issue there is just not often that I am watching something that a lot of others (or any others) are also watching.

I have heard that there are non-amphetamine based ADHD meds from friends that weren’t allowed to take regular meds. Which might be easier to get a Dr to start with if brought up. They (the friends) said they didn’t like the non-stimulant ones as they felt weird. But you might be able to try to see if they work for you. My boss’s kids seem to have had luck with the non-stimulant versions. I might need to look into getting a small script for some whenever I finally am able to go to visit some friends in Japan. I have heard that it is hard to get approval to travel to a lot of countries with USA ADHD meds because amphetamines.

The only time I have traveled outside the USA after starting ADHD meds was Japan, but had the benefit of being in my early 20’s and more energy and not many years taking the meds. Now that I am in my late 30’s and been taking meds for so long, I already get a lot of anxiety if my refills might get delayed. I just feel so spaced out and no energy aside from small bursts. Kind of like just a permanent state of caffeine crash (even with energy/pre-workout drinks). Some of it might be due to my normal meds counteracting some of the effects of my anxiety/depression meds’ with regards to lower energy.

Even with the small amount per user, they better be forced to pay in real checks or similar. Not in Play Store gift cards/credits, as I imagine that is what they will want to do if their appeal fails.

The article is interesting, but they really went hard with the title just to only talk about it for like two sentences. I was hoping for more since it seems like a pretty fun topic.

That would be the real “wildcard” out of nowhere mobile OS, and would be amazing. For some reason I thought of it like a pro-wrestling “pop” where Android betrayed their long-time friend Linux mobile while fighting iOS. Just to then have “WAIT what’s happening?!?” then OpenBSD mobile’s music hits and runs down with a steel chair, and the fans lose their minds! lol

Specs:

• Asus TUF Gaming X570-Plus WiFi
• AMD Ryzen 5950X
• 64GB of G.Skill F4-3600C18-32GVK
• Gigabyte AMD RX-7900XTX
• Samsung 980 Pro 500GB (OS drive)
• Samsung 990 Pro 4TB (Game Drive)
• Samsung 870 EVO (one 2TB and one 4TB for main non-game storage)
• WD Black 1TB HDD (mostly used for books, comics, file history for my user profile, and misc storage)
• LG M-Disc Ultra-HD/4k internal burner/reader with hacked firmware to use with MakeMKV.
• Seasonic 850W 80+ Platinum
• Noctua NH-D15 Gen 2 (had a NH-U12S) and 5 140mm case fans from them (can’t remember which models but one is the newer version).
• Fractal Define R4 (main reason I have air cooling instead of an AIO as the 5.24in bays and older style from a 2013 build I bought from a different friend in 2015 that wanted to downsize to do two years of Van-Life).
• Windows 10 Pro (will likely move to a Linux distro after I have a new build and use this one as a dedicated Plex/Jellyfin/long-term data storage).

Built piecemeal over the past 6ish years (original CPU: Ryzen 3800X as a bundle with the board and GPUs first RX-580 8GB then RX-5700XT also 8GB, drives changed out also over time along with the RAM). So the cost of all the parts has been spread out. I got the RX-7900XTX for $800 off a friend that was down-sizing on things which was too good to pass-up as the price was still $1000~1100 at the time (2023 within the first year).

Usecase: Mostly games, general daily tasks and browsing, also as my Plex server and more recently ripping/re-encoding my Blu-rays and DVDs.

I plan to build a more straightforward PC for games and daily tasks. I don’t have the parts selected yet for it, but plan to stay all AMD. Also plan to run a Linux distro from the start with that one since Proton has worked so well on my Steam Deck (along with Windows 11 being so much more invasive than even 10). Might still need to setup a VM with Windows for really specific situations and to keep-up with how things work and trying out things that might help in fixing PCs I work on for my job.

I have heard that doing hardware pass-through on VMs is maybe easier if the host is Linux to be able to actually use my GPU in the client OS. So I am looking forward to seeing how that might work (I don’t use VMs much since I haven’t had proper GPU support which annoys me lol). —

That would be awesome to see. OEM bootloaders (and their fuses) and dealing with the proprietary drivers/blobs are the things that really need to be tackled with resources to be on as many devices as possible. I doubt those companies will want to play nice depending on whatever Google demands to be allowed Google Play Services. It is so hard to actually break into the OS market for mobile at all, but it is dedication that LineageOS has had that has kept it alive and updating. I hope that all the custom ROMs and the Linux Mobile OSes help each other out to the benefit of everyone on all levels of phone/tablet tiers.

Good to hear that dd did the trick for you, and I will keep that one in mind the next time I need to re-install an OS on a drive that might be having the issues. SpinRite works by going sector by sector reading and copying the data, erases the sector, and then writes the data back. Not like something you would want to do all the time for sure. The creator of the program also said he will have the code go FOSS when he dies (pretty old but in good health). I am hoping that he is able to complete the full re-build he has in the works to have it work with how modern motherboards and controllers work (the current code-base is extremely old and requires turning off both Secure Boot and UEFI (or at least enable CSM) in order to boot the live USB (I think it still uses FreeDOS as the environment). There are ways to run it in a VM correctly, but I haven’t messed with trying that yet.

I also agree that it seems that really old cards and drives tend to not have the same issues as newer ones. Hell, I have even found that my floppies that are from the mid to late 90s and very early 00s tend to have a better chance of me still getting data off them. More of my mid to late 00s disks have issues with corrupted data. Found that out when going through a bunch of disks I had forgotten about, to get whatever I could last year.

I wonder if it was more like folks putting stuff together to just work (likely with demands of it getting done really quick). But then the folks that got it implemented forgot to change the default/placeholder stuff (at least for the passwords). Just like how basically all routers used to have the same log-ins that never got changed by the end-users because it “just worked” out of the box (even if the labels and setup clearly said to change them first thing). I really hate how companies of all sizes seem to think of IT/sec as something that is just a drain on money that could be used for making profits look better.

Mostly just a small-ish info dump in the event it helps anyone. All flash and nand media can self-wipe if not used for a couple of years (though nand can last longer but may start to slow down to SATA and slower). Even if in an active PC, the parts that are only read but not written this can happen. Learned that from some episodes of “Security Now” podcast and personally saw it happen with a PC I was trying to fix for someone. On the show one of the hosts has a commercal program called “SpinRite” that was made to help with HDDs that have non-moter/actuator issues revive sectors.

Some testers using it found that it also helps with nand that has drastically slowed down from reading spots that never really get writes come back to normal speeds. In my case, I tried it on the PC I was working on and it really did help (the OS was already borked so it wasn’t going to hurt trying it out) with it loading much faster. Obviously the cheaper the flash/nand the faster issues will happen.

I have seen some random motherboards offer basically a pre-erase on SSDs that are acting slow before you re-install the OS to make sure a more complete flipping of cells happens and not just a basic formatting that just zeros the first parts of data and leaves the other cells alone. In that case the data/OS isn’t the focus and wouldn’t need a special paid software (I am only aware of SpinRite just because of the podcast and bought it to support the host that makes it). I am not sure of any free/FOSS software that does the same full drive cell flips, but I imagine there are some (or will be as flash/nand is used more and more).

Main take away is that it is important to make sure to not just let flash drives/SD/nand drives sit without at least hooking up to a PC every now and then. My PS Vita fell victim to just sitting around dead for a few years along with the Vita card I had in it. Fortunately the ROM with the OS is still working and I was able to at least set it up again.

Not the channel you where talking about, but if you like fake tutorials. Then this one has some funny ones. https://www.youtube.com/@infinitesolutions

Only a few days after you for me.

The “dumb TV” options are few (there are some but doubt their panels are as good), so the only “real” options are to go with the second option you gave. Depending on the size needed, PC OLED/AMOLED monitors are probably the best option pared with a HTPC or whatever other box. Sucks that a lot of the larger ones are also becoming “smart.”

GrayJay is pretty good option, it does have YT but also has plug-ins for other services. So it could be good for getting results if searching for something that will show up in YT that the creator also uploaded to other sites, while still having the option to watch if not. Also has built-in support for SponsorBlock and DeArrow for the things that are only on YT (and can opt to sign into or stay signed out of YT account). PeerTube is still a mess though. Not able (or at least I don’t know how) to pick your instance to sign into and doesn’t seem to allow for adding to the pool of peers to help upload while watching. But I don’t think even the phone apps that specifically are for PT do that/have the option. Would be nice to be able to do that if on WiFi at least.

I think that Snowden (and other leakers) would argue that the US is much much less transparent. Though it is best to just assume that all major govs are spying on everyone (even if it makes an ass out of u and me). Though we can agree on open source hardware.