Cloudflare is a decent service, with really good security. Plus, with their tunnelling feature, they’re helping to keep you private. If you just pointed your A record to your IP, that’d be visible to everyone. Instead, your A record is just visible to Cloudflare. Plus it’s handy if you’re using them to forward a bunch of services onto the net. Not to mention all the other security features you can use. DNS records by design, are not private.

Depending on your server, and how you install you might have a bad experience. I’ve had issues where it wasn’t finding the film/series metadata, having plugin issues, and being incredibly slow (slow UI when anything is being done, slow scanning folders, slow loading saved metadata, etc). Jellyfin, like a lot of open source software, feels like jank. The devs know about a lot of issues, but they’re swamped with so much, with this big of a project.

People criticise Plex, rightfully so with some of their bad decisions, but it still works better. For me, Plex runs so much better, and without issues. I won’t be moving away to Jellyfin in the foreseeable future, but I’ll be glad when I am able to.

Honestly, I don’t even remember it being that funny. I haven’t gave it a second thought since its release. The power of social media marketing, I guess.

If you’ve never seen Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, I’d encourage you instead to take a look at Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz, both really good movies.

To make sure they get blocked by the most amount of people.

Due to its proprietary nature, finding software that can properly read those files can be tricky.

LibreOffice is the usual go-to for folks wanting an office suite, that respects privacy, and FOSS. It can read docx files, but it can mess up formatting. Still, for many it’s the preferred choice. It’s got the best reputation.

Now if formatting REALLY matters, take a look at OnlyOffice. It handles those MS formats so much better. It’s not a bad suite, but it’s hard to beat the good reputation Libreoffice has gained.

Each to their own preferences. Some of these sources disagree with each other, and that’s a good thing. The worst place to belong, is within an echo chamber. Always think for yourself, and try to understand where others are coming from (why they came to the conclusions they did).

As for Louis… honestly, I prefer his tempo. It feels more genuine, less like he’s putting on a show for the camera. In the tech world, take Craft Computing, LTT, or Jays2Cents as examples. All have gone on record to admitting to putting on a show, changing how they talk, etc, while on camera. If Louis is putting on a show, I gotta admit, I’m impressed. Hats off to the guy.

Personally, I like Techlore, NBTV, Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons, Luis Rossmann, The Hated One, The PC Security Channel, ThioJoe, and (sometimes) Linux oriented channels like The Linux Experiment do some good privacy/security stuff too.

First computer, I got was via a trade. I was about 12. At the time I knew next to nothing about computers, with desktops being a thing at school (in one room). Something like this in a home… that’s rich people stuff. It ran Windows XP, and was almost certainly a Pentium (don’t know which).

I remember making several trips to transfer the monitor, desktop, and accessories home. That thing was HEAVY, for me back then. It must have been about 3 miles before I carried everything home. I connected everything, booted it up, and everything worked perfectly… Then five minutes later I found out the importance of the internet… optical games worked fine, but no porn… My next purchase would be a USB 2 mobile internet dongle. How else was I going to do all that valuable “research”.

About two years or so later, it wouldn’t turn on (the PC). There wasn’t any shops near me that could fix it, and I thought what would be the harm in opening the side panel, and taking a look. Suffice to say… I made things worse. Can’t recall what I did, but the power supply went bang, thankfully no fire. I ended up throwing the computer out, and selling the accessories and monitor. I didn’t want to own a desktop computer, again for years. That loud bang scared the living hell out of me.

I only later got back into computing, because I was kinda addicted to video games, heard PC gaming was better, and slowly aquired several games from relatives (Crysis, Total War Empire, etc). That computer I purchased, new, with cash I earned from trading with folks/shops (still haggle, to this day). My next computer was AMD, a A6-3600, I think. No graphics card, though I would later haggle for a GTX 960. This computer was where I started to get really interested in IT. I wanted to learn why my old computer bit the dust, and figure out everything I could. It was more than a porn and gaming machine. That computer taught me more than most IT lessons ever did (still can’t believe using Google Search, constituted as a “lesson”).

No. Here’s a pretty good explanation from the qBittorrent forums:

Your ratio is what percentage you have given back to others of what you have taken. For example, if you download something, and have a .5 ratio on that file, that means you’ve shared back half of what you’ve taken.

Ideally, you should strive to always seed to 1.0 meaning you have given back the same amount that was taken. In an ideal world, this would assure that no torrent ever has to die. Private trackers may have more specific rules about what ratio you must maintain, either overall (across all torrents you download) and/or on each individual torrent you grab. Check the specific trackers you participate on for their rules.

If you deal exclusively with public trackers, then 1.0 should be your minimum goal.

Personally, I’d put your ratio at 2.0, if you have the available data allowance, and bandwidth. Help others like you’ve been helped, even on public trackers.

You might have better luck with Jellyfin, than Plex. Plex uses online authentication tools, which is used for not just user, but server management. In contrast, Jellyfin can be ran completely locally.

Now one thing to note is that neither solution will properly detect your media files properly. You’d need to manually input file details. Usually these servers would do a quick online search, to detect that your movie is what it is. You could import this data, but you’d need an internet connection to acquire it. If you do not mind all that busy work, then you should be fine.

Now the remote… honestly, no idea. I’m pretty sure Android TV has a button remapper app, which might help… Do modern Chromecasts use Android TV? I haven’t used them since their second generation. Best do some research yourself, or wait for another reply.

20xx

The rewrite is done.

https://protonvpn.com/blog/vpn-linux-app/

If anything, they’re worse.

1. Brave is an advertising company, that blocks everyone, but them. Forcing over people and companies into their system.
2. They’re heavily in the blockchain ecosystem, with their own worthless crypto.
3. They take from open source projects (uBlock, Chromium, etc), but threaten legal action when someone forks them.
4. They install bloat/spyware on your Windows system (later claimed it was a mistake).
5. Brave, and its CEO is right-wing, lobbying against things like same-sex marriage.

I could go on.

It applies to most business.

1. You give a positive face to the market you’re in (Game Pass, Phil Spencer, pro-dev vibe, etc).
2. You buy chunks of the market (Activ-Bliz-King is a massive chunk), while saying it’s good for the industry.
3. You squeeze the company of its IP, while bleeding the market dry of money. All of which kills, or at least hurts that market.

Right now, Micro$oft is in the Extend phase.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

PIA is owned by Kape Technologies., a dodgy company, founded by a member is Israel’s Intelligence Devision. They’re known to spread malware, steal users data, and redirect traffic to advertisers. That being said, PIA claims that despite being owned by Kape, they remain in control of their day-to-day operations. I haven’t heard of any major issues, since the acquisition. Kape also seems to like the profitability of their (several) VPNs.

Up to you if you trust them with your data. Personally, I do not.

Sadly, yes. A Proton team member on Reddit confirmed it a couple years back:

Folder/label names are visible to the server (for filters and other reasons) as are email metadata. Message and attachment contents are encrypted and not visible to the server.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/hxomoy/are_mail_folderstags_encrypted_or_private/fzc6wry/

Do note that this is ONLY true for Mail. Calendar, and Drive does encrypt folders/label names.

Tutanota. I used to use Proton, but they don’t encrypt folder names, which is a deal breaker. Tutanota does, and they’re also a privacy respecting, reputable, decent service.

Adguard Home. I find it to be more feature complete, compared to Pi-Hole. Nicer GUI, more options, built in DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS, better client controls & detection, more domain information, better domain list blocking, and so on.

I moved from NextDNS, to Adguard Home. All self hosted, and accessed with a reverse proxy.

I think we are constantly progressing in that field. One issue for latency was that controllers used to contact your device, and then the server. Now they can connect directly to the server. Things will improve, like it or not.

For right now, I think the biggest hurdle is with ISPs.

1. Data caps can be quite common, in many countries. Essentially creating a huge limit on how much you can (if at all) play.
2. Most people’s router, and access point hardware needs upgrading. A lot of the stock router AIOs from ISPs are really bad. Creating a bottleneck before the data even reaches the servers.

Another hurdle I can see is companies profit sharing. Everyone wants a large cut, so I’d expect multiple streaming options… and many failures, like what we’re seeing on the movies/series streaming model… just with games it’ll be soooo much worse.