Yeah it was 2006 and that was how you got the MP3 files onto your iPod Nano. This was back when “mobile internet” consisted of “m.website.com” links that loaded a page without a style sheet at dial-up speeds that was designed to be navigated with a D-pad.

The year was 2006, and the 80 GB HDD in my Dell Optiplex 790 was full of podcasts, stolen music, and episodes of Dr. Who…

Especially with ChatGPT you don’t really need to be that good at it, just good enough to read the script over and to know how to execute it.

Would they make it worse than watching ads?

I am not a lawyer, add salt as necessary.

There are a few instances of people getting sued, but usually your ISP will get a DMCA notice and send it to you and so long as you remove the content they’ve DMCA’d you’re usually fine. I also believe that in Canada there’s a $5000 limit to the damages they can recover so it’s usually not worth it for them to hire a lawyer, which again, I am not.

Call me if you need help ;p

Yeah honestly I’d rather some VPN provider get my $15 so I can torrent in peace rather than giving it to one of ten different streaming providers so they can pay some executive to dream up new ways to extract value from me for sitcoms from the 90s.

This is true, but I don’t know if you’d be counted as a seeder on that list though if you don’t have the full torrent.

It depends if you’re using them all. Systems where I have lots of applications installed (especially graphical ones) will have lots of packages, my bare-minimum container hosts will have few. I think there’s also an element of selection bias here, because people posting screenshots of neofetch on their system are also likely to be people who intentionally run very minimal systems focussed on minimizing the number of packages so they can brag about it on the internet.

TL;DR - the right number of packages to have is as many as are required for your computer to do what you need it to do, and not too many more than that.

Something I’ve found very helpful is time tracking. I have an app on my phone that is always running a timer where I input a task and a project (basically a category for the task). What this has forced me to do is to consciously decide when I’m doing a thing, and it acts as a kind of lightning rod for my attention. When I start a new task, I need to decide that is what I’m going to do and put it into the app, and if I find myself drifting from the task I must either stay focussed or decide that I’m not able to focus on the current task and instead focus on what is distracting me. It helps me remind myself that “now is the time for X, not for Y.”

Sell all stock photo memes and buy worried Alex Jones memes.

The thing with cats is that they just kinda know themselves and offer you the deal of “yeah these are the three nice things I like to do and the three annoying things I like to do and if that jives with you, we’ll work. Otherwise, I guess just let me back outside and I’ll go back to eating birds and shit.” So every cat owner is like “yeah sure he vomits in my shoes every 2-3 days so I just turn them upside down when I take them off but he likes to sleep on the couch beside me when I watch TV and that’s our special time, you don’t really need to get it.”

I’m personally a big fan of OpenAudible. It’s not free, but it’s not crazy expensive and it does all the work for you. You sign into your Audible account in the app, it will pull your library, download each book, decrypt it, and convert it to the format of your choice (I usually do M4B). I’ve been using it for years and it makes downloading your Audible library in an ongoing basis a breeze.

So two things about this:

1. Tailscale doesn’t actually route through Tailscale’s servers, it just uses its servers to establish a direct connection between your nodes. You can use Headscale and monitor the traffic on the client and server sides to confirm this is the case. Headscale is just a FOSS implementation of that handshake server, and you point the Tailscale client there instead.

2. Doesn’t renting a $3 VPS and routing your traffic through that expose many of the same vulnerabilities regarding a 3rd party potentially having access to your VPN traffic, namely the VPS provider?

For what it’s worth, I generally think that the Headscale route is the most privacy- and data-sovereignty-preserving route, but I do think it’s worth differentiating between Tailscale and something like Nord or whatever, where the traffic is actually routed through the provider’s servers versus Tailscale where the traffic remains on your infrastructure.