This broken english is printed with impeccable quality.

That’s probably the funniest bit about this whole thing. Absolutely impeccable workmanship, but horrendous English. If only they spent a touch more money for decent translator.

Legit impressed with the sharpness of that text at that size. That’s definitely not from any fly-by-night back-alley Indian factory using sweatshop labour.

Apple is the least bad + most functional option out there.

Nothing else will go further in being least bad, unless you are willing to completely sacrifice functionality and usability.

Apple at least walks the walk of protecting user privacy because they aren’t dependent on non-hardware, non-app-store revenue (as in, selling user’s data). Google is absolutely dependent on revenue from selling user data because their hardware and App Store revenue is almost insignificant in comparison.

Apple is the least bad + most functional option out there.

Nothing else will go further in being least bad, unless you are willing to completely sacrifice functionality and usability.

Apple at least walks the walk of protecting user privacy because they aren’t dependent on non-hardware, non-app-store revenue (as in, selling user’s data). Google is absolutely dependent on revenue from selling user data because their hardware and App Store revenue is almost insignificant in comparison.

Then it’ll be the Covids for me, especially ravens. And pretty much all of the parrots, especially the African Grey.

Fun fact about owls: they appear to be intelligent with their large eyes and calm(ish) demeanour, but the ironic thing is that those eyes are so large that they don’t leave much room in the owl’s skull for their brain - owls are unusually stupid for their size.

Imagine if a carmaker sold a premium vehicle with a polished metal and glass exterior that you had to protect under a vinyl wrap to keep it from rusting and chipping under normal use… they’d be a laughing stock!

tesla cybertruck wanders into chat, spots comment, slinks quietly back out with a red face

I would likely go case-less if it wasn’t for my dry hands, and the occasional need to have my phone sit on my leg (while I am driving) so I can go hands-free with it.

My problem is that any phone without a case (and about 99.999% of cases out there) has the phone being as slippery as an enraged hagfish. It literally leaps out of my hands with most operations, which is why I need a case – to grip it effectively.

And now with my iPhone 15 pro max, I have been in a desperate search for any case which is sticky enough. As in: with the phone in the case, place it face-up on your open palm without gripping it and tilt your palm 30-45°. If it slides off, the case is too slippery. I’ve had sticky cases before, but it seems that everyone suddenly stopped making them some time after the iPhone X.

Another tool is yWriter.

This isn’t a tool for everyone, because it is research-first focused.

What I mean by that is that it’s a little clunky because background/research data is meant to go into it first, and then you are supposed to lean on that content to write your book second.

So for a non-fiction book, you would add all the data and facts and references, for a fiction book you would put in all of the important characters and plot points and things that the characters interact with.

This is so you always have a body of references to work off of so you don’t introduce inconsistencies.

Some people might find this software useful because assembling and fleshing out the underlying data is loads of fun and/or how they prep. Others might need this feature just to keep track of everything that goes into their book, as they might not be able to keep track of things like character quirks very easily in their head.

YMMV.

but you’d already be hard pressed to read the data off a deck of punch cards or reel of magnetic tape

Even something like a 3¼″ floppy is getting hard to find a drive for, because not many USB drives were made, and non-USB drives need a motherboard with floppy compatibility. Which would be more than a decade old by this point.

Nothing for the Nokia 7.2, and yet the 4.2 sits there with more than a half-dozen options. WTF??

And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.

the key is to simply seed all of your content for as long as you have it in your collection.

Tell that to TheGeeks. If you aren’t actively uploading - not just sitting there sharing, but actively sending data to anyone else - you’ll eventually be warned, then banned.

Back when I was trying to use their site, they had only one system: strict 1 ratio on a time limit. If you couldn’t maintain a 1+ ratio, and achieve it within a very limited amount of time, it didn’t matter what you grabbed or how long you shared back out, you got banned. At the time they had no other way to get ratio other than sharing back out - no freeleech, nothing. Which meant if you were wanting any content more than 2-3 HOURS old, you were looking at a ratio shortfall because there was no way to make up that ratio you were losing by downloading that content. There were simply too few peers after you to overcome the masses of seeders ahead of you satisfying peers.

It was absolutely brutal, which is why I now refuse to deal with any sites with that rule (1+ ratio with time limit) even if they have other ways (freeleech, etc.) to mitigate it. Like, f**k those sites. I’ve been seeding some torrents for close to 15 years, I have no problem letting shit remain resident in my client. So sites like MyAnonamouse it’s going to have to remain.

If you are talking about sites that have a strict, non-negotiable seeding ratio requirement, it is impossible. Your only real long-term option is to write a script that will grab everything that gets uploaded on a 30-second cadence, and then aggressively super-seed that content back out. And this is regardless of what it is - this script runs 24/7, doing about 2,880 hits on the website a day for new content. Still, even with the script it will be difficult to have your overall ratio exceed more than about 1.5-2, and you may still get banned for individual seeds that never exceed 1 because no-one is very interested in them.

I have tried to use sites that have strict ratio minimums, and long-term success is impossible without an edge like the script I mentioned. It’s why I now work with sites - like myanonamouse - that have minimum seeding times for everything you grab, regardless if anyone else needs it. They tend to be far less stressful and user-hostile.

We have high technology because we don’t have anything else to leverage.

I suspect a world with strong magic is liable to leverage that to the exclusion of technology.

A now-ended iseki story on Reddit’s HFY subreddit called “Wait, is this just GATE?” Asks the question of what would happen if a universe of only technology and no magic (ours) made contact with a universe of pretty much only magic and almost no technology beyond that found in the Middle Ages. It contains some tropes (used mainly as comedic relief or irony) and plenty of references to current magical-universe plot elements from games and novels, but is a surprisingly fresh and compelling examination of the cross-universe idea.

For the vast majority of flip phones currently available on the market, if they’re not running some version of KiaOS, they’re running stock Android - with all the Google spying that entails - under the hood.

even if the kernel has extra chromosomes.

Okay, that is a hilarious way of saying those forks are back of the short bus “ssssspecial”.

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Vanadium is purely for GrapheneOS, and Trivalent is purely for Linux. Both of which also appear (looking at this on mobile) to require compiling by the user.

Soooo… an appropriate pair of tools for, what, 0.5% of all computer users in aggregate?

Really appropriate suggestions, there. /s

Show me something Windows based that can be as secure as LibreWolf along with the appropriate extensions for blocking ads, fingerprinting, CDNs, and other spyware-like content.

Because Chromium in any variation, it ain’t.