Hopefully we’ll get the true version of Tales of Symphonia! The proper 60 FPS GameCube version, and not the crappy 30 FPS ports with missing lines of dialogue.

Great questions! Seriously, those made me think for sure.

For question one, I suppose a profiler could do that. If my domain name is myemaildomain.com, they probably could track all emails and sell it collectively. But I don’t think corporations do that at this time. That would be akin to profiling all Hotmail, Gmail, Live, etc emails, appreciating those are massive services. I suppose if nefarious actors were to do that to my domain, I could consider switching domains - I have multiple domain names I own, and it’d be trivial to use the other ones. In the years I’ve been using a custom domain for email, I haven’t encountered any nefarious actors and have significantly eliminated any spam.

For question two, the domain provider I use doesn’t do that in their terms of service. However, if they did look at my MX records and decided they wanted to profile me as a user of Addy, they definitely could do that. Though it would hurt their business as many users would migrate their domains to new registrars - I certainly would move my domains to a new registrar!

When you get an email from Company A that sends to your alias email, the email goes to your inbox. When you reply to that email, your alias provider forwards it to Company A where the sender is your alias address.

In short, you simply reply and your alias service takes care of it for you so that the recipient only sees your alias email and not your true email.

I signed up with them ensuring I read their privacy policy. Based on my personal privacy threat model, I’m okay with their policy. This wouldn’t fit a more intensive threat model.

I haven’t read it recently but last I remember they do have the option to temporarily store an email in the event of a failed delivery, until it can eventually get sent to you. This is opt-in I believe, and a toggle you can enable in your account.

In the time I’ve used them I haven’t had any issues with email deliveries. Been happy with the service so far, having left SimpleLogin and Proton for political reasons.

This is what I do as well. I purchased my own custom domain name and run aliases off it using Addy. So as an example, an email for an online account would look like: random9.words@mycustomemail.com

Then I feed these accounts into a password manager so I don’t have to remember them.

All the aliases forward mail directly to my main inbox. Companies never see what my real address is. If I get spam, I know which company either sold my data or leaked my data. I can then take action by simply turning off that email alias and then spinning up a new one.

The best thing about owning your custom domain is that you’re in control and never have to change your email addresses. If I want to move to a new email provider, I can easily do that. The process, simplified:

• Buy a domain name
• Sign up for an email account at Tuta, Mailbox, etc.
• Set up your custom domain at that provider.
• Go to your Domain provider and update your MX records so that it syncs with the email provider.
• if you want to switch email providers, get a new one and then update your MX records to point to the new provider.
• If you updated your records to point to the new provider, you’re done. It’s that simple. You won’t miss an email.

Edit: All providers make it very simple to set up a custom domain. If you can follow instructions and copy and paste text, their systems will run checks to make sure you did it correctly and it’s syncing properly. Very easy for those who aren’t technical.

Not necessarily. If you can find on Bandcamp, it’s probably best to buy from there since I heard more money goes to the artists. I buy from wherever I can find the music, and thus I’ll cycle between Bandcamp or HDTracks if I can’t find it on Qobuz.

Separately I dislike how Bandcamp embeds their name in the metadata of the tracks you buy, but it’s trivial to remove it. Just rubs me the wrong way, so most of the times if songs are on Qobuz I buy it there since they don’t do that.

I only can answer your second question. You can redownload your purchases at any time. Music will remain in your library forever until one day licensing will take it away from you.

Qobuz has been very transparent - when you complete a purchase, they warn and recommend you to download it as soon as you can because license revocation can remove that music from your account. They’re my preferred platform for buying music.

Nice work! Glad you’ve sorted it out!

Yep we really do love them. Hopefully persons keep up the engagement on your posts. And also, hoping we’ll get some more to help create content in this exciting sphere. Thanks for what you do and glad you get a kick out of this! I’ll explore how I can try to help create some content too that inspires me. Something I can nerd out about as well!

Thank you so much for putting this together. I really do look forward to reading these! Must take so much work prepping and finding this, but man it’s just great.

Just a heads up that the Smart Cancer has already begun infecting PC monitors. Samsung makes Smart Monitors.

It won’t be long before there are no longer Dumb Monitors.

Thanks for the response! It was hard to gauge your level of technical ability as I was going off on the other comments and made a dumb assumption. :) My mistake and apologies if any offense as they were purely innocuous comments.

Since only the GPU is used in that build, thermalpaste was the way to go for sure. I assume you also cleaned it and inspected the thermal pads so rule out all that stuff. I never owned an rtx20 series (only gtx 10, rtx 30, and now i’m on AMD) so I don’t have firsthand experience with how they handle or if they run really hot all the time. Nothing else should be a factor here apart from getting rid of that top exhaust fan I talked about and moving your top exhaust fan further to the left.

GPU fan swap is always great - if you have no qualms with doing it, go for it and swap out to more performant fans that are less noisy. Undervolting is a free option. I only know how to undervolt on Windows since it’s stupid easy using MSI Afterburner, but I’m on Linux Mint now for a few months and I haven’t even explored that yet as a possibility for my RX 7900XTX.

For binding case fans to the GPU, some motherboards don’t come with that capability. I haven’t seen it in the one gigabyte board I’ve had, and I’m currently on an MSI X670e (I think that’s the model) and I don’t have that option to do it there. On Windows, you could download Fan Control and configure it in the app so the case fans will ramp up with the GPU load. On Linux, no idea - when I game, I just ramp up my case fans manually.

Something also popped in my head I didn’t think about. You may also want to benchmark your GPU and compare it to others in its class, this way you can get a rough idea of how the hardware is still performing.

Edit: fixed some typos as I’m on mobile

Two observations:

1. Your fan layout in your case is not optimal.
2. Your GPU idle is high, but not dangerous.

Fan layout in a PC is very straightforward - cold air in, hot air out. You want the airflow to be constantly moving and not choking. So first off, good on you for trying to balance the count of intake fans vs count of exhaust fans. I noticed in your observations that you’re wondering if your exhaust fan is detrimental - you are correct. The problem is that you are exhausting cold air before it even reaches your PC components. A common problem I see with inexperienced builders is that they try to fill as many slots as they can with fans. More fans doesn’t equal more cooling. Remove the top exhaust fan that is closest to the front intake (i.e., the top right exhaust fan as it is exhausting cold air). For your last top exhaust fan, move it as far left as you can (so it sits in the top left corner of your case, basically behind your CPU cooler). With this adjustment, cold air goes in and actually gets to reach your CPU cooler, and then all the hot waste air is optimally pulled out of the top left corner of your case (via both the rear case fan and the top exhaust fan).

For your GPU, based on reviewing your comments in this post, I assume you’re probably an inexperienced/new PC gamer. And that’s totally fine of course. Thermal Junction temperature of a GPU is generally certified by the manufacturer to reach 100-110 C. This of course is entirely dependent on the manufacturer, so check your GPU make/model, go to their web site, and look at the certified operating temperatures. Ideally, keep the hottest point of the card much colder than that. If your GPU is idling at 58, start by increasing your fan curves for your GPU. In general, you want more fan speed for higher load. Do your best to try to target ~70-75 F when doing heavy gaming (gpu temp 70-75 F, Tjunction and mem < 90 F) depending on the games you play.

My recommendations:

• Inspect your GPU for wear/issues.
• Clean your PC from dust. Blow canned air (or get a computer duster) through the GPU fans and heatsink and try to get rid of as much dust as possible. If you use a computer duster, make sure to hold the fans still as you blow through them, or else you can make them spin faster than the bearings can handle, which will damage the fans.
• Set a proper GPU fan curve to balance noise and cooling.
• It’s okay for your card to get hot as these cards can go up to 100 F, but it is ideal for longevity to keep it much cooler
• Optimise your case fans to have curves. Ideally, bind the case fans to the GPU so that when the GPU ramps up, the case fans ramp up too. If for any reason you can’t bind your case fans to the GPU, instead whenever you play an intensive game, just manually increase the fan speed to something like 1200 rpm just to bring more air in). Ideally for noise and airflow when doing general computing, your case fans don’t need to spin fast at all - I keep mine around 700 rpm.
• Balance your case fan speeds to match 1:1. In my above recommendation, you eliminate one exhaust fan so you are left with 2 exhaust and 3 intake. That’s okay. The ideal for case airflow is neutral air pressure (the same amount of air brought in will leave the case at the same rate), but the alternative less-ideal situation is positive air pressure (air comes in faster than you can exhaust it). However, be careful when balancing positive airpressure airflow. If you have way too much air coming in (e.g., 2000 rpm intake fans running at 100%) vs being exhausted (e.g., exhausting at 20% fan speed), you end up hurting airflow. What happens is you ram too much into the computer, and it has nowhere to go because the exhaust fans can’t keep up with how much is coming in. Eventually, the hot waste air from your PC components ends up getting mixed in with the cool air over time, and you end up with a hot box. Eliminate this problem by having the exhaust fans run at the same speed as your intake fans - always.
• And finally, make sure you have an airflow-friendly case. I don’t know what case you’re using, but as long as it’s not a bad case with filters or obstructions that choke airflow, you should be good. I’ve been using a Corsair 5000d airflow for several years now, but there are much newer cases that are better for airflow.

When you become more advanced:

• Do not do this part until you have experience and know-how!
• Disassemble your GPU, repaste it, and consider replacing the thermal pads if they’re worn.

Fair point, was curious if there was a reason beyond what I suspected. I love his comedy, but my opinion of course. Totally okay for you to have your own preference and recognise you don’t find that style funny at all.

Honest question because I’m curious. Why can’t you stand him?

Same strategy here. I’m in the U.S. and tariffs were my big concern. In December, I waited for the Sapphire Nitro+ 7900 XTX to go on sale and I paid less than MSRP for it brand new. Having experienced both the disasters of the previous two GPU gens, I had the foresight that the launch of the next gen cards would also be a disaster, and here we are.

PC Gaming has become a rich person’s hobby.

Buy current gen right before the next gen launches, and you’ll be set. I expect to get 10 years out of my card, with the incredible performance, build quality, and 24 GB VRAM.

Nah, you can still try Floorp. It’s very similar to Vivaldi (Chromium). I’m happy with it after using it for a few days to where I uninstalled Firefox. Shame for Firefox, been a user since 2003 or whenever.

It took me less than five minutes to easily migrate my data from Firefox to Floorp. If Floorp enshittifies in the future, it’ll be super simple to migrate to another Gecko browser, or possibly Ladybird or other engines.

No prob at all dude! I just wanted to add the additional context in case some other persons stumbled upon these comments, were confused, and so they can get some more information on different browser options out there. Candidly, I only learned about Mull vs Mullvad Browser this week when I was researching what non-chromium browser to switch to next.

Mull Browser != Mullvad Browser. Just to be clear. I’m adding this context because your reply was regarding a thread on Mullvad Browser, and you replied with details about Mull.

For anyone else reading this comment: Mull browser is from DivestOS and deprecated. Firefox fork. Mull was forked by the community into IronFox.

Mullvad Browser is still alive and kicking, developed by Mullvad the VPN provider. Developed in partnership with Tor Browser, also a fork of Firefox.

If you’re stuck with Windows for corporate-issued computers, the next time this happens you can abort shutdowns in Windows.

Command Prompt:

shutdown /a

Saved me several times over the years.