Your options if you wish to stick with Windows:

• Windows 10 LTSC (massgrave activators and has a guide for getting an ISO for it) which means a reinstallation (best option with Windows, least enshittification, still keep security updates but have to back up your stuff and reinstall everything) though this may not be a long-term plan if you play video games as I expect many places may drop Windows 10 support by 2028-29 end of ESU rather than 2032 end of LTSC support.

• Windows 11 but change to LTSC (massgrave can do this)

• Windows 11 but change to Enterprise license (massgrave can do this) and use Windows Group Policy settings to set target for updates to the current OS build version number which will delay feature updates for I believe up to 6-12 months but allow you immediate security updates. Bad news is you still get the new “features” but good news is they’re delayed significantly and maybe by the time you have to “upgrade” Microsoft has tweaked them to be moderately less bad and much less buggy.

Star Trek.

Everything after Voyager gets axed completely. 100% retconned. Doesn’t exist. You can’t even joke about happenings in it in any new works.

Voyager and DS9 themselves get trimmed down. DS9 loses 75% of its episodes, Dominion war erased, mundane space station stuff instead, no religious weirdness validated. Voyager gets better ending but retains most of its episodes.

ToS gets turned into legendary chronicles rather than full canon with the more absurd less science bits cut out or reduced to the fantasies of the chronicler. Main stories and characters retained with >=80% of it surviving. Movies from both ToS and TNG era retain full canon status.

It is established that alternative dimensions are extremely limited in number, you cannot do Marvel universe #69 stuff with it, the main one is the nega-universe with evil everything and a few other isolated pocket universes that are short-lived and unstable (often as a result of warp core implosion weirdness and such).

All existing writers and producers currently associated or associated since the end of the Voyager era are summarily fired with prejudice. New ones are hired and quizzed by me to ensure at least the main producers are communists like Roddenberry and do not want to turn my hopeful FALGSC property into grim-dark in space IP number 3. Prominent transgender characters are MANDATORY in the new series and other steps will be taken to drive every last reactionary out of what’s left of the fan-base.

It becomes studio policy to viciously copyright strike anyone uploading video of retconned parts of the IP to any platform as well as to bully journalist insiders with access into adopting the new line by excluding anyone who disagrees with it from access or favor.

Not sure.

Apple TV devices do offer a similar app for collating together all your streaming services and their offerings and Apple tends to be a tad better on privacy but for something like this I really suspect your data is being collected by Apple though what they do with it may be a little bit better than Google though I don’t really know.

These apps tend to have some sort of built-in recommendation stuff and to do that they need to profile you and your habits to be useful. Now true they could do that and not make it available to advertisers but the very idea is pretty fraught. I can tell you the streamers themselves in many cases are selling your habits and preferences.

Basically though when it comes to streaming you have only these choices of ‘platforms’:

• Google / Android TV: Run by Google, you know the deal, comes with lots of smartvs, various devices exist running it from Walmart (Onn) to Google themselves, to Xiaomi, and so on.

• Apple TV: By Apple, comes in two flavors, with and without ethernet, typical Apple experience in that it’s locked down, so no side-loading but no ads on the homescreen either and less data collection than most other offerings by Apple themselves (note: the streaming company apps often do their own data collection and will do so on any platform). Very direct competitor to Google TV by a company wealthy enough to be able to stand toe to toe and not fret too much about profits from one small device line like this, also used to get people into their streaming service AppleTV+ as the devices come free with a few months of it.

• Roku: Probably about the worst for privacy, very aggressive anti-privacy practices, data collection, profiling your local network devices and of course the service itself is ad supported.

• Fire TV by Amazon: Not great, better than Roku probably, not a lot of hands on experience with this myself but it runs a modified version of Android and in future probably a modified version of Linux. Used to be sideloading friendly but they’re now cracking down hard because of piracy.

• Roll your own device, use a mini-PC, raspberry pi, old laptop, etc: Disadvantages include all commercial streaming services will not go above 1080p (no 4k), many are locked to 720p because it’s not a certified device with lock-down against video capture, experience isn’t as natively smooth as a dedicated streaming device designed with that in mind. Hack-y solutions like using air-mouses as remote controls that can be good or bad. Things can break and you’re on your own to support yourself. Upsides include no homescreen ads, minimal data collection, complete control of the device, ability in some cases to do limited adblocking but at the cost as I said of no 4k, often no full 1080p with most streaming services. I wouldn’t recommend this unless you do a lot of served from home media streaming via Jellyfin, Plex, directplay off your movie rips hard drive, etc as this is where it really shines.

• Dune-HD: If you’re looking for something with high-end support that allows 4k streaming from streaming services plus stuff like Plex there are Dune-HD devices. They run certified Android alongside a custom linux build inside a privacy container isolated from Android. They offer a lot of devices that are in the roll your own category but a bit more polished (though still often locked to 720 or 1080p by streaming services), but they also offer a few devices that are dual-os as mentioned so straddle the AndroidTV and roll your own divide kind of offering the best of both.

MKVToolNix.

An excellent tool for working with video files as long as you’re okay with your files being in MKV containers (you should be they’re superior to mp4). From within it you can add and remove tracks such as audio and subtitle, change flags (flag subs as forced, default, etc), rename tracks for clarity, adjust track timing with positive and negative delays to fix sync issues. You can do batch scripting against it to iterate through whole folders of video files. For anyone who has a home media server it’s a must. For anyone who works with videos regularly it’s at least useful.

I would say there are not any and that best practices are avoiding running random scripts you don’t understand, keeping software up to date with package managers, and using virtualization tools. Also look into Portmaster perhaps which is an interactive firewall.

Perhaps contained evidence against the former PM who tried to do a military coup and this is the way of getting rid of it? Perhaps protecting co-conspirators if not the top guy.

I think the home media collector usecase is actually a complete outlier in terms of what these formats are actually being developed for.

Well yeah given who makes it but it’s what I care about. I couldn’t care less about obscure and academic efforts (or the profits of some evil tech companies) except as vague curiosities. HEVC wasn’t designed with people like me in mind either yet it means I can have oh 30% more stuff for the same space usage and the enccoders are mature enough that the difference in encode time between it and AVC is negligible on a decently powered server.

Transparency (or great visual fidelity period) also isn’t likely the top concern here because development is driven by companies that want to save money on bandwidth and perhaps on CDN storage.

Which I think is a shame. Lower bitrates for transparency -should- be the goal. The goal should be to get streaming content to consumers at a very high quality, ideally close to or equivalent to UHD BluRay for 4k. Instead we get companies that bit-starve and hop onto these new encoders because they can use fewer bits as long as they use plenty of tricks to maintain a certain baseline of perceptual visual image quality that passes the sniff test for your average viewer so instead of getting quality bumps we just get them using less bits and passing the savings onto themselves with little meaningful upgrade in visual fidelity for the viewer. Which is why it’s hard to care at all really about a lot of this stuff if it doesn’t benefit the user in any way really.

And which will be so resource intensive to encode with compared to existing standards that it’ll probably take 14 years before home media collectors (or yar har types) are able and willing to use it over HEVC and AV1. :\

As an example AV1 encodes to this day are extremely rare in the p2p scene. Most groups still work with h264 or h265 even those focusing specifically on reducing sizes while maintaining quality. By contrast HEVC had significant uptake within 3-4 years of its release in the p2p scene (we’re on year 7 for AV1).

These greedy, race to the bottom device-makers are still fighting AV1. With people keeping devices longer and not upgrading as much as well as tons of people relying on under-powered smart-TVs for watching (forcing streaming services to maintain older codecs like h264/h265 to keep those customers) means it’s going to take a depressingly long time to be anything but a web streaming phenomenon I fear.

You can I believe sign up with a wechat account as well. So you’d create that first, then use it to sign-in.

Disclaimer: I’ve not used that exact machine but have worked with similar Lenovo/Dell stuff.

On HP’s spec sheet it says the max HDD size is 2TB. Do I need to do anything to the BIOS to allow bigger drives?

Set mode to UEFI and/or GPT possibly. Some very old BIOS may simply refuse to boot off a drive that big while some may work as long as the boot stuff is in the first 2TB.

I’ve heard it’s possible to add a third 3.5in HDD in the DVD drive bay. Can anyone confirm? Do you need a bay adapter or whatever?

Often these form factors have a SATA plug for a DVD drive. Be aware that this one is usually only SATA 2 at best so slower than SATA 3 (only 3Gbps vs 6Gbps) and often only SATA 1 (1.5GBps) in fact given DVDs need significantly less than that. Not technically a huge limiting factor in anything but bursts and saturating the cache as mechanical hard drives are going to tend to struggle to get much above 300Mbps sustained write anyways but a consideration. I wouldn’t put a RAID drive on it if possible as RAID drives should be on SATA adapters of matching speeds.

You can use a bay adapter and you can set the drive directly bare on the surface but it may induce vibrations and in theory for mechanical drives could shorten the life of the drive in addition to being annoyingly noisy. An SSD located there wouldn’t have this problem as it’s safe to set the SATA ones on a bare surface. Though if the SSD is getting heavy regular use you might consider still investing in some sort of heat solution like an aluminum dock for 2.5" drive to place it in and set that there.

As far as if you really want to set a 3.5" spinning disk HDD there without paying for a dock, at least put rubber between it and the metal of the case. Either little rubber standoffs or a flat rubber pad. This may induce heat issues but should solve the vibration one at least.

You can of course buy a PCIe SATA or SCSI card and connect to that to get higher speeds.

The other questions I’ll leave to other people. Technically hardware RAID tends to come with lots of problems for home lab setups and software at the host OS tends to be more recommended as easier to recover with and less prone to various problems.

A Chinese social media app. A ton of US tiktokers fled to it when it seemed a ban was imminent.

Read the linked source FFS.

Me: Provides evidence that in decades past last century they were paid for and did dirty work of British intelligence, at no point were the people responsible cast out, at no point was this influence purged and processes and organs put in place to prevent this

Me: Also provides evidence they are in the bag as of the twenty-teens they were doing propaganda work for the British against Russia in coordination with the British state through cutouts

You: um acktually do you have any proof they’re still doing that this month? No? Checkmate.

Yeah it’s called a pattern of behavior. Why would they change? What would cause this? Sudden secret come to Jesus moment that fits your idealistic wants and needs in this particular argument? The burden of proof is on YOU and on THEM to show a sustained pattern of change. More than to show that but to admit, call out, and have a reckoning about their past behavior, bring it to the front, make everyone aware of it, apologize, and explain how they’re changing and what they’re specifically doing to prove this isn’t happening.

Partnering with Tass in what way? As wire agencies? Carrying some of their stories? That’s proof of nothing. You think because some org that’s deep in with the intelligence apparatus of one state has some casual or professional cover level contact with a state media organ of a rival state that is proof of what? Impartiality? That they’re actually Russian spies using British intelligence?

What I linked claims they agreed to use journalistic contacts within Russia to influence Russians and others within the CIS sphere for the interests and goals of the UK. If I was doing that I’d want contacts like that including contracts to carry out that work and legitimize my stories to my targets. I’d want to pretend to be friendly, professional and open while carrying out this work.

The new leaks illustrate in alarming detail how Reuters and the BBC – two of the largest and most distinguished news organizations in the world – attempted to answer the British foreign ministry’s call for help in improving its “ability to respond and to promote our message across Russia,” and to “counter the Russian government’s narrative.” Among the UK FCO’s stated goals, according to the director of the CDMD, was to “weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbours.”

Reuters and the BBC solicited multimillion-dollar contracts to advance the British state’s interventionist aims, promising to cultivate Russian journalists through FCO-funded tours and training sessions, establish influence networks in and around Russia, and promote pro-NATO narratives in Russian-speaking regions.

In several proposals to the British Foreign Office, Reuters boasted of a global influence network of 15,000 journalists and staff, including 400 inside Russia.

No.

They are a British government and intelligence cut-out. That doesn’t mean they always lie but they skew coverage, are manipulative, dishonest, and serve the interests of the British state. They’ve been that way for decades, receiving funding in the 1960s and 1970s from MI6.

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-office-russian-media/

A series of official documents declassified in January 2020 revealed that Reuters was secretly funded by the British government throughout the 1960s and 1970s to assist an anti-Soviet propaganda organization run by the MI6 intelligence agency. The UK government used the BBC as a pass-through to conceal payments to the news group.

In the modern era they still target Russia under the direction and funding of the UK government. One cannot be in bed with spies like these and hope to hold them and their friends like the US, EU, etc to account.

The fourth estate in general in the west is highly compromised. Russia and China and many others openly fund state media and the west decries it as propaganda, but they never hide it. Whereas the west secretly funds, manipulates, and controls supposedly independent press and declares itself the free one while it lies to the rest of the world and their own populations.

As a wire agency Reuters does tend to have less room for deception than say Fox News due to a lot of short form news breaks. So in that regard they’re more trustworthy than say CNN or Fox News but that doesn’t mean a lot.

I would go for an Apple TV 4K box with ethernet (don’t burden yourself with wifi when you can have gigabit ethernet for $20). No ads, simple, works, looks really nice, apps are very responsive, I can fly through my home media collection’s wall of posters using the remote without any delays in loading images. Compatible with all the major streaming services. Has infuse for streaming local media as well as Plex and Jellyfin apps.

If you’re interested in spending some money and want something better without the Apple ecosystem (be warned, Google seems to be cracking down on sideloading so who can say how much longer that lasts but do as you feel right) I’d recommend something from Dune-HD.

Considering how old the Nvidia Shields are at this point, the disinterest from Nvidia in refreshing them periodically as Apple does, the insertion of ads, framerate switching issues, etc I think Dune-HD makes the superior product for upmarket non-Apple TV streaming. People have been waiting for a Shield update for 4 years now. In that time Apple dropped their own prices to make Nvidia look like even bigger clowns still selling old hardware and chips all these years later at such mark-up.

They support AV1, dolby vision, atmos and 2 of their 4k models have a dual OS set-up. One is Netflix certified Android which gets you full support for 4k streaming, DV, atmos, etc from all major streaming services, the other is a special virtualized container running a customized version of linux with a media center which you can install Kodi, Plex, Jellyfin, etc onto.

People who say “just run it off a PC you install Linux on” are not very serious or not very discerning (or more hardcore than me in their refusal to ever pay for any streaming services). Quality from such non-certified devices is capped at 720p without dolby atmos, dolby vision, etc from nearly all the major streaming services.

If you don’t want to drop as much as Apple or Dune-HD charge I’m not sure what to say. Walmart’s onn USED to be a great choice as you formerly could root them but they changed that and locked them down since 2024 I believe. Just get something beefier than a stick that plugs into your TV IMO, any kind of box is going to be superior in terms of ability to deal with heat.

laughs in group policy disabling of onedrive

Make a version of Office that works on Linux natively.

Three basic options exist:

1. Burner: Take a device that isn’t a normally used device for each category. Make sure it has nothing you care about on it, no incriminating web history, no accounts logged in or saved as cookies that are incriminating, etc, etc. This is simplest, most expensive, but also most fool-proof against all possible threats.

2. Wiped: Wipe the device before travel, possibly backing things up in the cloud to download after arriving. You’ll have to back up again with any changes you make and wipe again before traveling back then at your final destination again restore the device from backups. If you have serious fears of close inspection or forensic analysis then it would behoove you to use a secure erase feature on the drive and reinstall the OS rather than just trying to delete problematic files. For smartphones especially doing this and restoring from a cloud back-up can be pretty easy, for laptops it’s more of a pain.

3. Mail ahead: Take the devices to a package service, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc ahead of time, mail them ahead of or just behind you so they arrive just before or slightly after you. For this to work you need a fixed accommodation that can accept packages and which you trust to store them and give them to you. This technically doesn’t prevent mail interception but unless you’re a high value target that’s unlikely at present as its kind of a multi-agency intentional effort thing. Still I’d mail the device in a fully encrypted state.

No other feasible options exist. You can encrypt yes and if you are a US citizen you cannot be denied re-entry (non-citizens can be not only denied entry but barred for years after for refusing to decrypt a device/cooperate) but they can seize your device and hold it for up to a year while trying to crack it and you’ll have to expend effort to get it back at the end of that period. They can also put you in a holding cell for hours or hypothetically up to a couple days if they really want to press it accuse you of something and be unpleasant during that time.

I need at least sheets that are thick enough not to let light through, not super thin sheets. It’s annoying in summer months. I need my feet covered because I’m paranoid about mosquitos though it’s rare for them to actually get inside and I need my head/eyes covered as well or it just doesn’t feel right, partly about light and muffling noise.

And for me it’s definitely a horizontal sleeping thing too. Propped up I can fall asleep while being only partially covered or hardly at all but horizontal I have to have it.

If the UK is serious about blocking VPNs that don’t comply they’ll mostly succeed for the big ones. They’ll get them removed from app stores which will prevent most normies from finding and using them. They’ll apply network blocks to their entrance IP addresses (laughably easy, there are commercial vendors who sell data like this so they don’t even need to invent the wheel here) and make it difficult. They wouldn’t be able to prevent truly determined VPN providers from providing service but the days of $4/month for privacy/torrenting would be gone as the prices would likely be higher and you’d have to do things like mail cash.

Beyond the known IPs, VPN traffic is fairly easy to flag with DPI solutions and could be detected and blocked or dropped by ISPs acting under the law. This could also be used to stop people running tunnels to hosted VPS solutions outside of the country or run by friends from their homes. There are obviously ways around these, disguising traffic, various techniques but for most people they’d give up and either stop browsing porn or cough up their ID. Of course this would create a dangerous state of affairs where anyone using a VPN without being KYC’ed is clearly a criminal, at the very least a suspected video pirate, at the most a dangerous child predator or terrorist.

Additionally the UK isn’t like Russia or China, lots of western CEOs and employees pass through and within its jurisdictions and if a particular VPN is providing service without this they could try and arrest c-suite people or engineering staff associated with it and slam them with jail time. So that’s a problem.

then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function

A little credit here. They’d rephrase the law to only target VPNs whose purpose is offering as a service to the general public (as opposed to exclusively employees and contractors) the ability to connect to a private network with exit points / the ability to appear as if their traffic originates from outside of the UK.

On a related matter they could also require know your customer for all VPNs, require all VPNs keep logs available on request for police inspection and those who don’t are banned. All companies keep extensive logs for corporate VPNs so this wouldn’t present any additional burden to private enterprise but would be the end of anonymous VPN services.

I really don’t think this is more of the spectacle and move on. Not this time. I think Palestine has them spooked because they lost control of the narrative and the best way to seize control of the internet and clamp down on people conveying information they don’t like is starting with things like this.