me but opus instead of mp3 and ViMusic instead of Spotify

Pihole, if i understand correctly, works by blocking DNS requests and YouTube ads are not DNS based the way ads usually are. You’re stuck blocking them by uBO on each device or use Invidious.

As long as it applies to the normalplebian things like WhatsApp, I’m not really concerned nor surprised.

It is up to us to protect themselves and it has been since the wake of malicious ads that track your every click. It’s gotten so bad that you’d have to be insane to not use uBlock Origin.

Now it’s time to find another means of communication. So many privacy oriented open source apps have come out and all that you need to do is install one and tell your friends… such as SimpleX Chat and Session Messenger.

Don’t sleep on your OPSEC, unless you have a reason to. :)

Working minimum wage or struggling with money for any reason shall not mean you cannot have nice things in life, never. So I do the thing. Sometimes. Normalizing spending money into things you physically cannot touch is one thing i could get over with, like buying GOG (DRM free) games i’ll actually end up playing, but licenses to play a dang video game that is valid for god knows how long? This is where I draw the line.

Your friend is right: when them corpos suck us dry, we gotta suck em back. It is easy as that.

Furthermore: It’s not piracy when paying for it is not owning it.

I fail to see why not. It’s just a dress. You shall wear whatever resonates with you.

“When you walk into a classroom, you shouldn’t be able to identify the pupils’ religion just by looking at them,”

Sir I’m sorry but a abaya doesn’t prove someone is religious. You can wear one if you so please even if you’re not Islam. It’s just a dress.

I don’t have the disposable income for ordering or even takeaway anymore and the fees only get worse from here. Learn how to cook. Impress your visitors. Get nice things in life with the savings.

Ü

If you got Android Smart TV that allows apk install, such as a fairly cheap FireTV Lite, check out SmartTubeNext. NewPipe or Revanced for mobile. Laugh the difficult in the face if you got the time and mood to try these out :)

Edge got a shitstorm for in-browser self ads on the chrome page, now in-browser censoring? The internet bows down to EU, sure, but one nosy country? If at all the official download links for France would be laced, but not anywhere else i.e. its gonna be yet another joykiller for normies, like… even the thought of maintainers pushing another release specificially for a country is laughable. That’s my assessment anyways. Signed

The future looks grim if that WEI thing comes to practice. But it’s my understanding that identifying the ‘undesired’ browser is done by fingerprinting? In that case you could just fake it by using JShelter, even fake the extensions you’re using. Not sure how they’re gonna fend Revanced if at all.

Stay strong everybody

oi mate have you heard of ViMusic?

You all got a valid point… it’s just that mileage varies and x codec will sound better in y combination. If I remember right, AAC on Android is at times implemented differently than on it’s home Apple: The encoder would work with smaller bitrates to save battery. There must be a special synergy for max bitrate LDAC to sound worse than AAC, indeed. All in all my post is about being open minded and giving you the option to use a thing, rather than finding out what codec is universally the best: You virtually can’t, can you?

This is like asking why manual or automatic is frustrating. You mostly use the thing you have grown up with and that’s it, particularly when you got bills to pay and there isn’t much free time unfortunately. If you put it into perspective, a massive amount of users already hold Linux in their hands and everyday life: Android. Nah let’s get back to computers.

IT class back in college taught a wee bit of Linux. I was one of the few who were interested and did what the teacher said, the rest played Hearthstone. Linux Mint is what intrigued me since high school. A wonderful OS that brings life to laptops too slow for Windows 7. But I’m still the cozy and unbothered person who sticks to Windows on their main machine. I just want to relax after a good days work and play Forza Horizon 5. However I do enjoy my Linux laptops that won’t run red hot just because of Windows Update, Defender, telemetry and other garbage. My love&hate about Linux is that there are so many distros to choose from. There were times when x is better than y and it was(still is) the devils circle: distro hopping. Today I’m cool with Ubuntu derivatives like Mint and Pop, along with Fedora and Suse, since a decade of having at least one Linux PC I still don’t find joy in advanced stuff like Arch. Anyway use the thing you are comfy with and don’t let anyone judge you, live your life. <3

just yes. the sound and anc is day and night compared to my more compact redmi buds 3 pro. I used to diss TWS as a whole until I got these pairs. Had some issues after a firmware update but a factory reset did fix it for me. :)

This is true if you leave it at defaults but I make use of file versioning. When you flick that one on, files that are otherwise replaced or deleted will actually move to a offline .stversions folder. That is very vital I must say in case a host catches some encryptor malware eheh

I use foobar2k via wine. Yes, you may stone me. Tip: You will save heaps of space by not embedding the cover on each file, just put a cover.jpg in the albums folder, virtually any player will pick it up.

No. That would defeat the purpose of me installing Linux in (old) laptops. Windows feels sluggish enough with a sea of bad things wanting your minimum wage and have Windows Defender prevent it but not all of it, obviously.

I put all my attention to prevention and set strict rules on the router. It can be as simple as setting the DNS to stuff like dnsforge.de or DIY it with PiHole with hosts lists of your hearts content that update itself weekly, I do the latter. Nothing beats a cross platform solution that protects every device in the network, if you’re after 100% performance. Of course you can still catch bad things, such as social engineering by email that happened over at Linus Tech Tips. You better stay vigilant no matter what solution you use and don’t sleep on making backups, which can be as simple and automated when you use Syncthing for example.

Yes… I made double sure to mention ‘encoder’ between that.

Xiph really won the lossy codec scene with Opus and I transcoded all my junk to that format. Hitting (my personal) transparency on 128k vbr is flat out impressive and it warms my heart that corpos won’t have a reason to collect taxes for basic things like audio codec. However it’s a different story with bluetooth audio codec in which I hope will change.

I see, so Edifier and Soundcore shall do some homework as well: LDAC and multi point don’t work there either.