It may be a bold of me to say, but I hold the controversial opinion that I don’t really give a shit which computer OS you use. If you can use a mouse and keyboard to navigate a desktop environment then 🤙 you are ahead of the curve at this point.

I couldn’t bear to make e-waste, so I repaired two c.~2012 era chromebooks earlier this year. The end result was equal parts rewarding experience and a complete was of my time xD. Those sandy bridge cpus are sloooow

Tor. Anything short is freely giving your data away. If you’re looking for something that isn’t based on Gecko or Chromium there is the DuckDuckGo browser, which is WebKit. I can’t attest to how good their privacy policy is though as I have no idea.

I used a Jelly pro for two years as a daily driver. Smaller than a credit card

Sex with a hella sexy robot? Nice.

Using a hella sexy robot to fill the emptiness of no intimacy or authentic mutual connection? Not nice.

For some reason sex with a robot doesn’t feel gross to me — until they start using it to fill a hole (hehe)

I will never forgive Microsoft for just straight up deleting everyone’s (mine) MineCraft purchases and accounts, and then having the gall to tell us to buy it again. It’s still in my Microsoft Store purchase history, for Christ’s sake.

I’d sooner buy Skyrim 4 more times than buy back what was stolen from me.

• Keeps your progress if you exit without saving
• Supports tabs so you don’t have 5 separate notepad windows open
• syntax highlighting for programming languages and markdown format
• plugin support
• can handle extremely large text files (I’ve opened 50gb text files and used ctrl+f to find terms and it worked fine)
• superb tools for manipulating text (e.g., use reg expressions). Super easy and flexible in making mass edits.
• dark mode support. That alone makes it superior lol

If you just need a quick window open to make a note you might actually prefer Sticky Notes over Notepad!

Sorry, I misread. What is bad about the UX exactly? You don’t need to customize anything if you don’t want to; “it just works”. And I dont follow you on how having the option to customize things makes it a bad user experience. You’re assuming the native UI is bad for some reason.

I’ve used Plex a lot too back in the day but there’s nothing it provides that Jellyfin doesn’t do out of the box + self-hosted + for free.

You can change the UI design to whatever you want with a custom CSS. Can make your own or there’s a plethora of themes on GitHub. I remember trying one that replicated the Netflix app, and don’t hold me to it but I think I saw a Plex one as well.

Also, regarding the metadata, there are options that auto populate it for you. Idk how it does it, but my haphazard library of torrents all had accurate metadata AND it downloaded the subtitle files as well.

I tried Jellyfin two years ago and was so fed up troubleshooting the installation that I swore it off. Tried it again a few months ago and it worked flawlessly! Now I host movies, shows, music, ebooks, and audiobooks for a handful of friends and family. My jellyfin instance is probably siphoning $120/month from Netflix’s subscription revenue lol

On an unrelated note, that thumbnail image looks fairly convincingly like pixel art until you zoom into it. Conversely, the pixel art people are making with comfyUI and LORAs (locally) is insane. I messed around with it and you can generate 2d and 3d game assets of anything you can think of.

For those who still need to run Windows, I recommend that you utilize the Windows 10 LTSC IoT iso (can be found online; make sure you verify it with a checksum from microsoft) as it will receive security updates until 2032. You can debloat the iso significantly using this guide, though be warned that it is very easy to break and you may need to re-modify and re-install it to fix any weird errors that you introduce. Mine works great, totally removed defender, all telemetry I could find, etc, but my BitLocker doesn’t work lol.

I have a novice coding question using the mouse tracking as an example: Is it possible to intercept and replace mouse tracking data with generic inputs? For example, could you implement an overlay that blocks mouse interactions, and instead of physically clicking on elements, send a direct packet to the application to simulate selecting those elements?

Hi, here are the extensions I use in FireFox/Librewolf (all will work in Chromium too, but I don’t recommend Chromium browsers):

Privacy and Security-focused

uBlock Origin: A lightweight and efficient wide-spectrum content blocker.

Decentraleyes: Protects you from tracking through free, centralized content delivery.

CanvasBlocker: Protects your privacy by preventing websites from fingerprinting you using the Canvas API.

Ghostery Tracker & Ad Blocker - Privacy AdBlock: Blocks trackers and ads to protect your privacy and speed up browsing. Also has a handy feature that automatically rejects cookies for you.

KeePassXC-Browser: Integrates KeePassXC password manager with your browser.

NoScript: Blocks JavaScript, Flash, and other executable content to protect against XSS and other web-based attacks (note: you will be required to manually activate javascript on each web page that you visit, but this is a good practice that you should get used to).

Privacy Badger: Automatically learns to block trackers based on their behavior.

User-Agent Switcher and Manager: Allows you to spoof your browser’s user-agent string (avoid creating a unique configuration; opt for something common, such as Chrome on Windows 10).

Violentmonkey: A user script manager for running custom scripts on websites (allows you to execute your own JavaScript code, usually to modify how a website behaves or block behavior that you don’t like. VERY useful. Check out greasyfork for UserScripts).

Other useful extensions (non-privacy/security)

Firefox Translations: Provides on-demand translation of web pages directly within Firefox.

Flagfox: Displays a flag depicting the location of the current website’s server.

xBrowserSync: Syncs your browser data (bookmarks, passwords, etc.) across devices with end-to-end encryption.

Plasma Integration: Integrates Firefox with the KDE Plasma desktop environment (for linux users).

Jokes aside, keep in mind that the idea of fingerprinting is that your computer’s configuration is as unique as a fingerprint (e.g., your monitor is x resolution, you are on this operating system, you are using these following extensions in this browser, you have these fonts on your system).

Setting your user agent to something super unique is basically shining a spotlight on yourself.

I recommend this user agent switcher extension (firefox)

Working tracker list for RARBG here