You can block all their advertising, telemetry and even their software update domains with pi hole. The older readers allow you to set hardcoded DNS to your pi hole server. Not sure if the newer Kindle Fires and Paperwhites do or not.

And there are notorious “blockers” - publishers and bands who copyright strike and remove all third party videos using their music. Reference Rick Beatos various videos and rants on this topic.

Louis Rossman has done a couple videos about this and I tend to agree - Paying customers get a worse experience.

You use the official apps and real accounts and you are still subject to artificial bandwidth restrictions. You use the official YouTube app on your smart TV and you get 10+ midroll ads at unnatural places during a 12 minute video. You “own” purchased content in one platform and it can still be taken away from you or made inaccessible when a service gets collapsed into another platform or rebranded etc. I’m not going to re-buy the same fucking movie I already owned on one streaming platform and have already owned on 2 different formats of physical release.

Curating your own digital copies, regardless of how you obtain them, is the only way to guarantee quality and availability anymore.

I remember when we upgraded to a Pentium III and later put an aftermarket Voodoo card in the thing after much begging on my part. That was the first PC I had that felt genuinely “powerful” to me.

Agree with this. All the pro weed and pro other drug people need to realize they are making the opposite argument to support banning smoking. All substances carry some intrinsic risk and the externalities must be managed, but its up to consenting adults to make their own choices about what they will consume.

JFG has sentimental value for me. It had some controls issues and a bizarre difficulty spike etc. but the co-op with Floyd was so awesome.

It is fucking horrible with false positives though. RIP if you have a Kali ISO sitting on one of your drives.

That and the Antimalware service executable gets hung up and chugs 30-50% of your CPU and RAM and won’t stop.

How to tell someone they’re old in as painful and indirect manner as possible.

I’ve still got the original UT2004 DVD ROM physical release. How big of a pain would this be to get running on my Deck?

Their UN troops apparently wear the SAAV (South African Assault Vest) style of gear, which is considered like the bargain basement of load bearing equipment. As in, airsofters get roasted for using them.

I feel like anyone who has to do anything that “deep cover” is probably doing some hyper aggressive prevention techniques as well like creating a botnet and their own “private” Tor which they recycle machines frequently, or using stolen/compromised VPS and only connecting to it via proxy chains, or something similarly complex.

Yay private trackers I guess.

We should be donating and developing projects to open source hardware so there are decent alternatives to Google/Samsung/Apple. I understand the supply chain is complicated and there are many hurdles to this, but it is a known problem and many diverse interests should theoretically have their own incentives to change things.

Good on anybody who is willing to go get training.

Worth pointing out it’s gonna be harder than it needs to be to get a good trigger press and do other manual of arms tasks with those excessively long nails (fake or otherwise).

If anyone has this running on Steamdeck, lemme know.

Billy Mitchell or Todd Rodgers might claim to.

Yeah but stroopwafel though

I’ve successfully used stuff like Google Maps and even Uber, with sandboxed Play Services.

There is some niche functionality that doesn’t work. For example I use the Sam’s Club app to scan and purchase stuff in the club and that all works fine, but when attempting to use the app to pay for gasoline at their pumps, it gives a connection error.

I think this looks awesome. Curious if it will be added to F-Droid?

Ah, more evidence for the “uniparty” theory.