Random Dent

I think anything that masks your IP address is good for piracy AFAIK, but I’ve had no issues torrenting with it so far. Seems to be about the same as Mullvad, performance-wise.

Ah I hadn’t heard of Picard before, I’ll take a look!

Personally I just use Nicotine+ to grab whatever I want as a .flac, then use beets to organize them.

I switched over to IVPN, they seem pretty right-on and no scandals that I know of so far.

I switched away from Mullvad because of that. I waited a bit for their response before deciding, but I found their eventual response pretty wishy-washy. Their counter-argument was:

It was a private donation from Daniel the individual. Mullvad or its parent and sister companies did not endorse and were not involved in it.

But his personal money still comes from the company, so if I continued to send Mullvad money I’d know it was still indirectly going to the Örebro party, whose leader called immigrants “parasites”, which (as an immigrant myself, albeit not to Sweden) is not acceptable to me.

Canada is like that. IIRC the maximum fine you can get for piracy is $5,000, meaning it’s pretty much not worth it for any company to come after you. If you live in Canada and use a VPN you’re pretty much golden, but I also know people here who don’t even bother. They get a letter once in a while from their ISP and they just ignore it and nothing ever happens. One of my friends called their ISP to complain and told them to stop sending letters, and they said sorry they have to but if you seed a little bit less then they won’t have to send them lol.

That’s always been my position, IMO - it does have some genuinely useful applications, but we’ve blown it up into this huge thing and tried to shoehorn it into everything, and it’s polarized people into these “AI in everything” and “AI in nothing” camps.

TIL that the CEOs of AMD and Nvidia are first cousins once removed.

Especially in terms of wiping the drive like OP is asking. If their goal is simply wiping data, they can just put a drill though it. Or if it’s to wipe and replace the OS, they could presumably whip the drive out, format it on something else and do what they like with it, then put it back in the original computer or something like that.

I know, it really stands out on that list lol

I’m not 100% sure, there might be a bit of overlap between them but I’ve never personally had any trouble running them side-by-side.

And yeah I love wobbly windows. I’m so used to them now that if I have to use Windows or something with non-wobbly windows it feels wrong now lol.

Oh yeah, another one I’ve recently discovered that looks interesting is Quickshell. I haven’t used it much yet though, I made a semi-functional panel with it and that’s as far as I got. But it looks like you can do a lot with it once you get the hang of it.

I have a bunch in my KDE:

• Karousel for arranging windows

• Klassy for window decorations/general theming

• Panel Colorizer for customizing the panel/dock

• Kvantum for general theming

• And then a few general things like Wobbly Windows etc.

We’ve been boycotting US products in our house for a year or two now, since the last time Trump decided to be removedy towards Canada. However, reading about all the veggies and sketchy beef the last couple of weeks, it might become less a matter of ideology and more just about basic safety TBH.

I use Filen, I don’t know if they still do it but you used to be able to buy a lifetime plan for a one-time fee that was like 50-100GB or something like that, and you could stack them. So I just bought several during a Black Friday sale.

As far as I can tell there aren’t really any rules anymore if you annoy rich people enough. They just sort of come after you regardless.

They can’t fire Mitch McConnell, it would be unfair to all the living senators.

Last time I checked it seemed like it wasn’t quite there yet in terms of features, but admittedly that was a few years ago so I’ll have to give it another look. Thanks for the reminder!

An open source 2D animation suite that can compete with Toon Boom Harmony. I bought an (expensive) perpetual license for Toon Boom Harmony years ago, and then they moved to a ridiculously overpriced monthly subscription model and deactivated my license, essentially ripping me off for hundreds of dollars. So ever since then I’ve wanted something to come along and put them out of business.

I’m switching for political/ideological reasons TBH. It’s a good service and it works well, but one of the company’s co-founders recently made a huge donation to the Örebro party in Sweden (as in, big enough to account for 72% of the party’s entire income for 2025.) The party’s leader, Marcus Allard, has called for mass forced remigration of immigrants, including people born in Sweden, and has referred to immigrants as “damn parasites.”

In fairness, this isn’t the political position of Mullvad the company, it’s a personal donation made by one of the founders and the CEO and others have expressed discomfort with it. But the fact still remains that if I keep giving the company money, it will keep funding the co-founder, who will (presumably) keep funding the party and I can’t in good conscience send money if I know it’s going towards something I disagree with that profoundly, even in a roundabout sort of way. I only have about 30 days left on my subscription anyway so I’m going to just let it run out and then switch to something else.

Yeah I use QBittorrent, and Mullvad for a VPN (although I’ll probably switch soon once my subscription runs out.)