I mean this is shockingly easy to find. Literally his last point is “type name in ‘john doe’ in google search engine” and unless the person has a very common name or a strong online presence that alone will pull up tons of these sites

These sites are pretty gross and should probably have some kind of regulation. They ultimately are just compiling public records but they make things shockingly easy and are ultimately used for domestic abuse, stalking, and shit like swatting and doxxing more than any legitimate purpose. As others have said, maybe the fact that this has led to politicians being targeted will mean that regulation finally occurs but given the current climate and the fact that the targeted politicians were on the wrong team maybe not

This is already a serious problem imo

My counseling practice is geared at queer people so I don’t get a ton of sports gambling types generally but I do get some and the amounts they reveal spending is mind boggling to me. Like 20-30% of income

I have a colleague at a more affluent practice in the city I used to work in that is geared towards “men’s issues” and he sees this far more. We’ve discussed it a few times now. He tends to get more of the bro type

It’s silent too, very often hidden from partners. I increasingly hear about it as a source of stress in relationships too: someone comes in one day and everything was going okay but their shit is blown up because it turns out their brofriend is spending 1800 a week on parlays

Deregulation works!

A text file encrypted with aes-256/gpg on a usb drive with a hidden veracrypt volume that also have a decoy encrypted veracrypt volume is essentially uncrackable even by state actors unless you give up the passphrases or use some dumbass passphrases that are easily guessed.

This is the kind of shit where if you have critical evidence on the drive they’ll hold you: there was a police sergeant in Philly who (probably) had child porn on his macbook. They couldn’t prove it becuase his drive was encrypted and he refused to give up the passphrase. He was held for four years on contempt charges and they finally gave up. He wasn’t even using an esoteric approach, he just had macos filevault turned on

The approach I described sidesteps that issue because it creates a decoy encrypted veracrypt for them to find and for you to give up. The hidden veracrypt with your salacious details is a volume that is created within the free space of the outer volume so it essentially undetectable unless you give it up and by design you give up the outer volume that shows innocuous data. Of course, having veracrypt at all invites suspicion of a secret volume but this puts you in the above spot: catching a few years with no real charges for refusing to give yourself up. Much better spot than catching charges for whatever crime (or being executed for political activism/journalism/etc)

Meanwhile this guys journals were immediately found and well documented for his federal complaint. You could just burn them I guess but then you no longer have all your data

There is no allegedly, the dude was a total boomer and literally wrote out instructions on how to dox someone in his notebook which are shown in the federal complaint against him

Literally outlines which sites are free, which ones have free trials, etc

Like you you would think he would just use a text document or bookmarks or something

Donations isn’t going to cover the hunger of a 40 million dollar VC round. Those investors want more than a return, they want plex profitable ASAP

FWIW while my hardware serving Jellyfin is more powerful, my hardware accessing is not much more, I forgot to mention that detail

I typically use a ugoos android tv box flashed with coreelec. I believe it’s more powerful than a pi for this application but it’s not particularly powerful.

I use Jellyfin for kodi over Jellycon. I’m not saying one is better than the other, I’ve never tried jellycon, but that is what my experience is based on. In my experience initial library scans are very lengthy (building db from scratch) with the size of my library, 20-30 minutes. This never is necessary at this point though and was only needed because I was testing something for coreelecs nightlies that required me to trash my db a lot. Typically I login and it updates within a few seconds, even if I’ve recently had a somewhat hefty update. It does help that the ugoos has fairly speedy emmc here - my initial testing running coreelec off of the sd card this was a bottleneck. Flashing to internal emmc and enabling hs400 mode made this notably quicker

Pinchflat is interesting! Thanks! I have been looking for a better YouTube archival tool

IMO kodi plugins are very hit/miss. This is why I prefer the setup I have where storage nas runs Jellyfin then flashed android box runs coreelec. Kodi and Jellyfin both have IPTV plugins, for example, but they are terrible. So when I want to use IPTV I boot to the degoogled android side and use tivimate, which is much more stable and convenient. I also have an APK for youtube there with adfree and sponsor block integrated. There is a build of freetube for android but unfortunately I cannot get it to work on the box. I don’t watch a ton of youtube though

I have much more powerful hardware than you but Jellyfin shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to load directories. The hardware is fairly irrelevant, this was still the case when I was on my old nas (which was an ancient pc that was garbage). Jellyfin doesn’t require much. My library is gigantic too, easily over 100,000 items across music, movies, and tv.

What do logs say? How is your network? When I moved into my new place i went ethernet only and had issues with Jellyfin (and other self hosted stuff) and tracked it down to one cable that was super cheap and limited to 100mbit.

Jellyfin isn’t really geared towards viewing media in a folder structure though.

You may be best off going with a freetube access. TBH I find Jellyfin works best with media that can be scraped or that I’m willing to create nfo files for. My music/tv/movies? These are overwhelmingly fine. Every once in a while a niche show or album requires manual scraping or a custom nfo. But I also have some other collections like music videos. Imvdb exists but is far less complete compared to other scraping sources and as a result I don’t even bother using it, the overwhelming majority of my collection needs manual nfos. When I’ve tried to contribute to it my contributions have sat in pending for literal months pending approval, even for obvious videos by major artists.

I don’t know of any scraper for youtube videos and such a thing would be a tremendous undertaking. If you archive a lot it’s a lot of nfos to create. Perhaps you could make a script that generates them automatically by scraping the description and grabbing the thumbnail as fan art?

This isn’t a “blaming immigrants” thing. 14% of the population is notable and while much of that population can speak, read, and write English better than native speakers a sizable portion only learn to speak it. This does go back to the official language thing (which actually is not true anymore, trump executive ordered it in his flurry of bullshit EOs). Before that EO they could just get government forms in their native tongue but now that’s probably jeopardized

But these studies generally look at literacy rates of English since, while it wasn’t the official language until very recently, it functionally was. So it’s not blaming immigrants but more explaining that yes, a portion of the data is attributed to people that do not speak English as a first language, rather than the native speakers who were failed by a collapsing public education system

It’s not hyperbole, this is an actual serious issue in America. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not have high enough reading skills to extrapolate and cross reference data from things like text books and journal articles. Something like 40% of American adults can’t read well enough to comprehend multi-step prompts (e.g. they struggle with stuff like bus schedules). About 15-20% of American adults can’t read at a basic level, very simple things like medicine bottles. Depending on the survey these numbers can vary a bit

Part of this statistic is because we have a high immigrant population that doesn’t speak English as their primary language but the main reason is that we’ve simply eroded education quality for decades. I work with teenagers who are in high school and can barely throw together a coherent email. Statistically, most adults don’t read for pleasure at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

Look under “literacy rates” section

We’ve been convinced to slap fight about identity politics, many times necessarily so because unfair pressure is being applied via abuse by those in power

This results in blocking any dialogues about class consciousness

At the same time there is propaganda that goes against class consciousness: labor unions have been utterly destroyed both literally and from an optics standpoint (many Americans distrust the concept), consumerism runs deep in our blood to push the idea that we need more capital and glorify excessive “baller” lifestyles, poor is pushed to be seen as a moral failing, etc

They absolutely do this. A drug with a lack of efficacy data is a great way to get shortlisted to insurance denials

It’s one of the frustrating things bc people can then easily manipulate the issue. A drug that can be prescribed a doctor and filled by a pharmacy being denied by an insurance company is very easy to write about online. Then it’s a slam piece, “x insurance company denied me my meds”. Basically 0 people will have any interest in the nuance that the medication is bullshit or possibly even harmful. Too bad insurance companies made their bed by being absolutely horrible for decades, I guess.

Interesting fact: when lowtax was forced to sell somethingawful to one of his moderators that got bitcoin rich for 400k he revealed during the negotiations that conde nast attempted to buy somethingawful for 13 million dollars around 2006 or so. He turned them down because he “was still having fun with the site”

After the sale was completed the mod looked into it a bit more and realized in that same timeframe conde nast ended up purchasing a majority stake in reddit for a very similar amount

Imagine how different the internet would be if “the front page of the internet” was a hacked up vbulletin site from 2003 filled with 40 year old IT dorks and run by a guy that was so afraid of paying child support that he literally killed himself

Well they’re not good, they’re still enabling the government to remove your rights and the rights of others plus they tend to have a lot of other hot takes and behavior that are objectively shitty.

Speaking broadly they seem to be people that are bigoted and reassess their bigotry when it becomes humanized. They only changed this opinion because it impacts someone they care about directly, basically. In some cases they still hold the shitty opinion and view their loved one as the exception (the “real trans” vs “fake trans” thing)

The other piece that can be a real mindfuck is that they can often go to a “we just don’t talk about it” thing, where they do silently think the absolute worst of you but at least aren’t assholes about it. This is at least not detrimental to you directly but can lead to ugly behavior and systemic oppression

Approach with caution, basically, and don’t be shocked if someone who initially seems very sweet and courteous says some utterly disgusting shit if the conversation turns ugly if you bring up “sensitive topics”

Everyone is going on about how maga is inherently anti trans but the situation is more nuanced

If you’re terminally online then yes, maga is 100% anti trans all the time but irl that is not always the case

I provide gender affirming care and work with families where someone is trans and their families are MAGA people, respect pronouns and names, give rides home from surgery, call partners boyfriend/girlfriend as appropriate, and will even at times get mad at others for not respecting their child’s identity

This is not a super common thing, to be clear, but it’s also not shockingly rare. Maybe 20-25% of my clients? It also gets into the whole “humanizing” factor. These people are so insulated from minority groups thanks to continued segregation that they can easily demonize them but lgbt minorities can pop up in their families much easier. That’s why they fucking hate acceptance movements; you can’t white flight from your queer kid but you can bully them into a loveless marriage that ends in divorce or suicide. But when they finally do integrate they generally recognize that while there are aspects of a culture they still despise the people within it are still just people, especially if those people are the people they’ve known and loved their whole life

It’s cognitive dissonance at its finest though and creates tons of friction. Client is obviously very upset that family is voting to end their rights and family usually does mental gymnastics to not see it that way. Also majority of instances, overwhelmingly so, are trans men. This is all based on my anecdote so take it with a grain of salt but imo trans women are most often used for propaganda and portrayed as monsters so trans men sometimes fly under the radar via erasure. though to be absolutely clear key word is sometimes, trans men absolutely get a ton of shit flung at them too. This probably plays into the fact that trans women outnumber trans men by a significant margin and more importantly/likely systems of misogyny, people hate women.

That said I would generally assume the worst, especially if you encounter a group of Trump people, or if you are in a place where you are doing discourse online

You’re correct, I was misremembering (it’s been awhile)

The prodinfo/console identifier is on the emmc and in situations where the console was dead or not hacked this couldn’t be dumped (although looking it up now it appears there are methods to extract prodinfo from dead emmc or generate a fake one that will get you banned but make the console boot).

I repaired more switches than anything because there was an ample supply of broken ones and they were easy to sell as refurbished. I stopped a few years ago but for awhile I would buy every broken switch I could get my hands on that was reasonably priced, fix it (if possible), and resell it

I would argue they are very repairable though it is in spite of nintendo, not because of them. The modular design does help a bit but ultimately what helps is that there were a lot of people like me posting notes online and if you know where to look (badcaps, gbatemp, youtube (side note youtube fucking sucks for this post your notes as actual notes), etc) there is extensive documentation on the switch and joycon motherboards to the point where they’ve basically been reverse engineered (not fully but close enough).

Then on top of that there is a huge level of support from Chinese manufacturing. I can get all the chips that were hard to source from places like mouser and digikey on AliExpress. I can get replacement joysticks, batteries, fans, usb c ports, LCDs, casings, basically everything Nintendo won’t sell, and most of it is all solid quality. In some cases it’s greatly improved - I can skip the $3 joycon stick replacement that will inevitably drift again in 6 months because of the flawed design and get the $20 Hall effect stick replacement that will last for years. I have these in my switch and they work great, I haven’t replaced the sticks since like 2020

Nintendo made the somewhat modular design and not pairing parts right but otherwise fucking suck at support. If you get one I refurbished they’ll tell you to go fuck yourself. Fuck nintendo. That said if you want a console you can repair yourself the switch is extremely well documented and parts are everywhere.

Keep in mind that not all switches are fixable before you buy a broken one and some repairs are extremely complex. If the emmc is fucked you’re screwed because it’s paired to the cpu. If there’s a short in the cpu you’re screwed unless reballing the cpu fixes it but this is generally not worth the effort and probably won’t work. If someone else who sucks tried fixing it first you might find a nightmare scenario of board damage: the worst deals I got were ones where someone said their switch broke and sold it to me, I opened it up, and it was clear they tried to replace the usb c port. This isn’t a terribly difficult fix if you know what you’re doing but if you’re new to soldering it’s pretty challenging, definitely not a first project. So the board is all charred, burnt flux (from flux core solder, they never use flux haha), pads lifted and traces ruined, blobs of solder, passives in the area like filters just straight up missing. Fixing all that is a nightmare so it becomes a donor

Honestly the bigger thing is sponsorblock, blocking youtube ads is a big deal but it’s so much nicer to be able to circumvent the internalized advertising. Youtuber spends 4 full minutes plugging a vpn service? Automatically skipped seamlessly

Rooting ranges from very easy (literally go to a webpage, very unlikely you’re on a firmware this old), to medium (put stuff on a usb and try to play some music, may have to try a few times), to very difficult (connecting hardware to the tv), and in some cases is impossible. Don’t update your tv if you don’t have to, lg rarely fixes issues and never adds new features

https://cani.rootmy.tv/

Jellyfin for kodi is pretty bulletproof for me although it wasn’t always that way; when I first changed to this setup (bit over a year ago when Coreelec added dolby vision support) there were some headaches because kodi was changing how the db worked at the time (change from kodi 20 to 21 and Coreelec was using the kodi 21 nightlies for dv stuff that hadn’t been brought into final version)

Once the 21 final came out and Jellyfin for kodi was updated it’s been smooth sailing.

That does remind me of another downside though: there’s a minor slap fight on how db management should occur between kodi and jellyfin devs. Like many open source projects they simply can’t agree on anything so each project just does what they think is right. So kodi 22 or jellyfin 11 might cause another scenario like above if they decide to revamp the db again (especially on the Jellyfin side; I would not be surprised if someday they will overhaul the lackluster music portion of Jellyfin)

If you ever do revisit Jellyfin for metadata administration I would suggest posting about your issues on the github for Jellyfin for kodi. I’ve never used Jellycon so I can’t speak to that but Jellyfin for kodi’s github is overall helpful although fair warning that the dev can be a bit curt, especially if your issue has already been addressed and is configuration related. Things may have changed but at least ~ a year ago it was solely developed by one person who did the majority of the support as well. But if nfs is working then why break what isn’t broken?

You can root webos depending on what version you’re running but that more just lets you run homebrew (which is handy for youtube with Adblock and sponsorblock)

As others have said the best thing you can do is bypass internet connectivity altogether. I use the youtube app so I keep it connected with lg services and tracking blocked:

||snu.lge.com^ ||su.lge.com^ ||su-ssl.lge.com^ ||snu-dev.lge.com^ ||su-dev.lge.com^ ||nsu.lge.com^

(Formatted for adguard dns)

But it’s easier to just disconnect entirely. Let it collect data but if it’s disconnected it can’t do anything with it.

For a box I use a Chinese google tv box - ugoos am6b+. It can decode almost any video format (including dolby vision and all lossless audio, can pass through) except av1 basically and there are some newer versions that can do that as well. Google is awful right? The ugoos is stripped back pretty hard though it does retain the play store but still block the following:

||androidtvwatsonfe-pa.googleapis.com^ ||androidtvchannels-pa.googleapis.com^

Probably not necessary but just in case. Anyway, the Google tv side is just for streaming services (if you use them) and IPTV because Jellyfin and kodi are garbage at IPTV, tivimate on android is leagues better

Anyway flash the box to use Coreelec and copy Coreelec to the emmc, takes like 10 minutes and is pretty easy, just need an sd card. Now you use kodi as your Jellyfin app (or plex/emby but fuck plex/emby) by just installing the Jellyfin for kodi plugin in kodi and in jellyfin. Sign into your Jellyfin instance in the plugin, your library will import (can take awhile the first time if you’re like me and have a huuuuge library with like 1,000 movies, 10,000 episodes, and 300,000 songs)

Then look around on the kodi forums for a decent skin that looks nice for you bc the default one is butt, configure the menus to match your setup, adjust the skin settings to your liking, etc. backup your settings!

Now you have a Jellyfin client that plays back media directly without transcoding 99.99% of the time (assuming you have an avr that can play lossless audio), is far more mature than any of the shitty Jellyfin client apps (development started in 2003), handles stuff like subtitles far better, still syncs watched status, etc. and the worst part of kodi: library management and administration, is now handled by jellyfin, which does it much better.

If you have remote users or other TVs/phones/etc they can still use the client apps too

Downside is that you lose most plugin support. Like back before they started to roll intro skipper into Jellyfin or jelly scrub, those are useless to kodi. And a weakness of kodi is that with the rise of plex/jellyfin addon development for kodi has dropped off significantly so no introskipper plugin for kodi. Navigation features work well (pressing right on the remote skips forward 10s) so that’s close enough, or just download good quality rips with chapters

There was only 1 utopia boot disk (the spinning reindeer). The second was the same thing but modded by scene group to change the background image (kept the reindeer) and force vga mode even if the game didn’t support the official vga box, which didn’t work sometimes

https://cdromance.org/dc-iso/utopia-boot-cd/ has screenshots of both, the bottom with the little alien fella is the original

The weird part is the vga patched one didn’t actually support vga mode itself so when you used it that way you had to boot the console, your screen would be blank, wait, change disks after a minute, then if it worked and the game booted your screen would pop on. You basically had to be used to the process with a/v cables and do it blind, which to be fair if you were a 90s kid that grew up on disk swapping ps1 backups was pretty much a given

But then like a few months later (I think it was) echelon started releasing self booting games so no one cared anymore and soon after you could vga patch the games directly