I hope you’ll find an easier way to do it, but if it was me in your shoes, I’d probably drive out to them. You driving the U-Haul with them driving your car home sounds like a good idea. It’s the safest option to make sure they don’t run into even MORE trouble.

My advice would be to stop fucking fighting about shit that doesn’t actually matter, like religion and guns. Focus on things that are actually more likely to end our civilization, like accelerating climate change.

I think that taking a hard-line “policy” on something is inherently stupid. Everything has nuance, and having very strong, rigid opinions about the hot-button issues of the day doesn’t make you smarter or better than those that are more apathetic.

I’m generally pro-choice, but I fully understand why many people have issues with abortions and I don’t really blame them for wanting to outlaw the practice. I’m in favor of SOME increased gun control, but I also think that people are wayyyy too obsessed with guns in general. There are other things that kill a lot more people than guns but nobody’s freaking out about those. So honestly I think there isn’t much to be gained here by trying to make guns harder to buy, or taking people’s guns away, or whatever.

Lol seems like you’re here to pick fights. What do I think should happen to what?

Makes sense to me. I consider myself independent because both parties piss me off, and I think the duopoly and polarization is ridiculous. Democrats say Republicans are stupid, Republicans say Democrats are stupid. I say they’re both idiots. 😆

I have Plex, Radarr, Prowlarr, and Qbittorrent all installed on the same dedicated server. I’m using a SOCKS5 proxy instead of a VPN, it works great because I set up Qbittorrent to use the proxy and I just leave it running 24/7. I also have Tailscale installed for remote access, setup for that is dead simple.

Here’s my workflow if I’m away from home:

1. Turn on Tailscale on my phone.
2. Open my radar app (it’s called LunaSea).
3. Search for and add the movie I want.

That’s it. If I’m already at home, step 1 is not necessary.

Prowlarr and Radarr find the movie on my registered indexers, at the desired quality, and send the torrent to Qbittorrent. Then when the download is finished they automatically rename the files and move them to my Plex library (and they could do the same with Jellyfin). Roughly 10 minutes after I finish step 3 (more or less depending on seeds), the movie magically appears in my Plex library. I don’t have to turn a VPN on or off.

This is utter nonsense. First, let me point out that this is an ad for Surfshark, a VPN company. They’re trying to sell you their service by scaring you.

Second, their methodology is absolutely useless, it’s an easy and very common way to come up with a clickbait article like this. They’re just looking at app store permissions, and assuming the app with the most permissions is bad and the one with the least permissions is good. Which is utter nonsense, it might be that the apps with more permissions NEED those permissions because they have more FEATURES.

I could make a “language learning” app that ONLY asks for the audio recording permission, and then sell audio recordings of my users to the highest bidder. But Surfshark would praise my literal spyware as “privacy-focused” because it only needs one privacy permission!

The way to ACTUALLY do this properly would be to fully audit each app, find out WHY it’s asking for additional permissions, go over the full privacy policy, and do some packet captures to figure out when the app is phoning home to send data, and what servers it’s connecting to. Contact the app owners, ask them why exactly their app needs each permission. Consult some experts.

But that’s too hard for Surfshark, they just want to write a scary article so that they can sell you a VPN that doesn’t really make you safer on the internet.

EDIT: You know why I dropped Surfshark? They started bundling a “virus scanner” in with their “privacy-focused” VPN client. So my “privacy” tool wanted to scan all my files all of a sudden? GTFO.

You don’t use Mullvad for their performance, you use them for their insanely paranoid security and privacy practices.

And for the record, I was never impressed with Surfshark speeds. I dropped them when they bundled a virus scanner into their VPN client, that’s sketchy as hell. I don’t want my VPN provider scanning my files.

You are incorrect. Look through their blog archive (scroll to the bottom): https://mullvad.net/en/blog/

They’ve been posting steadily for over a decade, maybe the posts just got more popular this year on whatever sites you browse

Ah yes, they fired a bigot. How dare they!

I’ll see if I can find a password manager created by other small-minded bigots and let you know.

If you’re not a power user, then it’ll probably work fine for several years. And it will be cheap and easy to replace the battery in 3-5 years when it starts to degrade, or replace the screen if you drop it. Not sure if a full 10 year lifespan is realistic, though.

And you’re right, the price is high, but it’s not supposed to be an affordable phone. The stated goal of the Fairphone is to be better for the environment and better for people than most other electronics. So, they have to do things like use sustainable materials and source parts from places that treat their workers well. All of that means that Fairphones will NEVER be as cheap as other brands. Because doing things right costs more.

You can convert most movies to 1080p x265 and it takes up a little over a gigabyte of space. If you’re already hosting 4K movies, why do you give a shit about another gigabyte? If you’re NOT hosting 4K movies, then you have ZERO reason to transcode, just make everything 1080p and call it a day.

Also, transcoding DOES cost you money, your electric bill goes up, even if you don’t track it or care. So spend the extra fifty bucks on a few extra terabytes now rather than spending it over the course of several months transcoding. And if you cut out transcoding, you can run Plex on VERY cheap hardware, so that saves you money too.

Transcoding. Is. Dumb.

Don’t transcode on Plex if you can avoid it. It’s very compute-intensive and it makes your streams look like shit. Convert your videos to nice formats that most people can direct play (like x264 or x265) and turn transcoding off. It’ll keep your hardware running longer, keep your electric bill down, and your streams will look better. Win-win-win-win.

Yessss that’s a nice sweet spot in pricing, still too rich for my blood but I bet it’ll drive the prices further down on the $300-$400 cards.

It should be noted that this is advice specific to white men in Western countries 😆 but yes, it’s true.

Fair enough, the features are nice. I just want people to know that they’re compromising on security by using Telegram. But if you don’t have any REAL reason to be paranoid, then you don’t really NEED to use Signal.

Why use either of those apps that you can’t trust when Signal exists?

That is needlessly complicated. Just force qbittorrent to only use your VPN network interface and you don’t need any of that: https://lifehacker.com/you-should-really-bind-your-vpn-to-your-torrent-client-1849779407

This has the advantage of giving you the “kill switch” feature without having to download your VPN’s proprietary app. It works with Wireguard, OpenVPN, whatever. Qbittorrent is actually one of the few clients that has this feature, one of the reasons it’s so widely recommended.

Did I say that “all China is shit”? Don’t put words in my mouth.

I’d like to avoid hosting personal things on Chinese servers because the Chinese government is too powerful, and surveils everything. They don’t even act otherwise.

I would also totally understand if people don’t want to host things on US servers for their own reasons.

Sorry for not fitting into your weird narrative.

China based. I wouldn’t put anything private or sensitive on their servers…