Pop OS is the same machine as the Ubuntu but with RGB.

Not all patents are good. But a patent system is good. It could be better but the general concept is not flawed like the person I was responding to suggests.

The physical object isn’t what is patented in this case. It is the method to create the object that has a patent. One that can’t be reversed engineered as it isn’t part of the final product. You could only reverse engineer it if the process was not novel or not obvious to anyone knowledgeable in the field. If both of these conditions are true then the patent should not have been granted.

Patents are not inherently bad. This is a bad patent. Patent laws don’t have to be changed, because this patent shouldn’t have been granted. The issue is ineffective patent reviews, not patents. Getting rid of patents is not a good idea. If you think it is you probably don’t have a good enough grasp on what a patent is.

You can make something if you figure out how they did it because it was obvious. In this case the patent isn’t valid. If you have to develop a solution then the patent is probably valid. The patent is a reward for developing and sharing the solution publically.

If you still don’t grasp why patents are useful. It may be helpful to think of it like open source software. The patent is the code base that is freely accessible to everyone. This preserves the knowledge and lets others build on it. However, to incentivise people to make their code open source you provide protections that stop others from selling the same code you developed.

The incentive mechanism is why far more businesses produce patents than produce open source code.

If you remove patents businesses stop funding internal r and d overnight. It increase the risk and reduces the reward.

The patent system explicitly provides free access to knowledge. The patent is the knowledge that would be kept secret otherwise.

You would still have monopolies, except things like the ingredients to medicines would be unknown.

Patents do provide some value. If there were no patents than companies would make their technological development a a secret and not share the work with the world.

The patent systems exchanges knowledge and technology development for a temporary monopoly on the technology. It means a company can publish the ingredients to medicines, methods of manufacturing etc. if they didn’t have the patent system they would keep these secret and if a business folded this knowledge would be lost.

Probably better to make those submitting false patents pay a large fine.

RS, not the same breath but the pricing is usually good.

Whenever you get a new router or move somewhere, change the WiFi access point name and password. Set it to the same line you used previously. That way all your devices will connect to it without changing anything.

Use a new unique name and password. Never keep the one that is printed on the back of the router. You can make the password easier to share by making it a few words and numbers. Still very strong, but much easier to say aloud to someone.

A small computer, large capacity ssd and two WiFi interfaces (2x usb dongles, or dongle plus usb).

Small computer could be anything: raspberry pi (or generic and), nuc mini pc or laptop. If you want to use it without a plug you’ll need to add a battery, usb c powered devices could be more convent to power from a battery.

A ssd is better for this use case. Not because it’s faster, but they are more resilient to being knocked about and dropped. They are also much smaller, especially M.2, and aren’t fussy about how they are mounted.

The two WiFi interfaces would allow you to create a WiFi bridge to access the internet through a WiFi network and access your media server. It would need some configuration, you may also need to have the computer act as a router if you want to use multiple devices without reconfiguring.

It may be easier to have your device act as a WiFi hotspot and have the media centre automatically connect to it. This would make it difficult for multiple devices to use it simultaneously, and you could accidentally allow the media centre to do all its updating and downloading over your mobile connection.

This type of thing is going to be expensive and troublesome to configure unless your already experienced with that sort of thing.

I think a better solution, especially if you already have a media server. Is to set your media server for external access.

To get media when you don’t have internet, buy a large capacity flash drive (or external ssd/hdd). When you have access to your media server download all the content you want on to the drive. I think iOS jellyfin can do this without much modification.

Once out of range of your media server. Delete the content you’ve watched on your device (iPad) to free up space. Connect the external drive through the usb port on the iPad, copy over the next lot of content you want to watch. Disconnect and then watch the content.

Jellyfin can download the content, but you may need another app to play it when you don’t have access to the media server.

This approach lets multiple people access a much larger amount of media, effectively simultaneously. It doesn’t require a large amount of often expensive local device storage - you use cheap external storage. It much less expensive if it breaks or gets lost and has very little configuration -if you already have a media server running jellyfin.

No it doesn’t, or at least it didn’t for years if that has changed recently.

No one that knew about this was talking about it or doing anything about it.

The reality of the situation is only three organisations are capable of producing fully fledged browsers. Google, Apple and Firefox. Every variant, spin and de-whatever is nothing compared to developing a browser. All the chrome derivatives had this in them, arbitrarily execution of code from google. Code that wasn’t included in the binary when you downloaded or updated it. The sort of thing a virus would do. The sort of tool you would use to compromise the security of a system.

If you want a de-googled chrome the only option is safari, it’s chrome before google got its hands on it. If you want properly open and accessible browsers you need to use something else entirely like Firefox.

De-googled chrome is a myth.

Chrome excites arbitrary code from google.com (this wasn’t something widely known until recently and appears to effect all the chromium downstream browsers). This sort of back door and the design approach that made google do this means you can never really trust Chrome. The same issue with Firefox would be a bug, in chrome it’s a feature.

Head and shoulders has anti-fungal properties. That may have been the source of your smelling problem.

Google uses WiFi and Bluetooth info for location tracking. So they can track you when you don’t have GPS switched on. WiFi names, MAC address are correlated to locations by google.

So google infers any app that has WiFi or Bluetooth access can track you like they do.

Mac isn’t UNIX based, it is UNIX and comes with many of the UNIX tools a user would expect. Completely different situation.

I read it as just better than chrome, if you use chrome switching to any other popular browser is better. Not that edge is a particularly good browser.

Firefox, Brave, Edge, and Safari offer stronger privacy protections by default than you get from Chrome, which is the world’s most popular browser.

In the rest of the article they seem to suggest Firefox, safari and brave are the better options and point to evidence. And that Microsoft claim edge is a better option. Overall its suggest Firefox it better at evading tracking and safari at evading fingerprinting (largely because all the safari devices are so similar, and apple try to make them look more similar).

Probably not much for people on a self hosting community, but those that want to get away from subscriptions and steal your data as a service cloud providers that might need some reassurance that they’ll have a working system.

Nixos is an os that’s defined by its config stored in .nix files. Everything is defined here all the software and configurations. Two people with the same script will have the exact same os.

Any changes you make that aren’t in the scripts won’t be present when you reboot.

You could maintain a very custom linux distribution (kinda) by just maintaining these config scripts.

So a user wouldn’t need to install all required software and dependencies. They could get a nixos and the self-host config and adjust some settings and have a working system straight after install.

They aren’t getting google money anymore.

It’s hard to get a good read on these things. You’ll only see the perspective of the person that thinks they were cheated by the IRS. The IRS won’t make Reddit posts about people carrying out tax evasion.

Likewise you say the IRS dont think it’s a business. They probably carry out much stricter measures than that. Probably much stricter than the people complaining on Reddit. The people complaining also only “think” it’s a business.

There isn’t much sugar in brains, so their teeth may last longer than the average alive human.

The contract only works if Microsoft complies with it.

Why wouldn’t they, they don’t care and are unlikely to get caught stealing the data the agreed not to steal. How are you going to find out, how are you then going to sue them and how are you going to replace the services. The reality is most businesses won’t find out, they won’t sue if they do and they’ll continue using Microsoft services.