Yeah, New Mexico IDs and license plates both say “New Mexico, USA” for exactly this reason. So many people have almost been illegally arrested and turned over to ICE by incompetent cops during traffic stops. Cops will pull New Mexico plates over, see the New Mexico ID, and demand to see visa paperwork because they think the person is from Mexico.

Or just get a GLi.Net router, and get the OpenWRT firmware right out of the box without even needing to flash it manually.

As a bonus, if you ever have the need for one, they also have some badass travel routers that can use your phone as a modem, take a SIM card natively, or just connect to an Ethernet/public WiFi to create your own secure network. Super handy if you do a lot of traveling, because they can be used in hotels or cruise ships. Know how cruise ships sell internet access per device? Yeah, your travel router only counts as one device. Set that bad boy up, and now all of your devices have internet.

Tankie is a sort of derogatory term for people who whitewash and cover up the horrors of communism.

There was a rebellion in the Soviet Union. The SU responded by rolling tanks into town and violently busting it. This put two sides of communism at odds; On one hand, there was the plight of the working class (the rebellion) and then on the other there were the actions of the people in control (the tanks). Tankies are the “communism has only ever helped people, you’re just listening to capitalist propaganda” folks who decided to side with the tanks, instead of siding with the working class. It’s sort of like calling someone a fake communist, [insert “No True Scotsman fallacy” argument from a tankie below], because a “real” communist would side with the working class.

You see it a lot on Lemmy because many instances have some major communist lean. After all, the “anyone can run their own instance and be in charge. No centralized instances, if you don’t like the mods you can just change instances” concept of the Fediverse jives very well with communist ideals. For instance, the “ml” in lemmy.ml is meant to stand for “Maoist/Leninist”. And that means the entire communist spectrum is on display; From both the more moderate “yeah communism has some cool parts but was also responsible for some major humanitarian crises” to the more extreme “those crises [were caused by individuals, not by the political system]/[never actually happened at all. They’re lies made up by capitalists to deter people from supporting communism!] Communism never actually hurt anyone.”

Yeah, booting from USB is something you see a lot in the data security and/or privacy-oriented circles. Because many USB boot drives are designed to be volatile, meaning nothing about the OS is actually stored on the drive. So you can nuke the whole OS just by unplugging the drive.

Basically every (smart) drug dealer who orders their supplies on Tor uses a USB drive OS, so if the cops ever bust down their door they can just yank the USB and destroy all evidence of their online orders.

But it can also be useful for test-driving a particular repo. If you ever manage to fuck things up royally, you’re just one reboot away from a fresh start.

Or a flash drive. You can just boot it from a flash drive to see if you enjoy it. Set your motherboard BIOS to boot from USB before booting from an internal drive. When the flash drive with Linux is plugged in, it’ll boot from that instead of booting Windows.

Microsoft took a big bite out of GRUB, which is the utility that your motherboard uses to dual boot OSes. A Windows update basically borked it and set Windows as the mandatory default OS. It basically makes it so your motherboard can’t properly identify your Linux install(s).

Luckily, you can fix it directly in Windows Command Prompt. But still, it’s a dirty trick that Microsoft has been using recently. Windows has historically been a bad neighbor for other OSes, (for instance, the Secure Boot Module is basically an attempt to make booting other OSes difficult,) but this was the first time in recent history that they have outright prevented another existing OS from booting.

Yup. The big downside to flatpak is that, as you said, it takes up more space.

To make a Windows comparison, imagine needing to install Java separately for every single program that needs it. Flatpaks tend to be orders of magnitude larger than technically necessary, simply because they’re sandboxed and come with everything they need to run, even if you already have it installed.

Loose lips sink ships. Don’t be that guy, y’all.

The irony is that what they’re talking about is even older than torrents. It’s just less heavily policed.

I first heard about it due to my buddy (a high school English teacher) complaining about how his incoming students were incredibly far behind in basic reading comprehension skills. We ended up having a pretty long talk about it, and he mentioned that all of his colleagues have noticed the same thing.

I did some digging, and discovered that language teachers everywhere have basically been lamenting the fact that the upcoming generation just straight up doesn’t know how to interpret media when it falls outside of their personal algorithms. I ended up talking with another buddy of mine (a writer for a magazine) and he mentioned that they have started needing to change the way they write, because people have simply lost the ability to comprehend what they read. Skimming the first one or two paragraphs is the new norm, even for in-depth news articles. So they have to load as much content into the early paragraphs as possible.

I meant specifically with the Apple TV, since that was the topic of conversation. In case you weren’t aware, the Apple TV is just a box. It’s not an actual screen. So the consoles, DVD, cable, etc are irrelevant as they would be plugged directly into the screen as well. You’d just change screen inputs to use those.

Apple TV has a fully functional Plex app. In fact, it’s pretty widely regarded as one of the most compatible Plex clients, and it’s able to DirectPlay all of the major codecs. It’s better than the apps that come built into the major smart TV brands like Roku, as many of those don’t support modern codecs like HEVC/H.265.

Pihole would happen on the DNS level. It’s not something that would require specific compatibility with the Apple TV. Unless you’re not running it on your whole network, and are manually assigning devices to it via custom DNS for each device? That would be odd, but maybe you don’t have control over your router. But even then, you can just change the network settings on your device to point its DNS at your pihole.

As far as android phones go, are you just looking for screen mirroring? Or looking to use it as a remote? Either way, you can do that; There are apps for remote control on the Google Play store.

Existing and future streaming services will likely be better supported on Apple TV than on something Iike a Samsung TV. Hell, my Samsung TV already doesn’t fully support Plex, because the app hasn’t been updated in literal years. Apple is actually pretty well known for legacy support. Hell, their fourth generation Apple TV from 2015 still has support. That’s almost a decade of support. Meanwhile, my Samsung TV is only ~5 years old, and already has apps that haven’t been updated in literal years.

Apple gets flak from the android users every time they phase out an old model of hardware, but in reality they have a better track record than most android manufacturers. It was always funny seeing the Android users memeing about Apple phasing out a 6 or 7 year old device, when their phone is half as old and is already unsupported. Google has improved with this in recent years, but only because Pixel users raised hell and started complaining to the FTC about getting dropped after only 3 years.

One is a Samsung, and the other is a Roku. The Roku is a little bit noisier, but not by much.

If you want customization and the ability to sideload apps, get an Nvidia Shield. There are custom OSes you can load which remove a lot of the spammy ad BS that the Shield’s default OS has baked in.

If you want ease of use and setup, get an Apple TV. It won’t natively run all of your pirated hentai apps, but it at least has Plex so you can stream custom content from a server if you set one up.

AdGuard as a service is alright, but it’s essentially just a pihole that you don’t have any control over. It does DNS level blocking, which means the ads get blocked before they even load on your network.

The issue is that since you’re routing all of your DNS traffic through AdGuard, you’re directly telling AdGuard which sites you are using. So there are concerns that you are just shifting the data collection from the ad companies to AdGuard instead, but AdGuard has the ability to be way more invasive in how the collect data.

Just set up dual piholes (one for your primary DNS, and one for your secondary DNS) instead. You get the exact same end result, without any of the data collection worry.

For consumer grade gear, Ubiquiti is probably the best bet. Unless you want to get into the commercial side of things, but that’s prohibitively expensive for the average person.

Personally I run a GL.iNet system. I like it being completely open source, and the Flint 2 is a workhorse of a router. But as far as ease of use and config, Ubiquiti is certainly more straightforward.

That would only work until your neighbor leaves their guest WiFi open.

What other ecosystems do you need your TV to interface with? It has a remote, or you can use your phone to control it. And it has all the major streaming apps you would want in a smart TV.

I blocked my two TVs from phoning home via my pihole. They are the two noisiest devices on my network, by leaps and bounds.

On a day of heavy usage, my phone and desktop may get ~2000 blocked requests combined. That’s high, but not unheard of. It just means I did a lot of browsing, with a lot of blocked ad requests. My TVs average somewhere around 7500 blocked requests per day, on days that I haven’t even turned them on. That’s an attempt to phone home every ~12 seconds. And it is much worse on days that I actually use them.

I tend to front-load my comments as much as possible, to try and avoid just that. Make the main point ASAP. But even then, there’s only so much you can do without sounding messy.

For instance, I front-loaded the part about reader comprehension. All of the “why” is in later paragraphs. But even if they only read the first few sentences, they’ll at least get my overall point.

It does make nuanced discussion impossible though. I work in a pretty specialized field (professional audio) with lots of snake oil myths about what will or won’t make your system sound better. There have been several times that I have seen people parroting this snake oil type stuff as if it is genuine advice. And often, this advice happens because the person only has a surface-level understanding of how audio works. Something sounds plausible, (and they don’t understand the underlying principles that would disprove it,) so they end up perpetuating the myth. So a lot of discussions boil down to “well kind of but not really” and people won’t bother reading anything past the “well kind of” part.

Ironically, your link is broken on Voyager because it doesn’t treat anything before the https as a link. It just leads straight to the normal pay walled site.

You need to embed the link for it to actually work. And even then, it may not work on this comment because it’ll try to route to my home instance due to having a Lemmy.world link for my image.