It depends. I’m not saying I never pirate books. I’m not going to just support a publisher milking a book that should belong to the commons.

Also, some publishers have taken to raising ebook prices to as high or higher than hardback costs. For those I might buy one book by an author and pirate another. I won’t justify it other than to say I only ever bought paperbacks anyway and still remember those being like $3.99 to $6.99, so I’m not paying $18+ for an ebook novel because of publisher greed.

But if it’s an author I like, I buy their books, and support them in other ways (like with Sanderson’s Kickstarter for example).

Nah, no need to be a shitheel. I’m cool with paying for books, authors gotta eat. I wouldn’t refund a book I’ve read.

MOBI has been deprecated for a long time. Standard formats now are AZW3 (KF8) and KFX. They’re a bit more advanced than MOBI, and thank goodness, since it was a terrible format. AZW3 is essentially a MOBI/EPUB container, and I believe KFX is equivalent to EPUB2, possibly with some EPUB3 features.

Takes a small effort to set up (install Calibre, install NoDRM plugin, apply Kindle serial to plugin), but once it’s done, the rest is literally drag and drop, it removes DRM from your books automagically.

Like hell I don’t. Calibre plus NoDRM says otherwise.

It’s a monument to human achievement that they work as well as they do at all.

FTFY.

I don’t use pi-hole currently, but have managed access via my router. My LG C1 has been locked down to LAN access only for a long time.

It’s kinds great this way. Since it has an IP it doesn’t give me any bullshit about network, but no traffic escapes the home network.

I’m in my forties and what you’re describing doesn’t sound normal at all. I beat myself up good in my younger years with sports and still do somewhat regular cardio and weightlifting. I have a bum knee and hip problem, shoulder issues from weightlifting injuries, and my back gets stiff and sore on a good day.

None of that stops me from functionally living, and none of its anything the occasional ibuprofen or toke won’t fix in the short term. I can still exercise, do physical labor, open all the jars, and be generally active, and without pain the majority of the time.

What you’re describing sounds more like an inflammatory disease or auto-immune disorder. 110% get a second opinion from a different doc, or a third if needed.

Ah thanks. I didn’t follow to the release page and just skimmed the article, should have read closer.

Maybe a stupid question but… what exactly was illegal about this? I’m sure there were ToS or EULAs violated, but what law is he being charged on?

I mean, it should be fine, just because the PSU can provide more watts doesn’t mean the system is actually using that much power. I have an 800w PSU in my gaming rig, but its average load is only 240 - 320w during gaming (I’ve measured it by powering the system with a portable Ecoflow battery).

Just be sure to get the edge release if you care about gaming or have current (like newer than 2021) hardware. Mint’s main release is on an old kernel, 5.15 I think. Mint edge release is running kernel 6.5, which is from earlier this year.

“The incident is widely characterized by critics as an example of mishandled manhandled customer service.”

Just a typo.

Microsoft will just enable it via an update once all the fervor dies down. They haven’t abandoned the plan, and won’t, not while your data is pure profit for them.

Hell with them, no more Windows PCs in my home. I’m sick to death of everyone and their mother trying to both advertise to me and sell my data without my permission and at zero benefit to me.

The fact this is even necessary makes me want to shit a brick.

“Do you want to make an online account?” No. “Okay, please set up your local account.”

That should be it. And honestly, even that’s egregious to me. Signing into online bullshit should be opt-in, not opt-out. Thank goodness I don’t use Windows anymore, finally wiped the last Windows machine in my house this past week.

Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend?

My plex server is headless, running Almalinux. Doesn’t take much, I have it running on a very old NUC8 (NUC8i5BEK). The box is also running Asset UPnP and AudioBookshelf server too.

Personally, unless the server will also be the client (as in, you’ll be watching from the server box and not a streaming box, tablet, TV app, etc), I’d skip any GUI and just install it from the terminal, save your resources for what matters. Desktop environment is pointless for a server machine.

If you were buying a cheap machine to handle it today, I’d probably recommend a Beelink (or other) mini-PC with a Ryzen 5000 series chipset (5500u/5560u models with 16GB RAM can be found very cheap, generally $215-$240 new these days). The 5000 series in particular are very power efficient for something you likely will leave on all the time, and have both 6c/12t and 8c/16t variants, though the 8 core ones will probably be more like $300-$320.

Whatever you buy, if it comes pre-installed with Windows, delete the OS. I wouldn’t trust preinstalled on these boxes, and in any case Microsoft is getting really sketchy with this whole Windows Recall thing anyway.

Try entering the pin wrong repeatedly. May not work, but there’s a setting to force a wipe if it’s entered incorrectly 10 times. Will only work if that was enabled that at some point, but it’s worth a shot.

For instance, you can’t factory reset an iPhone without connecting it to either an OSX computer, or a PC running their special program.

This is patently untrue. Settings -> General -> Transfer or Reset iPhone. You have the option from there to wipe all data, do a full factory reset, or transfer the phone’s data to another device.

I’ve no idea where you’re getting your info from.

Generally underscore _ works best for this, and should be viable for both OSes.

You’re not likely to do that for $150. You might be able to pull an old Dell Precision T5500 tower with a weak Xeon on eBay for cheap and refit it with more ram, better CPU and cheap non-redundant storage for $200 - $250.

For sake of power requirements though, seriously consider your use case and needs. You can get by pretty well with cheap mini-PCs like Intel NUCs or AMD minis like Beelink for pretty cheap and just cluster them with something like Proxmox to scale out instead of up when you need additional resources. This will be reasonably priced and keep the power bill and noise levels down.