Of course. The YT-DLP team by refusing to support DRM videos gave Google a huge neon sign that said this is the one thing that will shut them down, the line they won’t cross. Google has targeted the big front end instances with rate limits and blocks and this is the next step.

Our only hope really is that the current YT-DLP team hands the reins over to people in countries that don’t give a shit about copyright and they put back in the ability to download and decrypt DRM protected video.

can they be added to the search function in qbittorrent?

Nearly all can. All the one’s you’d want anyways work with Jackett. They don’t work via direct plugins but just run Jackett, follow its instructions and connect it to qBittorrent and you’re good to go searching just the same as before. Some annoying ones occasionally require setting up another software like Flaresolver but for the most part the big easy to get into ones that open their doors annually work without that.

While there will likely be some openings throughout the year the fact is most trackers open in the period from Thanksgiving/late November through early January. TL opens then basically every year, a number of more exclusive trackers do open signups then, some for only 24 hours so get an RSS feed of that and remember to sign up IMMEDIATELY as soon as you see a post as the post on reddit may have been made 22 hours into a 24 hour open window, you just don’t know. TL though at least tends to stay open for several days. So if you have no luck before then, wait until that time of the year and then check daily or even twice daily if you can, once before bed, once earlier when you get up or lunch or after work, whatever.

It just does more and more easily. It styles things better, makes them more professional looking with a click. It can do certain things like nested tables in Word that Writer cannot do. Excel is much more powerful than calc, it has more functions, more refined functions, it’s easier to work with, has more and prettier chart options. And oh you can create tables in Excel that are sortable. There are many other cases.

Now for the last two the die-hards will whine and whinge about how you should just use a software for creating charts and a database but sometimes you just want to make something quick, sometimes that’s overkill for what you need. Grandpa doesn’t need to learn how to deal with databases just to make a sortable list of books he’s read, he can just use excel and the Libreoffice people telling him to pound sand because they won’t add that feature to calc because it doesn’t belong there means he and many other people don’t use calc, they use MS office. Likewise the Libreoffice defense force saying of making graphs and charts to just use dedicated software, well many corporate types, business people, white collar workers don’t understand those things and may not be able to get them installed, what they understand, what they already have is MS office and it works and has lots of pretty, professional, very slick options which don’t make them look poorly in office meeting presentations.

Just on the sortable tables front, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into hobby stuff that’s based on an excel file with tables that rely on being sortable. From stat sheet creators to mini-databases (<2000 rows) on some game created by fans.

It’s useful for those who need the very bare basics of being able to open and read basic MS word documents, csv files, excel files, and to write an occasional letter. But the moment you need to start doing beyond basic formatting or dealing with files that have that, you run into issues.

You have this gulf of usability, it’s useful for people at the very bottom of the basic needs pole, barely computer literate types who think facebook is the internet and it’s useful for highly technically competent people who can and do use other dedicated software, often without GUIs to solve problems, it’s a frustration for the middle 60% of the population who are more than basically computer literate but not scientifically trained, not CS or IT.

I don’t care about Nazis switching to Linux and neither should you. Not a good look.

i haven’t yet encountered an AP that is capable of providing all of the features that i currently use. ie ad blocking; personal vpn;

Pfsense does both of these. pfblocker NG in particular is a very powerful network adblocker with lots of lists. Pfsense can also run VPNs, it supports openvpn and wireguard in both client and server mode and you can set up multiple so one client, one server.

web hosting; and cloud-like internet accessible storage via ssh tunnel (in addition to others).

If you just need personal services it would be best to run something local, setup a wireguard tunnel on pfsense that gives access to your network and VPN in to access things remotely. If you need to share with others I suppose this can become a problem.

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What they told you is misleading.

Transcoding and burning in subtitles for Plex and similar only happens in some cases if your streaming device doesn’t support image based subtitles. Plex themselves could fix this on a lot more devices but don’t.

10 years ago it was the case that there were a LOT of issues with anything but text subtitles. These days it depends. If you’re running it directly off a smart tv (bad experience anyways, not recommended) it’s likely to be an issue. If you’re using an Android streaming device or Apple TV or gaming console there’s a good chance the subs just work.

Truth is lots of things can force transcoding with Plex including using certain audio formats in certain media containers. Most of these days picture subs work. If you can get text subs it’s not a bad thing but I wouldn’t go through the hassle of doing flawed OCR unless you can confirm it’s an issue you’re experiencing with your setup.

Console batch file for mkv merge should do that as long as subs are named same as video files (or something consistent like that name +subs).

You’d want to target the sub files not idx. If that fails I’d just do an intermediate step of merging the sub and idx files into an mks file then merging that into the mkv. The gui only needs the sub files added. I’ll try and come back to this though someone else already posted a script that should be able to be adapted to do this.

It’s alright. Not anywhere near as nice as say TL in retention and breadth/amount of content available but they have a fair amount of zero-day scene RARed stuff as well as some non-RARed stuff. Not as much free leech as many other trackers either, if you sign up I strongly recommend trying to grab stuff while you have sitewide to build a buffer.

Oh and they do have pretty regular problems keeping the site up. People regularly get API request failures and the website can be unreachable for hours or more. Not a bad tracker but I wouldn’t suggest using it as your only resource unless your needs are very specific such as only wanting day-one scene access.

data such as host name,

Okay why do they need to know that? Why do they need to know if the computer is called “Melissa’s Laptop” or “Workstation 15, Internal security division”? Seems like this kind of data could if stolen be misused and it has minimal legitimate purpose IMO as anyone can put anything as host name and while in organizations it often corresponds to use it doesn’t have to for individuals. Someone could call their machine “Mack’s Porn Rig” and they only use it for doing banking and a little coding.

kernel version, desktop component versions, detailed information about hardware and drivers involved, screen size and resolution information,

This all seems legitimate enough, this would be helpful for understanding the hardware their users run on and targeting features or bug fixes.

network device MAC addresses,

Not great but there is an argument for it, they could just grab and send the first 3-4 octets which would give them the info they need on manufacturers without getting uniquely identifiable data that along with some of this other stuff is concerning for fingerprinting.

disk serial numbers,

Okay, what the fuck. Why do they need disk serial numbers? What possible use is there for that. Those are used for warranty claims and could be used as part of uniquely fingerprinting a computer and person. Not cool.

disk partition data,

This is vague enough. I guess one could choose to see this as just info about partitions in use say if there’s also an NTFS partition that looks like a Windows install that would be useful but on the other hand data encompassed within a partition could also nefariously be read as allowing them access to all your data. Partition layout, partition labels, and file systems used on disks available to the system would be a clearer way to put this and erase any doubt.

information about the number of running processes and installed packages, versions of basic packages such as systemd, gcc, bash and PipeWire.

All this is also fine just technical data stuff.

This isn’t the end of Linux but it may be the beginning of the end. Right now alarm bells are screaming in China, Russia, India, across the global south about this. They’ve seen the decades of US sanctions, often arbitrary and other punitive measures including cultural campaigns of exclusion and punishment (remember “freedom fries” after 9/11 because the French wouldn’t go along with US adventures in Iraq?) now reaching a fever-pitch. All pretensions of the US to stand for freedom and individual liberty and such have been pushed aside, shoved away by these acts and the blatant hypocrisy of their support of the genocidal zionist state which even now broadens the war of aggression and genocide against Palestinians and Lebanese with full US support and diplomatic cover at the UN.

They see that all that lofty talk from the US was after all a lie. A large number of lies.

Where do we go from here? I fear fragmentation and partition of the world may be inevitable, a new cold war, the internet, software, everything being divided by series of hard and not so hard walls and barriers impeding cooperation, business, trade, cultural exchange, and people to people relations and discussions at an organic grassroots level.

Those in the west will see the freedoms increasingly curtailed, lofty language rolled back behind a large series of ever more expansive “but…” clauses, corporatization of the internet will increase, surveillance, control all justified by the waved wand of hysteria over Russia, China, Iran, muslims, whoever necessitating giving up your privacy, your rights, your freedoms, and of course any right for a dissenting opinion against whoever the current US president is and their administration.

National security in the 90s was used to outlaw export of encryption, to embargo the idea of a secure internet, to push for backdoor chips via the clipper chip in all personal computers. Now it and the same kind of foreign boogeymen are being used to finish that task that they failed at and we are letting them because of jingoism.

The real answer is organize your library. There’s no reason to have it like that.

At least create two folders “Movies” and “TV Shows” or however you want to name them. Put movies in the movies sub-folder, ideally in named folders that match the name of the movie (so Movies/The Godfather (1972)/moviefile.mkv) and TV shows in the other folder again with a subfolder for each show with year included.

The best way to do this is to use a media manager when adding files. Something like mediaelch or tiny media manager and scrape your films and ideally tv shows as well and create local metadata for them that you save. Both can do renaming though tmm does it slightly better if you pay for the subscription version and it can automatically scrape and rename your library along with creating the relevant nfo files and things like posters so Kodi just works.

I guess you could try connecting Kodi to another service. If you’re okay running Plex on some other machine or Jellyfin you can connect Kodi to that if they scrape it all properly but most likely they’ll have issues as well because the only real solution is organizing your library. There are paid tools as I mention as well as free ones. Filebot is another paid tool that does organization and such.

Which is so weird, because office is crapware. It’s terrible software.

If so then all the other offerings are even worse crapware.

In my experience Microsoft Office opens twice as fast reliably than LibreOffice (when I terminate the process responsible for keeping it ready it takes about the same amount of time but it’s no slower importantly).

Microsoft office is simply the best. It’s a fact. It can do tons of things that Libreoffice and OpenOffice cannot. It has tons of advanced features, it’s just a superior office suite.

Comparing LibreOffice to Microsoft Office is like comparing a Lexus SUV with the full package of options installed compared to a basic fleet Ford sedan. Yes both can do very basic things and if you just need to type some things or do very basic spreadsheets then they’re interchangeable.

But ask some slightly advanced things like sortable tables (Excel does easily) and suddenly only MS office can do that and the LibreOffice people tell you to pound sand and use a database which doesn’t make sense for a lot of tasks when you may just be preparing some data for example for a presentation or some quick financial work (I’m talking about stuff for myself, not a professional accountant), etc. Take a look at design options in MS Word compared to LibreOffice writer. Both have title and header styling options but the MS office ones simply look more professional, cleaner, and they have more options you can easily tweak. If I’m presenting a report I absolutely want to do it in MS office because I can make it look neater and nicer with less effort.

Businesses use it because 1) they’re used to using it, it’s a standard among businesses and the public, and it’s maximally compatible with files created by it so interoperability isn’t an issue as long as you too use it, 2) it’s the best. It has more options than others, it can do more things. It has more depth. It has extensive support and documentation and it has good integration between the different pieces of software.

It’s like comparing GIMP to Photoshop. Sorry. I think FOSS is a great philosophy and I hate Microsoft and Adobe as much as anyone but in practice Photoshop is miles and miles beyond GIMP in capabilities. And this is coming from someone who has GIMP installed and not Photoshop (because PS is expensive).

The extended suite of MS office has always been meh. But it doesn’t matter. Word, Excel, PowerPoint all work great and are exceptional tools at the top of their class. Could they be better? Yes. But they don’t have to be the best possible, they just have to be the best compared to other offerings by a country mile and they are if your needs are any more complex than the occasional letter to grandma.

Does that mean I think people should pay for MS Office? Not when there are ways to get it free with no cracking or risk.

It depends. If you’re using a laptop and say you take it to university or work then you’re not on your LAN. You’re on someone else’s LAN and they may have no interest in trying to stop these types of attacks via any kind of client isolation or it may be incomplete.

I can imagine it’s a very normal scenario for university students to have CUPS running and available on all networks as they may need to print at their university.