This thread is giving me flashbacks to the times before Unicode, when swapping files between Windows and Linux partitions would have a good chance of fucking up every non-ASCII characters in their names.

There was ways to set it up so the ISO character sets would match, but it was still a giant pain to deal with different ones.

Blessed be Unicode.

Where I live temperatures can reach -30C in winter and 30C in summer, so storing anything “sensible” in a shed is a very bad idea. Everything has to be stored in a controlled environment or it will quickly get moldy and rusty.

However, I kept my old 5.25" diskettes in a box where they were a bit squeezed together and they obviously didn’t like that. It could also just be time. Anyways, a few years ago I decided to copy everything on hard drives and some diskettes were now unreadable.

I waited too long to backup them and now it’s too late for some of them.

And even stored “properly”, I also have burned CDs from the early 2000 that are also unreadable. It’s unfortunate but there’s nothing I can do now, except to learn and remember the lesson.

I’m always baffled by people that find old computers stored in barns and still working. Where I am I don’t think they would last more than two winters with this kind of temperature and humidity variation.

The hunt for the cofounders of torrent site The Pirate Bay was a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse, spanning several continents. In the end, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm all ended up in prison.

The only open source client that I know that worked with Steam is for bridging Steam’s chats and notifications with IRC. It’s called Bitlbee.

And i’ve stopped using it a few years ago because IIRC it was a pain to keep the authentication working with Steam. They thought hackers were accessing my account or something like that, and I kept having to disable security “features” just in order to stay logged in.

I assume an open source client not endorsed by Steam would have the same issue.

Your PC is now Stoned.

This thing is from 1987 and I still have it on some of my old floppies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.

For me it’s an old habit from IRC. Instead of sending 5/6/7 lines of text, I just cut it with … and continue typing on the same line. I could make complete sentences with capitals and periods but instant messaging is not a medium well suited for full sentences and paragraphs, so you get …

Bah. I’ve been using Linux for 25 years, started with a derivative of Slackware, then used Slackware for about a decade, and switched to Debian. I used 5.25" floppies and manually set IRQs so I’m quite comfortable with Debian and tinkering in general.

For friends and family I prefer LMDE. Snap packages can go to hell.

Audio over the network is a feature of pulseaudio/pipewire from a module aptly named “module-simple-protocol”, and as simple as it is to make it work on Linux (when it works), it’s unfortunately not as easy on other platforms. Technically speaking, it’s possible to do that on Android with an app called “Simple Protocol Player” but it’s apparently very glitchy and you’re going to need some patience for the setup. It’s from someone that wanted to stream audio from an HTPC with Ubuntu to an Android phone, but the author states that it’s pretty buggy. Here’s the link to their blog: https://kaytat.com/blog/?page_id=301

So the short answer is unfortunately “no”, unless you want to practice your patience on a project.

Hehe, I knew that if I wanted stability I had to stay on Slackware! That’s the price we have to pay to use a bleeding edge distro like Debian where everything is fast paced. 😏

When it works (!), it’s one of the reasons I brag to my tech friends about Linux, and why I switched to Linux many many years ago. In fact, it was when Esound was a thing. But once in a while it stops working after an upgrade or a dist-upgrade, and I have to spend time trying to fix it.

I like to joke around with tech minded friends that Windows keeps breaking with every updates, but then I have to spend an hour finding out why my sinks disappeared after an upgrade, and I’m forced to realize that… sigh… these things happen with Linux too.

Mainly because of bluetooth headphones with multiple computers. That way they are paired to only one computer and I can use them with other computers at the same time. Just right click on paprefs system tray icon, change the sink and the audio is sent somewhere else. I know it’s now possible to have bluetooth headphones that have multiple connections but it wasn’t the case a few years ago and I still find it much more useful this way.

But it’s also useful when I have my laptop near my main computer and want to use its much better speakers instead of the crappy ones on the laptop. Right click, select another sink, and that’s it.

It’s just nice to have the option to send the audio from one computer to another. It’s a shame that it’s apparently a niche thing.

Alternatively,

Setting up an ad blocker for a whole device often requires root. I gave up with my new phone and just have ublock origin on Firefox but that’s the point. I can’t easily install something that will modify the DNS because I have no admin access on my phone.

That’s why I also do give up on certain apps. For example I don’t like the ads in Boost so I stopped using it. Sometimes I pay for the version of an app without ads. This doesn’t happen on Linux.

Also being heavily pushed towards apps for websites like YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook… Lemmy, Mastodon… They are all “best experienced” in apps, and most of them will probably try to push you ads or make you pay.

Again, I’m relatively tech savvy so I can find other ways, but it’s still annoying and disappointing to have to constantly find ways around the system. It doesn’t happen in Linux.

Android is the enshittification of Linux.

Free software. Try to use apt on Android, or run software that you can use on a desktop. And no ads in every app.

Root access, that is, being admim of your own device.

Being able to access the file system and support for different types. For example Android doesn’t support NTFS and needs FAT. Plugging a simple USB drive has mixed results.

This is from the top of my head. I use both but I really don’t like how Android is locked down and so limited, even for power users. I really wish I could have a real “pocket computer” instead of this thing that feeds me ads.

That’s excellent for their clients. I’m guessing it set a precedent and the industry stopped trying anything else.

I didn’t follow the most recent developments here in Canada but AFAIK, a decade ago the industry tried to sue individuals that were “pirating”, and lost because they couldn’t proof that an IP could be associated with a single person, or something like that. Then the industry pretty much stopped trying to sue individuals from that point. They still send the threatening letters, but they don’t do anything else because past experiences with our courts didn’t go well for them.

Of course, there is a very very slim chance that the industry will try to sue a few individuals to scare others and create a new precedent, but it’s going to be a civil suit because it’s not even criminal here.

Meh. I don’t know about OP but where I live ISPs are forced to relay the legal notice, but nothing more happens. There is no prosecution and nobody will knock on my door.

I have been torrenting on and off since the protocol exists and never once hid my IP. My ISP relays me the threats from the industry, I ignore them, and continue what I was doing before. Same for everyone in my country. Those that end up paying for a VPN and hiding their IP are just intimidated onto doing so, because of the threats. But again, aside from getting that threatening email, nobody will knock on your door for torrenting here.

Many many years ago, it’s one of the things that made me switch to Linux. Moving and renaming files while using them was kind of a game changer.

I’m using Android but I can give you a few personal examples on why I still prefer mobile websites to apps.

1. The place where I take weather has a shitty app full of ads and always sending notifications. They don’t have PWA offered on their site but just going through a browser instead of the app is significantly better.

2. YouTube’s app is also full of ads. So I use the mobile website in Firefox with uBlock Origin.

3. Again with awful apps full of ads. Twitter is also much more tolerable through the mobile website. There’s no autoplay on FF and again, ads blocked.

4. I still use IRC and my client is web based, so that I can see pictures and videos in my chats. The web based IRC client (The Lounge) offers PWA and it’s very nice to have the thing in a “clean” browser.

Again, I don’t use Apple for reasons like this, but Firefox is already pretty bad with PWA and having those possibilities mangled or removed wouldn’t be acceptable to me.

Maybe you don’t use a browser on mobile and just do everything through terrible apps. Maybe most people do the same. But if you don’t use it, why do you care if those using it want to retain the possibility to do so?

I personally don’t watch TV so nobody watches TV anymore, right?

Modern web IRC clients like The Lounge or Convos can now display images, play mp3 and mp4 formats, and they have upload options. It can still be excellent for real time support, but I’m not so sure about documentation though.