elagost

If anyone actually watched the talk Guido addresses Android at about 2 minutes in, and why it's not a actually what Linux users want.

They're what I have access to (for free; I don't buy this stuff), and what I grew up with. I used Pentium IIs and Pentium 4s (and some PowerPC Macs) in my early days. Exploring the limitations of older software or trying to cram newer software on to these machines is fun.

I don't get nostalgic feelings from a C64 or Apple 2 or TRS-80 because I've never even seen one IRL before. For my leisure time I want to play with something I'm mostly familiar with, because that's relaxing. I would jump at the chance to score a free Amiga or other hardware older than I've ever used, but just haven't had any presented to me.

This is a fantastic project. I've played around recently with late-90s/early-00s PCs, and have used Plop 5 on CD to boot off the USB disks. If you use older hardware, keep a copy on CD - booting off USB is much faster than CD!

Either that or CD. I used this to install an OS from USB on a PC from 1998 that has a USB port but can't boot from it.

Trisquel is based on Ubuntu like other operating systems (Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Zorin OS, etc.) but they do something unique - they rebuild the Ubuntu packages from source, instead of just including the Ubuntu repos in their software sources.

Trisquel is quite a usable distro for laptops that are 3-4 years old if you have an appropriate wireless card - Atheros 9xxx series cards tend to work well as the ath9k driver is FOSS. That's really the only blocker most people encounter. Why run this over Debian Stable (without adding "non-free" sources) I couldn't tell you. Debian tends to be more up to date than Trisquel since it's usually based on the previous Ubuntu LTS.

Use an alternative DNS server, Firefox/Brave/Ungoogled Chromium, uBlock Origin, and disable JavaScript everywhere you can possibly help it. As far as reclaiming some privacy from routine surveillance, this is probably better advice than "Pay Unknown Company X $9/mo to maybe be slightly better than your ISP in terms of privacy".

Ok. Use a proxy, or set up your own Proxy/VPN on a VPS? Then you also have a VPS - you can host your own website there, use it to download stuff and rsync it back to your local machine, deploy nextcloud, etc., all for less than the cost of ExpressVPN. And bonus points, you can use unlimited devices.

Diversification. Theoretically most of the nodes are owned by different people, and every connection will randomize your node list route between them, making it difficult to track, unless most of the nodes were owned by one organization. With VPNs, all of your connections are through servers owned by one company, identified by an account ID.

Browser fingerprinting works much better than checking IPs. With multiple devices being behind the same IP, it's necessary to distinguish between users.

I'm not saying VPNs are worthless - I'm on one right now for work. Commercial VPNs, for most people who purchase them, are completely worthless.

And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook.

If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN, you're probably wrong.

Why do we even give these companies the time of day?

(Small clarification - Most people who want VPNs should use a proxy instead. It fits the use case better. Those still exist and don't route ALL of your device's traffic over the tunnel.)

Consistency. All the Google hardware forever has allowed easy factory unlocking without a fuss, easy ways to restore to standard OS images without jumping through hoops, and are widely available. Plus they allow re-locking the booloader and the phone equivalent of enrolling your own custom secure boot keys. They also provide firmware updates for a long time so you can get platform/hardware patches too. CalyxOS does provide these in their images.

The 3a/4a are cheap and have headphone jacks and good cameras. What's not to love? Until they change their policy on unlocking bootloaders and installing custom OSs they're great devices. I still have a Nexus 5 that runs PostmarketOS and Ubuntu Touch, and if it completely breaks I can always use ADB/Fastboot to flash the Android 6 images that are still on Google's website. Don't even have to log in to get them.

dvgrab is awesome! I used it quite a bit recently, transferring old tapes on to more reliable media. Sometimes it the tape had an error and I had to rewind a bit and restart capture, but it mostly just worked.

Be warned, it does produce pretty large raw files, though, so after import, I ran ffmpeg to convert them all to mp4 files. No visible loss in quality, and about 90% size reduction.