I think I’ve bought from 7digital a time or two in the past and had no problems. Obviously there are issues with Amazon as a company, but I think they were the first big name to offer DRM-free MP3 purchases and I used it a lot back when it first launched, especially since they offered a selection of albums each month for just $5. They should have most mainstream music available for purchase, depending on which country you’re in. According to this Wikipedia page listing music stores they only offer 256 kbps MP3 but I was sure most if not all were upgraded to 320 kbps now, although of course you would have to re-download anything if you had downloaded the lower-quality version previously. That Wikipedia page is a good link to other stores as well, with a number I’d never heard of including specialty stores.

Also, along with someone else’s comment mentioning ripping CDs like the old days, check to see if you have a local record store. It’s been a mantra since at least the Gen-X days to “support your local scene.” I know in Raleigh the longtime staple Schoolkids Records is still alive and kicking, although their Chapel Hill store closed last year. It might take some digging but it can be worth seeing if there’s a local store in your area.

Not having done much with Signal, is there a way to create local backups?

Self-hosting there are some ways to fight back, or depending on your opinions on Cloudflare it seems they’re fairly effective at blocking the AI crawlers.

There’s actually a surprising amount of free static website hosting out there. Besides GitHub, GitLab, Cloudflare, and Netlify come to mind offhand.

Just stick a Mac mini in the case and call it a day!

I was about to hit send on this, then looked it up and realized you could actually stick one in the 5.25” bays, although it would take two of the standard “half height” bays—or at least some extra height in the case—because it would be too tall by less than half an inch. I would not be surprised if someone has already done this.

Phone projection for navigation has been significantly better than any built-in navigation on any car I’ve ever driven. The vehicle screens are typically larger than a phone screen so that’s a really nice feature to me.

I’ve known about Linux since the late ’90s; I haven’t been around any significant concentration of people talking about it and how to use it until I joined Lemmy.

I’ve only seen that kind of keyboard for iPhone; what model is this?

It’s from ClickHole, which is a site The Onion started parodying viral content sites like BuzzFeed or Bored Panda. It was sold to Cards Against Humanity in 2020.

Unironically I like that

Yes, but you said you were using Resolve for color grading. My understanding is you should still be able to use that on Linux, but I haven’t tried it yet myself.

It’s not FOSS (IIRC) but I think Resolve is fully available on Linux?

Yes, that is surprising; I’m fairly certain they were involved in developing Bonjour also

I was notified about 3 or 4 breaches just last year, some from companies I’d never even heard of but had my info.

If you’re okay with writing a little HTML and just don’t want to deal with writing/designing the CSS, I recently found out about HTML5 UP, which has a bunch of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-licensed templates. It’s fairly straightforward to modify the content if you understand the HTML, and then you can host it for free as a static page at any number of places like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages.

If you don’t want to have the CC-By attribution on the webpage, the designer also offers a service called Pixelarity with the same templates and more for a $19/quarter non-renewing subscription. You can continue using the templates even after the subscription expires and can keep making new sites with any template you already downloaded, you just don’t get any updates or tech support when the subscription expires. Upload to one of those free static hosts and it’s dramatically cheaper than Ghost or WordPress, and probably less work than a static site generator for something that’s not changing often.

What’s the deal with Linux and Nvidia? Do the official drivers suck, or is it people not wanting to use a closed source driver but not having good open source drivers? I might have access to a good gaming PC soon but it has an Nvidia card.

I liked this read when considering legal ramifications for hosting content. It is U.S. focused so it might not be applicable to someone in another country.

I’m no expert but given the repeated efforts from governments around the world to get backdoors added to encryption and frequent pushback from big tech, or at least Apple, I’m more inclined to think there currently, or recently, aren’t backdoors. At least, not easy ones, not official ones. As an example, recall a few years ago there was a terror-related attack in the U.S. where someone tied to Muslim extremists went on a shooting spree before taking his own life (I’m not bothering to look up the details and my recollection could be flawed). The attacker used an iPhone and the U.S. government took the opportunity of strong public outrage to try to force Apple to create a tool to break the encryption on the iPhone so they could examine its contents. Apple resisted and the effort went to court, with the decision eventually being that Apple did not have to break the encryption. The government then revealed that they had access to a third party tool that they used to break into the phone and recover its contents. That’s pretty much been the pattern before and since: a government will try to find a cause that seems likely to gather widespread support and use that to get a backdoor they promise not to abuse, and the companies push back to varying degrees. All the while there seem to be third party tools that exploit various flaws, including zero-day flaws to gain the access the companies won’t provide. My impression is that at least a couple times a year there’s a story about an Apple security update patching these holes and notifying certain users if they may have been targeted.

It’s possible that’s all just theater put on by the U.S. and allies to help Apple or Google tell governments the U.S. doesn’t trust, “see, we can’t even give the U.S. government we’re subject to access, so we certainly can’t give you access.” Given some of the cases that have been used to try to force access, though, I’m more inclined to think the government really doesn’t have the easy access some might like.

Of course, it’s also possible that some of the flaws used by zero-day exploits to gain access are intentionally planted, either by the software companies or by an individual programmer acting at a government’s behest. The later patches could be to maintain appearances to outsiders, since there always seem to be additional flaws. Still, programming is hard enough and operating systems are complex enough that I’m more inclined to say that usually these really are just human error and not something malicious.

None of that is to say that anyone should fully trust these encryption systems. Used properly, they’re probably good enough against ordinary hackers, people just looking for financial rewards. You can keep your family photos, important records, school notes, etc. on them without worrying too much. Financial records you might want to doubly encrypt, just so they’re not so easy to exploit if there is a breach and data dump. If you’re doing something any government cares enough about to really investigate, they’re probably going to find a way into your computer, phone, or cloud service, depending on how motivated they are. Maybe not some impoverished “third-world” governments, but most of the big ones have some resources. I’d be extremely cautious about things that could actually send someone to jail, either in your own country or one that is less friendly.

These are browser engines, or at least software for rendering HTML but not necessarily the actual browser. I don’t know them all, but top left, Gecko, is the engine for Mozilla, center is Web Kit for Safari, bottom center is Chromium for Chrome, Brave, Edge, etc., and bottom right is Trident, the old engine for Microsoft Internet Explorer.

I suppose there’s a reason a Brit wrote 1984?