Spooky

It’s included with the 8 Pro.

They had that YouTube Premium Lite tier in a few regions, which was basically that. But Google just killed it.

It’s a great tool but note that by default it upgrades EVERYTHING, up to and including production cloud environments if you are connected to any.

Linux?

It’s so nice to be excited about my OS again. I remember as a kid, I used to be really excited about Windows updates. People were cynical about Microsoft even back then, but I remained loyal to Windows for years.

Only last year did I finally move to Linux as my OS (although I still use Windows for gaming). Since then every following Linux news is always exciting. New versions of distros, desktop environments and software always bring interesting improvements.

Meanwhile on the Windows side, most noticeable updates just bring more ads, tracking, forced Edge recommendations and forced logins. Ironically the last Windows feature I remember being genuinely excited for was WSL 2.

Better than OsmAnd?

Kindle devices are nice but not at all FOSS, and not very open either. Although you can sideload books, EPUB files are still not directly supported, you have to convert them. Converting is easy with Calibre but it’s still a hassle that is not needed on any other ereader.

There’s a vibrant jailbreak community on MobileRead, however Amazon keeps blocking jailbreaks.

After my Kindle died I got a Kobo instead. Costs about the same as Kindle (maybe slightly more?). Still not fully open, but supports EPUB and its MobileRead community is just as vibrant (and Kobo doesn’t block you from doing this).

It’s good to hear you get less captchas with Mullvad. At least for me, when using Surfshark + Private Browsing, I am basically guaranteed to get a ton of captchas on any Google searches.

Yes I agree Surfshark has done some weird things. I find it weird that it’s actually the same company now as NordVPN, but they don’t make it clear.

Regarding performance, Surfshark is decent speed but still slower than not using a VPN. The more annoying thing is that I get a lot more captchas when using Surfshark. I think these issues are common for all VPNs, though I haven’t tried Mullvad yet (I will when my Surfshark subscription ends).

Funny thing is I started using Surfshark just before they started all the YouTube sponsorships. Them doing so many sponsorships actually made me trust them less somehow, if that makes sense.

Mullvad “appears” to be more trustworthy but maybe they are just better at marketing that image. They still cost twice as much as Surfshark.

Is it noticeably faster than Surfshark for you?

As in the actual data is bad, inaccurate, opinionated and doesn’t explain anything. Half of the chart is just “Cloudflare lol”, like at least explain why.

It’s a chart that looks useful at first glance, but the more you look at it the less you learn.

StartPage also blocks VPN usage.

Ancedotal but Startpage works perfectly fine with VPN for me. Certainly better than Google, which works but requires a lot of annoying captchas.

Also the actual diagram is bad.

I guess many servers are capping speeds them. Makes sense since I almost never see downloads actually take advantage of my Gigabit internet speeds.

FDM does some clever things to boost download speeds. It splits up a download into different chuncks, and somehow downloads them concurrently. It makes a big difference for large files (for example, Linux ISOs).

It’s still my favorite download manager on Windows. It often downloads file significantly faster than the download manager built into browsers. Luckily I never installed it on Linux, since I have a habit of only installing from package managers.

Do you know of a good download manager for Linux?

CalVer isn’t confusing.

Like by having various VMs running and accessing them from different PCs?

That’s easy in Proxmox, but you can also passthrough USB and display devices directly in order to access a virtualized OS directly on the PC running it. I read some people run virtualized Hackintosh in this way.