Not directly. There are some hacky work-arounds that may or may not work:

https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/Stremio/comments/18s55cy/how_to_use_stremio_with_infuse_on_apple_tv/

The only way I know of that’s possible is to use web.stremio.com on your iPhone and copy the movie link and paste it to the Infuse app on your phone and then if you have iCloud Sync enabled in Infuse on your iPhone and Apple TV it will show the movie available to play with metadata and everything when you refresh the Infuse app on the Apple TV :)

https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/debridmediamanager/comments/12id1dj/streaming_movies_and_tv_shows_on_apple_tv_using/ This suggests adding it as a webdav source may work.

You have 3 options:

1. Android TV/Google: bad for privacy, some devices can be customized for slightly more with tweaks, ADB, etc

2. Apple TV: pretty private compared to Google, no ads out of the box on Home Screen, nice hardware that lasts awhile.

3. Wilderness of roll your own on a mini-PC, raspberry pi, etc: no ads, private. But pain in the ass, no 4k, no full HD (720p max), no HDR, no atmos sound because not locked down with DRM for streaming services so not approved. Choose this only if most of your content is self provided Blu-ray’s or yo ho type stuff and/or YouTube. Otherwise miserable experience.

As far as 1) goes there are some better options like Dune-HD (make sure to get a Netflix certified model so you get 4k support from streaming services), and some customization via changing launchers and such for more privacy.

However only options 2 and 3 are really more private IMO and “fixes” for Android TV devices mostly are in the form of blocking ads and allowing side loading of say a custom version of YouTube with ad blocking so don’t and can’t address the under the hood spying Google is more aggressive about.

As to getting away from American. Good luck, both major platforms are American companies. Only other option is Chinese fork of Android and it’s no good for western streaming or use outside China. Otherwise roll your own but also provide your own content and that gets you away from them. A mini-pc is great for that with an air mouse but it’s not the same finely polished experience though can be decent with a little work.

False slander (ironic considering what we’re discussing).

Only slurs are auto removed including a very common one against women pertaining as well to female dogs. You can say fuck, shit, asshole, etc.

If the drive previously wasn’t making this noise (as in it had been filled with data, been in use for days-weeks and wasn’t ever making this noise) and it doesn’t happen in response to data writes (even hours after the fact) then it might be a cause for concern that the drive could be dying.

In general it’s a good idea to have back-ups of any important data but I’d really ensure that’s the case here and assume it could imminently fail. In general the sound of hard drives changing (that is sounding different in either idle noises or active writing/reading noises) is a cause for concern for potential drive failure though it could be other things and as drives age they can sometimes change sound signatures as mechanical components age without necessarily failing (could go on working fine for years).

That said there are normal processes in drives that can make noise:

• Some sort of operation driven by your OS itself, I won’t begin to get into all of them but there could be something accessing things in the background, doing file table or journaling operations, writes, checks, etc on the file system itself, just low level maintenance stuff.

• SMR drives may continue to write and shuffle data for quite some time after being written to, especially if it was a large amount of data. Though this should still even in the case of multiple terabytes probably be resolved within 12 hours.

• Many drives, especially high capacity enterprise drives do make a -soft- clicking sound as a result of the arms sweeping the surface when idle but not off to if I recall correctly spread around lubricant or some sort of basic mechanical maintenance. It’s part of the normal drive operations. It’s possible it occurs more frequently in response to a massive amount of writes previously like filling a drive or may not be activated until a certain amount of data is written, I’m not really sure how that works as that would probably be proprietary information to the manufacturer.

Should I be worried about this? To my paranoid mind it feels like something is slowly reading my files with some exploit to bypass the indicator light to fly under the radar.

How would it do this? Is it installing hacked firmware to your enclosure too? I doubt you’re that valuable of a target.

If you’re worried about malware then back up your stuff, nuke the install and reinstall from scratch. I wouldn’t worry about it if this is the only thing you’re seeing and find it unlikely.

Your options if you wish to stick with Windows:

• Windows 10 LTSC (massgrave activators and has a guide for getting an ISO for it) which means a reinstallation (best option with Windows, least enshittification, still keep security updates but have to back up your stuff and reinstall everything) though this may not be a long-term plan if you play video games as I expect many places may drop Windows 10 support by 2028-29 end of ESU rather than 2032 end of LTSC support.

• Windows 11 but change to LTSC (massgrave can do this)

• Windows 11 but change to Enterprise license (massgrave can do this) and use Windows Group Policy settings to set target for updates to the current OS build version number which will delay feature updates for I believe up to 6-12 months but allow you immediate security updates. Bad news is you still get the new “features” but good news is they’re delayed significantly and maybe by the time you have to “upgrade” Microsoft has tweaked them to be moderately less bad and much less buggy.

Star Trek.

Everything after Voyager gets axed completely. 100% retconned. Doesn’t exist. You can’t even joke about happenings in it in any new works.

Voyager and DS9 themselves get trimmed down. DS9 loses 75% of its episodes, Dominion war erased, mundane space station stuff instead, no religious weirdness validated. Voyager gets better ending but retains most of its episodes.

ToS gets turned into legendary chronicles rather than full canon with the more absurd less science bits cut out or reduced to the fantasies of the chronicler. Main stories and characters retained with >=80% of it surviving. Movies from both ToS and TNG era retain full canon status.

It is established that alternative dimensions are extremely limited in number, you cannot do Marvel universe #69 stuff with it, the main one is the nega-universe with evil everything and a few other isolated pocket universes that are short-lived and unstable (often as a result of warp core implosion weirdness and such).

All existing writers and producers currently associated or associated since the end of the Voyager era are summarily fired with prejudice. New ones are hired and quizzed by me to ensure at least the main producers are communists like Roddenberry and do not want to turn my hopeful FALGSC property into grim-dark in space IP number 3. Prominent transgender characters are MANDATORY in the new series and other steps will be taken to drive every last reactionary out of what’s left of the fan-base.

It becomes studio policy to viciously copyright strike anyone uploading video of retconned parts of the IP to any platform as well as to bully journalist insiders with access into adopting the new line by excluding anyone who disagrees with it from access or favor.

MKVToolNix.

An excellent tool for working with video files as long as you’re okay with your files being in MKV containers (you should be they’re superior to mp4). From within it you can add and remove tracks such as audio and subtitle, change flags (flag subs as forced, default, etc), rename tracks for clarity, adjust track timing with positive and negative delays to fix sync issues. You can do batch scripting against it to iterate through whole folders of video files. For anyone who has a home media server it’s a must. For anyone who works with videos regularly it’s at least useful.

Difficult I would say. A lot of them require Chinese phone numbers, emails, etc. Some of them you can probably sign up for with just a wechat or QQ account or similar though paying (if you want large amounts of storage for instance) may be an issue without jumping through some hoops.

You can search up cloud storage providers in China. Baidu, Tencent, and several others have a presence.

If you’re looking for an MS Office replacement there is WPS office as paid software but I’m not sure how much better than libreoffice it is.

I think the home media collector usecase is actually a complete outlier in terms of what these formats are actually being developed for.

Well yeah given who makes it but it’s what I care about. I couldn’t care less about obscure and academic efforts (or the profits of some evil tech companies) except as vague curiosities. HEVC wasn’t designed with people like me in mind either yet it means I can have oh 30% more stuff for the same space usage and the enccoders are mature enough that the difference in encode time between it and AVC is negligible on a decently powered server.

Transparency (or great visual fidelity period) also isn’t likely the top concern here because development is driven by companies that want to save money on bandwidth and perhaps on CDN storage.

Which I think is a shame. Lower bitrates for transparency -should- be the goal. The goal should be to get streaming content to consumers at a very high quality, ideally close to or equivalent to UHD BluRay for 4k. Instead we get companies that bit-starve and hop onto these new encoders because they can use fewer bits as long as they use plenty of tricks to maintain a certain baseline of perceptual visual image quality that passes the sniff test for your average viewer so instead of getting quality bumps we just get them using less bits and passing the savings onto themselves with little meaningful upgrade in visual fidelity for the viewer. Which is why it’s hard to care at all really about a lot of this stuff if it doesn’t benefit the user in any way really.

And which will be so resource intensive to encode with compared to existing standards that it’ll probably take 14 years before home media collectors (or yar har types) are able and willing to use it over HEVC and AV1. :\

As an example AV1 encodes to this day are extremely rare in the p2p scene. Most groups still work with h264 or h265 even those focusing specifically on reducing sizes while maintaining quality. By contrast HEVC had significant uptake within 3-4 years of its release in the p2p scene (we’re on year 7 for AV1).

These greedy, race to the bottom device-makers are still fighting AV1. With people keeping devices longer and not upgrading as much as well as tons of people relying on under-powered smart-TVs for watching (forcing streaming services to maintain older codecs like h264/h265 to keep those customers) means it’s going to take a depressingly long time to be anything but a web streaming phenomenon I fear.

You can I believe sign up with a wechat account as well. So you’d create that first, then use it to sign-in.

Disclaimer: I’ve not used that exact machine but have worked with similar Lenovo/Dell stuff.

On HP’s spec sheet it says the max HDD size is 2TB. Do I need to do anything to the BIOS to allow bigger drives?

Set mode to UEFI and/or GPT possibly. Some very old BIOS may simply refuse to boot off a drive that big while some may work as long as the boot stuff is in the first 2TB.

I’ve heard it’s possible to add a third 3.5in HDD in the DVD drive bay. Can anyone confirm? Do you need a bay adapter or whatever?

Often these form factors have a SATA plug for a DVD drive. Be aware that this one is usually only SATA 2 at best so slower than SATA 3 (only 3Gbps vs 6Gbps) and often only SATA 1 (1.5GBps) in fact given DVDs need significantly less than that. Not technically a huge limiting factor in anything but bursts and saturating the cache as mechanical hard drives are going to tend to struggle to get much above 300Mbps sustained write anyways but a consideration. I wouldn’t put a RAID drive on it if possible as RAID drives should be on SATA adapters of matching speeds.

You can use a bay adapter and you can set the drive directly bare on the surface but it may induce vibrations and in theory for mechanical drives could shorten the life of the drive in addition to being annoyingly noisy. An SSD located there wouldn’t have this problem as it’s safe to set the SATA ones on a bare surface. Though if the SSD is getting heavy regular use you might consider still investing in some sort of heat solution like an aluminum dock for 2.5" drive to place it in and set that there.

As far as if you really want to set a 3.5" spinning disk HDD there without paying for a dock, at least put rubber between it and the metal of the case. Either little rubber standoffs or a flat rubber pad. This may induce heat issues but should solve the vibration one at least.

You can of course buy a PCIe SATA or SCSI card and connect to that to get higher speeds.

The other questions I’ll leave to other people. Technically hardware RAID tends to come with lots of problems for home lab setups and software at the host OS tends to be more recommended as easier to recover with and less prone to various problems.

A Chinese social media app. A ton of US tiktokers fled to it when it seemed a ban was imminent.

In 1984 authoritarian country they gestures.

Read the linked source FFS.

Me: Provides evidence that in decades past last century they were paid for and did dirty work of British intelligence, at no point were the people responsible cast out, at no point was this influence purged and processes and organs put in place to prevent this

Me: Also provides evidence they are in the bag as of the twenty-teens they were doing propaganda work for the British against Russia in coordination with the British state through cutouts

You: um acktually do you have any proof they’re still doing that this month? No? Checkmate.

Yeah it’s called a pattern of behavior. Why would they change? What would cause this? Sudden secret come to Jesus moment that fits your idealistic wants and needs in this particular argument? The burden of proof is on YOU and on THEM to show a sustained pattern of change. More than to show that but to admit, call out, and have a reckoning about their past behavior, bring it to the front, make everyone aware of it, apologize, and explain how they’re changing and what they’re specifically doing to prove this isn’t happening.

Partnering with Tass in what way? As wire agencies? Carrying some of their stories? That’s proof of nothing. You think because some org that’s deep in with the intelligence apparatus of one state has some casual or professional cover level contact with a state media organ of a rival state that is proof of what? Impartiality? That they’re actually Russian spies using British intelligence?

What I linked claims they agreed to use journalistic contacts within Russia to influence Russians and others within the CIS sphere for the interests and goals of the UK. If I was doing that I’d want contacts like that including contracts to carry out that work and legitimize my stories to my targets. I’d want to pretend to be friendly, professional and open while carrying out this work.

The new leaks illustrate in alarming detail how Reuters and the BBC – two of the largest and most distinguished news organizations in the world – attempted to answer the British foreign ministry’s call for help in improving its “ability to respond and to promote our message across Russia,” and to “counter the Russian government’s narrative.” Among the UK FCO’s stated goals, according to the director of the CDMD, was to “weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbours.”

Reuters and the BBC solicited multimillion-dollar contracts to advance the British state’s interventionist aims, promising to cultivate Russian journalists through FCO-funded tours and training sessions, establish influence networks in and around Russia, and promote pro-NATO narratives in Russian-speaking regions.

In several proposals to the British Foreign Office, Reuters boasted of a global influence network of 15,000 journalists and staff, including 400 inside Russia.

No.

They are a British government and intelligence cut-out. That doesn’t mean they always lie but they skew coverage, are manipulative, dishonest, and serve the interests of the British state. They’ve been that way for decades, receiving funding in the 1960s and 1970s from MI6.

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-office-russian-media/

A series of official documents declassified in January 2020 revealed that Reuters was secretly funded by the British government throughout the 1960s and 1970s to assist an anti-Soviet propaganda organization run by the MI6 intelligence agency. The UK government used the BBC as a pass-through to conceal payments to the news group.

In the modern era they still target Russia under the direction and funding of the UK government. One cannot be in bed with spies like these and hope to hold them and their friends like the US, EU, etc to account.

The fourth estate in general in the west is highly compromised. Russia and China and many others openly fund state media and the west decries it as propaganda, but they never hide it. Whereas the west secretly funds, manipulates, and controls supposedly independent press and declares itself the free one while it lies to the rest of the world and their own populations.

As a wire agency Reuters does tend to have less room for deception than say Fox News due to a lot of short form news breaks. So in that regard they’re more trustworthy than say CNN or Fox News but that doesn’t mean a lot.

laughs in group policy disabling of onedrive

Make a version of Office that works on Linux natively.

Three basic options exist:

1. Burner: Take a device that isn’t a normally used device for each category. Make sure it has nothing you care about on it, no incriminating web history, no accounts logged in or saved as cookies that are incriminating, etc, etc. This is simplest, most expensive, but also most fool-proof against all possible threats.

2. Wiped: Wipe the device before travel, possibly backing things up in the cloud to download after arriving. You’ll have to back up again with any changes you make and wipe again before traveling back then at your final destination again restore the device from backups. If you have serious fears of close inspection or forensic analysis then it would behoove you to use a secure erase feature on the drive and reinstall the OS rather than just trying to delete problematic files. For smartphones especially doing this and restoring from a cloud back-up can be pretty easy, for laptops it’s more of a pain.

3. Mail ahead: Take the devices to a package service, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc ahead of time, mail them ahead of or just behind you so they arrive just before or slightly after you. For this to work you need a fixed accommodation that can accept packages and which you trust to store them and give them to you. This technically doesn’t prevent mail interception but unless you’re a high value target that’s unlikely at present as its kind of a multi-agency intentional effort thing. Still I’d mail the device in a fully encrypted state.

No other feasible options exist. You can encrypt yes and if you are a US citizen you cannot be denied re-entry (non-citizens can be not only denied entry but barred for years after for refusing to decrypt a device/cooperate) but they can seize your device and hold it for up to a year while trying to crack it and you’ll have to expend effort to get it back at the end of that period. They can also put you in a holding cell for hours or hypothetically up to a couple days if they really want to press it accuse you of something and be unpleasant during that time.

I need at least sheets that are thick enough not to let light through, not super thin sheets. It’s annoying in summer months. I need my feet covered because I’m paranoid about mosquitos though it’s rare for them to actually get inside and I need my head/eyes covered as well or it just doesn’t feel right, partly about light and muffling noise.

And for me it’s definitely a horizontal sleeping thing too. Propped up I can fall asleep while being only partially covered or hardly at all but horizontal I have to have it.