I’ve been running PiHole for awhile, in short it’s your own DNS server that’s configured to block DNS requests to known advertising domains. So when you load a website and it sends a DNS request to PopularAdvertisingCompany.com to load an ad, PiHole blocks the request so the ad can’t be loaded. It’s useful for devices that you can’t put an ad blocker on, like iPhones and smart TVs and such, but can’t block stuff like YouTube ads cause they come from the same domain as the videos themselves.

It also has bonus features like DNS caching which can speed up web browsing.

Any router from a mainstream brand is likely fine, just don’t enable any of their “cloud” BS and don’t use their smartphone app. I’ve had good luck with Asus, they have an app but you don’t have to use it at all.

For security, try to enable WPA3 on your Wi-Fi networks, otherwise WPA2 is probably fine unless you’re being targeted by a government-sponsored hacking operation. Choose a long password for your network.

Once you get it up and running, then worry about DNS and PiHole and VPNs and all that. Don’t get in over your head.

“You get Matryoshka! And you get Matryoshka!”

It’s pretty hard though. Without mass, everything travels at the speed of light and doesn’t experience the flow of time, which don’t really mesh well with classical physics (or quantum mechanics, and definitely not relativity).

One thing to keep in mind: if someone gave you a 5.25" floppy disk with this type of data on it, even if the data was perfectly readable, would you have any way to do it? You’d need to hunt down someone whos into retro technology and hope you can figure out how to decode the information. The format itself became obsolete, so even if the data would theoretically be accessible, the means to access said data may not be.

Point is, what are the chances that CD drives will be around in hundreds of years outside of a museum or personal collection? They’re already becoming more and more uncommon after only a couple decades. But there really isn’t a great solution to this, especially when it comes to video, because you can’t just print it out.

Side note, are you sure that CD Golds are more durable than M-Disk?

They don’t actually provide decryption keys, the user has to either extract them from their own Switch or find them elsewhere online. However, it could be argued by Nintendo that using an unreleased game ROM for testing proves that the devs themselves were guilty of piracy, and were therefore somehow condoning the use of their emulator for piracy.

Either way, we won’t know how well Nintendo’s arguments would have held up in court, because the devs settled rather than fight it out.

It was a settlement. The devs decided, for reasons that are not public, that it would be easier to just pay Nintendo some money and take down the emulator than to fight them in court. It’s very possible (even likely) that they figured it would be more expensive to fight Nintendo’s lawyers than to just pay a fixed amount up front.

Pretty much every food regulatory agency in the world has deemed aspartame safe. There were some worrying studies all the way back in the '70’s, but those were almost certainly bogus due to conflicts of interest with the sugar industry. It’s just as safe as MSG, which I personally believe people get so worked up over just because it has a “scary-sounding” chemical name.

I would look for a dongle that specifically markets itself as being Raspberry Pi compatible. Most stuff you find will prioritize Windows, but if it’s marketed to work with the Pi you know it’ll have at least some level of Linux compatibility. Once you find one, try to figure out what chipset it uses, then search if it’s supported by a handful of the distros you wanna try.

To be fair, I’m guessing the majority of Pi’s are used headless anyway. Plus even the older Optiplexes have DVI, which is just HDMI without the audio or fancy stuff like ARC. Won’t be getting 4K or anything, but still a very good video output and IMO adequate for almost all use cases.