It really depends on how much you value your time and how good you are with configuration

A QNAP or Synology will work and be pretty simple to configure out of the box. Installing custom software is possible, but can be tricky as they require you to enable sideloading and custom apps can be hard to find. Both have supported app stores with available apps to do what you’re looking for (QNAP has apps for both torrents and Plex. Not sure about Synology)

However, you will get way more bang for your buck by building one from scratch using something like TrueNAS and the Arr stack, but this can require a fair bit of technical knowledge about configuring containers and securing network services(Especially if you want them to be accessible remotely)

Most people here do selfhosting as a hobby and as a result, the time spent trying new configurations is negligible as it wouldn’t be much of a hobby otherwise.

IIRC, they only do this if you’re logged in with a Microsoft account.

Bitlocker is disabled by default if you only use local accounts

Not that it helps now, but you can also dump your bitlocker recovery key through powershell and save it independently.

(Get-BitLockerVolume -MountPoint “C”).KeyProtector

Ubuntu server is okay, but I’ve come to really appreciate a minimal, stable Debian install instead.

I tend to just take the defaults when I’m deploying. I wouldn’t get any benefit of having home or tmp on a separate partition, but it’s nice that it’s an option.

It depends on what you think the purpose of keeping creative works outside of the public domain is. Generally, the idea is so that the original creator can make a living off of their art without someone immediately copying their work and undercutting them. The idea of keeping a character true to the original interpretation is not usually considered in this discussion.

Personally, I believe that IP should enter the public domain way sooner than it actually does. I’m generally in favor the original definition of 14 years, with a 14 year extension before the work enters public domain. That gives someone 28 years to make a living off of a character before the ideas become free game for others to use and adapt in any way they see fit.

Having Spongebob as IP keeps him on rails for who he is as a character. Change that, Spongebob as a character is changed by the public that could make the original unrecognizable

I fundamentally disagree with this premise. The vast majority of characters that are in the public domain are not significantly different from their source work, outside of a handful of modern exceptions. Dracula is still mostly Dracula, even in the modern day. Same for Sherlock Holmes, or anyone in a Shakespeare play. The idea of completely twisting a character once they enter the public domain happens, like with Blood and Honey, or that Popeye horror movie coming out, but I think you’d struggle to find anyone that only knows Winnie the Pooh or Popeye from their modern, cheesy slasher adaptations rather than the original stories.

As relevant now as it was 10 years ago

Usually yes. In some cases, companies will block access to known VPN IPs outright.

But most of the time, the cost of policing that is way higher than the revenue they’d get from the handful of VPN users that decide to go through proper channels rather than decide not to engage, or worse, spread word of their anti-consumer practices and potentially lose legitimate business.

This is absolutely normal when you first buy the place. I bought my place in 2017 and was super anxious over the first year because I suddenly had basically no savings and all my equity was in this building. I didn’t know anything about home repair and couldn’t afford to hire someone who did.

The thought of something going wrong enough that it would ruin the place gave me an anxiety attack more than once.

Then, after a couple years and a few things needing fixed, I realized that things don’t go wrong that often and most of the time if they do, they are easy to fix.

don’t give a non-answer to someone’s question. Ex. if someone asks how to do X, don’t answer with, “Why are you trying to do X? You shouldn’t want to do X. Do Y instead.” Instead, explain what it would take to do X, and then offer Y as a possible alternative and why it may be a better option. But assume they already know about Y, and it doesn’t fit their use-case.

I can get behind the spirit of this, but often times this is caused by people taking the wrong first steps to solve an issue and then getting lost in the weeds while asking for the solution to where they’re stuck, rather than asking about the original problem. In this case, usually both X and Y are bad answers, and asking why they aren’t doing Y can elucidate more about the whole situation.

I just cleaned up my downloads so I no longer have it, but a couple weeks ago it was a copy of Maid: The Role-Playing Game

This is my read too. Cut someone out of your life for their shitty actions, not their shitty opinions.

I haven’t tried to use hamachi in years so I’m not sure about a solution to your problem. However, I can strongly recommend Zerotier as a potential alternative

The soctatic method. It forces people to actually think about their position in an argument

I’m not sure it counts as it’s not made in RPG Maker anymore, but To the Moon is amazing

I would seriously question why I had views that no other person shared.

It’s one thing to have a minority opinion, but if literally no one else shares that view, then I’m almost certainly wrong and should rethink things.

Protonmail is definitely more private than google or Microsoft, but you shouldn’t hold 100% trust in any provider. Ultimately your data is still on their hardware and they have control of it. Also, as others have pointed out, both sides need to be secure otherwise all that data is accessible on the other side.

You can mitigate it yourself a bit by hosting your own email server, but I highly recommend against that as its a massive headache to secure and basically every provider will reject your messages anyway.

Right attitude, wrong solution.

Email is very much not private

This would be a double edged sword. Without regulation, the ISP will work in whichever way grants them the most money.

This means that they probably won’t go after copyright claims unless the rightsholders pay them first, but they will ramp up data collection efforts to sell to brokerage firms and will also engage in rate-limiting on high-bandwith use cases like streaming or torrenting unless you pay extra.

fun fact: If you ever see any of those quirky “solve this complex equation for the Wifi password” It’s always either the phone number of the place, or the first X digits of Pi.