In regards to the DNS advice should I use that for both my PC and android ? And when would I use a vpn?

You should setup your preferred DNS server everything really. On your phone, on your computer and on your router if you can. DNS is the absolute easiest way to track and block/hijack browsing habits, so hardcoding your devices to use a standard one like NextDNS, Quad9 or Cloud flare will put you very far ahead

Regarding VPNs, commercial VPNs are really overhyped, and thats because they’re a cash cow for operators. See Tom Scott’s video on the subject if you prefer this britishplained to you. All a VPN is is a tunnel from your device to the VPN server wherever that is, so you’ll look like your traffic is originating from that VPN server, plus all of your traffic is going to that VPN server so you have to trust that that server isn’t compromised nor slurping up all of the data to sell/provide security agencies. Clear text browsing traffic will also be secured between your device and the VPN server, but that’s super uncommon nowadays. Realistically a commercial VPN is best for if you’re doing illegal activities such as piracy because it will add layers of abstraction should a private company or public agency wish to investigate your activities and try to identify you. I do use Tailscale with an exit node on my home network when connecting to public wifi just in case the network is misconfigured, but it’s really just another layer of Swiss cheese security.

I tried Graphene OS but my banking failed so back to stock Android

Any features in the mobile app that don’t exist on the website? I’ve had good luck checking my bank balance and all sorts of other things through Firefox on Android - pre-edit: I missed that it was app only. That sucks.

For browsing on Android I use Mull and on my android Proton VPN is always on. I visit twitter and twitter ocasionly but always through mull browser.

The VPN really doesn’t do much at all for privacy. It just moves the point of trust from the service provider for the current network to the VPN provider, plus now you have extra hurdles as you’ll show up as a VPN IP rather than a “normal” residential or cellular IP. Realistically set your DNS to be something like Quad9 or Cloudflare and you’ll already be several steps ahead on browsing privacy

For spending habniys I try to use Google pay as little as possible and use my master card.

Realistically any card is going to be selling your spending habits. Cash and crypto are about the only ways to have private purchases, and plenty of places won’t accept either

Personally I had a long hard think about my privacy practices and how they only isolated me and made me unhappy, and realized that if I’m already blocking all ads so I never get to see the results of the incredibly dystopian advertising hellscape, does it really matter that much if Google knows I spent $200 on random model train shit last month when they already know I watch a few hours of train-related content on Youtube? So I take smaller steps to not fully given in, but I don’t take steps that create extra hassle in participating in modern society and living my life to its fullest.

I got one for work. It literally just pastes into ChatGPT

I just hope it makes it out of development hell unlike Kerbal Space Program 2

The thing I don’t like about laptops are 1. Noise and 2. The bursty CPUs just don’t mesh well if I want to run a swarm of VMs or need to just run a big compress/decompress process. I watched one laptop slowly throttle itself all the way down to 700mhz while I was messing with a bunch of VMs and it really made me miss having a desktop where it can just chill at 5x the speed at 100% utilization and chew through whatever is being thrown at it

My experience when I worked in support for a device manufacturer is that if you get high enough in the support tree and can demonstrate that this effects you (and the support person will also have a matrix of affected devices) you’ll still get a repair/replacement outside of warranty for them bricking your computer with a bad update.

We had a specific instance where a specific budget model of phone sold by Boost mobile would brick after a specific update for people who had subsidy unlocked it and taken it to a GSM carrier such as T-Mobile (this was shortly pre-merger) or AT&T. This update rolled out about 2.5 years after this devices release, so most customers were ~12 months outside of warranty. Since the scope of affected devices was so narrow our directions from the top was to replace affected devices regardless of warranty status, and the replacement would come with a standard 30 day replacement warranty

So in short, I would expect HP to repair/replace affected devices that bricked after this BIOS update regardless of warranty status, but I would expect some amount of hassle in terms of reaching a specific support department before you get assistance and standard refusal of service for customer induced physical damage (smashed screen, smashed ports, mashed potatoes in the ports, badly bent, etc.)

I tossed mint on a PC after about 8 years of not using mint at all and I’ve been extremely impressed at how stable and friendly it is. It works exactly how you expect it to and Cinnamon has the best default workspace implementation of any DE I’ve used

get hyped for COSMIC

Honestly I’m just excited for a non-gnome DE with an actual company backing it. I can’t wrap my head around gnome’s expectations for how you use it, so the fact that it’s the default on every enterprise-backed Linux project is annoying as heck

I have two different ISPs serving the entire town I live in, both offering symmetric gigabit fiber to the home to the entire town, but can I get a lick of IPv6? Of course not!

Its one of the challenges that seriously doesn’t seem to have an easy solution. Like the closest I can think of is a centralized authority that the service can send a identity verification request to that, then the user can sign into the centralized authority and confirm “yes I am the person you requested to verify”

This would also help with annoying employment verification where I have to bring every document needed to steal my identity to my new employer for them to scan and digitally store indefinitely then return said documents to my safe

I keep bringing up how awesome the new SAVE federal student loan repayment program is. Income based repayments that go as low as $0 with the federal government covering any interest that you payment would have gone towards, plus after 10 years of payments balances of $12k and less are forgiven (11 years for $13k, 12 years for $14k, etc.)

So if you got a low paying degree from a community college, like say an early childhood education degree, you get pretty close to free education since you can make your $0 payments every month and get your entire student debt forgiven after a decade. Or if you have a career that doesn’t pay much at first but ratchets up you only make payments when you have the income to make them, and still get forgiven after 10 years, and there’s no real penalty to paying the $0 payments earlier since the balance hasn’t grown and is still forgiven on the same date. Or like many people who attend community college, if you end up dropping out and getting no degree, you’re not penalized like earlier plans would have penalized you.

Now, if it was a flat tax, a fixed percent…But they gotta make sure the middle class is paying 22% of their income to the feds and the billionaires pay one tenth of a percent… you know… for reasons.

I fall into the lower end of the middle class (nationally) and my income tax is about 11%, but on top of that, after deductions and credits I end up deducting myself into the lowest tax bracket and collecting credits so I get a nice chunk back every year. To actually pay a full 22% of your income in income taxes, you must be making pretty good bank (and probably spending pretty good bank if you’re still considering yourself middle class)

Flat taxes are extremely regressive. The whole idea of tax brackets is that those with more ability to pay pay more and those with less ability to pay pay less. If you only make 22k/year you need all of that and that $2200 can be pretty lifechanging, but if you make 220k per year you can live without that $22k. There’s also fun stuff with how much tax revenue the government can actually bring in depending on who they tax harder, and generally it favors taxing the rich at a much higher percentage rate than they do the poor.

I even had to make a login.gov account to apply to some federal jobs (ironically enough one was with the IRS even!)

On a related note, it appears based on their job listings that the IRS will not hire anyone who owes them money

The biggest red flag is the up-front payment for a year

Another comment pointed out this was probably to prevent them from signing up for a month then using that month to bounce to another provider

There’s countless desktop music players out there, so there’s no real need to reverse engineer it

My dad switched for vista, I switched for 10 for a while. Who knows, maybe I’ll switch for 11 too

My friend who works at an MSP said they’re migrating most of their customers to HyperV, but these are mostly extremely small companies with a dozen or so employees and only a handful of services

Evidence suggests those that can tolerate lactose as adults are descended from farmers who drank milk to survive during seasons of bad yields.

Milk is full of great vitamins and minerals. I haven’t verified this claim but I heard someone say recently a person can entirely meet their entire nutritional needs on purely milk and potatoes, which doesn’t sound super pleasant to have as a diet, it’s certainly an easy baseline to meet

They usually have the milk on hand for cooking, or just the kids menu. If my family of 4 can easily go through 2 gallons a week, I can’t imagine a resteraunt having problems using up milk before it goes bad unless they over-purchase

I’ve never had that problem. I basically always order milk anytime I eat out. Sometimes they only give me a kids portion or even a kids cup (it was extra funny when my wife ordered it for me and I was away from the table changing a diaper while visiting family), but usually I get a full glass of milk