Here is the VPN setup page of Njalla. As you can see, it looks just as spartan as the public-facing parts of their website.

You do not need to set up port forwarding on the website. They give each customer a static IP, so as long as you configure your ip tables to allow port forwarding, it just works on any port. QBittorrent worked out of the box.

Since my airvpn test month expired, I’ve just bought a Njalla subscription. Here are my experiences:

Pro:

• Payment via PayPal or cryptocurrency
• Same price as Mullvad (5€/month)
• Static IPv4 and v6, allows you to forward any port
• Torrenting just worked (including port forwarding)
• No VPN application, just use vanilla OpenVPN or Wireguard
• Does not throttle my internet speed (I only have 50MBit/s, so I cannot really test VPN performance. Definitely better than AirVPN though)

Contra:

• Requires E-Mail address/XMPP to create an account
• Only one client. If you need to access your VPN from multiple devices at the same time, you need to buy multiple subscriptions
• Only Swedish servers

Conclusion: for my usecase (Raspberry-Pi-based torrent box) Njalla looks great. If you want to use it on multiple devices or need to circumvent geoblocks, you should look for a different service.

KDE Sytem monitor has that function, too. You just have to add it to the history page (Sensors/GPU/Usage)

You can setup PiHole to block Samsung’s ad servers. Some routers give you the option to block specific websites, that works, too.

The site you have to block:

• samsungads dot com
• samsungtvads dot com

You can access ZFS snapshots from the hidden .zfs folder at the root dir of your volume. From there you can restore individual files.

There is also a command line tool (httm) that lists all snapshotted versions of a files and allows you to restore them.

If the snapshot you want to restore from is on a remote machine, you can either send it over or scp/rsync the files from the .zfs directory.

Yes, it does. You can also use the tool to check if a file is cached (just run it without any arguments for that).

If you use a VPS as a backup target, you can also format it with ZFS and use replication. Sending snapshots is faster than using file-level backup tool, especially with a lot of small files.

You can use Spotrip. The original developer made his code private in fear of DMCA takedowns, but there are a few forks around.

https://github.com/MikeeI/spotrip

There are a lot of audiobooks available on music streaming sites like Spotify and Deezer. You can download those with Deemix. But that may be limited to certain countries. I am from Germany and here a lot of audiobooks are owned by record companies which publish them on streaming services.

Searching for second-hand CDs on ebay may be worth it, too. I’ve gotten some good deals there as well.

If the reason for the ban is massive server load due to content scraping for AI models, that could become an issue for the fediverse as well. Our infrastructure is funded by donations and has much less performance and resiliency than big tech companies.

We might reach a point where the negative impacts on the environment caused by AI outweigh the benefits, just like it already happened with blockchains.

I’m definitely not using this platform anymore, but Twitter being private also locks away a lot of valuable content (including government announcements, as someone mentioned).

Elon posted this on Twitter (quoted from an private blog since I currently have no way to access twitter):

Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users! Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.

Lets hope that they lift this ban soon.

What nitter instance are you using? I’m getting an error message indicating an empty json document.

I would be careful with using regex for content moderation (see the Scunthorpe problem).

There are open source machine learning models that could be used to detect toxic content. See

• https://huggingface.co/unitary/toxic-bert
• https://github.com/unitaryai/detoxify

I dont know how much compute power you would need to process the content of a lemmy instance using this. But it would be more reliable than regexes.

I switched to AirVPN after finding out that Mullvad disabled port forwarding. I have heard rumors that the did that because of people hosting cheese pizza via their VPN accounts.

The performance of AirVPN does vary, I had to try a couple of countries before I found a server that didn’t throttle me (and I only have a 50MBit connection).

Maybe I will try Proton in the future, but then I would have to commit to a 2year subscription or pay a lot more.

How should a car in the middle of this “train” leave it?

Head and tail would have to detach, speed up/slow down to create a safe distance for the car in the middle to change lanes and after that the train has to reconnect? At highway speeds? Seriously?

Captcha solving bots have been around for years (e.g. CapMonster Cloud). Before AI was good enough, it was the job of actual workers (mostly from South America and Southeast Asia) to solve the captchas for a few cents each.

I am on the latest version of the app and it still works after I ignored the popup.

This scheme has been known for several years, but the scammers used to hire writers for a few bucks online. Now they got replaced by AI, unsurprisingly.