They can block specific communities.

Previously there was this whole thing over lemmy world admins banning their piracy community so I would not be surprised if they were blocking certain dbzero communities as well out of their extremely cautious and risk averse nature.

data such as host name,

Okay why do they need to know that? Why do they need to know if the computer is called “Melissa’s Laptop” or “Workstation 15, Internal security division”? Seems like this kind of data could if stolen be misused and it has minimal legitimate purpose IMO as anyone can put anything as host name and while in organizations it often corresponds to use it doesn’t have to for individuals. Someone could call their machine “Mack’s Porn Rig” and they only use it for doing banking and a little coding.

kernel version, desktop component versions, detailed information about hardware and drivers involved, screen size and resolution information,

This all seems legitimate enough, this would be helpful for understanding the hardware their users run on and targeting features or bug fixes.

network device MAC addresses,

Not great but there is an argument for it, they could just grab and send the first 3-4 octets which would give them the info they need on manufacturers without getting uniquely identifiable data that along with some of this other stuff is concerning for fingerprinting.

disk serial numbers,

Okay, what the fuck. Why do they need disk serial numbers? What possible use is there for that. Those are used for warranty claims and could be used as part of uniquely fingerprinting a computer and person. Not cool.

disk partition data,

This is vague enough. I guess one could choose to see this as just info about partitions in use say if there’s also an NTFS partition that looks like a Windows install that would be useful but on the other hand data encompassed within a partition could also nefariously be read as allowing them access to all your data. Partition layout, partition labels, and file systems used on disks available to the system would be a clearer way to put this and erase any doubt.

information about the number of running processes and installed packages, versions of basic packages such as systemd, gcc, bash and PipeWire.

All this is also fine just technical data stuff.

I’d err on the larger side for a disk. Assuming 1000 hours at 60fps, 1080p, serviceable bitrates I’d get an 16-18TB disk to start.

As to watchable that depends on how good your eyes are and the exact content.

I really hope you plan on naming these files descriptively or having a document that has tags and lists info for videos for easy searching as future you may not want to sift through hundreds of hours to find something.

The real answer is organize your library. There’s no reason to have it like that.

At least create two folders “Movies” and “TV Shows” or however you want to name them. Put movies in the movies sub-folder, ideally in named folders that match the name of the movie (so Movies/The Godfather (1972)/moviefile.mkv) and TV shows in the other folder again with a subfolder for each show with year included.

The best way to do this is to use a media manager when adding files. Something like mediaelch or tiny media manager and scrape your films and ideally tv shows as well and create local metadata for them that you save. Both can do renaming though tmm does it slightly better if you pay for the subscription version and it can automatically scrape and rename your library along with creating the relevant nfo files and things like posters so Kodi just works.

I guess you could try connecting Kodi to another service. If you’re okay running Plex on some other machine or Jellyfin you can connect Kodi to that if they scrape it all properly but most likely they’ll have issues as well because the only real solution is organizing your library. There are paid tools as I mention as well as free ones. Filebot is another paid tool that does organization and such.

If it’s transcoding then that’s a server error most likely saying it doesn’t have enough memory to support live-transcoding. Try and force direct-playing by changing settings or as someone else suggested, use Infuse with direct-mode which avoids transcoding.

Don’t listen to people saying not to use the ethernet port, recent ATVs have good gigabit ethernet ports and I’ve measured good performance on them in the past and I suggest the person saying that mistakenly believed you had an actual smart TV, not a device like an AppleTV.

My problem with this in spite of the dire situation they face if Google is forced to cut funding by anti-trust court rulings (or not even forced but they make paying off Mozilla a moot point so they stop) is that they become an ad company. Ads become tied to their CEO compensation, to the salaries of the people who develop it.

They claim they’re making a better kind of ad network, a privacy respecting kind. The problem is the ad industry doesn’t want less data, they want more. There are no looming laws that would force the ad industry to adopt a more privacy respecting alternative or die and without that the ad industry is going to shun this and it’ll be a failure and then they’ll have a failed ad network that they can either discard entirely or adapt to industry standards of privacy invasion and abuse and continue to exist and then they’ll make another “hard choices” post about having to do that.

And I can see it now. This experiment will fail and after some pressure from the ad industry and some devil-on-shoulder whispering Mozilla will begrudgingly start to enshittify. Their ad network will become less privacy respecting by tiny little steps, by salami-slicing or boiling the frog, the whole privacy-preserving measurement thing will be thrown out BUT they’ll still claim they respect you more than Google and will at first perhaps but that will erode. Maybe they’ll just implode at some point after that which given Google is being found a monopoly works just fine for Google and the rest of big tech who want a more centralized, locked down browser company that wants to help implement DRM that can’t be circumvented, that wants to help lock down everything on the web to restrict users freedoms to choose what is displayed or if they can save it or record it or copy it to say nothing of blocking ads.

You can but they’ll find out. It’s reported or flagged or something, they can tell what provider holds a number and they block VOIP ones. Also if a number was ever previously a VOIP number do not try and transfer it back to proper cellular as it will still remain blocked for many but not all of these for years potentially.

Cons:

You absolutely cannot get 2FA authenticator codes from 90% of services. Many services that require a phone number even without 2FA just for “verify you’re a human” or because they want your data or to verify region use shortcode services that also will not work with ANY VOIP provider.

You will not receive their codes. These companies vary from banking institutions to gaming companies to online shopping marketplaces and stores to a Google account (used to be you could get an automated phone call to verify an account, not anymore, must be able to receive SMS from shortcodes that are disabled for VOIP numbers to register and to recover an account) just about anyone you could end up doing business with.

A shockingly large amount of companies demand phone numbers and send verification texts before allowing you to do business with them, to create an account, to recover an account, to delete an account, to place an order, etc.

They really shouldn’t, it’s a bad security practice but companies love it because with a phone number they can lower support costs by just allowing people to do a self-service where they get an automated text and can unlock their locked account. They also love harvesting that data and preventing anonymization with VOIP numbers and the reduction of fraud and increase of reliable KYC that comes with requiring them.

And they all take it as a given that EVERYONE or at least 99% have a cell plan with a non-VOIP number that works with these and the 1% who don’t they don’t care about in the developed world and are an acceptable loss.

If they have to have a lot of channels then $120 isn’t the worst price (I have relatives who pay twice as much as that a month for cable) though you could perhaps try and check into whether they could switch to a streaming linear TV service like DirecTV Stream with one of their lower tier packages to save some money while retaining a cable-like experience (there’s also Sling, Hulu+Live TV, YoutubeTV, FUBO, etc, many of which have packages with many of the top channels for $60-$80/month).

Fact is to save money you need to be willing to give things up. If you’re moving from a premium cable package with a ton of channels to a few streaming services you’re going to lose things and potentially a lot of things. You’re going to lose access to live news channels, you’re going to lose access to specific programs on some networks that don’t have streaming service equivalents (I know for one older person I knew the fact they couldn’t get and watch Lifetime and Hallmark movies within any reasonable time-frame of their premier meant they were not interested in looking into streaming any further to replace their cable).

More than that though most old people hate change, they were used to a certain way of things and they’re afraid and perhaps get confused or frustrated with this new way of doing things. It’s simply more comfortable for them to use the old satellite system they’re used to and its interface and way of changing channels than doing something new where they have to think of how to do something or get frustrated or ask for help. Which is why I do think trying a streaming cable replacement like those I mentioned might be your best bet. It would still save some money.

Try toggling ErP setting or similarly named EU energy setting in your UEFI. This should resolve the lights being on.

Just FYI. Comments nearly exactly like yours on Reddit were used in copyright troll lawsuits against ISPs as evidence they didn’t do enough to enforce copyright and were negligent and legally liable.

Further when that didn’t work the copyright agency sued Reddit to try to unmask the identities of those people to bring legal proceedings against them to coerce them into testifying against their ISP at threat of being in trouble for their activities. Reddit was big enough to fight off the lawsuit luckily but be careful.

Kind of like Microsoft then. They buy up or spend money trying to break into all kinds of different areas but consistently take bad L’s and get pushed back to their core business time and again after face-planting and alienating those who gave them a shot.

Hamas is a legitimate resistance group exercising their legitimate, legal right under international law to violently resist unlawful colonization, occupation, land-theft, and genocide. They have every right to exist, they have every right to use violence against settlers who should leave and give back the stolen land.

If you want more moderate types, know that the zionists intentionally crushed them and propped up Hamas to create just this kind of argument and by spouting it you’re carrying water for them. Only the end of the occupation and the formation of a full Palestinian state will result in the breathing room for the creation of moderate groups and opinions.

It’s a shame. I’m using Voyager but it has some critical problems for me that make the experience unpleasant.

Biggest one would be it doesn’t show the username of the poster of a post in any views but when viewing the post. This is important. Certain posters regularly post good, reliable, interesting, funny, etc content. Some I’m even friendly with. Others I know post frivolous things, post straight up fake-news and “jokes” so seeing their name clues me in I don’t need to freak out about something upsetting because it’s fake. And so on. Basically having the name displayed saves me a ton of time otherwise wasted going into lots of threads to see who posted it before backing out again and I’m sure there are plenty of threads I’d otherwise engage with which I don’t because I can’t see the username. There’s also the issue of seeing what instance a user is from. If they’re from a home instance dedicated to a certain thing (perhaps vetted individually) I feel differently than someone from an outside instance.

This was something reddit did on both old and new and it was correct to do so. It’s also something I was used to with Apollo which I used for some time. It feels like half an experience without the user-names shown but I’m guessing it’s an intentional choice on the part of the Voyager dev.

Second biggest one would be the upvote and downvote colors are reversed and it’s messing with me but I could get over it.

If anyone knows any apps like Memmy or Voyager but with usernames always shown or an option to show them in the feed view I’d love to hear of it. I really like the aesthetic design of Memmy best but Voyager is close enough minus that one glaring issue.