The easiest way to disable unnecessary services is to uninstall them with aptitude, or whichever package manager you like. Try terminating services one by one, and see if anything bad happens. If nothing bad happens, you can probably uninstall it. On the other hand, if the system does get wonky a reboot should fix it. Or, you can research the services by name and decide whether to uninstall them. (avahi-daemon for example is a good idea to uninstall.)

To make the GUI not run, uninstall your display manager (gdm, xdm, nodm, or whatever) and uninstall your xorg server or wayland server. There may be GUI programs remaining after that, but they will only be consuming disk space, not RAM or CPU.

If the battery is old and holds little charge, you may save a few watts by removing it and throwing it away, instead of letting the system keep it topped off.

Get a power meter, such as a Kill-a-watt device. Then, experiment with different settings. If it’s consuming less than 30 watts, you’re probably fine. If you live in the US, one watt-year is about one US dollar (or a little more), so for every watt it consumes, that’s about how much you will pay per year for its electricity.

NTFS is considered pretty stable on Linux now. It should be safe to use indefinitely.

If you’re worried about the lack of Unix-style permissions and attributes in NTFS, then getting BTRFS or ext4 on Windows may be a good choice. Note that BTRFS is much more complicated than ext4, so ext4 may have better compatibility and lower risk of corruption. I used ext3 on Windows in 2007 and it was very reliable; ext4 today is very similar to ext3 from those days.

The absolute best compatibility would come from using a filesystem natively supported by both operating systems, developed without reverse engineering. That leaves only vfat (aka FAT32) and exfat. Both lack Unix-style permissions and attributes.

Beta testers should get a discount, or even get paid, in exchange for writing good bug reports. These people are fools for paying extra for earlier access to a bug fest.

I would never pre-order a game. That just makes it harder to refund it if it sucks.

draw .io is closed source.

This is condescending and completely unhelpful.

Yeah, it’s definitely a problem, and genetic information could end up getting linked. Even if a person thinks they might not have DNA in any existing database, whether criminal, medical, or otherwise, there’s no telling what might happen in the future. I can think of a few different ways a person might involuntarily, through no fault of theirs, get their DNA forcibly taken with no legal recourse.

Every path here will have some tradeoffs. But the odds of getting linked are probably much lower outside your home country.

I voted you down because HIPAA absolutely does include privacy provisions, and requires written consent for data use in the way I described above.

My best recommendation would be to go to a testing lab and provide a fake name. It should work. I’ve never been ID’d at any doctor’s office, and one time did even receive healthcare under a fake name with no trouble. Of course, that means your insurance won’t cover anything, but that’s the unfortunate reality of US healthcare. Also, they probably won’t delete your data. HIPAA includes no right to be forgotten, and in some cases, may even mandate retention for several years.

Sorry I don’t have a better solution. I think your best bet is to distance this genetic data as much as possible from your real identity.

Alternately, you could try going somewhere outside the US.

I completely agree that HIPAA is dead. One time when I went to a new doctor’s office, totally unaffiliated with any doctor I’d ever seen before, the doctor instantly pulled all my medical records from several other places. They didn’t even get my verbal permission; they just did it. If that’s the level of security on these databases, and doctors are allowed to access them on old unsupported Windows computers, then it’s almost certain that the databases have tons of undetected data breaches. They’ve probably been scraped completely by multiple attackers.

The existence of one or more gods can’t be conclusively proven or disproven. So it makes sense to me that some people believe in it and others don’t.

What ad blocker? I used uBlock origin without any issue, although I have a lot of custom filters.

Do you even know how a primary works? This can’t possibly reduce Biden’s chance of winning (not in the primary, not in the election).

I would be voting “Uncommitted” tomorrow if I didn’t already have Covid. It’s not so severe that I couldn’t vote, but it is definitely contagious enough that I can’t safely go to a voting site.

Headlines like this are problematic. I think we can all agree that Trump has done a lot of damage to democracy in the US, but are rural Trump supporters really more dangerous than urban Trump supporters? That claim is suspect, and the article provides no evidence to support it (it provides evidence that most Trump supporters are rural, which is a totally different claim.)

And saying that white rural Trump supporters are worse than non-white rural Trump supporters is an even more serious claim. It’s racially discriminatory, and seems totally baseless in this article.

The article has no evidence of these claims, and seems to indicate that the book doesn’t even make the claims of the headline.

(I’m not objecting to the claims that Trump supporters are mostly rural and mostly white. That is common knowledge.)

Using a VPN (like Tailscale or Netbird) will make setup very easy, but probably a bit slower, because they probably connect through the VPN service’s infrastructure.

My recommended approach would be to use a directly connected VPN, like OpenVPN, that just has two nodes on it – your VPS, and your home server. This will bypass the potentially slow infrastructure of a commercial VPN service. Then, use iptables rules to have the VPS forward the relevant connections (TCP port 80/443 for the web apps, TCP/UDP port 25565 for Minecraft, etc.) to the home server’s OpenVPN IP address.

My second recommended approach would be to use a program like openbsd-inetd on your VPS to forward all relevant connections to your real IP address. Then, open those ports on your home connection, but only for the VPS’s IP address. If some random person tries to portscan you, they will see closed ports.

So are you able to view content, but pay to download? If that’s the case, I could probably write a scraper for the site.

If you have to pay to even see the content, then you may have a bigger problem. Try pooling resources with some of your fellow students, to have one person download all the content, and then make it available to everyone else.

Another option is to expose your instructors. There’s a high probability that they are getting kickbacks, especially if this is at college level. Maybe in the form of 10% of each dollar spent by one of their students. Or, they might be getting free equipment or content from Docsity, in exchange for forcing students to use it, and offloading the costs to students.

When I was in college, one of my instructors used these “clickers” that cost students $40 per semester to rent. They used radio to allow submitting realtime quiz answers during class. Students were scored on how many questions they answered, not whether they were correct. If you didn’t pay the clicker fee, you lost that 10% of your final grade.

I was suspicious, so I looked into it. It wasn’t hard. The clicker manufacturer advertised kickbacks on their own website.