I don’t knowvwhat mtls is, but Joplin has mostvof what you want. It does not have card layout native, but there might be a plugin for that.

I sidestepped all this crap by buying Synology in 2014 and upgrading 2 years ago. Sure, it isn’t FOSS, but it is very nearly plug and play.

I configured OpenVPN for when I want to use it remotely, and self host my music, video, and family photos.

Having the 4 drive RAID-6 gives me some security from the danger of losing data between backups.

I store all my scanned documents, ocr’d, and keep the paper under control.

I definitely see increased battery drain and heat when I am entirely on cellular data for a long time.

So far, DNS type blockers appear to be unaffected. I use adaway with magisk. In the other hand, I don’t generally use my browser to watch videos. I use Newpipe.

You use a VPN, right?

I toyed with i2p several years ago. Back then it was very frustrating - both slow as a snail and hard to find working, non-darknet resources.

I recently saw a c++ implementation, so I will toy with it again.

For now, a VPN is enough for me to be safe, and I can get speeds up to 15 MB on popular torrents.

Here’s a supporting example; my son wants to see Blue Beetle. I checked it out, and the rental is $20 - for a streamed “right to view” which means there is zero marginal cost for them to produce, track, or retrieve it. Even with recent inflation, you can get a restaurant meal for that.

I’m pretty sure ethical pirating is mostly just justifying it to oneself.

That said, these corporations regularly steal from their customers and employees in many ways they can and cannot see. In that respect, pirating is more of a way to fight back.

Stealing is not ethical, but these profiteers do much worse on a daily basis, including stealing from those who created their profit engines. See Bill Willingham’s recent release of Fables to the public domain for a common example.

The problem with that, is that you now have to maintain virtual infrastructure in many different syntaxes. And features of one do not exist in another.

Plus things like cash and session do not cross those boundaries.

More accurately, it’s someone else’s network of pluggable computers. “The cloud” is just a convenient metaphor for “it’s up there,where someome else keeps it working”.

The point is to free up resources in individual companies that would otherwise be used maintaining the infrastructure.

In a lot of companies that translates to having fewer employees to pay. Enlightened companies keep those people and allocate them to other, profitable, activities.

A wonderful and Powerful effect of vitualization is the idea of declarative infrastructure. Individual companies can allocate those Cloud resources in specialized ways. It’s primary value is in economies of scale.

Absolutely. My only serious problem with it comes when an individual’s only option is to use someone else’s infrastructure.

The issues you describe are primarily business issues. Individuals generally don’t have to worry about that stuff. If the software requires using a host, then it should be able to run on a host we can set up on our own hardware.

Virtualization is wonderful, and powerful. But it can also be weaponized.

This us why we all need to use and evangelize LibreOffice!

Just remember that whenever you convert, you are losing fidelity. The only exception is when you convert between lossless formats.

I suggest you get as much music as possible in FLAC, then make mp3 copies you use only for devices that require it. Upgrade equipment when finances allow.

For everything else, also keep your original, like m4a, to keep sound quality at the best you can.

Because of the encryption algorithms, mostly.

KDE Connect utilizes SSHFS in order to securely and wirelessly mount your Android device’s file system to your computers. You will be able to browse all of the files on your device via your preferred file manager whether that be Dolphin, Nemo, Nautilus, Thunar, etc.

It’s gimped for me because it insists on using an insecure sftp algorithm, so I cannot use the file system browser to transfer files to/from my Android 13 devices. It probably can’t access the root anyway. I want to use it for backing up my device files, especially the Android folder.

Everything else seems to work though.

Not fact. It’s my opinion based on the actions I see, and the fact things started to go down hill after the investors gave money. One of the big ones was Chinese.

We’ve seen how things go down when China is involved - loans to poor nations, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the disputed islands with Japan, Tibet, the Urghurs.

We’ve seen the various iterations of the “oops how did that key logger get in there?” discoveries (Lenovo, i’m looking at you), corporate espionage, Huawei telecommunications infrastructure being used to tap communicatons, etc…

Strict control of pretty much everything is the pattern, in which disinformation is easily dispensed and difficult to identify.

Looks like the Chinese “investor” is the Communist Party. The actions Reddit is taking are pretty much how they take down all the companies and citizens they target.