The arguments around piracy are less about legality (in most places its copyright infringement which is NOT “stealing” but is illegal). Its more the moral and ethical arguments. Is it moral for a service to remove something that you’ve paid for? Is it ethical for people, through no fault of their own, to not be able to afford entertainment. Is it moral for large corporations to price gouge and continuously Make Line Go Up while offering a continuously worse product? Is it moral to copy software not available in your country? Is it ethical for companies to force people into subscriptions for the sole purpose of making more money when they already have loads? Is it ethical to pirate when companies refuse to support the operating system you have? Is it moral to copy software when the company that makes it is not just unethical but has been found to be taking part in things like genocide? Is it ethical for huge corporations to manipulate democracy and laws to serve their profits at the expense of everyone else? Is capitalism itself ethical?

Most people I know who are anti-pirate just lack an understanding of why people engage in copyright infringement. Calling people “scum” and “thieves” without understanding the very big moral and ethical considerations behind what drives people to piracy is reductionist, ignorant and Othering for the sake of self-superiority.

Not saying that your partner thinks that way, just that its a very common example of thinking that misses the important points and that its not just about what’s legal and what’s not (because there are many things that are or have been illegal that are completely unethical.)

I keep meaning to sign up so now is as good time as any!

Last time I used Acrobat via WINE, it was more work than it was worth to get stable and running without issues :/

I tried doing print to PDF but it flattened the resultant PDF so the layers were lost. Almost all of the software I used to try converting altered the PDF layout in some way and patterns must not change at all, otherwise they get messed up :/

I was already able to remove the edit password with qpdf --decrypt. Most of the PDF editors I used, changed the PDF too much (e.g. added margins/padding) which ruined the very specific layout needed for the patterns to work. There has to be no changes to the PDFs apart from removing the ‘footer’ text :/

Not entirely sure I understand what you mean but in addition to the suggestion of WordPress, all the plugins must be licensed as GPL as well. So all the paid for plugins can be obtained and legally used without paying. You will however have to forgo support and automatic updates on most.

I would suggest the WordPress section on babia.to

Unfortunately you likely still have a shadow account :(

It’s not science that’s destroying society - its the misuse of science and worse, greed that has a veneer of science or rather, $cience.

It’s the usual story of capitalism, oligarchy and big corp ruining everything for everyone but themselves.

Tell me you don’t understand GrapheneOS without telling me you don’t understand GrapheneOS.

This typed from a GrapheneOS phone that works just great, including the UI (breath of fresh simple air, no clutter, no crap, no AI).

And I’m happily using my phone knowing that not a single thing is spying on me or data mining and everything on my phone is there by my choice. And even happier that there’s not a damn thing Google can do about it.

Yes, you are wrong.

Did you have any problems with Aurora? I thought it would be perfect for my parent. But ran like a dog on their laptop and could work out why. Tried Mint instead and it just worked out of the box.

Thank you! I’ll take a look :)

My phone does not have expandable memory and storage is expensive in my country anyway.

Thanks, I’ll have a look into it! :)

I was considering doing that sort of thing if I couldn’t find anything automatic. It’s just annoying as I buy new music and have to convert along the way, especially as I have memory impairment and can forget to clean up afterwards.

I’ll give that a go, thanks :)

I don’t want to stream at all because I don’t want to be reliant on having an internet connection :)

You are correct and I don’t normally like to listen to anything less than 320kbps. BUT, my phone does not have expandable memory so it’s hard limited. And where I listen to most of my music while travelling is in the car using the car’s speakers which aren’t going to make much difference listening to 128vs 320. Even when streaming music, I’m not going to get 320. I may go up to 192kbps instead of 128 but I doubt it will make much audible difference with shitty car speakers.

I don’t want to be reliant on an internet connection to play music. Hence, why I prefer everything to be local on my phone. I also don’t want to open our home server up to the outside world.

I recently switched from Enpass to Bitwarden and as a result decided that, while I was at it, I would delete accounts I don’t use anymore. Oh boy, some were incredibly difficult to delete. Some would only anonymise data and remove login access. And one outright refused to delete my account. Unfortunately New Zealand privacy law only covers accessing and changing personal information so I’m shit out of luck with threatening anything legal to force that company to remove my account. One company (Klarna) has taken months to respond and since stopped replying to my request to delete and I haven’t been able to find a way to escalate my request :/

Likely from now on I will check account deletion policies before making an account and it will be a hard pass if they don’t allow account deletion.

Technically its illegal in New Zealand (after the great John Key and The Hobbit saga) but the ISPs don’t give a shit. Never used a VPN and only got one letter just after the law took effect. Nothing since. So many people here do it it’s unenforceable.