prepaid netflix card, ftw. all they have ever asked for is an email to set up the account if you don’t already have one, and a postal code for sales tax determination (doesn’t have to be yours, just same country. *wink* *wink*). no name, no phone number, no billing address…

they do exist.

i’d just pick one up on bestbuy’s site (their store brand, on clearance, $20). i’ve had good luck with their brand for other video converters (have ones that go usb to vga, hdmi to dvi, and dp to hdmi).

they’re also easily found on azn (for even less. look for ones with both a good rating and many reviewers). get one to try, then get a second one once you’ve checked it out.

note that these are all probably not bi-directional, and that converters that go the other way (composite to hdmi) also exist–so be careful when buying that you get one that goes in the correct ‘direction’ you need.

leftovers. breakfast taco, fish sandwich, reheated french fries from friday’s lunch, maybe part of a burrito.

Me at 18 in 1980’s: “wtf is a bitcoin?”

letterboxing built into the video so DVD players show them correctly. Since that loses some pixels up front, they require using higher quality levels to prevent visual lossiness.

Letterbox and pillars baked-in actually has very little, if any, impact on filesize or quality, when encoding from the same source and settings (other than the one dimension that was trimmed)

My base starting point parts list (full build with 9800x3d, 64GB/4TB, 9700xt) was 2000usd about five months ago when it was last used to base a build on.

It’s currently ‘down’ to about 3400 after peaking last week at over 3500. The excess is nearly entirely from RAM and SSD prices.

‘removed from public access, but retained for our own or for legal purposes’

yea, they do.

g.skill was probably just the ‘easy target’ for the legal vultures.

even with all ‘legit’ sources for everything wordpress-related, maintaining it is a PITA–which is why i send anyone who asks me about wp to their own hosting service. i don’t wanna deal with that shit.

you don’t need “everything”… and if you did, you’d perhaps also need to recreate the entire working windows environment. so make full hdd backup image to satisfy that requirement—or, don’t reformat and reuse the drive, just pull it as-is for safekeeping–executing a full shutdown first: shutdown /s /t 0

as far as the user files go… this is the basics of what i do (migrations for home users is about half of my workload):

copy user libraries (the default locations windows saves your files to) for each user account:

robocopy c:\users(windowsuserprofiledir) d:(destinationonexternal) /e /dcopy:t /copy:dt /xjd /xa:sh /xd appdata /r:1 /w:1 /mt:2

put each user’s files into their own destination directory.

use care when backing up directories linked to or taken-over by cloud services (looking at you, onedrive). make sure the files copied actually exist on the destination drive.

export bookmarks and saved passwords from every browser and browser profile from each windows user account.

backup steam or its directories for later restoration, if wanted.

save mailstores from local mail clients. not many home users run a mail client with local stores anymore. the windows-only free-to-use (but not foss) ‘mailstore home’ in portable mode run off an external might be useful (yes, it can run in a vm later if needed). don’t forget to jot down mail server configs.

check ‘public’ and other places for stray files.

optionally, backup browser profile directories, zip 'em up (fastest compression is enough). if you restore entire profiles, you might preserve more of the browser environment… but chromium ones will still choke on logins, so having password exports is critically important. most people are fine with just having bookmarks and passwords migrated–which are easily backed up, and normally what i restore instead of entire profiles (unless it’s firefox to firefox, and windows to windows).

make sure you know the credentials for and can login to important sites and services from a different pc or a private window without leaning on saved sessions in existing browsers on the current windows pc.

if there’s something else specifically that you want to save, like a wallpaper that you don’t have the original source file for… a quick web search will likely reveal its location.

my flatpaks and appimages consume a hell of a lot more space than silverblue itself (which is essentially just a ‘browser launcher’ with an appstore ‘out-of-the-box’).

(and then there’s the data, which uses even more)

you should probably not hock-up a nice big loogie, then swish it around your mouth for a minute like you’re at a fine wine tasting event, then swallow it in one big, noisy GULP.

We are at that point

were.

years ago.

and bots.

and when you look at who owns the sites, you have to also throw in the very real possibility of manipulation of the data itself from within, too.

it really depends on what demands you are going to place upon the system…

gaming? have weird hardware? you’re gonna visit a command line and have to ‘research’ things…

but just basic tasks and well-supported hardware? many can give a mostly or even entirely ‘point and click’ experience.

i have a number of users on silverblue and endless that would be terrified if they ever had to open a terminal, and i rarely open a terminal on my own desktops (xfce manjaro, cinnamint, endless, silverblue)

we’re safe from that particular method here in the boonies. we’re lucky to even have one tower from any provider within range anywhere around here.

i know that big magic box in the food room has more.

the twin cities doesn’t have a ‘chinatown’ or a ‘little italy’–they have little canada

it’s called “hate”. he peddles an endless supply, and enough of the ‘right’ people bought it, consumed it, and spread it to others. it’s a vicious cycle that has no end until his own.

still does.