gila

I think you can just add archive.md or archive.ph etc before the URL of the article, e.g. archive.ph/https://vox.com/whatever to skip that. I’ve never had to do any captchas this way

Yes, for a loading method which takes time to complete the conversion rate will generally be locked in from the time the transfer was initiated. You can always preview the received converted amount. Although the transfer method may vary depending on availability in the recipient account country, the various timeframes and fees (where applicable) have always been previewed accurately.

For myself I have set up MFA for payments via the app, so I will routinely be required to use the app to authenticate a payment. However other MFA methods are available. I can’t think of any other function the website itself doesn’t do.

Given there is no additional fee for converting at a foreign point of sale, I just load up in my home currency as there are free/instant methods available and convert to whichever destination currency at point of sale, ensuring to select not to have the balances converted by visa/master at terminals which have that function.

Hope you enjoy your time in Japan!

I’d recommend searching about their fees this because it’s going to vary a bit based on your local currency. Their documentation on the topic is easy to read and answers your first two questions better than I could put it.

I’ve rarely had to interact with support so I couldn’t give a useful response about that in earnest. They do have local support in the two major countries in which I’ve interacted with them and it’s been fine.

The KYC process is standard for a digital money account AFAIK. I signed up in 2017 originally to handle a one-off transfer between local bank accounts in different countries, so I’d not have bothered investing much time in it if it was a hassle. I haven’t had to re-identify myself or think about it since, despite migrating across several countries, starting to use the physical card etc. I imagine I gave them my government ID though.

I’ve used wise.com for this sort of thing for many years (since they used to be called transferwise). Can spin up as many virtual visa cards as you need (I think it’s max 10 active at once). I also have a physical debit card with them which will do conversions at foreign points of sale from my local currency using the mid market rate and fees much lower than visa/master. Never had an issue with them, though this is more a sort of obfuscation rather than privacy

How were the trackers added to these torrents? Assuming either a) you added them manually, or b) the tracker you downloaded the torrent files from bundled them into the torrent file?

If b), if you downloaded the torrent file again now that one of its trackers is defunct, would it still be bundled?

If no, or if a), you could remove the torrents without touching the downloaded data, then locate your “snatch list” on the private tracker (a list of all torrents you’ve downloaded), batch download them all and add them to qbt, assuming same output folder they will detect the downloaded files and go to 100% without downloading anything.

If yes, there isnt a way I can think of to remove the trackers as a batch, but aside from tidiness of your client there shouldn’t be any actual problem resulting from them being there.

FWIW you can fix the aspect ratio issue on the firestick using ADB to force the device to display in a 4:3 resolution (except when using streaming apps that force 16:9)

If you want something privacy oriented you’ll probably need to build some kind of NUC. To my knowledge no off-the-shelf streaming device respects privacy

There are things like torrentio now which lend BitTorrent piracy a more integrated UX, and that has definitely extended the lifespan of its usefulness to me. Torrents rarely max out my line speed these days, mostly because I have 1000X the bandwidth compared to when I first started torrenting 20 odd years ago. But it’s still one of the fastest and simplest methods to get any file you want, so I think it’s relevant

After seeing this post, I tried streaming the newest episode of Silo and found it wasn’t working in my addon (which uses a4kscrapers).

My mother tried streaming Slow Horses (using same addon) after I told her and she said it worked fine. I guess it had already been cached and was therefore unaffected since the file I streamed was only released today.

Anyway I luckily only had 8 days left of RD, so I subscribed to Premiumize and it only took a minute to reconfigure the addon to use that instead.

This app live captions any output to your sound device locally https://github.com/abb128/LiveCaptions

Whether I mute my output device, or selectively mute a tab or app it still works fine.

There’s a similar feature baked into Win11, not sure whether that is processed locally/privately though

I’m sorry, I meant to respond about the lack of BBC archival footage, as it had to be archived to be able to compile it. You’re right that it was probably shot straight to VHS.

I remember the VHS we watched was presented as a compilation of episodes with a new introduction and interludes so my guess is there was some kind of professional reproduction of the episodes themselves

The groups forming the roots of digital media piracy established ‘the scene’, which holds itself to rules and has particular distribution methods. For example Usenet was popular for many years. https://scenerules.org/

By P2P I’m meaning these are ‘non-scene’ releases, just something a random person on the internet cooked up and released somewhere, in these cases by feeding some prior standard definition release through an upscaler and creating a torrent from the output, which involves certain considerations.

We can’t exactly determine the pedigree of these files, but we can say they are lossy transcodes, that is they first existed in a compressed format and later were re-encoded by the upscaler to another compressed format.

While the upscaled may look sharper to your eyes, data from the files as they were before that process was inevitably lost due to this transcoding. If we define “quality” as the amount of information from the original presentation that was retained in the output, then the standard definition versions are definitely higher in quality than the upscaled ones.

I’m not meaning to use the term in any perjorative sense, but it’s useful information to have. If an official HD presentation is ever made from the original film, it would certainly get a ‘scene release’ that would look better than these ones.

Could do that, or sideload the APK from https://repo.jellyfin.org/files/client/androidtv/

Yes, that is the quality of the original presentation. If anything it looks worse because it has been converted from film to a digital signal, as well as being stretched to be a bit larger than normal. Lmk if you young whippersnappers have any questions about this, I grew up watching this on VHS back in the dark times 👴

Yes, both are upscaled p2p releases

Lineage OS doesn’t include google apps or services. Jellyfin works though.

Do you need an in-remote microphone? If not, I’d suggest a degoogled nvidia shield tv (i.e flash it with lineage OS or similar)

Just used this to load up some concerts for my long haul flights tonight and it worked great, thanks for the rec

I use Shotcut for more or less any video operations that require re-encoding. It’s great for basic editing but also simple transcoding jobs too

Losslesscut is what you want for this. It’s basic and concatenates without re-encoding. And it’s open source (as is handbrake)