For those who want to know:

Nobody's Boy: Remi is a depressingly dark late 70's kid's show where a orphaned boy gets absolutely pummeled by an extremely harsh life episode after episode, carried forward solely by his hope of one day being reunited with his unknown parents. Poverty, parental abandonment, death... No bleak theme is spared from this show intended for a child audience. If you have seen this show as a child and don't remember crying, you're a psychopath.

Macrodroid has been a favourite of mine for automating things on my phone. This is no longer the case.

It has been silently updated at some point to become a data mining and leaking nightmare. At the time of writing these lines, this app contains 30 trackers from various third party telemetry services according to the latest Exodus report. This is an extremely high number of trackers and there definitely weren’t that many a few years back. Even most junk free mobile games can’t manage to contain this many. It appears that the owner of the app has sold out and turned it into spyware to sell your data to as many companies as possible.

This is particularly worrying considering the level of access and permissions the app requires to function. If you are using the app still, I’m urging you to reconsider.

Spread the word.

Exodus report

Macrodroid has been a favourite of mine for automating things on my phone. This is no longer the case.

It has been silently updated at some point to become a data mining and leaking nightmare. At the time of writing these lines, this app contains 30 trackers from various third party telemetry services according to the latest Exodus report. This is an extremely high number of trackers and there definitely weren't that many a few years back. Even most junk free mobile games can’t manage to contain this many. It appears that the owner of the app has sold out and turned it into spyware to sell your data to as many companies as possible.

This is particularly worrying considering the level of access and permissions the app requires to function. If you are using the app still, I’m urging you to reconsider.

Spread the word.

Exodus report

In many RPG games, when you level up, it feels good. You see your stats increase, your damage output and damage resistance go up, all the numbers get bigger. It gives you a sense of accomplishment. But then, you are made to face tougher enemies which completely cancel out the progress you've made. As a player you're locked into a gameplay loop that acts like a treadmill that keeps you struggling all the time while providing an illusion of progress.

Inflation and "pay raises" are doing exactly the same thing. When you get a pay raise, you feel like you've progressed because you make more money than you used to when you first started. But if you take inflation into account, you've never really progressed at all. For most, their struggle only got even harder even.

I have an old Laptop (MSI MS1721) that I want to repurpose as a media player on my TV. I have installed an old SSD on with Linux Mint XFCE.

Almost everything works well, with only one exception. The laptop's graphics card (ATI HD3850) requires proprietary drivers that haven't been supported since Kernel 3.4. The replacement open-source drivers cause stuttering while playing videos, which makes it useless for my purposes.

Are there Linux distribution options out there that would fit my needs?

Edit After trying a wide array of distros including Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Lite, Linux MX, Bohdi, Linux Mint Debian Edition, Nobara, Debian XFCE and CachyOS, I was pleasantly surprised to see that CachyOS performed very well and still feels like a modern OS and runs surprisingly smoothly with KDE. It looks like the open source drivers do work decently after all depending on the distro you're running and how well optimized they are for your CPU.

What if Trump was really into this kind of stuff and everything he has been doing is a secret genius plan to make sure people will pee on his grave for decades, if not centuries to come?

Explaining in good detail why people should care about how modern cars have become a privacy nightmare. From Regular Car Reviews.