I gave in and bought makemkv yesterday. It just works.

GPD Win Max 2. I love this little thing so much. ~8-10 hours of battery life, up to 64GB RAM, 16-core Ryzen on the newest model, 2K display. It's only 10 inches and it can run Cyberpunk with raytracing. It also has two slots for SSD's and an optional LTE module.
The sticks are hall effect sensors, so there's no drift (looking at you, Nintendo). The keyboard is backlit and feels way too satisfying for something this small. (I actually like typing on it)
On the backside of the device, you can slide out two metal covers and place them on top of the thumbsticks, hiding them and making the device look more professional.
I once took this to a customer doing a training session and dropped the line "This thing is more powerful than all the computers in this room" and it was probably true.
There's only one real Proton.

I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago. Although the activity has drastically gone down during recent years, people still occasionally come by. I'm very happy I kept it up, even though a lot of people switched over to a Discord server.
Recently we had an incident where the sole admin of the Discord server was banned and the whole Discord had to be abandoned and created from scratch. People still keep using this trash! I'm not arguing with them, I'll just keep an alternative up. One day, when Discord really enshittifies itself to a point where it becomes unuseable, people will be happy for my stubborness. I hope.
(It's a forum for an obscure space pirate game for the PC - I-War 2. Its first post is here.)
TV: Do you ever feel scared? He's the richest man in the world.
VW: He's a pathetic man-child. Why would I feel scared of him? Ohhh, he has so much power. Nah, nah, nah. I don't give a fk. Why should I be scared of this man? Because he's rich? Oh, no, I'm trembling. Ooh, shivering in my boots here. I don't give a fk how much money anyone has. I don't. I really don't. He owns Twitter. Okay. Congratulations.
Absolutely based. The pathetic man-child was probably fuming when reading those lines. :)
My sister gifted me the third book of a fantasy trilogy series once.
I never read or got the first two books.
Also, when I was little, my grandma (who hated me with passion) bought me a pink bike just to piss me off, because she thought a boy wouldn't ever like that color. I rode that bike until I was too tall to use it and every time she saw me enjoying that thing she was furious. :)
I like movies and I like the atmosphere at my local cinema. I'm going there almost every week. Most of the time I bring my own snacks. I think they just ignore me because I'm like...their best customer, lol. :D
I do order a drink every time. But eating popcorn or nachos every week sounds like a nightmare, and that's all they have there.
When I was in my 20's, I always gave 200% at the jobs I worked at. I was young and naive and believed I would eventually be rewarded for all the hard work I put in, even on weekends and night shifts.
Then I got burnout, because I was working at a pace my body just couldn't sustain anymore.
It changed my life drastically. I learned to value my health and free time and to prioritize that over the needs of my employer. I learned that hard work doesn't neccessarily bring you any benefits, it mostly benefits your employer. I also learned that nobody cares when your health is fucked up - for your employer, you're just a cog in the machine that can be replaced.
Nowadays I only work four days a week and I don't give a shit about what happens on Fridays anymore. Server is down? Not my problem, get someone else to fix it.
I also learned to stand up for myself. I'm not getting paid like a monkey anymore and if you promise me a raise and then pretend like that never happened afterwards, you'll have my resignation on your desk, printed out by the company printer right in front of you.
There is a curated list of "no-bullshit" mobile games, without microtransactions and all of that horrible stuff: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/
My favorites so far:
- Monument Valley 1+2
- Riptide GP: Renegade
- Badland
- Galaxy on Fire 2 HD
- proper adblocking with AdAway
- ability to patch official apps to remove ads and improve the usability with ReVanced
- being able to root the device and use HttpToolkit to analyze the data that flows from apps to the web
- extensive customization (I can choose my own launcher and keyboard application)
- proper file management, especially with Total Commander
- watching Dolby Vision .mkv files with mpv
- price (iPhones are all way too expensive)
- Apple's stance against repairability
And this point is more hardware-related, but I've started to really love my Nothing Phone and its LED lights on the back, which produces amazing photos because the light is much softer than the small flash used by other phones. There isn't a single Apple device with a feature like this. You could probably get a case, but it's nice to have this integrated into the phone.
I met a girl in art school and lost track of her for a few years. During the pandemic we found each other again. He was trans now, identified as a male and had massive anxiety and body-image related problems.
It was so bad, that he stayed at home for weeks, only ordered food and basic needs online and got an instant panic attack when leaving the house.
I dragged him out to various events and spent time with him as much as possible for almost two years. It helped him get back on his feet.
As soon as he was able to handle his life without my help again and met another guy, he ghosted me.
That hurt a lot, but I would do it again. I still remember visiting him one day and he just started cutting into his arm in front of me because of his mental issues, it was really brutal. I would've felt like an absolute asshole if I left right then and there, even if the outcome wasn't positive for me in the end.
I hope he's doing well now and maybe one day realizes that he shouldn't have treated me the way he did. I don't want gratitude, but an apology would be nice.
Google has been been cracking down on installing .apk's on your phone for years and they're getting more and more aggressive about it. It's not a question of if they'll disallow it completely, but when.
It's already extremely tedious. Back in the Android 2.3 days (oh, good old Gingerbread) you could just get an APK and install it, but those times are long gone.
Years ago they threatened the developer of Total Commander to remove his app from the PlayStore unless he patched out an APK install feature, so he was forced to do that.
Now another example: Try to install eBay on a phone that is not passing device integrity. It is not listed on the PlayStore because your device doesn't pass safety checks. You can grab an APK and install it, but the OS will check if the app has been installed through the PlayStore and if it hasn't, it will complain and close itself.
GrapheneOS has patched that bullshit out, btw.
And this behaviour happens with all apps where the developer has enabled the "App Integrity" option, which is heavily pushed as a super-great security feature. So developers might just enable that feature, not being fully aware of the implications.
As you can see, it's one method at a time, slowly but surely, until Google fully controls the ecosystem. The intention behind that is pretty clear: They don't want people to have AdAway and Revanced, they want money and user data. And they also want you to login to the PlayStore, get hooked on their stupid daily points challenges and spend your hard-earned money on virtual crap.
This is textbook enshittification, it will only get worse from here on.