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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Nope, I prefer being able to run my own network router, open/close my own ports, block ads on the network, hopefully get as much bandwidth as I can, etc. so it’s usually better for me to subscribe to my own internet.

    … But since you bring it up, coincidentally I currently live on a street with shops/restaurants on the main floor under me. And all their wifi networks are visible from my apartment… so technically yeah, if I go through the trouble of collecting all their wifi passwords I could just hang out on their networks for free internet. Internet probably wouldn’t be great and not very private without a VPN but for free web browsing it should work.





  • Not sure which country you’re in but in the U.S. I haven’t seen many gift cards that are contactless tap-to-pay so you would want to double-check. Without tap-to-pay those type of cards would need to be added into a phone app (Google Wallet / Apple Pay) to be able to tap-to-pay using it.

    It’s possible outside the U.S. it’s more common for gift cards to be able to tap-to-pay.

    Or if you’re talking about store gift cards then the same applies, most of those aren’t tap-to-pay either so you’d want to double-check.


  • The vast majority of private trackers do not have a “hard” ratio economy like you describe. Most private trackers are flexible to give users ways to increase their own upload ratio without requiring that ratio to be “paid” by another user doing the downloading. e.g. when torrents are freeleech the users get to download for free but can still upload to improve their own ratio. And when there’s bonus systems in place those bonus points can be used to add to the user’s own uploaded data count. And sometimes private trackers have events where they make the entire tracker, or entire categories of torrents, freeleech so a whole ton of users get to download for free and will still be able to seed those same torrents afterwards.

    does that mean that there are some users who will forever be below 1, and thus end up getting kicked out, thus resulting in the private tracker just… shrinking over time?

    Sure, that could happen too. Private trackers will always get some users that just aren’t going to cut it and eventually lose access to the tracker. In most cases the tracker will just end up adding new users and maintain the total user count. Each tracker is going to be different in how they approach this… I think over time the user churn doesn’t happen as much, at some point there’s enough users on the tracker that are doing fine with ratio and whatnot while the tracker hits its own maximum user count so actually needing to replace users with new signups becomes less of a priority.


  • Core 2 Duos are slow, yeah. I’ve got an Asus F8SP-X1 laptop from ~ 2008 with a Core 2 Duo T9500, 4 GB RAM, and a SSD SATA drive in it. It was originally a mid-range Windows Vista system. Over its years I managed to upgrade it as far as it could go. It does run standard Ubuntu and Windows 10 - Certainly not fast but it does run. Performance would lean towards unbearable without the SSD. I suspect Gnome isn’t doing it any favors and switching to a lighter DE or distro would help (or maybe just ditching the DE altogether) but since it’s just a spare laptop it’s no big deal.

    One of the takeaways from your experiment is if it the system was already crap at running Windows 10 it’s not necessarily going to fare better with Linux, at least if you’re expecting a nice desktop environment. I don’t know if in 2025 we need to equate the “will this run Linux?” challenge on old Windows XP/7 hardware aside from the geek/techie users that want to do something with that old hardware. Anyone else non-technical stuck with that type of hardware isn’t thinking about Windows 10 being retired.