As a kid, I thought this was meant to test your sound system for the movie (aka lone CRT) and would blast it as loud as I could.

The Ontario government has had a few initiatives to push smart thermostats and my area just had our water meters upgraded to smart ones. I know nothing about the water meters, but I block the Google telemetry from my Nest Thermostat (unrelated to the gov’t program) via my pi-hole at least. By definition, if you sign on to the Enbridge thermostat initiative you are agreeing to send your usage. Not really sure of the impacts of this article on Canada, but pretty chilling nonetheless!

Nah, this one’s legit… Crazy indeed!

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Definitely true, but I think the problem is there’s no DNS out there that blocks everything you want. I’ve never found a DNS resolver that blocks my TV’s telemetry domains, for instance. A pi-hole on a RPi runs super cheap so the quick initial setup adding blocklists is super worth it for me at least.

Skyrim, without a doubt. That ambiance…

Sawyer tap filters remove 100% of microplastics (which I’m really hoping is legit!). They fit right on your tap and other than looking a bit funny work great. Just replaced my Brita filter with one a few weeks ago.

Dragon Age: Origins. Haven’t played since it’s release and wanted something in the same vein as the original Baldur’s Gate…does not disappoint!

I use Shelter from F-Droid to create a work profile and then install RethinkDNS on that profile which blocks any trackers from the “bad” apps (you can add a tonne of blocklists). Additionally, if you have a Pixel, GrapheneOS has total app isolation (including storage scopes) so Messenger only has access to what you allow.

No worries! Strange of them to put a deadline…I agree the hardware is pretty solid!

Yeah, thankfully worked in Brave! I use Firefox (Librewolf) and haven’t installed Chrome in years…def annoying but not unexpected from Google!

If you haven’t already, be sure to convert it to Bluetooth mode from WiFi before the end of December or you won’t be able to use it anymore…I only found this out after trying to set it up with my Retropie. The link to the google web tool to convert it is here!

I have an HP Envy and it has honestly been a dream with any distro I throw at it. I find KDE to have better touch gesture support than Gnome, but I have been running Gnome for a while now and it hasn’t bothered me at all.

The graphics are beautiful too!

My bank app works great even without google services!

Check out the Star Trek theme for PiHole! It’s one of the default options.

I run it through Steam as a “non-Steam” game via Proton and have also run it with Lutris. It runs on both 100% fine, if not even better than Windows. In fact, this game running great has convinced me to finally drop my dual boot!