Just use yt-dlp. It’s not hard to use. You just type yt-dlp, paste the video link, and press enter to download the highest quality version.

Because modern “journalists” only know how to copy and paste from other “news sites” and random social media posts.

Good, it serves them right for the way they treat their customers. I hope every one of their games gets leaked early.

Link files will show the .lnk extension on Linux and it should be obvious from the icon that it’s not a video file. If you have wine installed, then double clicking one will run it and malware can still cause problems when run in wine.

If your torrent client has the option to run a script or command when a download completes, you could have it delete all .lnk files in the download directory. Something like find /path/to/my/download/directory -type f -iname "*.lnk" -delete would work.

Inkscape is good for making icons, assuming you want vector icons.

Firefox on android supports addons, so you can install uBlock on it too. If you use an apple device, you are limited to DNS based ad blocking, which doesn’t help with youtube.

I’m surprised more people aren’t using uBlock Origin. It’s an absolute necessity for browsing the web anymore.

The music can be copied to new hard drives without any loss in quality, so why are they leaving their only copy on 30 year old hard drives?

I occasionally find 3.5" floppy disks at the local thrift stores. There are usually new old stock disks on ebay too.

The USB floppy drives usually only support IBM formatted disks and are useless for data recovery. For any other formats, a Greaseweazle will come in very handy.

Streaming sites are the source of the TV torrents until the season is over and the bluray is released.

AV1 is really only practical for content that has a high quality source like a bluray release. Most streaming sites aren’t using AV1 yet, so anything from them would have to be transcoded. Transcoding a low bitrate source to another format will cause a loss in quality. It’s not really worth it unless you want really small files to watch on your phone.

AV1 hardware acceleration is becoming fairly common, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the streaming sites start switching to it soon.

Donate to FOSS developers if you find the software useful, but don’t give a cent to big tech companies.

You can put a big hard drive in an external enclosure and use it for offline backups. There is no point in paying for cloud storage for something you can just download again if needed. Save the cloud storage for backing up non-replaceable data.

What kind of files?

I use Kodi to keep track of what TV shows and movies I’ve watched.

They are commonly used with USB keystone connectors. For some reason most of them have A connectors on both sides.

The data is encrypted and can’t even be recovered unless you create a recovery key. Some people don’t want their browser phoning home and others just don’t want to store their data on someone else’s server.

Why not just use bookmarks in Firefox with sync enabled? You can self host your own sync server if you are worried about privacy.

It’s either 2K or 4K video. The bitrate needs to be high because any compression artifacts would be very obvious on a huge screen.

It’s rather hard to open source the model when you trained it off a bunch of copyrighted content that you didn’t have permission to use.

They look like crap, I won’t watch them.