Showing my age here, but my similar story was in #warezart on ethernet (IRC). We had a pretty tight group of regulars. I spent nearly every day there for over 5 years starting in 1995.

It was unusual then that we were from all over. We had a mod in New Zealand, some euros, a bunch of americans from all over and a handful of canadians. But hanging out like we were in each other’s living rooms.

A bunch of us actually met up in person at the Siggraph trade show once and even made matching tshirts. lol.

except for that one guy and his son

Or be even more productive and go…

“STAND UP AND GET OFF THE FUCKIN RAIL AND GO LIVE YOUR LIFE!!!”

or the carrier fuck me over?

If you’re going to get that kind of phone then you gotta pay for it outright and buy the service separately. Most all the good ones are of the prepaid model. Just buy a month at a time starting with the cheapest option and if it doesn’t work well enough to your liking, try another. So I guess my point is that the above isn’t really a serious concern. At any rate, it is completely separate from the phone.

lol… I get that ;]

I’d probably stick with it as well. My current view is that VPN mostly just provides a cover for general piracy. If “they” wanted to devote the effort they could figure out who I was. But I am sure a lot of vpns serve as honey pots and you wouldn’t want to blow your cover just for someone downloading a movie they never would have paid for anyway. They got the signature thing, but if I was doing something serious then that is going to be quite different than my general use signature and match every other user of Tails or whatever. The signature thing really sucks, but we do have control over what signatures we leave where and via vpns and tor those different “personas” don’t need to be connected by singular ip address.

Or at least that is my present opinion. If anyone here has a good argument against it, I’d like to hear it.

Yep. Learning anything new or even just changing habits takes effort, time and mostly a sense of responsibility for yourself. A lot of the non-mainstream things we do in pursuit of privacy really aren’t much more complicated than their mainstream counterparts.

Thanks for rubbing it in… and failing to mention what service you use.

It can, but it isn’t likely as specific as an ip is.

My view is that security/privacy is a sliding rule and that every little effort helps.

It isn’t just Mullvad. I’m sure it is also AirVPN and I presume that it includes all of the popular ones. I doubt port forwarding has anything to do with it.

It was worth skimming through it for me…

I largely agree with stupid_asshole69’s comment, but I will add that just using a common commercial printer and using cash is still an option.

The rule of thumb is that you want at least the same amount of ram that you have (plus a little more just in case) if you have a laptop or similar where you’re going to use hibernate, since that works by moving whatever is in the ram into the swap.

Also, note that swap is basically emergency (and slow) ram. You want enough to handle any emergencies. Although I think it gets used before ram fills up completely. There are a lot of uses of ram where swap works just as well. Like if you got a program and/or browser tabs open in the background that you’re not presently using, it needs somewhere to store that data. And don’t forget about all the programs you may use that handle or process large files. Typically that gets loaded into ram (or direct to swap if fast access isn’t needed), and if ram can’t hold it, something that is used less is moved to swap.

But if there is no room, it keeps trying any way and it all freezes up like what op describes.

So… since people often have 16 gigs of ram in their machines, no, that isn’t a huge amount of swap to have. Even on my desktops I generally have at least 32 gigs swap just because I often do things that fill up a lot of ram. One of them has 64 gigs ram, and it can fill a good chunk of the swap as well if I try to render something heavy in Blender. Add on to that, I may have a vm open as well. That often uses swap along with filling ram. And of course general web use where it is normal to keep several tabs constantly open.

I want to make sure I have more swap than will ever be used. Because if it does get used, then that means it and ram is full and the computer will freeze.

Is your swap big enough? Some installers default to only 1gig. That isn’t big enough normally.

If it fills the ram and the swap, it will cause what you are seeing. Typically the suggestion is a little more than however much ram you have. Personally I set it at either 16 or 32gigs or more. Depending on the machine and what I intend on doing with it and how much drive space I have available.

You can keep a system monitor open (or top, htop etc) and keep an eye on it when you’re doing something ram hungry, like having a bunch of browser tabs open or whatever. If it freezes and you look over and see the ram usage pegged to the top, that will suggest that that is your problem.

Curious about what wasn’t working with matrix? and how XMPP is comparing? I haven’t used XMPP in like over a decade. Is it still about the same? Better? I don’t think I was that aware of its group abilities. Mostly used it with one friend back in the N900 days where it was built in. How does the excryption compare? about the same if you choose the right option? You got a favorite linux client?

(I know I am pestering you with too many questions, feel free to ignore)