That frankly sounds like power-tripping / intimidation, but perhaps I’m biased living amd working in a multi-lingual environment.

Some countries have a working vacation type of visa, but most of the jobs you’d get with that arent going to pay super well and are intended on covering your living expenses while travelling.

and it would put me on the path to a better life than I would have in America

If you’re intending on immigrating, many countries have pathways for taking higher education and getting permanent residency & a career after you graduate.

There’s also specific industries that countries may give you a work visa and a pathway to immigrate (e.g British Columbia, Canada is trying to acquire healthcare workers from the US).

Edit: There is also the option of remote work, however I think many companies are moving away from this as times change.

For FreeMC Boot, would you put it on a secondary OEM Card? Or is it best to just use one card for everything.

Sadly I don’t live in Europe, and the chain game stores here don’t sell them anymore. But there is lots of local places here that have good return policies / testing of everything before putting it on shelves.

Thank you very much for your insight!

Do you have experience with the MemCard PRO? Would you say it’s a full replacement for older memory cards, or should it be used in tandem with an original memory card in slot two.

I will second the suggestion for a dash camera, they can record audio automatically without need for user intervention.

Another option is to just use a voice assistant, I usually quickly ask my watch to start a voice recording beforehand to ensure there is a record of the interaction.

I think there’s an element of prestige people are missing. At least in my country there were online options prior to the pandemic even, they however lacked the prestige / name recognition that other institutions had. Keeping mandatory in-person classes is another way to maintain this prestige, a differentiating factor, from the other institutions.

I also have to agree with most of the comments here. From an instructional point of view online classes are lacking, they can be less engaging, and pedagogically neutered. And in fields with lots of laboratory work, it’s frankly impossible to get rid of at least part of the in-person educational component. Even for the humanities, having access to a large on-campus library of scholarly resources is integral to research.

In my personal experience I’ve been quite grateful to have access to a large archival collection, items that could not be shipped to remote students because they are too old to leave a temperature & humidity controlled environment. An online experience would prevent someone like me from doing some manuscript / original publication related research.

Now, I do think online options are helpful. ESPECIALLY for summer classes, where students may wish to retake a class while also moving away for summer work. But I do not think they should become the default, they should be an option where possible, but not the new normal.

Normally I would say community forks have the power to continue the project. However, in this case I think chrome / safari would eventually add enough new features that Firefox forks can’t add quick enough. Mozilla at least has some power in pushing the direction of web-standards, which these forks would lack, as well as the larger development team and some corporate usage of the browser which Mozilla has. I also don’t see the smaller development community keeping up with security issues found in the browser, particularly pertinent for corporate marketshare and individuals with a stricter threat model (journalists, dissidents, etc.)

The only other factor, is whether Firefox dissapearing would officially create impetus for an anti-trust case against Google. I doubt so under the current American presidency, but I could see the EU being concerned (even if they lack the power the US has to force the company to split). If something were to happen here there would be substantial change in the browser market, but I wouldn’t be too hopeful of this happening.

What are your goals?

I would say it’s really a combination of the instances policies and their jurisdiction, and in terms of jurisdiction it also depends on where you live (e.g. you may have more protections under law if the instance is hosted in your country)

There’s also nothing stopping you from using multiple instances — siloing your interaction in different types of communities in different accounts on different instances. This may be useful if part of your privacy concerns are having all of your post / comment data on one account on one instance.

Edit: You can also use an email aliasing service to avoid even giving your email out. There are aliasing services such as Addy.io, Simplelogin (subsidiary of Proton AG), Firefox Relay (Mozilla), as well as some email providers which provide (iCloud, Proton, Mailbox.org to name a few)

Passwords I would recommend Bitwarden or KeePass (both of which are in the PrivacyGuides wiki, particularly usefull for KeePass where there are different clients depending on OS)

Email / contacts / calendar I am still struggling on to be quite honest. I am debating right now on Mailbox.org + EteSync OR just using Posteo.de (while it has some security regressions compared to Mailbox.org, it has encrypted contacts and calendar). To be quite honest though the options available in this space are quite frustrating, it is really hard to find a solution that allows for interoperability / data portability as well as E2EE / elevated security.

I would say the only potential “benefit” is if the account contains non-public facing personal information - you are reducing the chance it gets leaked via data breach (assuming, of course, they actually erase your data properly)

But I would say it is at least worth it to reduce that potential risk, but you should also go into it assuming that anything that was publicly accessible has been archived / saved by someone.

I for some reason recall at one point WhatsApp’s encryption was actually an audited implementation of Signal’s encryption. But that is so long ago that I doubt that holds much weight now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Would it run ok on a SBC, such as a raspberry pi? I don’t mind self hosting, but I don’t have the space for a full blown server setup in my appartment sadly (as fun as it would be)

I see in the FAQ they mention that “If you would like, you can encrypt your calendar and address book with your password. Therefore, only you have access to your data” (translated by myself into English, sorry if it isn’t exact)

Is there any “downsides” to this in terms of interoperability with other calendar / contact apps?

Thank you so much for your suggestion, this seems like it fills the issues I had when researching mailbox.org

How reliable is the syncing? I currently sync a lot of things with Syncthing, and while it is great to not rely on a shady centralized cloud service, decentralized syncing also has its own problems (potential sync conflicts in my KeePass databases mostly)

It definitely seems like an interesting option though! Thank you so much :)

This is sadly what I was fearing running into, but I thought I would ask here nonetheless to see what other options people have even if they require some compromises on my goals

Do you self-host or do you pay? Just curious what your experience has been with the two options :)

Thank you for the suggestion!

I feel like the major one for me (that hasn’t been listed) is Ape Escape. Growing up i played the (arguably worse) remaster of it for the PSP. Genuinely interesting to play a platformer so different yet so clearly reactionary to Mario 64. And it’s also just interesting how they handle the analog sticks in terms of controls

Like many games of the era the controls are frankly janky, but they are just so much fun

If you don’t mind me asking, what makes gnome more adaptable in terms of functionality than KDE?

For iOS devices the most up to date client is “Strongbox”. I don’t think it is FOSS, but is compliant with the standard. It’s sadly a freemium app, but is quite well made in my testing. It cannot sync with syncthing, but does support several cloud services, its own service (which uses iCloud), and local file transfer over LAN. They also have a version of the app with all network connectivity removed for security (if you prefer)

This is perhaps overkill, but you can also encrypt the contents of your online cloud storage with CryFS / Cryptomater. This is particularly useful if you wish to store sensitive documents (healthcare, finances etc) in a cloud environment in case of catastrophic destruction of property (destroying computers / on site backups of data).

In this case you can also backup your keepass file in this encrypted virtual storage medium, on top of the prexisting encryption of the database itself.