You shouldn’t have any issues with MakeMKV and normal blurays. 4K blurays can only be ripped with certain drives and they need custom firmware.

Gnome Disk Utility lets you manage the mount points from a GUI. There are probably other programs that can do it too.

You can use stunnel to make your VPN look like HTTPS.

Most ISPs have remote access to their modems. You should use your own if possible. If you can’t, then put it in bridge mode and connect your own router to it.

If you bought the game, all you would have to do is click install and Steam would have done all of the setup for you. If you pirate, then you have to do that work yourself. It’s not particularly difficult, but it takes more than just double clicking on an exe file.

If you have a keyboard that can run the QMK firmware, you can remap keys and run macros in the keyboard.

You could write a simple bash script that will launch it, wait for it to open, then use wmctrl to position the window wherever you want it.

There is ddccontrol and ddcutil for controlling desktop monitors. There is also the ddcci-driver which adds a device to /sys/class/backlight so you can use programs that would normally be used for controlling a laptop backlight.

My DVR and IP cameras are on a network with no internet access. My server has access to the camera network and I can connect to the server over a VPN for remote viewing. I definitely don’t trust the DVR or the IP cameras. They are constantly trying to connect to a bunch of different IP addresses, some of which are in China.

They could also use treated waste water for cooling the data centers instead of dumping it in the ocean.

SoundConverter is a good one. It’s simple and supports running multiple encodes in parallel to speed up batch conversions.

For music, I would suggest setting the format to Opus and the quality to high. That will produce a file around 128 kbps which should be transparent. Don’t get rid of your original lossless files though. You will need them whenever a newer, better codec comes out.

OPNsense doesn’t officially support ARM. You need an x86 PC for it unless you want to mess with an experimental build.

OpenWRT does support the Raspberry Pi though. You will want the Pi 5 for that since it has PCIe to connect an ethernet card to.

Libreoffice Draw is the best option. You need to make sure all of the fonts used in the PDF are installed on your computer before editing it. The embedded fonts can’t be used for editing. If you are missing a font, Draw will try to find a substitute, which will most likely mess up the spacing. You can go to File->Properties in a PDF viewer like Okular or Xreader to get a list of the fonts that the PDF uses.

Most PDFs aren’t intended to be edited. The incorrect text splits are an issue caused by the program that created the PDF.

Do they need to play on a set top DVD player? If they are going to be played on a computer, you can reencode to a modern codec and burn them as data DVDs.

That’s the best way. It just adds a ReplayGain tag to the files instead of reencoding them at a different volume.

The battery issue was solved over 50 years ago. They used to just make them nuclear powered.

Any password manager worth using will generate secure passwords. There is absolutely no reason to use AI for that.

Backblaze personal doesn’t support Linux or BSD, so it would be useless for a NAS.

Mullvad doesn’t support port forwarding anymore. That means you will only be able to connect to people that do have port forwarding.

Nobody is going to be able to sell any 3D printers in California or Washington if these bills pass. It’s impossible to prevent them from being easily modified. Anyone can replace the controller board with an open source one.