I use Spytify, so I “download” my songs real time in the background. If anything it makes me more intentional about what I do grab. Grabbing the entire discography of an artists may take a day, so a little pre-veting is necessary. you find out why some of the big names only have 1 or 2 hits out of a hundred, but you also find some great songs that didn’t make it.

I’ll usually aquire a few albums at a time. I’ll give each song a quick pass (jumping to random parts) to determine the following

1. is the song awful and/or nothing like what the artist normally does = Delete.
2. is there dead space (a really long start/end of silence) or random talking/noises = trim
3. is it the volume stupidly loud/quiet compared to other songs = fix*
4. stupid rap section in the middle for no reason (thank god that trend is basically gone) = cut
5. what playlists does it belong in?

*I use MP3Gain for bulk volume adjustment, it does pretty good and is non-destructive, though not every player respects the adjustment (a tag in metadata or something)

I don’t catch everything doing this, mostly because I spend a few seconds on each song, but it does filter out a lot.

Sometimes it takes a few listens to decide “I dont like this song” - delete.

I’m not a completionist (or try not to be) for albums/artists. If I don’t like the song, its gone. If there’s one part of a whole that I don’t like, its chopped out.

Spytify

It records Spotify music real time, at the highest available bit rate (as long as you set it). Uses Spotify API to pull track metadata and album art. Its smart enough to not records ads and auto deletes tracks under 30 seconds (I think you can change the time)

It’s slower than YouTube DL, but having all the metadata sorted out for you is a big plus.

Its probably about 98% error free, sometimes a second of a song ending gets put on the next track. A quick cut/paste in Audacity and it’s fixed.

It works best if you have a separate audio device, otherwise other computer sound gets recorded too. I’m not going to do a full tutorial (unless someone asks), but basically you set the audio for Spotify on audio device #2, and continue as normal on audio device #1. It has a loopback feature too, so if you want to listen/record the same time you can.

LibreOffice is great, especially for home/private use or if you’re converting everything to PDF anyways.

It, and all of the ms alternatives, fall short in having 100% match for MS, so the more complex the document, the more likely formatting errors will appear.

“Even if they are not linked, services can still share data” Isn’t that the whole point!?

Sounds like instead of the whitepages, you’ll end up on an FBI list.

/s sorry for the non-answer…I dont really have any practicle advice beyond being careful you don’t end up suspected of criminal activity. Your privacy will really go down hill if the gov. is actually paying attention to you.

If they make an example of the big rule breakers, the rest will fall into line, making it easier to spot the little trouble makers…think of it like form mods. Sure they can’t catch everything, but by constantly allowing garbage through, that’s all they’ll get. If they enforce the rules then less will attempt to break them.

!!BARD AI IS THIS ARTICLE’S SOURCE!!

This is a bullshit article made for clicks. This article is an “interview” with Bard AI.

Do not trust Forbes.

If Google is truley using AI to read messeage, I am open to actual sources of information, but “acoriding to Bard itself” ain’t it.

Report this post. It does not belong here. We should not be part of this spread of the misinformation. Bard is NOT an information source.

The post title should read “Forbes uses AI to write B.S articles to scare people and get clicks”.

I use KeePassXC

It stores your passwords in an encrypted file, then i use the random password generator, the browser extension and free phone apps to autofill everything.

(It is up to you to sync the file between devices)

While not FOSS, Typfinity is a great keyboard that I’ve used for a long time on iPad - I assume phone version works just as well.