I highly recommend configuring qBittorrent to only connect to the VPN interface, so if your VPN is off it will simply not connect to the internet at all.

Rnote is currently the best for handwritten notes in my opinion, but its organization is minimal. I have never found a 1:1 replacement for OneNote, but luckily I no longer need it desperately like I did a decade ago.

My Note 4 died last year so I don’t have any android suggestions, sorry. On Linux I like Rnote, but it’s fairly early in development and I last time I wanted to annotate a PDF I had to do so in Xournal++

Consider dropping your built-in sync requirement, and use Syncthing instead. It opens up your options.

Blue Jays are the eastern type of jay, as seen on the Toronto sports team’s paraphernalia. Stellar’s jays are only west of the Rockies, I believe. Many people colloquially call them blue jays, though.

Emoticons ≠ emojis.

I’ve dealt with this particular bot problem as a mod. Noticing the pattern early on was easy because they always had posts on TEMU subreddits. Now that those subs are banned, it’s harder.

1. Comment length. Their comments are always less than two lines long.

2. Tone. They always contain at least one exclamation point, and tend to have a tone that I’d say is “cheery to the point it’s offputting.”

3. Context. Reading them, a lot of the time you’ll ask “did they even read what they’re replying to?” The comment seems related, but directly misses the main point.

4. History. Look at the rest of their comments. If more than one ends in two emojis, they’re definitely part of this particular bot network.

That user is the alt of a well-known troll. They know exactly what they’re doing.

I’m not responding to any more comments on this, but it’s evident that a lot of you have never lived through a wildfire. All of the resources you need get centralized on local news sites (like Castanet for Kelowna) in a way that makes it easy to figure out what’s happening. Many of the updates that local officials broadcast daily never get transcribed or posted anywhere except for local news sites such as that.

No, but it acted as a way for people to share links to legitimate news in times of crisis if that was where they normally communicated, and now they can’t. Similarly, people got used to accessing Twitter to find realtime information on local events, and now that’s also largely cut off.

I’m not defending the companies. I’m not defending people’s dependence on them. I’m pointing out that the need exists in this moment, and that this isn’t the moment to be shaming people who are actively fleeing a wildfire for decrying the fact that governments’ and corporations’ choices are impacting their ability to share information in a crisis.

I don’t use Facebook, but many affected by the wildfires do.

It’s very hard to find the resources. The government sites are not SEO optimized, the URLs change, sometimes there’s better info on local news websites. People are trying to share these vital resources with one another on social networks that already exist, and are finding that they cannot. In a time of crisis, you can’t quickly set up another network on a different platform. Many people don’t even know about better platforms.