So manipulative is in quotes but slam isn’t. Quality writing there.

WD/SanDisk have completely gone to shit. I’d go with Seagate. I have a bunch of IronWolf Pro drives that have been fast and reliable.

They own some of their servers and rent others. From their FAQ:

All of our VPN servers are encrypted and are either owned by us or dedicated servers that we rent.

• Our rented servers are all dedicated, meaning they are not shared with anyone else. We do not use virtual servers.

• With the servers that we own, we have physical control over these, which means they tend to be faster and more secure.

When connecting, you can filter to only show owned servers.

Mullvad all the way

Voyager

I agree with the sentiment, but if Mint and Pop needed too much tinkering for OP, a hackintosh out of his Nvidia laptop would be out of the question, I assume.

Not a horrible place to be stuck, though. Pop!_OS is pretty great. I run it on my media server and it’s been rock solid. I definitely wouldn’t mind running it on an old laptop.

I guess you might be hearing it movies set in New York City, which is in the southern tip of the state of New York. All the other notable cities, the Catskill mountains, Niagara Falls, and other attractions are all further north, or upstate. I wouldn’t be totally surprised if the expression got picked up by a wider crowd to mean “north”.