Can’t you disable it in settings? On android there is an option to toggle off sponsored shortcuts.
I agree they shouldn’t force it on but at least with minimal effort and if it’s really annoying it’s easy to disable.

On windows for a screenshot tool a good one is ShareX. and for a clipboard manager Ditto

+1 that’s what I do at home with my desktop and what is IMHO the best solution.
Yet on vacation I use an old android box with Android Tv (SlimTv) and I have to say it’s nice to have a dedicated interface allowing use of a remote.

IMHO I am not an expert but Mullvad seems the best (from what I read from others) and I would stick with it. I am using it and happy with it. I also appreciate that their monthly price do not change depending on how many months you subscribe and that there is no bullshit discount for the first x months.
You could also look at Proton VPN if you need port forwarding.

About SurfShark don’t have much opinion !

I guess she hadn’t a phone on her or she was off grid? It would have been nice if article mentioned it. Without that info I have doubts about whether the story is true or not… 🤔

Hate those posts only containing link… Feeling like I am looking at a news aggregator with click bait…

For those feeling like me here a simple cut and paste :

Sam is a very small Text-To-Speech (TTS) program written in Javascript, that runs on most popular platforms. It is an adaption to Javascript of the speech software SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) for the Commodore C64 published in the year 1982 by Don’t Ask Software (now SoftVoice, Inc.). It includes a Text-To-Phoneme converter called reciter and a Phoneme-To-Speech routine for the final output.