I’ve used this for several years. I miss when it was trivial to get scrobbling support on anything. Weirdly despite how portable players now have access to Wi-Fi & Bluetooth tethering, nothing support scrobbling out of the box. Last.fm even used to give good recommendations before it went downhill. You can say there is now value in trying to help ListenBrainz make a new recommendation algorithm with open data, but less folks have been using such platforms in the wake of leaving their data in the hands of Spotify & YouTube.

I mean Matrix was intiated by Israeli intelligence so not unreasonable

One reason for moving to Nix was declarative config so at least that part of my system is a series of Nix files to build into a working setup.

…The rest… let’s just say “needs improvement” & I would like to set up a NAS.

Be wary of sunk cost fallacy. Sometimes you gotta bite the bullet & allow yourself to see it as some wasted money with the opportunity to start over with something with less lock-in or the boost in creativity of now having to work with new constraints.

The thing that grinds my gears

WARNING: I’m not actually a quotation tho my > character says that is what I am for in the specification & if you check my HTML markup I am a <blockquote> which also has a spec saying I must quote a source

Markdown-itis is ruining semantics on the web just ’cause it doesn’t support callouts like a proper lightweight markup syntax for documentation, technical writing, & blogging. It is the wrong tool for these mediums but users forgo caring about semantics for the familar not even understand their tools or their outputs.

Sony is still carrying the torch for flagships

Additionally LineageOS for microG which rolls the microG stuff into the ROM which saves a lot of work/frustration when trying to unGoogle a device. Any device that is officially supported by LineageOS will have builds which can’t be said for many other ROMs.

But not friendliest on IO. No headphone jack. No microSD. No dual SIM.

They are probably fine but you should pick up a pair of nice wired headphones for when the battery dies & can no longer hold a charge.

Or OnlyKey

Weren’t the trackers opt-in? This doesn’t seem like a bad thing if you don’t mind giving up those user metrics for them to build something better. It is the opt-out stuff with no transparency over the kind of data collected to be worried about.

since it’s open source

Open core with an open community edition. 100% better than fully proprietary & Microsoft.

https://dagster.io/blog/fake-stars

‘Stars’ are such a dubious, gamed feature telling you little value about a project’s quality. It doesn’t really ‘support’ a project, but it does feed into the anxiety & social media sludge on the platform. We would be better without them.

For Darcs I have been using darcs hub & mirroring to my server. That said Smederee has slowly but surely been shaping up to be a better replacement (recently got reStructureText support!); once they have obliterate support, I will be tempted to make it primary for real since it covers all the basics.

For Pijul, I can really only use it self-hosted over SSH. Nest is far too feature barren to be usable—especially without the ability to fetch tarballs for instance where you can’t have or use the pijul binary for fetching (which is a bit ironic since the Pijul binary has an archive to create tarballs, Nest just doesn’t expose it). Pijul is faster & the key concept of separating your commit ID from details (such as Darcs or Git using Name <e@mail.address> as the identifier) is much nicer not just for privacy if wanted but changing these details for whatever your reasons maybe (imagine changing your name after marriage or sex change & trying to convince all projects you’ve committed to to rewrite their history with your new info to not be confused or dead-named—most maintainers would ignore you). Someone should write a decent, lightweight forge so Pijul can be usable.

I use Darcs/Pijul since Patch Theory is a better model than snapshot-based version control as seen in Git/Mercurial & others. Since neither have many hosting or forge options, there are not many choices (answering the “why?”).

If using Git, an inferior VCS IMO, things are now going hosted on Codeberg. In the past, I had paid for SourceHut & while it was a generally nice, lightweight experience I was disappointed with the features & progress to the point I didn’t feel I was getting good value (also no Darcs or Pijul support, just Git & Mercurial). Since I don’t write any of my own code using Git anymore, I don’t really bother self-hosting cgit, Ayllu, or something. That said, Forgejo is a pretty disappointing in its direction as they choose to clone more features from MS GitHub than even Gitea which basically leaves you with MS GitHub but FOSS without addressing some core issues (PR workflow is not good, YAML-based CI is not good, & so on); a better sell IMO would be fundamental improvements on these old models/workflows that would inspire leaving for technical reasons instead of social/political/philosophical reasons.

As far as fearing pain: I got drugged up enough as I assume most did that you can’t feel a whole lot—& we aren’t talking anything beyond local anesthesia + strong paracetamol (just make sure you take something before bed or GG sleep). I will never get used to getting needles in gums tho.

If possible, seriously try to get a one-shot appointment. Mine had 5 1-hour visits every 2 weeks (not what I expected or would have signed up for) & each time they would spend like 15–20 minutes of that clearing out & reapplying a temporary resin. In this state your tooth is quite compromised state. My tooth ended up getting a fissure all along it after the penultimate visit—which ended up being irrepairable. Which meant they had to do an entire extraction for an implant wasting more money & time. I do not wish this on anyone.

Adding fuel to the shit fire was after visit 3 I had massive pain on the other side. They were going to start a root canal on that one too but I begged for a temporary filling (was supposed to hold up 2 months but has been a year) so I could still eat. Tooth 18 was under repair so I had moved all chewing to 31 as my mouth favors putting a majority of pressure on these 2 molars. I don’t think I could have reasonable eaten anything enjoyable for months if both sides were out.

Of note: the root canal isn’t like a finalized thing either. They seem to inevitably, eventually break down & will likely require an implant anyways in a few years. When my right side goes out—which it is—I may just consider doing another implant there too since it can be done in just 2 visits here.

None of the creators I follow have LiberaPay or crypto as an option either. I don’t want to pay on a proprietary platform.

Depressing if true. Using cash lets us keep the transaction out of the records of the government & tech firms.

V3 has chathistory + away status so the bouncer isn’t needed. Voice & video would be out of scope if trying to use a single tool, but the way these protocol operate is just to handshake & negotion for another protocol. My mates & I use Mumble (looking for alternative but everything kinda sucks & uses too many resources) for audio & share terminal sessions for other tasks where video is a massive liability for bandwidth & accessibility with video artifacts making text illegible.

Even still none of this requires perpetual data replication—what it leads to is Alice joining Bob’s server instead of setting up her own server & joining that way since the cost of hosting all that data + CPU/RAM prohibit her sovereignty in the space. Our society has enough of that where you can’t own your own land or other resources, reliant solely on those in power. With tech we can give that power back to folks so they can run their own stuff if they want, but we can’t have that if the cost of running everything is too high due to bloated design.

Also this was hard ta read: Is your space bar broken? ’Cause a lot of words are stuck together… ins & outs*, DMs* …apostrophes don’t make words plural.

Image is a broad word. I would say in order of usage per year it would be Darktable, Inkscape, Hugin, GIMP, Krita… but these obviously serve different purposes.

The VoxeLibre mod is a substitute