Luke

This kind of confusion illustrated by Telegram users is exactly why it was the right thing to do for privacy when Signal removed support for SMS because it’s not encrypted. People still whine endlessly about it, but most users are not very savvy, and they’ll assume “this app is secure” and gleefully send compromised SMS to each other. All the warnings and UI indicators that parts of the app were less secure (or not at all in the case of SMS) would be ignored by many users, resulting in an effectively more dangerous app. Signal was smart to remove those insecure features entirely.

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point here (I have no idea why people engage with shorts, maybe they do love that format) but I wanted to push back a little on the idea that a product must be popular simply because corporations continue to offer them. Especially with social media, where users are actively discouraged from making their own decisions as much as possible by The Algorithm.

I think there are plenty of examples of things that people continue to use (and often even pay for the “privilege”) despite major aspects of those things being generally reviled by everyone who uses them:

• ad infested apps and websites
• gaming microtransactions
• a new phone every year
• cable service
• insurance
• HOAs
• gasoline
• Amazon
• pants and dresses without pockets

OnlyOffice can also be integrated with NextCloud or WordPress or a bunch of other stuff. I believe it can also be used standalone. Personally, I found it’s interface much more polished and usable than Collabora, though it’s been a couple years since I compared.

Three Body Problem?

I’ve been enjoying Apostrophe:

Having to copy a line from a document titled “The Principles of Communism” just to sign up should’ve tipped you off that something was a bit weird.

Uh what? How is it weird to have a mild anti-bot task in a registration process? That’s pretty normal.

If you’re objecting to the content in the text, well that’s just silly. A communist instance referencing communist writings is not “weird”, that’d be entirely within the realm of reasonable expectation.

If you feel so threatened by the mere presence of communism in your bubble, maybe don’t try to join an instance by and for them? How dare the dastardly communists be so happy and welcoming to everyone!

What I’ve done in the past is to copy the URL of the unavailable video (if it’s still accessible via the playlist entry, sometimes it isn’t which is annoying) and feed it into the Wayback Machine in the hopes that it got archived at some point. The video stream isn’t usually available that way, but at least the page title sometimes is, and then I can search for other versions of it.

Still want to add a few bits of info to it, but I’m pretty happy with the dashboard for my kitchen display that sits on top of the fridge where I can see it from the living room as well:

Uses the excellent LCARS theme by th3jesta via HACS.

Almost everything shown is just standard markdown cards, with minor tweaks by card-mod, with the exception of the 2 weather widgets shown (also via HACS):

• Hourly Weather Card
• Weather Chart Card

Windows 11 is technically still Windows 10, if you go by the actual version reported by the systeminfo command. For example, my fully updated Windows 11 Pro VM reports itself as OS Version: 10.0.22631, so there might still be something to the idea that “Windows 10 is the last version” but the marketing and branding teams didn’t stay on the same message.

No, we have other better options, but liberals will refuse to vote for anyone who they haven’t had led to them by the DNC establishment, and then act like everyone else is enabling fascism by suggesting actual leftist leadership.

It’s not downloadable software, but you might check out WordPress if you haven’t recently, it’s open source and free (though you do need to host it somewhere).

It used to have kind of a bad reputation for being a horrible hodgepodge of bad editing UI and random plugins that do things in wildly different ways, but the WordPress team has really stepped up their game in the last few years and it’s actually very nice now as long as you stay away from the commercial plugins. There’s almost always an open source plugin available for anything you’d want to do, but the out of box experience is plenty good for most pages you’d be likely to need.

WordPress has a very nice “block editor” enabled by default these days, which is essentially just their name for a WYSIWYG interface. Use drag and drop to design the pages, and then click a button to see it in a “code editor” that shows the HTML if you’d rather edit that way.

Anyhow, I know it’s not exactly what you asked for, but I thought I’d mention it since you did say you are open to something web based.

I feel like that’s just a longer way of saying “they all do it, so why bother mentioning it”, which is a lot more defeatist than I think we ought to be. Pointing out anti-consumer behavior is worthwhile for more than merely a simple dig.

that’s generally how computers work though? Updated OS is more resource intensive and require upgrades

That’s not how computers work unless you have an OS that intentionally creates that situation. Devices with Linux on them don’t get any slower over the years. Sometimes an old device even gets faster with OS updates because the OS isn’t being written by a corporation intent on driving you to new purchases incessantly.

Yeah, if people didn’t think it was worth donating to before, they sure as shit aren’t going to pay for it now that it’s also closed source. What’s their value prop even supposed to be here?

A foyer, essentially, but a lot smaller and almost strictly utilitarian. You take off and store your shoes, boots, jackets, etc there.

I usually interpret the phrase “drop in” to mean that the replacement being referenced will also work with everything written for the original. Does “drop in” in this case mean that Immich will transparently replace Google Photos, similar to how libretube replaces YouTube? That would be amazing!

Yeah what possible relevancy to getting from one place to another could the weather have?

Bernie wasn’t on the ballot though, because he got fucked out of the opportunity. Of course the people who were incredibly motivated to vote for him didn’t show up when they were denied the opportunity to vote for him. That’s not a failure of Bernie’s message, that’s a failure of the establishment to embrace a message that motivates young and disaffected voters.

Self hosting Gitlab or Gitea is always an option. Dead simple to do with docker (which the HA devs obviously are very comfortable using).

My worker cooperative helps authors self-publish, and we use as much open-source as possible to do that. We rely almost exclusively on a number of tools which are all better than proprietary counterparts for one reason or another (sometimes merely because they are free and allow us to keep costs minimal) but the main reason is most of our clients value unquestioned data ownership over anything else. We avoid corporate cloud services and self-host as much as possible, for example.

Having said that, IMO many of these are also better designed and better UI than comparable paid tools. Blender being the obvious best example, but WordPress is another one. I used to ignorantly shit on WP so much when I was working in the professional startup industry as a web developer. Since then, I’ve learned to my delight that it’s awesome if you don’t bog it down with a bunch of horrible plugins, and the latest versions with their block editor approach are so good for easy and quick theming.

Here’s a list off the top of my head of our regularly used software. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, and many of these are going to be unsurprising:

• Linux (seems obvious, but definitely worth mentioning. We primarily use Ubuntu and Debian based images.)
• Blender (2D/3D graphics)
• GIMP (raster image editing)
• Inkscape (vector image editing)
• calibre (creating ebooks)
• InvoiceNinja (generating invoices, tracking hours, payments, expenses, general accounting)
• NextCloud (storage and collaboration on files, passwords, office editing)
• Gitlab (git repository tracking, deployment management)
• WordPress (client websites)
• Caddy (web server with dead-simple config and automatic https support)
• Zulip (chat, the threading style they use is so effective for organizing discussions about client work, it’s miles beyond Slack or any other options we’ve all used in past corporate lives)