The aftermarket shells can be very good quality these days, if the original shell is badly scratched up I would just replace it.

Yes, if there is one lesson we should have learned from Reddit it’s that internet points aren’t great for fostering real discussion and debate.

Still, with so many new link aggregation platforms appearing to fill the Reddit void, hopefully we still end up with something better.

Successfully monetising a platform means doing it in harmony with the the user base though, at least to some degree. A platform can’t make money from users if it scares them all away. Social media platforms are especially vulnerable too because they rely on users to create their content. Nobody comes to Twitter to marvel at the system infrastructure, they come to read tweets.

The way certain tech companies are behaving currently is too knee-jerk and heavy handed. They are panicking and damaging their platforms in the process.

The internet used to be more decentralised. There were lots of smaller websites, blogs, forums etc, which people discovered via word of mouth, search engines, and forgotten things like webrings. It’s only recently that big monolithic social media platforms took hold.

Tech is often cyclical, we could now be swinging back to a more decentralised web, but with the benefit of newer technologies. Right now it’s almost a new “wild west” as new platforms appear and new ideas like federation are experimented with. Some will rise, some will fall, some will go off in the corner and do their own thing. While all that happens it’s going to be a bit messy, much like it was in the 90s with the initial rise of the web.

I’ve noticed a lot of German language fediverse content too. Does anyone know why German speakers are so keen on the fediverse?

Never mind zero stars, the Reddit app (and new Reddit in general) deserves negative stars.

Thankfully there is plenty of innovation in the market for fediverse apps.

The Amazon checkout has become a real maze for non Prime subscribers, about time something was done.

I cancelled Prime a while ago, and the few times I’ve used Amazon since I got multiple checkout stages with pre-selected Prime signups and trials.

Save them as PDFs and store them in your cloud storage or choice or a syncing tool like Syncthing. A basic folder structure can help keep things organised.

No need for anything complicated, for essential documents best to keep its impel and limit the scope of failure.

Federation is arguably the whole point of the fediverse however. Decentralisation is the solution to the problems created by centralised, proprietary platforms like Reddit and Twitter, but it can only survive if users are invested in it. If everyone joined one main instance, its admins could easily remove federation, add proprietary extensions etc and become yet another walled garden.

Trying to build the fediverse without onboarding users about federation would be like trying to build a democracy without educating citizens on the function and value of voting.

We should not shy away from sharing the concepts of federation, we just need to be better at sharing them.

PiVPN is a simple home VPN solution that’s worth exploring.

Is you are interested in smart home/home automation Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform and makes a great Pi project.

Wow, this is impressive. Already seems quite stable, I got it running straight away on a headless machine with an Intel i5-7400T running Ubuntu 22.04. I think I need to do some optimising, but I can already use it as a somewhat convoluted way to get proper adblocking on an iPad!

I noticed a small mistake in the docs - the docker run command in the quickstart is missing a backslash.

The PulseAudio container also doesn’t stop when the main wolf container stops - not sure if that’s expected behaviour or not.

I’m excited to see where this project goes, I can see a bunch of uses for this running graphical application remotely.

Yes, it’s a sad state of affairs that Apple’s restrictions on iOS and iPadOS browsers are the only thing stopping an effective Google monopoly over web browsers. Ideally Firefox would still keep things in balance, but Mozilla doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing these days in terms of building market share - and I say that as a long time Firefox user.

I still remember the IE 6 era, and I hope we never see a single browser dominate the web again. To those wishing Apple would be forced to open up, be careful what you wish for.

Blink has diverged enough from WebKit that they are separate engines now. KHTML has been sadly laid to rest.

It’s a miserable state of affairs that we are effectively down to just 3 browser engines now, Blink, WebKit and Gecko. But with the ever increasing scope and complexity of web standards I don’t see that changing, unless someone throws a lot of extra support at the Servo project.

Some older people in the UK still prefer Fahrenheit, Celsius is still the official/default unit however.

A politician here recently tried to promote returning the UK to Imperial units, it has gone nowhere so far.

I’ve had this happen with a few times while looking for communities. Does kbin not fully federate with Lemmy yet, or is there a delay in the federation syncing up?

The most recent time this happened was with the [email protected] community. Search magazines for “retro computers” did not show it. Going directly to kbin.social/m/[email protected] URL returned a 404. I then searched for [email protected] and the community appears in kbin at the same URL, and I can subscribe but no posts/threads are visible.

What’s happening here - does someone have to manually search for a Lemmy community address before it will start appearing in kbin?

I think the same happened a few days ago with [email protected] but now that does seem to work normally.

I’ve also seen a few kbin magazines not appear in Lemmy either.

I’ve been a longtime fan of CheapShow, a comedy podcast loosely based around unusual items found in cheap shops and charity shops (thrift stores). Episodes include deep dives in vintage/retro media, taste tests of weird foodstuffs, various games and challenges, plus a lot of complete chaos and toilet humour.

Maybe not for everyone, but if any of the above catches your interest it’s worth a try.

With hobbies involve lots of data. Anything with an excuse to make a spreadsheet or Grafana dashboard. My latest one is home weather monitoring.

Or if you just want to see a number get bigger, Cookie Clicker is a surprisingly deep distraction.

I agree. People can never fully seem to grasp that upvote and downvote do not mean agree and disagree, which discourages real conversation and ferments a hivemind.

People that want to put the effort in to have real discussions also don’t tend to care about internet points. But people that care about internet points are more inclined to only post low effort content and continual reposts.

I prefer non swappable phone batteries. If I need to charge my phone while out I use USB power bank, which is infinitely more useful than a naked phone battery that can only be used in the phone. Non swappable batteries also allow for phone casing to be much more resilient to impacts and the elements, and can help reduce the phones size.

A phone battery is not to going to reach end of life for 2-3 years in normal use, so it doesn’t seem too much of hardship to get the toolbox out or go to a service centre when it does eventually need replacing.

Maybe require manufactures to not use such incredibly strong glues that some use to secure the batteries, but mandating they be swappable seems the wrong approach to me.

Computers and tech in general often feels like magic. The first computer I ever used was a ZX Spectrum, now I have something vastly more computationally powerful, and constantly connected to a worldwide communication network and knowledge repository in my pocket!

It’s amazing any of it actually works, especially as we don’t always seem to know how it works.