sab

sab , 25 days ago

Also Telegram is growing shadier day by day. Signal is the way to go.

sab , 1 month ago

The world is full of surprises!

sab , 2 months ago

It's not very newsworthy perhaps, but seems relevant for a union community.

When seen in relation to what has happened over at Boeing it's a decent reminder of the role of unions not only in ensuring worker's rights, but also in guaranteeing quality and safety for consumers.

sab , 2 months ago

I'm sure you're aware of it already, but WineHQ provides a good overview over which software runs well under WINE. :)

sab , 2 months ago

What a sad faith for a website named after the glorious Dodo.

sab , 2 months ago

Indeed, thanks!

sab , 2 months ago

But Twitter used to have a monopoly, and it doesn't any more.

I can now follow an official white house account directly from Kbin, whereas yesterday i would have had to sign up for either Twitter or Threads. That makes a difference. :)

sab , 2 months ago

You go to @potus and follow him from there. :)

sab , 2 months ago

Now I'm imagining "In the Hall of the Mountain King" playing increasingly fast and loud as the car sneaks up on a half deaf person.

sab , 2 months ago

Well, the ones that federate with Meta will still be federated with those who don't. So it's really no different from what the Fediverse is already: Fragmented by design.

sab , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

In addition to what's already mentioned in the comments, shout out to Inkscape. I guess it's similar to LibreOffice Draw, but I prefer the user experience of Inkscape. Probably more for single-page PDFs.

sab , 3 months ago

They're also not holding anyone hostage. I can see how people are tired of the whole "if you don't like it, fork it" argument, but Kbin, mbin, and Piefed are all perfectly viable and interoperable alternatives that are available already.

sab , 3 months ago

Unless, of course, one blocks them. It's not perfect of course, but I think federation brings about an unique opportunity to decide how many fools one is willing to suffer. And the tools will only get better with time. :)

sab , 3 months ago

I'm currently experimenting with Seppo for my website, which is... not ready yet. So maybe not the greatest suggestion. But development is happening fast, and I like it for a couple of reasons.

1. It's incredibly easy to install. Just upload a file, set permissions, and open it in the browser. I'm somewhat incompetent, so I appreciate that even though deploying WordPress is obviously not very difficult either.
2. Content is stored in basic XML files, making it easy to access with just basic PHP and an XSLT stylesheet. Basically it easy to incorporate posts into your site however you want it.
3. It federates with ActivityPub, so people can follow your blog directly and get the content directly into their feeds.
4. It's lightweight - very little bullshit.

Basic functionality such as editing and deleting posts does not work yet, so it's absolutely not ready for primetime. But it's a project worth following, especially for those of us with an interest in the social web.

Edit: I guess this would be more if you wanted to create a basic website yourself, and add a tool for content management to it. I read the post a bit too quickly - if you're not interested in writing some code there are much better options to go for out there. Seppo I think is nice for those who actively want to tinker a bit. :)

sab , 3 months ago

I guess for now it's misleading more than anything, as they say it's the smallest of the three major federated platforms. That's hardly precise as neither Threads nor Bluesky is federated yet.

Bluesky should federate at the end of the month though, and a bridge to activitypub is already ready. Interesting times ahead.

sab , 4 months ago

While this is seems a bit incompetent, it is easier for them to make technology less available than to fix the underlying issues here. They might set out to do both, but solving the underlying issues will take more time.

At least they're trying to do the right thing, and they're making an effort to deal with a problem that affects real people. Good on them.

sab , 4 months ago

What absolute hogwash.

sab , 4 months ago

It's not even a true statement. "A real picture of a pipe" has never once in history been interpreted as "my golly - there's an actual goddamn pipe trapped inside this piece of paper". We know it's a freaking representation.

The "real" part refers to how it's a product of mechanically capturing the light that was reflected off an actual pipe at some moment in time. You could have a real picture with adjusted colours, at which point it's real but manipulated. Of course with digital photography it's more complicated as the camera will try to figure out what the colours should be, but it doesn't mean the notion of a real picture is suddenly ready for the scrapyard. Monet's painting is still a painting.

Everyone knows exactly what you mean when you say a real picture. Imposing a 3D model over the moon to make it more detailed, for example, constitutes "not a real picture". Pretending this is some impossible philosophical dilemma is just a corporate exercise in doublespeak.

sab , 4 months ago

Of course - there's a huge difference between a "real photo" and "objective reality", and there always has been. In the same way an impressionistic painting might capture reality accurately while not really looking like it that much.

sab , 4 months ago

Same. Which is to say I have it installed and boot it along with GNOME Web every time I need to check that my shitty web programming work outside of Gecko. Which is thankfully rare.

Vivaldi is nice though.

sab , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Looks promising.

I'm setting it up now, was close to give up when it continuously refused to work after setting up an account. Turns out the passwords randomly generated by Firefox is a bit too hardcore for it, I changed to something with fewer special characters and now all is good. :)

Edit: It worked for setting up the interface and my profile, but I still cannot sign in from within it. Seems like a promising project though.

Edit edit: Moved it from a subdomain to a normal folder, now I can sign in, but it still acts a little broken, and doesn't federate. Oh well, I'll see if I'll tinker more later.

sab , 4 months ago

I figured there are interesting people out there who don't really blog often, but who might post something online a few times ever year and whom I'd like to stay updated on. So I started trying to collect some of these relatively inactive personal feeds.

It's not ass noisy as following blogs or social media, which is what I like about it. The only drawback is of course that so few people maintain an RSS feed.

sab , 4 months ago

I think the key here is that it's a feed managed by the user. There's not enough commercial potential in that. As a tech company, you want to be the one curating the feed, and you want the user to believe you're doing it in their best interest so they don't notice how you're making money by subtly feeding them ads.

RSS is simply too good for the contemporary internet.

sab , 4 months ago

Worth mentioning that Vivaldi is basically the spiritual successor of Opera, and it's doing pretty well at that. It's still Chromium based though, so unless you really miss Opera for the functionality you're better off with Firefox.

Still, rather Vivaldi than Opera, Chrome, or Edge.

sab , 4 months ago

Oh, everyone who ever travels by train in Europe will tell you that the German infrastructure is very much broken. You're lucky if your delay is less than a day travelling through Germany.

sab , 4 months ago

I have no doubt their bureaucrats perform world-class efficiency in their handing out, filling in, faxing and archiving a sophisticated system of paper forms.

I guess it's the trap of getting complacent and stopping modernizing as soon as you've convinced yourself you have the best system in the world.

sab , 4 months ago

Well, it's based on experiences travelling through Germany proper - for example Denmark to France or Italy, including transfers. Often the delay will just be a couple of hours, but then you miss your transfer and you're screwed.

Also if you're on your way to Switzerland the Swiss have no patience for disruptions in their services, so if a train is delayed coming from Germany they're likely to just not accept it into the country at all.

I have also heard from people who were told to spend the night in the train, which DB just parked in the outskirts of the city for the night. That way they could offer passengers a place to sleep in the cheapest possible ways. Pregnant women or families with young children were asked to check in to hotels.

sab , 4 months ago

Brilliant. That's @catandgirl for anyone looking for something to follow on the Fediverse. :)

sab , 4 months ago

I think this should work for everyone: !harrypotter

sab , 4 months ago

Kbin needs to be aware of the community first, so my first link didn't work properly because of that. After interacting with the community once the !community@example.com format works just fine. :)

I subscribed from Kbin.social now, so future posts should be visible from there. :)

sab , 4 months ago

You should just need to write !harrypotter@literature.cafe in the comment box, and the link is generated automatically. Should work in both Lemmy and kbin at least, not sure about mbin but would make sense that it works there as well. :)

sab , 4 months ago

Even when you click it without opening in a new tab/window?

sab , 4 months ago

There are a bunch of those "simple" apps on F-droid, such as Simple Contacts, Simple Calendar, and Simple Camera. I cannot find Simple Gallery in F-droid any more, it seems to have been replaced by its Fossify equivalent already.

In light of this, it could be an idea to check if you have any of those apps installed and consider replacing them with an alternative. I was using Simple Contacts until now (only listed as "Contacts" in my apps), so I guess it's time to make some changes.

sab , 4 months ago

1. You don't like the Google app
2. You don't want to use Google apps out of principle
3. You're using a version of Android where Google apps are not installed by default, so you need to install something

sab , 4 months ago

Thanks! Needed a replacement for Simple Contacts after this, Connect You seems like a much better app anyway. :)

sab , 4 months ago

Etar is great!

sab , 4 months ago

If they're from F-Droid you're good; if you're on Google Play I doubt they'll update anything to get more permissions without your consent.

However, if the developer has taken a turn for the worse (which this post seems to indicate), you might not receive any more updates for your F-Droid software, and you might get to a point where you don't want to install updates from Google Play. Software that cannot be updated is generally not a good thing.

Furthermore, these apps deal with somewhat sensitive information by default, and I wouldn't want to use apps developed by a company I don't trust if I don't absolutely have to. :)

sab , 4 months ago

A personal recommendation is to use Droidify, it's just a great F-droid front-end.

You can download the APK here: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.looker.droidify/

sab , 4 months ago

I have used it for maybe a year and I never had any problems. Then again, I'm hardly a power user, so it makes sense that other people might have different experiences. :)

sab , 5 months ago

My understanding of the situation is that Ernest, the main developer behind Kbin, thinks of the current Kbin as a proof of concept, and he is doing profound rewriting of the codebase to better fit his vision of how it should be working.

Meanwhile, other people wanted to contribute to Kevin directly, developing a better product on top of what Ernest considers to be too shaky foundations. So he's not all that interested in pursuing that part of the development before he is happy with the core.

This also leads to a dynamic where he still has his own vision for the project and it goes through him, whereas other contributors want to make it their own more and develop something different.

It's hard to see how to make everyone happy here without forking. Hopefully both projects can still gain from each other in the future: Mbin can benefit from the rewritten codebase of Kbin, and Kbin can implement features from Mbin after seeing that they are good and work well. In either case, the continued development as separate projects is probably not all that bad.

sab , 9 months ago

While Gecko should absolutely be made available for iPhone, it's worth noting there's nothing wrong with WebKit per se. It's open source (forked from KHTML), servers as the base for among others the GNOME Web browser, and is not a monopoly player (outside of iPhones).

In some messed up way, Apple's WebKit insistance has helped competition in the browser market by making sure there's at least one popular platform where Blink is not dominating...

sab , 9 months ago

You can install your own launcher - I prefer the KISS launcher, which is great at getting out of your way and just do exactly what you want it to do as efficiently as possible.

sab , 10 months ago

It's such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it's too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn't a de facto browser monopoly.