Krita (a digital painting and Photoshop alternative). I’ve been enjoying using it for probably 10 years now, and it’s only continued to steadily improve. Fantastic program.

Linuxdaw.org, an awesome database of VSTs (virtual instruments) and effects that natively support Linux. It’s a great resource for musicians trying to escape the enshittification and spying of Windows.

GNU Taler would be a good global solution. It’s an anonymous (for the buyer) digital cash. Do far its been adopted by some swiss banks.

There’s more info on it over at !money@slrpnk.net

Yeah, if they’d gone with a decentralized model, it’d be able to scale up without the extreme operating costs (Lemmy/piefed is a good example of that in practice).

Currently our best decentralized/federated instant messengers are XMPP and Deltachat, which cost peanuts to host.

Piefed.social is defederated with Hexbear and lemmygrad, so you aren’t exposed to their content or users. Your instance is federated with .ml though.

90% of youtube thumbnails have a face in them, usually of an exaggerated emotion, and that goes for both male and female youtubers. Many youtubers have confirmed time and time again that the algorithm favors faces by a pretty wide margin, and thus most play that game.

I’m not a fan of it, I wish they didn’t or the algorithm was changed to not favor it, but I understand why they do it. Though I don’t think it’s particularly gendered as your image claims.

The protests are good ways of meeting like-minded people in your community to form connections, as well as spreading awareness of local mutual aid groups so more can join or form ICE resistance groups who can join an encrypted chat to coordinate, alert neighbors, and talk strategy. It also is a good place for unions or union members to encourage others to unionize their workplaces, which can also ultimately work toward a national general strike, which is our most tangible and powerful collective action.

The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor, allowing us to directly demand real changes (such as ending the war in Iran, ceasing support for the genocide of Palestine, and Abolishing ICE).

The General Strike was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.

There are some concrete steps all of us can take toward enacting that hard-core general strike to make it more viable and bearable for us all. (the titles below expand if you click them).

I’d also highly recommend Full Spectrum Resistance to anyone who wants further info on how to resist (audiobook version here).

20 years ago Linux couldn’t play 95% of Windows games seamlessly without tinkering, couldn’t easily produce music without a lot of tinkering and few DAWs, couldn’t effectively video edit (Kdenlive is good now, and Davimci Resolve now supports Linux), and it had spotty WiFi card support.

All of those are now no longer a problem, and make transitioning to it far easier for a much wider swath of people.

Ah, true. That I wouldn’t mind though, those are handy.

The Slate Truck has no infotainment system at all, it’s just a bare dashboard with buttons.

I wrote my personal reasons for preferring resistive over gas, despite the need to learn how to use it, which I prefer due to my own perceived negatives of gas. I actually live in a house with a gas stove right now, and I’m seriously considering having the kitchen wired for 240v someday just so I can install a resistive stove, since most of the time I use a portable induction cooktop in preference to using the gas stove. I also didn’t even get into the environmental aspect of gas stoves, which is another reason I don’t like to use them.

Calling that disingenuous and cope is… Certainly an interesting viewpoint. It would be similar to suggesting that anyone who prefers or speaks of the merits of bicycles over tricycles is disingenuous and coping due to bicycles requiring a learning period to effectively ride them, where as tricycles have no learning period (despite coming with their own advantages and disadvantages).

Ah, in that case that sounds like a bug, since Movim should fully support group audio and video calls on Firefox.

If you can, it’d be extremely helpful to report that on the movim github, where the developer can help get to the bottom of it and prevent that from happening to anyone else in the future :)

Putting down new cables is extremely expensive, especially if they need to go underground.

However it would be viable for a community to construct an ISP that uses a Wi-Fi mesh network, as demonstrated here and here.

The GPL would only let them close source their own code, but to close source any code that was contributed by others, they would need to explicitly ask permission from each and every user that added to the codebase, which generally isn’t feasible.

That prevents the original creators from being able to benefit from free and rapid community development and then close sourcing it all later. To effectively close source the app, they would need to re-implement every contribution themselves.

They would only be able to do what you describe with the GPL if they also required every contributor to sign a CLA which explicitly gives up ownership of the contribution to the project owners.

The MIT license allows anyone (including the original creators) to close source the app without needing permission from anyone.

Matrix has a lot of problems, some of them inherent to its design, including spreading metadata of encrypted messages to any server that participates in a chat room (this metadata includes the time the message was sent, size, sender and recipients of messages).

I’m not personally a fan of it, despite it being federated.

Not personally a fan of it since it’s not federated (and has no plans to implement federation) meaning its one centralized point of failure and one centralized point for governments to subpoena. It has no plans to implement any form of encryption (Movim has solid encryption, and Fluxer plans to implement encrypted DMs in the future).

Also very concerning to me is that it uses the MIT license, which allows for the company to do a rug-pull and close-source the code in the future so they can enshittify it. Only the GPL license ensures that it remains open-source and in the community’s hands forever.

I found with Movim that you need to ensure that both you and the other person have each other added as contacts (and both parties each accepted those contact requests) for the call button to show up, just being in a chat with each other isn’t enough (and that is quite painful UX, since there’s no information that explains that that must be done).

I think it won’t show a call button if it doesn’t detect a microphone either.

Earlier electric ranges, the ones with exposed coils, were legitimately inferior. They’re harder to do much other than boil water on because of how slow they are to heat and cool. They’re still seen as downmarket landlord specials today. Ceramic cooktop electrics were trendy for awhile.

Technology Connections made a great video that touched on resistive stoves which showed how to overcome their slower thermal responsiveness, which I’ve used for most of my life to great effect. Once you know the trick of how to use them, they’re quite easy to cook almost anything on.

For most of my life I’d cooked on a resistive coil-top stove, and only in the last few years was I able to use a gas, and even more recently, induction stovetop.

Induction is far and away my favorite, but between gas and resistive, I don’t really find gas preferable to resistive. The only real advantage it has is quick heat control, but that can be overcome pretty easily on resistive stoves by either anticipating the slower heating/cooling curve, or simply lifting the pan or moving it to an inactive burner until the active one cools down to the desired temp.

I virtually always use cast iron cookware, which makes gas’s ability to make quick temp changes less of a noticeable advantage. More noticeable to me was the disadvantage of the handles on my cookware getting super hot very quickly with gas due to how much heat escapes around the sides, and the inability to place flammable things over a pot or pan to prevent splatter (like a paper plate).

I also really disliked the idea of potentially forgetting a burner being left on, but with the flame out. That only happened to me once, but it was quite scary to walk into a living room smelling strongly of gas. And in a kitchen without outside ventilation above the stove, the pollutants from burning gas were noticeable, especially if the oven was on.

On my personal scale, I’d rate gas stoves at the bottom despite their slightly advantageous heat responsiveness, with resistive in the middle, and induction the best of both worlds.

Ivanpah Solar Power Facility and the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project.

Looks like the first is still producing power, but the electricity being generated ended up being much costlier than photovoltaic panels (since they didn’t anticipate they would become so cheap back when it was being constructed) and the people running it want to shut it down. And the latter was shut down after the company went bankrupt twice.