rsolva

As with anything in life, there is a balance.

I have rekindled my love for the small digital pocket cameras. I love using it when observing every day events unfolding. I try not to let the camera get in the way of my own interactions, like a good conversation when walking with friends or loved ones.

The small 14 year old Samsung W2000 I use is slim enough to easily slide into any pocket, and has a 5x optical zoom that allows me to take really nice pictures and videos from a comfortable distance, allowing life to unfold without the awareness of the presence of a camera.

The pocket camera has just enough megapixels (10) and supports RAW images and 1080p videos. It allows me to leave my smartphone at home, avoiding any distractions when out and about. If I need to be available I bring my old Nokia as well.

I would argue to rather leave your smartphone at home, not your camera :)

After researching this very topic earlier; SSI is the most pragmatic solution. Check out Caddy's Template Language (based on Go), it is quite capable and quite similar to building themes in Hugo. Just much more bare bones.

I have built several sites with pure HTML+CSS, sprinkled with some light SSI with Caddy, and it is rock solid and very performant!

Yeah, we got these red-bellied wodpeckers here, knocking on the metal top of the poles of the electricity lines. Since the main inlet is connect to a wall in our bed room, they wake us up early in the morning by their drumming, resonationg through the electricity lines from near and far.

It have spent hours, half aslep, pondering what that sound could be, it took quite a while before I found the origin!

In theory, I'm all for this. In practice, we have to take smaller steps towards this radical change and see how far we can actually get in real life.

In Norway, we have a total ban on advertising on certain products, like alcohol and tobacco. We also have strict laws regulating advertising towards children and political messaging on TV and radio.

There is only one problem; these laws where made before the digital age, so they have been sidelined. Political parties buy ads on Facebook and Insta like there is no tomorrow and children are constantly exposed to ads on social media. Only the ban on alcohol and tobacco is somewhat successful.

The right next move would be to ban peronalized ads (ie tracking of personal data). This is the one factor that has made the advertising industry (with Google and Meta at the top) go completely of the rails.

Other phones with Briar installed can carry your (encrypted) messages, as in a game of whisper. This works best if enough people between you and the recipient had Briar installed ... but most people don't.

But I see how this feature could be very helpful if a state shuts down internet connectivity or during war or a natural catastrophe. The nifty thing is that the app can be shared from one device to another, so you are not dependent on having the app in advance of an emergency.

Ideally, everyone should have this installed as an insurance :)

I found deleting all cookies upon exit to be really nice, in combination with a whitelist with some often used and trusted sites. The address/search bar is much more responsive and useful! I also adapted the practice of bookmarking anything and everything that I might want to find back later, throwing everything in one folder – only adding a few top-of-the head tags. It has become my second brain, and has made it super easy to fetch back stuff that I only vaguely remember.

Cleaning out all my browser history after every exit really has changed my relationship with the address bar.

Another way of looking at this method is as an antidote to ending up with hundreds of open tabs – I just bookmark it and close it, knowing I'll find it back later when I actually need it :)

Definitely more user friendly, and I love using Quadlets! For people using Flatpaks (Linux), check out the app 'Pods' as a lightweight alternative to Podman Desktop. It is still a young project, but is already a very useful way of managing your containers and pods.

As a side note, it is so _refreshing_ to observe the native apps popping up for Linux lately, it feels like a turning point away from the Electron-everything trend. Apps are small, starts immediately and is well integrated with the rest of the system, both functionally and visually. A few other examples of native apps; Cartero, Decibels, GitFourchette, Wike – to name a few that I'm using.

He may use Signal, but he does not want people on X to advertise their presence on any competing platforms. It is a childish and protectionist policy, and in no way align with his Free Speech® claims.

It was the same when URLs to Mastodon/Fediverse instances was banned on X, in an attempt to hamper the network effect for those who migrated. Meta does the same with Pixelfed these days, to hamper migration away from Instagram.

Elon and Mark are all for competition and free markets, but as soon as alternatives that can't be bought and controlled pops up, they outright ban any mention of it on their platforms.

https://lokalhistoriewiki.no/ – Norwegian local history wiki

Using federated forum solutions would at least partly solve the chiken/egg problem. Forum software like NodeBB and reddit/HN-type variants like Lemmy, opens the possibility of having a topic based communiy, while still being open for interactions from the entirety of the Fediverse.

This already works well for Mastodon and Pixelfed; I follow accounts on mastodon.art from my Pixelfed account.

The reach of folks at the art focused Mastodon instance is not limited to their community. The same is possible for reddit and forum like communities!

Look at it like this; every forum becomes a potential sub-forum in the global network.

I recently discovered NodeBB while looking for Discourse alternatives, and it turns out they just released support for federation (ActivityPub)!

What does federation mean in this context? If you set up a NodeBB forum, you can interact with other thread based and federated websites, like Lemmy ... or just another NodeBB forum.

Really cool stuff!

Wow, this is fantastic! Have to spin up a NodeBB forum soon to check it out.

My elderly family members beg to differ ;)

So far, my experience with people above 60 is that they quickly understand how to find and navigate between the apps they use every day. The ones coming from Windows adapt suprisingly fast, and are very pleased that the fullscreen popups and forced updates are gone. Shortly before I moved them over to Fedora, they started developing a fear of using the computer because they never knew when it would 'lock them out' because the screen was filled with a fullscreen Office365 ad that had no obvious exit button.

I have used OnlyOffice for my collaborative writing needs the last year, and it has been great. They offer a free hosted version, everything is open source and it can be self-hosted.

I can invite people in with SSO so they do not need to make yet another account.

Check out ente.io, they offer both hosted and self-hosted.

It is much better today, but still not perfect. For relatively simple word processing tasks, it is not a problem anymore.

And saving as a pdf is a fine compromise when the receiver doesn't have a need to edit the document.

A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives. I have helped alot of people try LibreOffice, which offers everything they need from their office suit. Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system.

GNOME? It is super simple. I have used Fedora/GNOME on my elderly family members laptops for many years now, and they just get it. Even the ones who came from Windows 10. The hours I spend on support has dropped significantly. Windows is such a hassel, and its desktop design philosophy is just not that great for casual users.

With "fully federates", do you mean that it can share forum categories and/or posts with other NodeBB servers?

I have had Bonfire [0] on my check-later list for a while, they seem to aim for a more generic use of the AP protocol. They also offer their services [1] to make custom implementations on top of their toolkit. Seems promising!

[0] https://bonfirenetworks.org/

[1] https://bonfirenetworks.org/mosaic/

Mastodons share of the AP network fell to ~70% the last few days alone, due to a huge influx of users to Pixelfed (fleeing from Instagram). I myself run my own GoToSocial server at home, so I am doing my part to increase the diversity of AP implementations :)

I have also been thinking in the lines of a generic "all-in-one" client. The only reason this is not common yet, is old habits from decades of captivity in silos. I believe we will see such clients developed in the next few years.

ActivityPub is today what Paul thought he saw in Twitter in 2009. Except AP it is not owned by a private company, which in hindsight, seems like a critical factor if a protocol should be able to survive and thrive for decades.

Elon censored me for mentioning my Mastodon handle on Twitter. Me and anyone else who did the same.

I use WireGuard to access all in-home stuff as well, but there is one missing feature and one bug with the official WireGuard app for android that is inconvenient:

- Missing feature; do not connect when on certain SSIDs. - Bug: When the WG connection is active and I put my phone in Flightmode (which I do every night), it drains the battery from full to almost empty during the night.

Many commenters argue that free speech is being infringed upon, but isn't this really about protecting user data and preventing an adversarial and autocratic foreign power from influencing U.S. citizens? Sure, it is hypocritical to not protect the same user from U.S. companies harvesting their data, but you get my point.

Shutting down TikTok in the U.S. doesn't prevent people from expressing their opinions. There are countless other ways to share and publish thoughts freely.

None of these platforms, like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and X, are public squares where citizens have any of these rights. They are privately owned and regulated by unending terms of service agreements, with users often moderated or banned for minor infractions by company algorithms. Free speech has never truly existed in these spaces, nor is it likely to ever do so.

The photo organizing software Ente [0] can do this, and is packaged into a really neat product. I have not gotten around to try the self hosted version yet, but it is on my list!

[0] https://ente.io/ml

Huh, this looks ... really, really good?

> there could be a captcha-like solution that will benefit from the limited location. For instance: Select only images that are of this location. Local users will know, bots will struggle.

Hah, that is a fun idea! But it could be a challenge to implement, unless you have a trusted person in that location selecting an image or some other local funfact – and at that point you might as well implement a graph of trust, spreading out from the first user in that area. Kind of like an invite system, where everyone vouches for the next one they invite in.

Come to think of it, having a limiting factor that an invite system imposes, might make the whole concept more attractive and a bit mystical, as it takes some effort to access the network.

I can see a lot of challenges implementing this though, but it is fun to explore different new directions this could take!

I have had something similar in mind for a while, but nothing so fleshed out as you have here!

One question; how would you implement identity? I can imagine spam and unwanted content becoming a problem, so maybe a reputation system or network of trust mechanism would be needed?

Heard your project mentioned recently on the localfirst.fm podcast, and that you use the Jazz framework. Interesting stuff!