I've been in the lengthy process of degoogling myself. Email is done, Calendars are done, drive is more or less done (but now at MS, so... yeah) - but a real sticking point is Google Photos.

I just love looking up places and faces and the occasional "This day one year ago" albums really lighten up my day.

Additionally, I am a bit of a hoarder, I never ever throw out photos, so I have right now 101 GB of pictures since 2012. This will be a pain to migrate so I only want to do it once.

I tried Immich, but could not make it work on my NUC with a very limited connection to the Internet and probably because of the vast number of images.

I came across ente.io, and it looks promising. While 4.99€ per Month for 200gb isn't exactly cheap, it feels still okay for hosting all of my visual memories.

But before committing, I would like to get some more feedback on this service, what is nice and what is not so nice and why you feel comfortable with entrusting them with your pictures.

The big one seems to be the inability to buy a mainstream device with a Linux distribution preinstalled. The few options I know of are niche devices or sometimes single models usually marketed as dev devices. It is also near impossible to even find something without any os installed. Even manufacturer like Framework doesn't offer Linux preinstalled laptops or even just fully assembled ones but without os.

Lacking third party software and hardware support. This is a very real problem and something that can make Linux unviable for specific use cases but also something that will never resolve without higher adoption in personal computing, my guess is at tenth of marketshare we would start seeing it being treated as a serious option. It is amazing that something like wine exists and how well it works but it still can't do everything and it is worse than native support. Similarly not many people are willing to even consider VMs or dual booting for specific workflows that need Windows.

Fragmentation of distros and ways to do things but with standard recommended beginner distros this seems to me more of a perception then a clear problem for most use cases for majority users who would theoretically migrate.

A fallacy where people value a thing perceived to be free less also seems to play a role along with public perception of Linux and its users. Slogans such as Linux is only free if you don't value your time which is ironically IMO more true of Windows these days with the cost usually part of the price of the device and not really perceived or considered by the average buyer.

This seems similar to the usual jokes about vegans and other ill formed perceptions. My guess is that it is the result of people plain ignoring things that have potentional to be uncomfortable along with those with niche opinions being more likely to have considered them and to have strong reasons to hold them along with wanting to at least tell people what they are.

I am just plain ignoring Mac here to be more concise and because I have zero experience with them.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

Kind of an awkward title, but I'm talking about settings for your phone, your OS, your coffee maker, etc.

With all the tech in our lives, and with so many devices and software having quite a robust set of options for how they work, it's easy for us to not even know that something is available. How many cool things are we missing out on if we're just accepting the defaults?

So, what's a setting, on anything you have or use regularly, that you recommend to others?

What makes it so worthwhile?

A "one hit wonder" is a musical artist or band known primarily for one breakout song. While some one-hit wonders stay that way because they put out very little music, others have had surprisingly full careers. (Did you know that Los del Río of "Macarena" fame have put out more than TWENTY albums over the course of SIX DECADES?)

Who is a one-hit wonder that you feel deserves to be known for more than just their "one hit?" What makes their other music worth exploring?

One question you can ask yourself before you invest in a company: why do I think the value will increase and provide a good return on my investment?

One reason is because the company is poised to grow at a rate above the overall market. These are called growth stocks.

Another reason is because the company is valued lower than it should be right now based upon a fundamental analysis of its fair market value. These are called value stocks.

Growth

With a growth stock, the current price may already be high due to strong demand, because people think the stock will be worth much more in the future. That is the risk you are taking, because if the stock does not outperform the overall market, you are now behind.

Having a good knowledge of the market in which a growth stock company operates is very helpful. There may be market disruptions (AI anyone?) that lead to outsized expected growth. Look at Nvidia’s 5 year chart. Tell me when everybody figured out Nvidia’s chips were amazing for AI processing.

Or Amazon during the pandemic. Look at this chart and tell me when everybody figured out that if you can’t go to the store to buy things, you are going to need to order it online.

These companies were sitting in a market that, for whatever reason, had amazing growth potential. The companies were able to use their core strengths to jump ahead of the overall economy in terms of value creation speed.

Value

As mentioned, value stocks are those that, after lots of research into the company and market itself, you think the price of the stock should be higher than it is right now. And you expect that stock price to rise as everybody else realizes all the amazing things you already realized.

The stock could have been beaten down by some newsworthy event, which caused everybody to panic sell. These stocks are trading nowhere near their high marks. However, if you think the stock will get back up to that high water mark, you may have found a good value stock.

Now, determining which stocks that have suddenly dropped in value are actually value stocks takes research. You don’t want to “catch a falling knife” by the blade and end up bloody. You want to be able to catch the handle! Does the company have enough cash to weather any storm? Are creditors piling up? Is the photograph printing market shrinking incredibly fast and the company is not making the right decisions? Back to that fundamental analysis of the company itself - if you look at the financials and are impressed with the leadership's team ability to navigate that quick drop in stock value, then you found a winner!

Warren Buffet seems to think United Health is a value stock. As you can see, the stock is about half of its initial value. Buffet is in this for the long term and is hoping that his research is correct in terms of UnitedHealth potentially doubling back up to its previous value faster than the market as a whole would double. Either that, or he hopes his clout is enough to make it a value stock in that more people will invest just because he did.

Holy cow done

That about wraps up the difference between these two types of stocks. Many stocks are a blend of the two, also. But seeing the extremes helps with understanding this way to differentiate stocks. Yes, there are more specifics that I didn't fully get into. And yes I am trying to be as approachable as possible with the topic. Hopefully this helped you!

Can you find an example of a potential value stock out in the world currently? How about a potential growth stock?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

A little background:
I’m an Irish man who lived in Scotland for a long time and developed a penchant for good Scottish whisky.

I’ve since moved back to Ireland and am on a quest to find good Irish whiskey.

I’ve been looking for double distilled, single pot (or single malt) and have found a couple of nice ones, though this is somewhat counter to the Irish market which favours triple distilled and has (imo) a narrower taste profile, especially when compared to scotch.

Currently drinking: Shortcross rye and barley

Its really pleasant and quite different to the traditional Jameson/bush. There’s a bit of depth to it, some spice from the rye and a lovely classic malty finish.

Any other whisky enjoyers out there ?

Well, my tomato season is basically over, and I have to say it was pretty disappointing. I've been gardening in the same place for 25ish years, and the microclimate has definitely changed. More heat, more humidity, more rain when we get it but less rain overall.

I've been growing my tomatoes in 20 gallon metal trashcans for various reasons, and that had been working great, but in the past two years the heat has wreaked havoc on them.

Last year was basically total failure. This year I had 1 sort of success-- Rosella Purple grew, gave me a few delicious fruits early, shut down all summer but stayed alive, and then gave me a couple more in the last few weeks. I grew Floridade on someone's recommendation for it's heat tolerance and it did produce all summer but I really didn't like anything about it. I grew a cherry tomato I thought was Black Cherry (which I really enjoy) but turned out to be some other, red cherry that was OK but nothing special.

I'm hoping there are people on this site who have some recommendations? I'm supposed to be US Zone 7, but it is really pushing zone 8. I'm looking for complex flavors, lowish acid and the ability to pollinate in 90-105 degrees.
I prefer beefsteak-style or at least low acid. I prefer "black" varieties for the depth of flavor. I prefer open-pollinated for the politics.

Or maybe you could share some tricks you've discovered to help tomatoes deal with the heat?

I'm hoping to get a head start on planning for next year.

Welcome to the 2025 NFL Season Weekly Discussion Thread! 🏈

Share your thoughts on Week 2 — wins, losses, fantasy fumbles, predictions, or anything else football-related.

NFL Week 2 (2025) Scores & Winners (All Games)

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

I'm buying a WiFi router for a new house. What would we get from using a router that works with OpenWRT, versus just going with Wirecutter's top pick?

Since we upgraded to fiber, I'm pretty happy with the network speeds at our current house. We don't have WiFi 6. I'm fairly unlikely to mess with advanced networking features as long as the networking just works.

The new house will also have fiber. The previous owners left us some kind of mesh networking devices, which I need to go look at tomorrow.

If we did go with OpenWRT, is there any particular recommended hardware?

I’m calling a “sore thumb” lyric a bad line (or lines) in an otherwise good, well-written song. Something that sticks out like, well, a sore thumb.

It’s something that’s bad enough to be noteworthy, potentially even bad enough to ruin the entire song if it’s really potent. It is, of course, also entirely a matter of personal taste and preference. One person’s “sore thumb” lyric might be another person’s highlight.

Of note: it’s not a sore thumb lyric if you don’t like the song or think it’s poorly written in the first place. The point of the topic isn’t to highlight bad songwriting but to highlight misfires in otherwise good songwriting.

What are some examples of these lines in songs you like?

Explain why they stick out like a sore thumb for you personally.

My party recently finished Descent into Avernus, which we played over Discord and FoundryVTT given how scattered across the country we all are. A regular party of the campaign was the DM poking and prodding players for "someone write up a recap of last session", helping keep us all in the loop, players who were absent in particular.

A few weeks ago it occurred to me that this could be automated, and Scribble was born.

Scribble is just a bash script wrapper that will:

1. Take a .zip of FLAC files from the Craig discord bot, recordings of each player present for the session
2. Use the tool whisperx to transcribe those audio files to text
3. Compile a transcript of the session and send it off to Gemini to come up with the recap
4. Parse the recap and send it along to Discord via webhook

After some trial and errors and tweaking, I've got it in a pretty good place, it's working very well for our campaign. So I docker-ized it and published it to share with the world anyone else who might get use from it. I'm not sure where else I could put the word out about this for anyone who might want to use it, so here it is. If you might find this useful, please, enjoy!

https://github.com/goose-ws/scribble

I recently moved to a place and unearthed an old Pixel 3. I updated it to the last official update (October 2021) but not sure what to do with it. It’s not worth any money (or at least I don’t think so) and I have a dedicated Android gaming device (Retroid Pocket 5).

What could I do with this device?

I was trying to think of a way to use it. Was thinking of setting it up facing my backyard to film squirrels/possums/birds, but it would likely fill the storage up in less than one day of continuous recording. I’m probably getting way ahead of myself but would there be a way to use it like an IP cam or Ring doorbell that records everything not on the device?

Any other unrelated ideas are welcome too. I just don’t want to throw it away since it’s functioning quite well.

Edit: my post has been deemed malformed, and I’d like to apologize and clarify to the community. The concept of a digital watermark signifying that the artist didn’t use any image generation, LLM, GPT, etc is the proposition. I do understand it’s tough to identify the term AI in use, since most of our tech uses some form of code to modify our work without our knowledge. More-so, I mean to identify work, art, or content that did not specifically use tools to create. Again apologies!

Post: I’m wondering the world of Tildenisian thoughts on this. Say I make a piece of art, no matter the content, and it’s completely of my own hand. Should there be some kind of digital watermark to signify that accomplishment? Maybe accomplishment isn’t the right word.

I must be looking for validation, because I’ve made art recently where folks have asked the question, “What tool did you use?” and immediately felt dread and disappointment.

Perhaps it’s not even feasible to signify since “AI” is eventually impossible to circumvent when sharing your art over these series of tubes. Oh well.

What do you fine folks think?

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Any interest in forming an investment club?

We would meet regularly (TBD), learn techniques from each other, pass on knowledge and experience, and present our individual analysis.

The chair would keep people on track in between meetings, encouraging the hard work of spending your own time researching duds in the hopes that one of us finds a potential gem for us all to enjoy.

Theoretically, we would want to research company stocks that are easy for all to buy, so I would be interested in a group based upon major US indices. However, this thread could potentially be used by others to form their own group buying from other markets.

Edit: alright, I'm sending direct messages to those who expressed interest in wanting to contribute. Those who expressed interest in learning will potentially be able to learn with however the group decides to communicate to Tildes.

If you are interested in participating, you can leave a comment here or send me a message for now. Thanks!

This isn’t really meant to be a hate post or “linux sucks” kind of thing, in fact I like Linux (EndeavourOS being my distro of choice). This post is more about the little things that nobody really talks about when comparing OS’s, but then you face them and they can be a dealbreaker or a pain in the neck.

This weekend I decided to try running CachyOS in my gaming desktop. For quick context, my desktop is dedicated to gaming, everything else I do on my laptop. The desktop is plugged to a 1080p 60hz monitor and a 4k 120hz TV (hz relevant for later), uses sunshine for streaming, and also Virtual Desktop for my meta quest.

So, I grab the USB and plug it into the PC. Turn it on and here comes the first issue: the background image appears and nothing else.

Well, my first suspicion due to a similar issue I had with ubuntu a decade ago, must be the Nvidia GPU causing issues. Without investigating further, I restarted the PC and used the legacy mode. The resolution was extremely low in my monitor, but it was manageable. Installed the thing and restarted.

Once the PC is back on, the login screen appears. I input the pass, enter and…. Exact same issue. Background image, no UI whatsoever.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time here, investigating the error. Checking the drivers, etc.

But long story short: the actual problem was that my monitor was the second screen, the TV was the primary. The desktop was outputting to both screens. The UI was on the TV.

I curse myself for not remembering that this may have been it, but in my defense:
1- the terminal commands that appear when turning on the OS appeared in my monitor
2- the legacy mode worked on my monitor
3- on windows, the OS is smart enough to figure out which screen is turned on, so I was used to it automatically outputting to the correct screen

Well, once I fixed that, here came the second (small) issue:
Scaling is broken.

Windows used to have this problem but nowadays, when you change screen Windows does a good job scaling things, despite some issues with some apps. At the very least, you won’t get blurry windows.

On KDE… Yeah. Blurry all around. I don’t have a habit of swapping screens mid session, so I could live with it.

Then came the third issue:
KDE is limited by the lower highest possible framerate in both screens. Meaning, on my TV, I was stuck with the 60hz because of my monitor

From what I found out, this is not exclusive to KDE and seems to be a problem with Nvidia. Regardless, for me it was a dealbreaker. In my case, Windows can use the respective framerate of each screen, while Linux can’t.

As I said, this is where I threw the towel and went back to windows. Which is really a pity because I really don’t like where Windows 11 is going, but it’s something I can live with as long it doesn’t get in the way between me and gaming.

Meanwhile Linux, because of these little things, introduced more issues than rewards for my use case, thus why I can’t jump to it on my desktop.

This college term I was signed up to a class on Digital Electronics, and it kicked my butt on the very first week because the learning materials were extremely obtuse; I actually dropped the course because I could not see myself being able to keep up no matter what I did, especially because my university does not allow late work. I'm going to have to go back to it next term in order to get my degree, so I'm looking for any learning resources anyone can recommend me to give me a head start.

Just to be clear, I'm primarily looking for good resources that covers basics like boolean algebra (which I already understand but am terrible at) and logic gates. I know we'll be using VHDL later, so those will also be appreciated.