EDIT: As one user pointed out, this is not about Apple Music the streaming platform, this is about basically itunes but itunes no longer technically exists as an application.

So a little background: my father just died and a big part of his life was listening to music, for most of his life he's been building themed compilations of songs he liked using whatever medium was available, magnetic reel tapes in the '60s and '70s, then cassette tapes, then CDs, and of course playlists for the last 20 or so years. Now my mother and I would like to back up and save a lot of that work as those compilations have a lot of sentimental value and are pretty unique. There's lots of old obscure rhythm and blues and soul songs that you aren't really going to come across anywhere else. However, it's pretty much all locked into Apple Music, which isn't really a problem in the here and now, because we all have tended to use macs since my mother adopted them in the '80s or '90s. However, we don't really want that data just locked into a private ecosystem that has been getting more and more restricted and where we have less and less control.

So I'm looking for a way to keep those playlists intact and export them out of Apple Music in a playable format and into a less locked in system to then back them up. Most of the music should be DRM free as a lot of it would have been taken off of CDs probably as MP3 files, though a lot of that would've happened 15+ years ago.

Does anyone have any ideas about the best way to do that? I seem to be able to manually export each one into a .txt file but of course it's not really playable sound files. My tech skills are pretty limited, I have about an average amount of knowledge or even slightly more for someone my age (30s) who grew up around computers and the internet but I grew up after it necessary to have basic coding skills to use computers so my experience doing even basic coding or running scripts is pretty much nil. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Edit: it’s version 1.0.6.10

Does Tildes have any way for me to logout of a device I'm not currently using?

• I don't see any session management or "logout of all devices" in the settings.
• Would resetting my password invalidate all active sessions?
• Do I need to email someone?

I have resubscribed to Netflix after cancelling about 6 months ago and I think there's been a change to the GUI which I really don't care for. I could be wrong but didn't the TV app use to work in the following way: after selecting a movie or television show, the first click would open a menu that would then allow further options including playing the movie or an episode of the TV show? I miss this. Currently, they're is one option at the to of my screen when I open the app that has a selectable 'More Info' option but everything else does not and the media just starts playing immediately upon selection.

I miss the 'menu on first click' behavior. Is there a way to get back to that?

Thanks.

TL;DR: NASA's public Planetary Data System is at risk of being shut down. Anyone have any ideas for backing it up?

Hi everyone,

Bit of a long-shot here, but I wanted to try on high-quality tildes before jumping back into the cesspool of reddit. I'm posting it in ~science rather than ~space as I figure interest in backing up public data is broader than just the space community.

I work regularly with NASA's Planetary Data System, or PDS. It's a massive (~3.5petabytes!!) archive of off-world scientific data (largely but not all imaging data). PDS is integral for scientific research - public and private - around the world, and is maintained, for free, by NASA (with support of a number of Academic institutions).

The current state of affairs for NASA is grim:

• NASA Lays Off ISS Workers at Marshall Space Flight Center
• More layoffs at JPL
• NASA is sinking its flagship science center during the government shutdown — and may be breaking the law in the process, critics say

And as a result, I (and many of my industry friends) have become increasingly concerned that PDS will be taken down as NASA is increasingly torn down for spare parts and irreparably damaged. This administration seems bent on destroying all forms of recording-keeping and public science, so who knows how long PDS will be kept up. Once it's down, it'll be a nightmare to try and collect it all again from various sources. I suspect we'll permanently lose decades worth of data - PDS includes information going all the way back to the Apollo missions!

As such, we've been pushing to back-up as much of PDS as we can, but have absolutely no hope of downloading it all within the next year or two, nevermind in a few months if the current cuts impact us soon.

If you or someone you know would be interested in helping figure out how we can back-up PDS before it's too late, please let me know here or in a DM. I've already tried reaching out to the Internet Archive, but did not hear anything back from them.

Edit: to clarify, the larger problem is download speeds - we've topped out at 20mb/s with 8 connections.

Hello smart ~comp people! I have a very basic, layman question. The kind of question I'm scared to make on Reddit and gettting flamed. Tildes is usually more patient ;)

Suppose that I get get a bunch of "best of" lists for several videogames. Like "the best RPGs on the Nintendo DS" for example. The lists have varying lenghts. Is there an easy way for me to combine those lists into one that doesn't require (really) learning to program?

I can follow instructions! Thanks!

Hi All,
It's been coincidentally EXACTLY 1 year since my previous post about Gametje. I've been busy creating some new games and re-designing all the main pages with the help of a UI/UX designer. I have posted a few updates in the weekly What programming/technical projects have you been working on? threads but I thought this milestone deserved its own post. I published the new site earlier this week and also migrated to a new backend server. Here's a refresher of what it is for those that may have missed my previous post a year ago. I also recently started working on it full-time last month after not really working on it much from January-June this year. You can read more in my recent blog post.

What is it?

It's a set of online games that can be played in person with a central screen (like a TV) or remotely via video chat. It's also available directly in Discord as an embedded activity. It is playable in 9 languages and doesn’t require any downloads. Most games revolve around creativity in some form. None of the games require fast reflexes and can be played by just about anyone.

Where can I try it?

https://gametje.com and directly on Discord

You can use the "quick play" option to launch directly into the game as a guest.

What's different from last year?

There are 2 new games (Sync Think and Hide & Peek) and the main pages have been redesigned. I also implemented a game room concept which allows you to bounce between games without having to recreate it each time. I also integrated with Discord, which means you can play directly in their interface and also use Discord as an Identity Provider when logging in. The games themselves need a bit more polish (especially the two new ones) but overall they should work.

What am I looking for?

I'm trying to gather some feedback about the games and the overall concept. Are the games fun? Is this something you'd try with your family? What could be improved? Is the site clear about what you can/should do? Should I add some gameplay videos to give you a quicker feel for the games?

I'm also open to game ideas, I have a few in the backlog already but need to focus more on the business side at the moment. Any advice on the games/marketing etc would be highly appreciated.

Side note: I'm probably going to rename the whole site soon since the name Gametje doesn't exactly roll off the tongue and has caused some debate with Dutch speakers. The branding for the new name isn't quite ready. I am considering calling it GameBuffet as my avatars are all food related and its more of a "all you can play" offering for any games added to the platform.

Thanks for reading.

Following this guide (linuxtechi) and got Mint Cinnamon 22.2 (Zara) - yes the iso is verified, created bootable USB with Etcher, and after the screen where I input user details and password, well along the install process, got a fatal error (screenshot) :
Unable to install GRUB in /dev/sda
Executing 'grub-install/dev/sda' failed
This is a fatal error
Here is a screenshot of the GParted, fdisk, df, lsblk and what re-running the install now looks like.

Restarting (after pulling out USB) , instead of going to Windows 10, goes to a black screen that says

This is not a bootable disk. Please insert a bootable floppy and press any key to try again ...
Turn it off, back on with USB, at least I can still boot from there into USB-space mint for now.

I'm guessing this has something to do with some peculiar hardware/BIOS settings than the fault of Mint. Worth mentioning that this is a refurbished 2013 HP box (order excerpt) , with a windows 10 digital key license, and that upon every fresh boot up (first time ever to now) it shows a black-background screen that says

The preboot authentication application cannot be found.
Press any key to attempt boot without authenticating.
so it's very possible something is bork'd from the get go or else it has some very unorthodox settings to begin with.

Can confirm running Mint off the USB is fine. The screencaps are sent from Firefox within, and I'm super happy with how clean everything is. Just not sure what to do now. If it's complicated, I can try sending the box back for refund and try again with another brand new box. But now I'm shy about trying dual boot on my regular desktop.

Questions after looking around for help:

1. am I booting from UEFI or Legacy? I don't know -- how do I check ?
2. Fatal error installation hard stop: is there a way to access a log of what happened ?
3. How do I boot back into Windows 10 for now ? use GParted to delete all the "new" partitions and try booting again?

Edit: gave up . It's now a Mint box. Goodbye Windows you can kiss my dust

Background: I started daily driving Linux (specifically Mint) several months ago and for the most part it's been great. Some weird hiccups occasionally but nothing I can't handle/deal with. When doing my research to set the system up for the first time, I decided to go with 30GB for the / partition and ~220GB for the /home partition (the other half of the drive is for Windows 11 and the various essential tiny partitions). For a while this seemed to be fine, but lately I've been starting to get warnings when performing software updates via the Update Manager that the / partition is running out of space. I think it peaked at maybe 90-95% full a few weeks ago, at which point I started doing some research and cleaning up a bit (apt autoremove, deleting old logs and kernels, etc). I was able to claw back ~4GB and kick the can down the road, but now the warnings have returned and I'd like to handle this properly. I'm working from the assumption that I simply made the / partition too small and intend to double it by giving it some of the Windows space.

My question: How do I know if this is expected or if I've been doing something wrong? Is 30GB indeed too small on modern Mint, or should that have been enough? I know it partially depends on what all I actually do with the computer, but I really don't have very many applications installed (aside from defaults of course) and only four of them are Flatpaks, which I read tend to be larger. If it helps, the Disk Usage Analyzer reports that within /, /usr is taking up 13.2GB (55%), /var accounts for 9.1GB (38%), /opt is 1GB (4%), and everything else is <1% each.

Thanks in advance!

Hey y’all,

YouTube recently decided to put a feature into the app which zooms in to fill the screen more and reduce the dark space. There’s apparently settings for the android app, but I can’t seem to find any way to disable if for iOS. Does anyone have any suggestions? It’s incredibly annoying and distracting when watching videos.

Edit: I've made some progress if you want to read the edits at the end.

Last year I started slowly planning out a home server setup with help from Tildes. I've gotten a few things up and running, but have been bouncing off a variety of walls trying to get to the next step.

The first goal was-
"Ok i've got Cosmos up and running for local access using self signed certs. I'd like to get it up and running using lets encrypt and a domain so I can eventually start giving a few family and friends proper logins and external access". Of note, ideally,

This led to a second goal of-
"Gosh it sure would be nice if I didn't have to be sitting at the physical server to do testing and could instead be at another computer in my house. I should probably configure ssh locally (working) and get it to forward windows so I can work in other rooms (not working...)"

"The stack":

Server - MS01 running LTS Ubuntu with Cosmos Cloud installed (well it was, but is currently not)

Router - Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro (of note i've done some minimal guided config of this to try and harden it at a basic level so my cameras and IoT devices are better isolated. Not fully default, but the server is, for now, in the same network/vlan as the rest of my main computers so don't think this should matter.)

Clients - All local windows 10/11 machines for now, although in the off off chance it matters, i'm running nushell in the terminal

Domain Provider - Cloudflare

The SSH Problems:

I have a friend who's set SSH up for themselves with their home server, however they haven't had time to come over and troubleshoot. My rough understanding is "setup VcXsrv, change some configs, then it just works.". Windows these days has ssh built in, and I can SSH to the machine just fine with my key.

ssh -X...less so. I've read some docs, followed some guides, tried copilot, and it all leads to "yeah should work" and it just doesn't. I have configured a ssh config on both machines to allow X11 forwarding, i've started the XLaunch making sure I disable access control, made sure my unbuntu login isn't on wayland and so on. So far, no dice.

If someone has an end to end guide they trust to link, i'll gladly read and start from scratch. I've been cobbling together so many sources at this point i'm very lost. Lots of things jump quickly to "well just use WSL", which yeah ok i probably should test that next, but I was hoping I wouldn't need to (and am unclear if that'll even help).

The HTTPS/Domain Problems:

So..cosmos cloud.

I like the theory behind this software in that it helps enforce best practices so you don't blow your own head off when you screw something up. Maybe it's not the absolute best starting place, but getting it running without a domain was trivial, and more importantly, shockingly well documented. Not perfect, but for what I understand is mostly a one man show it's better than a lot of professional grade stuff i've dealt with.

And so I figured it'd be easy to just do the setup from scratch but choose https and point to my domain. There's been two attempts here, no DNS challenge and DNS challenge

No DNS Challenge Method

Per their docs it seemed easy enough. I'd never touched a DNS screen before but I configured an A record pointing at my WAN IP (eventually...) and disabled the cloudflare proxy.

Well going to that domain took me to my router login. Hmm. After screwing around with port forwarding and router DNS records I never got it to work and felt like I was playing with fire, so undid everything I'd done and decided I'd try the DNS challenge. Of note I could still access the cosmos cloud page from http directly to the IP, where it confirmed it failed to get the TLS cert, but https to the domain wasn't having it.

DNS Challenge Method

This seemed like I was close, and then nothing. I have no idea if i need to do internal routing on the router for this, it just sorta says "Do the DNS challenge, here's a form, you don't need to fill out all of it" which uh...ok.

I filled out what I think I needed to after setting up a token(not an API key) in cloudflare. I'm pretty certain I got that correct as I saw text files with keys created on cloudflare's DNS page and had I screwed that I'm guessing it couldn't have.

However from what I can tell, that's as far as it got. The files nuked themselves 2 minutes later when the TTL expired, and going to the domain locally gave me the cloudflare "our shit's fine, the server is timing out" page. From what I could tell diving into logs, cosmos had the same error, and I couldn't hit cosmos at all, even using the IP and http.

I do however wonder if maybe it did work BUT since I undid the router DNS record before trying this maybe that killed it? dunno.

Any ideas?

That's basically my situation. Figured i'd throw it here and see if anyone has some guidance or troubleshooting they'd recommend. Aforementioned friend who's done some of this before should be free one of these weekends and can probably help, and I haven't tried again since the second attempt. I've thrown some of the questions i've had on the discord and gotten minimal response(although I'm kinda using the thread as a rubber ducking spot as well). Next attempt is probably just DNS challenge again after more research on it and seeing if that works if I put back on the router DNS record, but i feel like logically that shouldn't work.

Oh also if anyone has some general recommended reading so that I can really understand what the hell it is I'm doing I'd love that. There's a ton of networking books/articles/etc, and in general I'd like to learn more about the subject, but I'm curious if there's a go to for people who are techy and trying to dip their toe in all of it the same way I am and setting up a proper home network and server.

Edit:
So after lots of testing, doc reading, and help from the cosmos discord I:

1. Got the DNS challenge to work according to the cosmos logs.
2. narrowed down that the main issue was my UDM pro router policies. Needed a firewall rule and a port forward, and had only done one of those at a time in my various attempts and not realized they were really different.

Now once that was all working and I could hit the site i was getting "likely a false cert" errors, but since i've got all the pieces I'm probably going to try another clean install later and see what we get. Hurrah for troubleshooting, good docs, rubber ducking, and helpful humans.

Edit 2:

Eventually required:

1. Port forward rule in UDM pro
2. Firewall rule in UDM pro
3. Static IP and DNS entry in UDM pro.

One I’d done those things started working. Killed it after that as now I need to think about architecture

I joined their waitlist last month and still didn't get an invite, now they even have mobile apps but still invite-only... so any chance I can get an invite code from someone here 👉👈. I just want to try and see what it's like

Edit: I didn't expect so many comments, I hope everyone gets an invite! but I just want to say, it seems it doesn't work the same way as tildes and from what I can tell, you need to be a "Groundbreaker" to create invites and only 2 invites can be created? (would appreciate if someone can clarify that in the comments) and I'm personally not able to create invites from my account unfortunately, otherwise I would've sent an invite to everyone who commented. :(

I have a lot of stuff filtered such as tech and US politics. But I’ve noticed on several occasions that posts I see when I’m not logged in are inaccessible to me when I log in, even when I click the button to disable filters temporarily.

One example is this post about Just Buy Nothing https://tildes.net/~health.mental/1pke/just_buy_nothing_a_fake_online_store_to_combat_shopping_addiction

I can see it when I’m logged out, but the only way to access it is to copy the link while logged out and then paste in when logged in.

I’m happy for the devs to look at my account settings etc if it helps!