Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like the game awards.2025, devices.smart and gift cards. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was out of the loop.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Welcome back to another edition of the good news thread. Where I challenge folks to find and post good news. Don't just link to a source of good news, pick one out and share it. Personal good news stories are also welcome!

Even if it's good in the face of bad, even if it's the sort of good that can also remind you that shit's fucked up. For this thread, we focus on the good and we don't let the fact there's still also bad in the world drag us down.

Hello, Tildes

Allow me to introduce myself.

I came over to Tildes fairly recently after Twitterriffic died and Apollo announced it would shut down.

As a relative youngster, I tend to mostly browse on mobile.

While I do appreciate Tildes' philosophy of having a simple website that works well on desktop and mobile, I've always preferred mobile apps. I'm a strong believer that a well-built native application will always provide a richer experience than a website.

But enough talking.. showing is way more fun - here's a lil' something I've been messing around with:

Introducing Surfboard for Tildes

The goal is simple: to be the best way to interact with Tildes on mobile.

Features

Surfboard is still extremely early, and is missing many features.

With that said, here is what it currently supports:

• Login to Tildes (supports 2FA)
• Browse topics
• Filters & sorting
• Browse comments
• Advanced rendering is still in early stages..
• Supports comment collapsing behavior from the web version
• Reply/vote/bookmark/ignore on topics, comments, & notifications (requires login)
• Search topics
• Global search
• Search within groups
• Option for in-line images
• Clean browsing interface
• In-line markdown preview when composing replies
• Share topics & comments
• Notifications
• View read & unread notifications
• Reply, vote, bookmark, mark as read...
• Customizable
• Toggle settings, set custom gesture actions, etc.
• Free, as in beer

The design draws some inspiration from Apollo for Reddit, an app that I loved & am very sad will be discontinued.

Try it yourself

I would love to get some feedback from other Tildes users on the app. If you are interested in trying it for yourself, you can get it here via TestFlight

Surfboard is built for iPhone, and requires iOS 16.0 or higher.

Inside the app is a 'roadmap' of sorts which is basically a list of things I know are missing, but if there's something you want that isn't listed there, I'm all ears.

Formatting is a little rough at the moment, although I made enormous improvements on the parsing & rendering there over the last day.

It should support just about anything you throw at it other than a <details>

(I'll get around to them, I swear..)

If you run into issues viewing a post/comment, you can easily open them in an in-app safari window from the menu.

As mentioned above, it's very early, but it's already becoming my favorite way to browse Tildes. I hope that others will enjoy it as well. Consider it my gift to the Tildes community.

Cheers !

Edit:

The best way to submit feature requests & bug reports is to add it to the issue tracker and/or leave a comment on this thread and I’ll get around to adding it myself.

Thanks !

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.

What are some things that you enjoy, are useful, or recommend. I'd ask that you include the price in your native currency to give a ballpark and save folks the trouble of following links that are out of their budget.

Hi Tilderinos!

First, apologies for the ramble. I'm based in the US. I got a letter from our state's child services department telling me that one of my relatives who is a minor has been removed from the custody of their parents. The letter asked me to complete a form to indicate the level of involvement I'm interested in having with said child's placement and/or support.

We don't know what the child's situation is. I'm the furthest-degree relative they search for - hopefully someone closer will step forward, but unfortunately, based on what I know of our part of the family, other relatives may not be in the best situation to take on a child. I'm hoping that this would be a temporary situation and that the ultimate goal is for the child to be reunited with their parent(s), but we have no information at all right now other than "child was removed and we're looking for support from relatives."

I'm going to call the contact info on the letter tomorrow, as we received it after business hours today. We've discussed our comfort levels with caring for a child and what type of situation we could say yes to and what we would have to say no to. We are very fortunate to be in a stable situation (in control of our own housing, dual incomes, qualified for leave programs, etc.). Our point of view currently is that this child is a child in need of support, and we are willing to provide what we can as long as it's not overtly detrimental to us or to them. I already filled out the form the best I could in a manner that corresponds with our comfort level, which is approximately that placement with us would be a possibility but not right this instant, and otherwise we're happy to correspond or communicate in whatever way benefits the child. (We suspect that the child is currently 1-3 hours from us, so frequent physical assistance on our part would be less doable unless the child were placed with us.)

Is this something you've been through before? What experiences have you had with child placement? (I'm actually not even really sure what questions to ask beyond this, but if you have been down this road and are comfortable sharing, please do!) We've discussed adopting or fostering before, but only in hypotheticals, as it's something we weren't planning to look into for 5-10 years (we're in our early 30's and are not having bio kids). Something externally-initiated like this was never on our radar. Any guidance, tips for questions to ask, or experiences you would like to share would be welcome!

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

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.

This is your place to share any and all thoughts on your TV watching for 2025.

What you talk about does NOT have to be limited to this year’s releases.

Feel free to share:

• Favorites
• Disappointments
• Surprises
• Memorable moments
• Self-reflections
• Anything else!

Let us know how your 2025 went.

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!

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

This is your place to share any and all thoughts on your movie viewing for 2025.

Movies you talk about do NOT have to be limited to this year’s releases.

Feel free to share:

• Favorites
• Disappointments
• Surprises
• Memorable moments
• Self-reflections
• Anything else!

Let us know how your movie watching for 2025 went.

My wife and I are potentially adopting a cat.

The cat is an adult, not sure the exact age (but will see if that’s known when we get it).

The long story short is, a close friend had 3 cats (I think strays as kittens but not 100% sure, I think they were acquired at different times - they do not appear to be related to each other), but due to the current political state of the US ended up moving abroad on a visa for this past year, and is planning on staying away for longer. Initially, the cats were staying with another friend but that has recently fallen through (I think they did not expect the 3 cats to be as much to handle as they are, they keep getting onto counters, eating food that is left out/left unattended, and scratching furniture, and at this point they’re getting fed up with them), and we were asked if we could take any of them

We have met the cats quite a few times, and they do seem friendly towards us.

My wife seems very allergic to one of them, but only mildly allergic or significantly less allergic to the other two.

We currently live in an apartment that does allow pets, but this would be the first time either of us have owned a cat, so unfortunately I think we could only take one of them.

I’m thinking we could probably use some advice on things to consider and best practices.

Preliminary research has said to get 1 or 2 litter boxes, feed at regular times, running water bowls are preferred, and get lidded trash cans. We plan on keeping the cat on the same food and litter type, at least initially. I know there are other things, and we will take the cat for a check-up and establish a vet. Due to my wife’s allergies, we are planning on keeping the cat out of the bedroom and running an air purifier there, and hopefully visiting an allergist before we adopt the cat if time permits.

But I’m wondering what others’ experiences have been with a cat in an apartment and what advice you may have? (How to keep them off of counters? Keep them from getting bored while at work or while working from home?)

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?

My oldest zygote is 5 years old. Up until now, I've been able to keep a good lid on what he's allowed to watch. We have Roku with a handful of streaming services, and he's comfortable navigating it himself to watch shows. I'm big on teaching agency and responsibility, and he's responded well to that: he watches shows we've okayed, asks about other shows he's interested in, and respects us if we tell him no. He's a smart kid and I'd like to keep him that way.

It's starting to get harder. Originally I could say on on grounds of age appropriateness, or I could point to things about a show that I outright didn't approve of for him. This is important to me because I want to teach him to think about these things and make good choices for himself in the future. So instead of telling him "No, you can't watch that", I want to tell him "No, you can't watch this because _________."

Now that he's getting older, he's asking more and more to watch things. And in some cases, I find myself saying "No. It's hard to explain why, but this isn't good." I hate saying that because I know that's not satisfying at his age, and it doesn't teach him anything about how to make good choices about what to watch.

YouTube is rife with examples. If my son is watching a branded show about Spiderman, I know what to expect. There are brand standards that I don't always agree with, but I know what the damage is, and the problems I have with those shows are problems I can talk through with him.

But when YouTube recommends videos that are low production quality videos of people in their living rooms playing with Spiderman figures, I don't want him watching it. Some of it feels Elsagate-adjacent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate) in that it seems harmless but you are just waiting for it to veer into weird or inappropriate territory. There's no trust between me and the content creator. Sometimes they're just harmlessly dumb. But in any case it's hard to explain why I don't want him to watch something that appears harmless to him.

Does anyone have similar experiences? Advice? Commiseration? Perspectives?

Hey there! I'm trying to repurpose a Raspberry Pi that's been collecting dust for a few years, and I'm a bit out of my depth with systems/networking, so I'm hoping for some guidance on what I did wrong (or what I could've done better).

The story is: I upgraded my PC and had an old SSD lying around, and I also had a Raspberry Pi that I never really had time to toy with. I figured I could combine both and make a small family “drive” where everyone can upload photos/videos/documents and keep them in one place at home.

Then I realized the Pi sits right behind the TV, next to the router since the Ethernet cable is short. So I thought: if it's already there, maybe it could also be a media player. The idea was: upload videos and store them on the SSD then play them on the TV via Kodi.

What’s going wrong is that Nextcloud uploads are painfully slow, even short videos take ages, and movies are basically impossible. On top of that, once files are there, Kodi playback is choppy/laggy.

I'm not sure what the real bottleneck is. Nextcloud was already "kinda slow" before Kodi. I don't know if this is Docker overhead/volume configuration, the Pi just being overloaded, Nextcloud background work (previews/scanning/etc.), or the SSD adapter to USB C limiting speeds.

If you have ideas, I'd really appreciate pointers on where to start diagnosing, and what the "sane" architecture is here (even if the answer is "don't do both on one Pi").

TL;DR: Tried to reuse an old SSD and a Raspberry Pi to make a family Nextcloud drive, then added Kodi because the Pi is behind the TV. Nextcloud uploads are extremely slow and Kodi playback is laggy. Not sure if it's Docker, Nextcloud tuning, USB/SSD adapter, or just too much for a small device. Looking for beginner-friendly troubleshooting steps and/or a better setup plan.