I don't have kids, but I'm wondering about success stories parents have had with raising theirs in this sometimes scary world. Online, we hear about brainrot and inappropriate Youtube videos, and social media horror stories, and some of that could be massively overblown, I have no idea

So to flip that around, what are some good ways people have found comfortable having their kids spend their time?

tl;dr: disconnect from your VPN (or allow LAN connections)

I recently got an iPhone 17 and was being driven mad because, at first, CarPlay worked flawlessly on my 2019 Honda Fit (EX). However, next time I plugged in CarPlay refused to open. The phone was charging, the icon on the infotainment showed CarPlay, but it would hang for ~10s and close with a "no devices found, check cable, etc.". Android Auto worked for years without hiccups.

Nothing changed after a factory reset, reboot, etc. of the infotainment as many recommended.

I saw an offhand comment with how a VPN can cause problems. I'm connected to one 24/7 and I'm sure it worked earlier when I didn't set it up yet. I disconnected from the VPN and CarPlay immediately worked. The VPN I use has a "Allow LAN connections" setting which made disconnecting from the VPN unnecessary.

Wanted to throw this out there for people troubleshooting in the future. Not sure if this is specific to Honda or Apple, but my money is on how Apple devices do networking.

So I have a car that's ~10 years old and I like to listen to music as I drive. I was relying on the CD player, but it only works intermittently these days, so I'm looking into alternatives.

I'm not big on connecting my phone via Bluetooth for security reasons, battery life concerns, and poor connection for streaming. I've got radio of course, but it's slim pickings where I live.

I starting looking into digital audio players. They sound ideal - compact, big offline library, physical controls - so I was hoping someone on Tildes can recommend one to me. Alternatively, if you've another solution, I'd love to hear it.

I have recently found myself wanting to learn to draw. I have very minimal visual arts skills, and feel much more comfortable with a musical instrument than a sketchbook. I would like to change that, not to become some exceptional artist or anything, but because I like the idea of being able to just sketch and draw and doodle in my spare time.

I have an iPad, Apple Pencil, and ProCreate, but I don't really know where to begin. I would be most likely learning to use ProCreate at the same time as learning to draw, although I don't know if that's a bad idea or not.

Are there books, online courses, YouTube videos that you would recommend for a complete beginner?

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

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?

Inspired by some conversations I had over Discord where I realized that a lot of memes and videos from the early days of the Internet which were common knowledge are now just totally unknown. So, let's have a proper Throwback Thursday and reminisce over purer times.

Hello I hope you all have a good [insert time of Day] !!!

Maybe a bit of background about me:
(25 Age idk if that is relevant, but it could be interesting how other age groups see that)
I really like unique stuff. If it's design or clothes or web design or whatever you might think of. I have been working privately on my own website, and I built it almost from scratch. I really like unique-looking websites, and I also like the 2000s era style of design (not only limited to web-design).

I have been noticing a lot of websites that they look more and more the same. The same structure, design, similar colors, similar pictures etc, etc...

And I think this is just very boring and it just feels like more and more the web isn't made for us humans. It feels everything is being more and more optimized either for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or for AI scrapping. And I feel like being alienated from using the internet (Yes, also sadly that's the case in many other areas).

And I asked some people and what they basically told me is that they like that everything looks the same and everything feels the same. Since they can go on every website and understand the layout and know how to navigate every website.

So I wanted to ask what is your opinion about this topic?
Do you care what the Internet looks like? Do you mind that everything looks same~ier?