What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I thought it would be fun to explore what people on Tildes use for things like email, file synchronisation, webhosting, backups, streaming, password management, etc.
Are you using a common big tech service? Are you self hosting? Something in between? If you are self hosting what does it look like? Are you running bare metal, using containers, a complete proxmox setup with a legion of VMs? And of course, what software are using on top of it all?
I am also curious to see how satisfied you are with your current setup.

To be extra clear, this is not about the OS you are running on your personal computer, we've had plenty of discussion like that already ;).

And also to be extra clear, this isn't just about self hosting.

Posted in ~tech because I want a broad discussion, not just the ~comp folks.

I'll start

I have been trying to move away from a lot of the big tech services for a few years now. For me it isn't an absolute where I don't want any Google or Microsoft in my life, I just don't want to be reliant on them for what I see as critical parts of my personal infrastructure.

Running servers and maintaining them including infrastructure on top like reverse proxies, docker, Kubernetes, etc is something I am fairly familiar with. But it isn't something I quite enjoy or trust myself to do for a lot of important stuff. Specifically when it comes down to security and making sure backups are in order. This means that for a lot of things I have opted to use other services. But in a way that allows me to move away to a different one quite easily.

File storage & synchronization

For years I made use of Google drive, but after running into various sync issues and the lack of Linux clients (even though I am now back on Windows) it was the first service I moved away from big tech.
For this I make use of a hosted Nextcloud instance on Hetzener's "storage share" plan. Honestly, no big complaints here about the core functionality. Files get synchronized just fine and Hetzner takes care of updates and backups.

Email

For email I make use of my own domain in combination with mailbox.org mail hosting.

Media streaming

I still have quite some music, movies and series on my hard drive. For this I use Jellyfin, which works quite well. Though the native apps have some issues where it will start transcoding things that don't need transcoding at all. This isn't an issue with third party apps. On android, I use findroid. On the ipad of my SO I had to compromise a little bit, the best app there seems to be Infuse which isn't open and requires a subscription for some advanced features. Though for Jellyfin playback the free version seems to work fine so far.

Jellyfin itself is just running on my desktop PC. I have been thinking about a NAS of sorts, but decided to hold off on it for now as my computer is effectively always on whenever one of us wants to watch something.

Password management

In the past I have used KeePassXC which with the browser extension works quite well on my desktop. But keeping it synced to my phone as well was sometimes a bit finicky. So last year I decided to switch to Bitwarden with the idea that I can always switch to vaultwarden if I decide to.

Edit: DeaconBlue's setup reminded me that I also use Aegis which backs up encrypted to nextcloud.

Backup

For backups I make use of Hetzner's storage box plans. In order to create the backups I make use of restic, but to make things a bit easier I have opted to use the Backrest front-end for it which basically takes care of scheduling.

VPS for various random scripts and experiments

I am also running a Ubuntu server VPS, also on Hetzner infrastructure, which I use to run a variety of scripts, experiment with stuff I might want to self host, etc. The scripts it runs are mostly related to discord moderation and one I maintain for the /r/history team (even though I am no longer active on reddit).

Webhosting & Domains

While I have a VPS, for simple hosting and since I need to buy my domains somewhere I am making use of a hosting provider in the Netherlands called mijn.host. They are quite affordable and customer oriented.

If you have ever see me share images on Tildes this is also where I have my own image hosting thing running. Which is basically ShareX configured to upload images to a simple PHP endpoint I created that resizes images, strips their exif data and renames them.

Honourable mention: PikaPods

PikaPods basically provides you with docker hosting of a wide variety of open source apps in a very user friendly way. I have experimented a bit with it and while I don't have a current use for it I do think that it is a neat service other people might enjoy.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

My last dashcam was a total dud and wasn't even operational for 6 hours. I'm hoping to get some community recommendations on reliable units with good image quality. If you would also share the approx. length of time you've had/used it that would be a huge help as well. Thanks in advance!

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

A fancier way is here — but either is great.

—-

For those using iOS with a bookmark on their homescreen, you may have been plagued like me with Tildes opening in a private window instead of the session where you’re logged in.

I don’t know why I didn’t think about this sooner, but it’s so easy

Shortcuts > New > Create New Tab > Open URL (remove the variable and put in https://tildes.net) > context menu next to the title of the shortcut > Add to Homescreen > Photo (left image option) > select your tildes logo that i forgot to tell you to save

… done. Now Tildes will always open Safari in an authenticated session. ezpz.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I've been thinking perhaps I'll need to get one of the desktop LLM UI. I've been out of touch with the state of the art of end user LLM as I've been exclusively using it via API, but tech-y people (who are not developers) mostly talk about the end-user products that I lack the knowledge of.

Ethical problems aside, the problem with non-API usage is, even if you pay, I can't find one that have better privacy policy than API. And the problem with API version is that it is not as good as the completed apps unless you want to reinvent the wheel. The apps also may include ads in the future, while API technically cannot as it would affect some downstream usecases.

As a dual use technology, the table doesn't include the extra retention period if they detect an abuse. Additionally, if you click on thumbs up/down it may also be recorded for the provider's employee to review.

I don't think OpenWebUI, self hosted models, etc. would suffice if they are not built to the same quality as the first party products. I know I'm probably asking for something that doesn't exists here, but at least I hope it will bring to people's attention that even if you're paying for the product you might not get the same privacy protection as API users.

I enjoy Tildes a lot for its thoughtful discussion and well curated links. It's a site you can enjoy casually and not get addicted to.

But sometimes you're dealing with a cold, or laying in a hotel room after a long flight, or just feeling lousy, and you start to long for that infinite scroll, dopamine hit, image / video cornucopia. Or really, there are just times I want to laugh at memes, people's drama, etc., until I'm ready to get out of bed and back to the world.

In the old days, we had things like memebase, or early reddit to scratch that itch. But these days social media algorithms have gone nuts. For example, I can't spend five minutes on reddit without finding myself in a racially charged discussion. Platforms like TikTok likewise seem appealing (an endless scroll of silly videos would be great), but again the algorithms are there to highlight conflict and make you miserable. I feel like even if you work hard to curate on these platforms, you're not safe.

So for anyone who feels like me: is there a solution to this? Perhaps a fedeverse instance still small enough to avoid astroturfing. Or non social-media options with a huge amount of content (something like thedailywtf, or hitting random on a quality web comic). I would love to hear about what you enjoy when you're looking for internet junk food.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Disclaimer: I do not like LLMs. I am not going to fight you on if you say LLMs are shit.

One of the things I find interesting about conversations on LLMs is when have a critique about them, and someone says, "Well, it's no different than people." People are only as good as their training data, people misremember / misspeak / make mistakes all the time, people will listen to you and affirm you as you think terrible things. My thought is that not being reliably consistent is a verifiable issue for automation. Still, I think it's excellent food for thought.

I was looking for new music venues the other day. I happened upon several, and as I looked at their menu and layout, it occurred to me that I had eaten there before. Not there, but in my city, and in others. The Stylish-Expensive-Small-Plates-Record-Bar was an international phenomenon. And more than that, I couldn't help but shake that it was a perversion of the original, alluring concept-- to be in a somewhat secretive record bar in Tokyo where you'll be glared into the ground if you speak over the music.

It's not a bad idea. And what's wrong with evoking a good idea, especially if the similarity is just unintentional? Isn't it helpful to be able to signal to people that you're like-that-thing instead of having to explain to people how you're different? Still, the idea of going just made me assume it'd be not simply like something I had experienced before, but played out and "fake." We're not in Tokyo, and people do talk over the music. And even if they didn't, they have silverware and such clanging. It makes me wonder if this permutation is a lossy estimation of the original concept, just chewed up, spat out, slurped, regurgitated, and expensively funded.

other forms of conceptual perversion:

• Matters of Body Image - is it a sort of collapse when we go from wanting 'conventional beauty' to frankensteining features onto ourselves? Think fox eye surgeries, buccal fat removal, etc. Rather than wanting to be conventionally attractive, we aim for the related concept of looking like people who are famous.
• (still thinking)

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

So after moving, my new bathroom has some issues. Most pressing of all: my shower has ants. It started with a couple, but it feels like it's gotten progressively worse.

I researched this issue and have been spraying my shower with a vinegar/water mixture to kill and hopefully repel them, followed by my mom wiping them up to throw away because the scent of ant corpses will attract more ants. But so far, it hasn't really done anything but kept me from using that shower for a week because of the smell of vinegar.

I sprayed the shower today, when it had possibly the most ants to date, and mom wiped them all up... And then a few hours later I checked and more ants showed up. Actually I just checked again and there are now like, at LEAST fifteen ants in there. At LEAST. So, the vinegar solution obviously isn't repelling them.

We're at the end of our patience. Tomorrow we'll be sitting down to do some heavy-duty research together. The potential next step, based on the site where I got the vinegar solution, is to pour baking soda and vinegar into the drain to try to dislodge all the gunk, because I've washed ants down there and that can attract more ants. So, that might be why they won't freaking stay away.

Relevant vent: why does every single site about killing ants include tons of photos of ants!? I'd closed the site I used and I tried to find it again to link here, but had to stop because the first two sites I checked were full of ant pictures. And I freaking hate bugs and can't stand even looking at photos of them. Or at least, not in this context. I don't want to see MORE ants congregating in strangers' showers, knowing they're in mine already make my skin crawl without having an image of what they might look like at this very moment!!

So, yeah. Researching this has been very difficult for me, but I need those damn things out of my shower so we don't need to share my mom's. So, I'm open to any advice and solutions you all have!

Some other relevant information:

• Here's a photo of my bathroom and the shower. Warning: you might be able to see ants if you zoom in on the close-up of the shower, because they were mostly congregated in that area. Otherwise I would have gotten a better photo of the interior. I saw a lot of advice to touch up caulking, but with the type of shower this is, I'm not sure how relevant caulking really is? The shower is very smooth, almost like the rim of a bathtub.
• There's a skylight above the shower, which was replaced before we moved in. At the very least, it doesn't leak with water when it rains. So help me, if that's somehow the source of the ants........
• Related to above: there's no window I can open, and the room is quite small and narrow. So, humidity builds up FAST and I don't really have an effective way to vent it out or anything.
• I've seen a couple in my sink. Key word: a couple. I think the most I've seen there at one time is two, while the shower can have upwards of... I don't even want to try to guess, honestly.
• I've seen one or two ants crawling up the wall outside the shower, very low down around the moulding. So their nest may be outside the shower?
• At this point the number has me half-convinced there's a nest somewhere in the bathroom. Or maybe there's an entrance on the top of the white shower walls/rim where it meets the drywall?? Except I've only ever seen one ant relatively high up one of those walls, they seem to stick near the floor... Either way, the number feels extreme to me given there shouldn't be any real points of entrance besides the door and skylight.
• Given that articles love attaching revolting photos at multiple points, I'll just ask here if there's any chance they're climbing out of my shower head or the drain. One little fact that prematurely ended my first attempt to research solutions: apparently ants sometime come out of bath faucets. So, yeah.
• At this point, killing ants is secondary to getting them OUT. We've dealt with ant infestations before, we know how to kill them. But that doesn't help when more of them will show up!! I don't want to deal with this problem forever, or even just seasonally!!l

Please help, and thanks for taking time to read this!

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

tl;dr After 2 grueling days of mucking about I finally have KDE + Wayland + Nvidia working on Debian 13 (Trixie).

I started with Ubuntu 24. It just works, right? To its credit, it does. I didn't need to do anything to have it work out of the box. Nvidia was magically installed (even with secure boot enabled).

Gnome woes

But then Gnome would rename and re-encode images I dragged/dropped to "Dropped Image.png" from Firefox. Wouldn't even do that in Chromium. Can't tell if it's a bug, or "what's the use-case" scenario, but this behavior is a deal-breaker.

Not Kubuntu

Why not Kubuntu then? It doesn't do the same magic that Ubuntu does when it comes to Nvidia.

OpenSUSE almost

Latest and greatest whilst being supposedly stable. It took a while to get used to YaST and "patterns", but it was easy to install Nvidia drivers (zypper inr). But, naturally, there was an issue. I was able to boot, but into a very tiny resolution (on Wayland). After some thinking, I came to the conclusion that I was booting into my "integrated" GPU (on the CPU). Don't know why. Eventually I ran into prime-select boot nvidia and it worked. But then Steam (flatpak) wouldn't launch a game (loaded for a sec, then stopped). I was tired.

Debian & Nvidia driver woes

I always liked Debian. I use 12 at work for development and as a container base image. Seeing that 13 (Trixie) is on the horizon, I decided to give it a go for personal use. Surely the packages it ships with have been written in the last decade.

I followed their docs for Nvidia drivers. But I couldn't boot (no login screen) after installing. Apparently there's a bug with the driver and my GPU (3080) that Nvidia isn't going to fix. So I went and used Nvidia's installer instead to get the latest version. It worked without a hitch. The next kernel update will be interesting I imagine.

Final thoughts

Honestly, Linux feels like it's always a decade away for things to be stable enough to not require any tinkering for your average layman. I'm not the kind of person to muck with custom configs/etc.
I want things as vanilla as possible because I know it's a matter of when it breaks, not if.

Ubuntu feels the closest to the "it just works" experience IMO. I would've stuck with it if not for Gnome.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I'm a fairly new detectorist, only been detecting for 25 months, I've only used five detectors Nokta Simplex Plus, Nokta Legend, Minelab Vanquish 540, XP Deus, XP Deus 2, so most of my knowledge of other machines comes from YouTube videos and forum posts, not first hand experience, this post will be all over the place as I didn't plan it out, sort of a stream of consciousness, all prices are in Canadian dollars, it should be cheaper in the USA but with new tarrifs who knows

I guess the biggest issue budget, machines are expensive, the cheapest machine I think worth getting is $275 and the most expensive general use ones break $2000, specialized machines can be $3000 to maybe $10,000 like pulse induction and imaging machines

Also, if you want to just hunt parks and such, you can get away only using single frequency machines, but if you want to hunt salt water beaches, or even freshwater beaches with lots of black sand, you are going to want a multifrequency machine that runs multiple frequencies at once

I am only going to mention on the main three manufacturers in the bulk of this post, Nokta, Minelab, And XP, but at the end I will briefly touch on Garret and Fisher and Bounty Hunter

I guess first I'll list the single and multifrequency machines, since it depends the environment you want to search

I don't know if I need to leave a space under each line like reddit, so I will

The single frequency detectors are;

Nokta Simplex lite

Nokta Simplex BT

Nokta Simplex Ultra

Nokta FindX

Nokta FindX PRO

Minelab Xterra Pro

XP Deus (1)

The multifrequency detectors also have single frequency capabilities unless otherwise mentioned, they are;

Nokta score

Nokta Double Score

Nokta Triple Score

Nokta Legend

Minelab Vanquish 340 (no single frequency)

Minelab vanquish 440 (no single frequency)

Minelab Vanquish 540 (no single frequency)

Minelab Equinox 600

Minelab Equinox 800

Minelab Equinox 700

Minelab Equinox 900

Minelab Xterra Elite

Minelab Manticore

XP Deus 2

Our of all those detectors, I don't recommend the vanquish series, even though they work great at the beach, the box is not water proof, a rouge wave could end it's whole career

I also don't recommend the equinox 600 or the equinox 800 as the suffered from leaking issues and broken coil ears, the 700 and 900 came out addressing those issues

So, if your budget is on the lower end, and you are never going to go to a salt water beach, or you don't want to fiddle with setting and just want a turn on and go machine, the Nokta FindX Pro is a good choice, it's $275, the cheapest machine released to compete with other cheap Chinese machines on Amazon, there's a YouTuber I know who does very well with it, it's definitely not a toy machine, like a couple I didn't mention, like the Xterra Voyager released for kids by Minelab, and a Nokta one I forget the name

If your budget is a little more and you will not hit a beach, the simplex machines or the Xterra pro come in next, they have some settings to tweak, and the Xterra pro has selectable frequencies up to 20khz

I guess this is a good time to put a little blurb about frequencies, lower frequencies like to hit higher conductors like copper or silver

Higher frequencies like to hit mid to low conductors like gold or iron

lower frequencies use more battery power and go deeper

higher frequencies use less battery power and don't go as deep

higher frequencies will also hit smaller targets than lower frequencies

On the market there's machines that will go from 4khz to 120khz as of today, a new high frequency coil was released for the XP deus 2, most machines where you can't select a frequency will use somewhere between 10 and 15khz which is a good medium frequency

And last for the single frequency machines is the XP deus 1, which is a very old machine now, I don't recommend getting it unlss you can get one super cheap second hand, it's still $1000 in stores and if you get the high frequency coil that's another $500, and as of today the deus 2 released it's high frequency coil, so it kinda makes the deus 1 deprecated imo, I can't think of a spot where I would use the deus 1 any more once I get the new coil for the deus 2

Now for multifrequency machines, like I said the vanquish is a good machine, but there's no single frequency option and it's not water proof, features all other multifrequency machines have

The score, double score and triple score are water proof, infact the triple score pro pack is the best bang for your buck you can get, it cost $670 and comes with the good elliptical coil, a big coil, a hand digger, a pouch, headphones, a hat, and a pinpointer, basically everything you need to get started, if I was getting my first detector I would strongly consider the triple score pro pack, the detector itself is almost as good as the top tier detectors when it comes to unmasking targets

The Minelab Xterra elite is a newish release, it's a nice multifrequency machine with a single frequency option and is water proof, it's released to compete with the triple score

The Nokta legend and Minelab Equinox (700 and 900) were the flagship models for a while for their respective companies, the legend has a few more settings than the triple score, and the equinox has more settings than the Xterra elite and the vanquish, both legend and equinox are water proof, have multifrequency and multiple single frequency options, the legend has single frequency options between 4 and 40khz, and I'm not sure about the equinox but it's probably similar

The top two machines on the market are the Minelab Manticore and the XP deus 2, both machines cost in the ballpark of $2000

I don't know much about the Manticore, but it gets high praise from people, the deus 2 has the best audio on the market, the deus 2 is my favourite machine I ever used

So in summery, I guess if you're on a budget and not hunting the beach, go for simplex, findX, Xterra pro

If you are on a budget and hunting the beach go for a score machine, the best one in your budget, or a vanquish but be anal about not getting it wet

If you are not on a budget but don't want to pay $2000 go for the legend, equinox triple score, or Xterra elite, these machines have room to grow into them

If you sure you will stick with detecting a long time, and you have lots of money, might as well go for a Manticore or deus 2, these machines will be relevant for a long time to come probably

And I said I'd touch on other brands, bounty hunter you could get if your just curious if you even like detecting, it's about $150 for the tracker iv, and it will find stuff, but it's a very basic machine, I rather use the findX pro

Garret machines STAY AWAY FROM THE VORTEX, It's been plauged with problems since release, their engineers should be ashamed of themselves, other Garret machines work okay, if you can get one cheap second hand, it could be a way to go, but if you pay full price for one you can get better working machines for the same price range

Fisher is older, and works okay, again if you can get one second hand for incredibly cheap maybe it would be okay, but they are really outdated, I do want to try the Fisher cz21 but it cost $2000 and i don't want to try it that bad

If I wasn't clear on something let me know and I'll try to clarify

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Hello, I would like people to try and find the following:

• An image of someone using a bag phone that is not a stock photo, or an advertisement photo, or a photo from reference websites (such as Wikipedia).

• A recipe that is being presented as an original, or family secret, that is actually the recipe on the back of a box or otherwise publicly known (cannot be a reference to the Friends episode). I will allow personal anecdotes (no points will be awarded, this would just be for my amusement).

• An idea that is published for something that was later patented or otherwise protected under IP, that was published BEFORE the patented time, and the person is not the patent/IP holder. This is a two part find, because you must present the IP as well as the previously published idea.

Those are the only ones I have on the top of my head, I'm open to other people adding "find me" type things, in the same spirit, which is fun.

Please spoiler your results so that others can try it out, before seeing yours.

gl;hf

What's the best way to link a photo from my gallery to share here? My go to with friends and family is a Google drive link. Is there something I'm unaware of that means I shouldn't create links through my Google drive for general public sharing?

So for the past several weeks, I have been running my phone almost exclusively in greyscale. This is a tactic that is normally recommended for reducing phone usage, and can be easily done in iOS and Android through accessibility settings. The primary argument is without the colours to grab your attention, the phone looks less enticing.

My experience has been mostly positive, with a few drawbacks. Overall, it has made me use my phone less, although it is not the only change I have done.

Benefits:

• I do find my phone less distracting. It is less appealing.
• Text based content still works great.
• Images are normally readable, although sometimes I miss subtlety in images.
• If needed I can toggle it off, but I rarely do so.

Drawbacks:

• It took me several days to adjust, and it was a hard adjustment period.
• Some apps use colour for organization. The biggest offender in my use case for this is Three Cheers for Tildes. Overall the app is great, but new comments being denoted by an orange line is not readable for me. However, this just at times leads me to wait until I am at a desktop to look at the thread. I do think both on website and in apps Tildes should look at putting new comments with a dotted line, to not rely only on colour for accessibility reasons.

Surprises:

• The biggest surprise for me is how unappealing my phone is in colour, since the use of colour everywhere is jarring. Most people do not realize how bright and colourful even phone menus are, until they run greyscale for an extended period of time. It has become more obvious to me how much app developers (and even OS developers) are using colour to grab our attention and suck us in.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Yesterday presented the biggest pain over my few years of using Linux that I have personally encountered. With the current prevalence of topics related to Linux, and especially ones related to new users, I figured it would be good to share and leave a place for others to share any similar stories (and ideally how to avoid them).

The problem I encountered was effectively that my machine crashed and I was locked out on reboot. I'll describe how I crashed it later and for now just focus on the locked out bit.

During startup something was failing and as a result it would dump me into emergency mode. Emergency mode is basically just a root terminal where your ultimate goal is usually to read your logs and fix whatever was logged as failing. Annoying, but not a real issue. The real issue was that I was also locked out of emergency mode! This meant that literally the only thing I could do was get into a boot cycle telling me everything is locked.

So I head off to forums on my phone looking for what cryptic wizardry I'm going to need to perform. I need to a live boot OS because it is impossible to fix from my current install. I have to live boot another image, mount my original primary partition (after decrypting it), chroot the new mount point, and then use passwd to set a new root password. If I'm smart I'll come back to this thread later, when I'm not on my phone, and edit in or reply the actual commands needed since in reality I found myself piecing them together from across the Internet and maybe I'll need them again some day.

For avoiding this: check you have a root password. You may think you have one but might not. Set it to anything. Do it now, not after you're already locked out. The reason for being locked out of emergency mode was that passwordless root is locked, but there's no way to unlock it in emergency mode. I personally encountered this on Arch, but my search for error text was also taking me to Fedora forums so I don't think it is related to distro beyond the distro supporting no root password.

The bit down here is a bit less relevant as it is specific to my case.

Ultimately, I had an invalid /etc/fstab entry for a secondary drive (NTFS extra storage, not boot-critical). The thing is that entry has been there through months of daily boots and had worked, even though it may have been giving warnings or something. It's still lost on me as to why that suddenly became a boot blocker.

I'm pretty sure the original crash was my fault, although it seems pretty insane that what I was doing can break everything to the level it does. I was working on some Vulkan code and I definitely had some bugs in it that made my shader capable of reading out-of-bounds memory, but one would think this would stop at crashing the application. Instead it was causing graphical issues across the entire machine as if I'd simultaneously broken the logical drivers for every application, desktop environment included, at once. If I was lucky Plasma would reboot the whole desktop, if I was unlucky everything was completely frozen with mouse and keyboard doing nothing at all. It was me using the power button to escape the locked machine that triggered my chain of events.

For whatever reason on reboot it behaved differently than before. I'm still not sure why. I hadn't applied any updates or anything during that boot cycle. I shut this particular machine down every night and the issue was on a reboot, not my first boot of the day.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

The blog is daviramos.com

It is more like a 2000s blog than whatever blog means today. Just things I wanna write sometimes. It is not commercial, no ads. I like fast things. Images are heavily optimized, not mandatory, and always inside posts.

Bearblog is reliable and minimal without being barebones. I wrote about it before, so there's no need to go over it again here.

I really want to know if the way I’ve organized my blog makes any sense. Please keep in mind that I’m not a developer, programmer, or anything like that. I chose Bearblog partly because I already liked the default theme and didn’t need to change much. I appreciate minimalism, understand Markdown, a little HTML, and can "decode" simple CSS using a mix of intuition, Google, and ChatGPT. I only changed stuff that was not very deep and would not be hard to maintain.

:root {
    --width: 720px;
    --font-main: Verdana, sans-serif;
    --font-secondary: Verdana, sans-serif;
    --font-scale: 1em;
    --background-color: #fff;
    --heading-color: #222;
    --text-color: #444;
    --link-color: #3273dc;
    --visited-color:  #8b6fcb;
    --code-background-color: #f2f2f2;
    --code-color: #222;
    --blockquote-color: #222;
}

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    :root {
        --background-color: #01242e;
        --heading-color: #eee;
        --text-color: #ddd;
        --link-color: #8cc2dd;
        --visited-color:  #8b6fcb;
        --code-background-color: #000;
        --code-color: #ddd;
        --blockquote-color: #ccc;
    }
}

body {
    font-family: var(--font-secondary);
    font-size: var(--font-scale);
    margin: auto;
    padding: 20px;
    max-width: var(--width);
    text-align: left;
    background-color: var(--background-color);
    word-wrap: break-word;
    overflow-wrap: break-word;
    line-height: 1.5;
    color: var(--text-color);
}

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
    font-family: var(--font-main);
    color: var(--heading-color);
}

a {
    color: var(--link-color);
    cursor: pointer;
    text-decoration: none;
}

a:hover {
    text-decoration: underline;
}

nav a {
    margin-right: 8px;
}

strong, b {
    color: var(--heading-color);
}

button {
    margin: 0;
    cursor: pointer;
}

time {
    font-family: monospace;
    font-style: normal;
    font-size: 15px;
}

main {
    line-height: 1.6;
}

table {
    width: 100%;
}

hr {
    border: 0;
    border-top: 1px dashed;
}

img {
    max-width: 100%;
}

code {
    font-family: monospace;
    padding: 2px;
    background-color: var(--code-background-color);
    color: var(--code-color);
    border-radius: 3px;
}

blockquote {
    border-left: 1px solid #999;
    color: var(--code-color);
    padding-left: 20px;
    font-style: italic;
}

footer {
    padding: 25px 0;
    text-align: center;
}

.title:hover {
    text-decoration: none;
}

.title h1 {
    font-size: 1.5em;
}

.inline {
    width: auto !important;
}

.highlight, .code {
    padding: 1px 15px;
    background-color: var(--code-background-color);
    color: var(--code-color);
    border-radius: 3px;
    margin-block-start: 1em;
    margin-block-end: 1em;
    overflow-x: auto;
}

/* blog post list */
ul.blog-posts {
    list-style-type: none;
    padding: unset;
}

ul.blog-posts li {
    display: flex;
}

ul.blog-posts li span {
    flex: 0 0 130px;
}

ul.blog-posts li a:visited {
    color: var(--visited-color);
}

/* MY CHANGES */

/* That is an entirely new class for text */
/* that goes below an image as a subtitle */
.subtitle {
    text-align: center;
    font-style: italic;
    font-size: small;
    font-weight: bold;
}

.upvote-button {
    display: none !important; /* Hides button, overrides other settings */ 
        pointer-events: none; /* Disable mouseif it visible */
}

.title h1 {
    font-size: 1.2em;
}

nav a {
    font-size: 0.95em;
}

footer {
	font-size: 0.95em;  
}

.spaced-line {
	margin: 100px 0;
	text-align: center;
}

/* Keep images centered */
img {
    display: block;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
}

For comparison, see Herman's blog to see something closer to the default. He’s the creator of Bearblog.

Here’s what I’ve changed: the font size for the blog’s name, the navbar, and the footer that says Powered by Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ is slightly smaller (0.95em instead of 1em). I added a guestbook and links to the English and Portuguese pages in the navbar. I also changed the favicon and the site's meta-image to different-sized images of Humphrey Bogart.

The English and Portuguese pages are in their respective languages and only list posts in those languages. I don’t know if it’s possible to customize the navbar further. EDIT: bearblog has a builtin voting feature which I removed with CSS. All pages and posts are configured with their appropriate language via Bearblog, which I assume browsers and search engines can detect. Does it make sense to make my blog bilingual this way?

Maybe this is a new feature, but Bearblog lets you organize posts into subfolders/subdomains. So I placed all Brazilian Portuguese posts under /br/, which feels logical and predictable. I haven’t shared them anywhere yet, so there’s no risk of broken links. On the other hand, I already have several English posts that have been shared elsewhere. If I move all English posts under /en/, I’d love to find a way to let the older links keep working gracefully. Is that possible somehow? Maybe that’s a question for Herman, but I have a follow-up: Other than my obsession with tiny details, is there any value in separating my posts under either /br/ or /en/? Titles and URLs are unlikely to conflict between languages, and if they do, I can always add a -pt or -en suffix like in example-post-pt.

Other than that, I’d welcome any advice on how to improve my blog—whether in big ways or subtle ones.

Thanks!

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As per title this is inspired by my recent problems with a Latitude 7320 notebook.

I can't use my desktop right now and so wanted some cheaper nb for normal usage and eventually settled on this model due to being able to get it at an acceptable ratio of price to age and seeing it as compatible on Ubuntu, not noticing the disclaimer until later.

The problems started right after installing Fedora KDE - the nb was running at absolutely abysmal performance and this problem affects several models.

Running passmark I've got above 2000 on cpu, on Windows I had 11000. The cpu was throttling to 1500Mhz and lower for no reason. Switching a BIOS setting of power management to "ultra performance" got me to twice the score.

Eventually using throttled from github for various Lenovo and Dell models and thermald I was able to get to twice that again, still a fifth less than on Windows. Also the repo has potential of security concerns due to how it works, also potential to just stop working due to them later.

Mainly I'm posting this to just say that there is zero legitimate technical reason why this should happen, it works on Windows and on Dell tampered Ubuntu images. The hw is fine but for some reason someone somewhere decided to artificially limit the hw for whatever reason.

Right now I am still indecided if I should write off the several hours I've spent on this and return the machine to play the dice with some other model.

Edit 5.4.: it turns out I was not using the throttled package correctly and now have roughly equivalent performace in Linux as in Windows up from the 4/5 or so after all the other workarounds. All of the points still apply though. I also heartily recommend s-tui as a nice utility for cpu monitoring and stress test.