Long story short my roommate has a surround system she got at Goodwill and I set it up for her but the internal amps are not functioning properly. It's only using the front two satellite speakers and sub which is independently powered. So it's 2.1 for now.

The front two speakers barely put out much sound even cranked to max volume. The sub is fine as again it's independently powered.

I've ruled out all settings, as there is a 2.1 output mode, and the radio is just as low so it's not an input issue. I have it hooked to her PC's output. I also have proper gauge speaker wire so that's not the problem either. I did hook up the center speaker to one of the front outputs too. Same deal.

So can an inline amp help at this point? Is there anything else I can try or rule out?

Also if this is not appropriate to post here in Tech I apologize in advance.

Recently, I've been thinking pretty hard about how to archive data. Optical media is out, due to my (possibly irrational?) fear of disc rot. HDDs just break with extended use, SSDs have been known to die with either overuse or just existing for an extended period of time. What's left?

I have heard of tape (of some kind) being used for backup in some bigger operations, but with my experieces with VHS, and to a lesser extent, cassettes, they seem to be very susceptible to mould.

Any suggestions?

I'm big into self-hosting and recently getting back into writing as an additional hobby, cuz one can never have too many, right? Anyway, I am looking for a writing organization tool like Manuskript, Dabble, or Scrivener that is both open source and self-hosted.

Essentially, I would just like something that I can organize my thoughts and occasionally write in, but be able to access it from all my devices - desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, etc. It seems like most of the solutions I've looked at are limited to a single device or cloud functionality is locked behind a paywall. Of course, I could just use a self-hosted wiki site for cloud editing/organization, but I'd like something more oriented toward writing if anybody has any ideas. Thanks!

I have followed numerous discussions on here lately regarding extracting oneself from being Google-reliant, and they've all deeply resonated with me. For years now I've been slowly migrating numerous Google-bound things over to my own self-hosted alternatives. I've moved my storage, contacts, documents, and some (but sadly not all) of my calendars to home solutions, fairly easily too.

But the biggest hurdle I've been facing this whole time, the one I've been putting off the longest, is the act of figuring out how to get almost twenty years of mail archive and history on my primary account away from Google and into a space where I can access it separately. I have been steadily changing the main email on my more active external accounts to a self-hosted one, and now only seeing a shrinking handful of lesser-used services still attached to the old gmail. But that history is too precious to me, and I still find multiple occasions where I need/want to reference some communications from long ago.

I've tried searching the web for options, but so far all combinations of my queries are either really elementary "here's how to set up a new email" crap, or else aimed at moving from one Gmail account to another Gmail account. I've been thinking that the simplest approach might be just to set it up as a POP3 account in my mail client (eM Client, for the record), download it all, and then when I finally pull the plug just drag it into the local client archive, and then remove the account from the app. But I figure there have to be others who have done this, right?

Hello people,
This is my first post, so if you have any tips, please tell them

For a number of years I've thought about the idea that the experiment of the "free" internet has failed.
Around fifteen years ago the only goal of social media was to grow and how to make money was an afterthought. Now that investment money is drying up and websites like Reddit and Twitter are trying their best to find a way to become profitable, I'm thinking again of the idea that the "free" internet doesn't exist.
Small niche websites are able to exist on donations, but they aren't reliable and people aren't willing to pay a random single access fee or subscription for a website they don't know. Streaming has found an audience, but that has become close to the tv model.

So I thought:
What if your ISP has to pay a website a fee everytime a user accesses the website?
Of course you have to think about how that payment works and how this system can be abused.
I expect the system to work like music streaming, where an artist gets a certain amount of money per stream.
I am curious how the internet developes with this system. If smaller websites can exist without having to rely on adverstisements or if it might even get profitable. How these websites get paid and how IPS's will handle this (I expect monthly fees to become 10 euros/dollars etc. more expensive).

What do you think of this idea or do you have your own (dumb) idea?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/reddit-mods-fear-spam-overload-as-botdefense-leaves-antagonistic-reddit/

the Reddit community is still reckoning with the consequences of the platform's API price hike. The changes have led to the shuttering of numerous third-party Reddit apps and have pushed several important communities, like the Ask Me Anything (AMAs) organizers, to reduce or end their presence on the site.

The latest group to announce its departure is BotDefense. BotDefense, which helps removes rogue submission and comment bots from Reddit and which is maintained by volunteer moderators, is said to help moderate 3,650 subreddits. BotDefense's creator told Ars Technica that the team is now quitting over Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward moderators and developers, with concerning implications for spam moderation on some large subreddits like r/space.

BotDefense started in 2019 as a volunteer project and has been run by volunteer mods, known as "dequeued" and "abrownn" on Reddit. Since then, it claims to have populated its ban list with 144,926 accounts, and it helps moderate subreddits with huge followings, like r/gaming (37.4 million members), /r/aww (34.2 million), r/music (32.4 million), r/Jokes (26.2 million), r/space (23.5 million), and /r/LifeProTips (22.2 million). Dequeued told Ars that other large subreddits BotDefense helps moderates include /r/food, /r/EarthPorn, /r/DIY, and /r/mildlyinteresting.

On Wednesday, dequeued announced that BotDefense is ceasing operations. BotDefense has already stopped accepting bot account submissions and will disable future action on bots. BotDefense "will continue to review appeals and process unbans for a minimum of 90 days or until Reddit breaks the code running BotDefense," the announcement said. The announcement also advised "keeping BotDefense as a moderator through October 3rd so any future unbans can be processed."

My T430 has been my main PC for a while now. Since upgrading the ram to 10GB's and switching to Linux Mint, I could not be happier with it.

I'm not very tech-savvy, so this whole project has been a great excuse to learn more about computers in general.

What is everyone else's Thinkpad project?

I've never owned macs for desktop use because of the expense and my general preference for windows pcs.

I had a first or second gen iPhone and was incredibly frustrated by how limited it was - you couldn't set an alternate default browser, access your own file system, customize you home screen, etc, etc. So I've been an Android user since then.

I'm not really looking to make a switch for either phone or PC, but my brother bought an Apple watch which spurred a conversation that made me realize I don't really know if the issues that bugged me about Apple are still relevant in 2023.

Anyone want to weigh in?

I'm a huge fan of lightweight sites. They load super fast on mobile and that's the most important thing for me. I found a number of outdated lists online and wanted to hear what your favourites are.

Here is my list.

News

https://lite.cnn.com/
https://text.npr.org/
https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news/canada/toronto?sort=editors-picks
http://68k.news/
https://legiblenews.com/
https://www.skinnyguardian.xyz/
https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/
http://skimfeed.com/
https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/text/textedition

Edit

• Lots to think about, thank you everyone!

In the 2000s, I had Blogger or a subdomain on some random free host. I even tried Ning at some point.

Since 2012, I’ve had a personal site at a custom domain, on Squarespace, then WordPress who knows where, then Tumblr, then WordPress on Linode, now a combo Bear Blog and GitHub Pages.

I dislike WordPress for how clunky it is, Squarespace for how expensive it is, Tumblr for how obviously Tumblr it is (I could say the same about Squarespace and many WordPress sites), GitHub Pages for making me use git to post. Basically, I’m not happy with anything.

So I thought I’d ask los Tildeños—do you have a personal site? What web host and tech stack are you using for it? What do you like/dislike about it? What else have you tried?

I've seen some tutorials that suggest installing the Amazon app store and then using a workaround to sideload apks. There's also emulators like Bluestacks. I'm curious as to what people prefer and what apps they've found useful.

I've heard much about the great Digg migration but I found Reddit through different means.

Any of you hear of mfisn? It was my Reddit before Reddit. A bare bones link sharing community where a number of registered users could share links. Unregistered users could suggest links that I guess a registered user could approve? I remember sharing links to movie trailers there. I found Reddit years later after googling it and finding a Reddit post asking about it. And that's how I fell into Reddit.

I discovered mfisn through cookiethievery, a yourethemannowdog-esque page that had a rotation of repeating animations set to a short music loop. And I vaguely recall finding that through an AIM buddy's profile...? Either that or albinoblacksheep.

Any of you have a traceable lineage of Internet communities you've passed through? What were your pre-Reddit internet go-to sites? Are they still around?

This morning I was asked to find an archived email with photos of some scientific equipment. I searched "Powerlab," the name of one of the instruments, in gmail, and the email came right up. Great! But then I noticed that the word "powerlab" never appeared in the text of the email. I tried searching "ML206", an arbitrary character string from one of the photos in the email, and again, the email appeared in the search, without the search phrase highlighted in the search result, as it normally would be. I tried different phrases from jpgs in emails; not all yielded search results but some did.

I'm not happy about this. I accept some compromises to privacy when using Gmail, but sending text as an image can be a way of specifically avoiding information being harvested. All I ask for is a way to turn it off.

Can anyone replicate this? Did anyone already know about this?

I recently made a post here on Tildes in ~food about a pizza I made, and linked it to an Imgur album showing part of the process. This seemed interesting to me, and didn't think of it as an image post per-se. While most of the responses were positive, and we talked about pizza-making, it clearly did upset some people who viewed it as an image-only post.

Thinking through things, image only posts can be a bad thing - but there are plenty of good reasons to make image posts as well. Would images always be ok if they are original content? Certainly doesn't completely eliminate the possibility for people to shitpost, but does reduce it considerably.

Would it be acceptable to allow image posts, but require a certain number of words/characters attached to each post? This seems like it would be pretty easy to implement, and forces the user to actually make some effort, as opposed to just "karma farming".

AND ANOTHER THING!

Subscriptions. I would really like to see more specialized groups/communities here, and the current implementation I see is encouraging. ~games now has sub-groups, ~games.tabletop and ~games.gamedesign. This same system could be extended to sports. ~sports.motorsport.formula1, ~sports.esports.leagueoflegends, etc.

I was inspired to say this in a different conversation, but having said it, I want to say it more loudly/noticably.

A few, not many fellow newcomers to Tildes have made comments comparing it unfavorably to Lemmy/Kbin or Squabbles. We have options and there will likely be many more. To steal a good quote from a totalitarian dictator, Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.

Tildes vs Lemmy/Kbin or Squabbles reminds me of the disagreement between the Ents and the Entwives. Some people prefer gardens. Some people prefer the wilderness. Some like both. I am grateful that Deimos created this nifty site for me to play in.

http://www.tolkien.cro.net/talesong/ents.html
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/wiki/philosophy/index

I'll admit that I am a new user to Lemmy as a way to replace reddit in my free time, so a lot of my opinions will be relative to it. So far I've found it decent. I won't comment much on the UX or functionality, since I think it wouldn't be fair to criticize a fairly new platform in that way. I won't try to compare it to Tildes either, since I think they are very different in scope and purpose. I will say that the discussions in tildes are higher quality than both reddit and lemmy on average.

Overall the experience for me has been hit or miss. Joining a smaller server relevant to my interests was a good move. I joined SDF's instance and the people there are very friendly, and I enjoy the tech-forward posts. Throughout the fediverse as a whole, the discussions felt shorter and not as good as even reddit.

The posts and discussion on the larger instances to me felt a little immature. Generally I came across a lot of: (1) hyper-contrarians--it reminds me somewhat of linux/oss forums that skew younger. Lots of circlejerking the common themes/in-jokes/ideals of the free-software circles. (2) reddit-bad circlejerking (3) mediocre memes

I also came across a few very thoughtful discussions related to the fediverse regarding its place in the world, the sort of content that would do well, and the culture of its members. I'm very excited to watch the more niche communities grow. I'll admit that I miss reddit somewhat for music discovery and the smaller genre subs (although not enough to spend my time there again).

After a few months, I haven't felt compelled to visit reddit nor really Lemmy all that often, since I think both suffer from the same immaturity and hivemind thinking.

What do you all feel about Lemmy so far? Any good community recommendations? (Especially for music :) )

The only sane way to use Twitter was to follow a bunch of cool artists, set up TweetDeck, filter it to "tweets with images only", and just look at pretty pictures.

And now that's been completely removed. Does anyone know of any alternatives? I don't need any of the other features of TweetDeck, I just need that images-only filter...

Something I've noticed about the Fediverse, especially Mastodon, is that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of discussion going on except for meta discussion.

For example, if you go on Mastodon, you'll find lots of people talking about how Mastodon is the future. You'll find lots of people asking how to do certain things on the platform. But you really have to dig to find actual discussion about topics beyond the platform itself.

Even when you do find people not doing meta discussion, there aren't really any people talking with each other. There's people sharing content but not a lot of people interacting with it. Even basic stuff you see on other social media sites like people giving each other compliments just isn't really there. You can see everyone's stuff but it's just shouting into the void.

I think that the Fediverse has a severe problem with holding people's interest, and the most die-hard people who are interested just want to use it to talk about itself.