This is the first time in my career that a Mac is the preferred machine for an organization. I've been using Windows for 30 years. This is a big change for me but I want to learn some useful tips and tricks on Mac os.

This could be "what are some changes you made on the Mac settings to make your Mac experience feel more comfortable?" Or "what tool on Mac can you not live without?"

There aren't any rules really, I want this to be a fun conversation, thanks everyone!

** Please do not tell me how to fix my issue below; this is an example, not a tech-support request **

I have a (LibreOffice) spreadsheet, personal tracking data. The other day, I got a new laptop (Framework), put a new OS (Debian trixie RC2) on it.

Now, on the new machine, when I add a comment to a cell, the background color of the new comment is wrong/different from every other comment in the spreadsheet. When I add a comment to the same spreadsheet, opened on a different machine, the new comment still has the "correct"/standard background color, but any comments I added on the new machine continue to have the wrong color.

This happened once or twice in the past couple of days, and I just manually "fixed" the color of each new comment, but this morning, I tried to figure out what the deal was, how to fix it properly/permanently.

And just like that, my 3-minute daily edit of this spreadsheet turned into a 2-hour wild goose chase. I still haven't fixed it, I still don't know whether to blame LibreOffice, Debian, the new laptop, or some other variable I haven't even thought of. All I know is, someone has stolen 2 hours of my life from me, and I really want to know who that is.

Bigger picture ...

This happens all the time. Every day, often 3-4 times a day, it is a regular point of stress, of contention in my life, deciding whether to devote hours (sometimes days) of my life to strong-arming software into working the way it was supposed to work in the first place, or to try my best to accept that we just can't have nice things on our computers, and move on.

This definitely predates the word "enshittification", but I don't think it really predates the concept. Stipulated -- software development is complicated, and software is used in so many different situations -- different hardware, different OSes, different libraries, different supporting/complementary software, versions, etc -- it is extremely hard to make software that "just works" for everyone, all the time.

Nonetheless, I think the entire software development industry just collectively decided that is it okay to release stuff that doesn't work ... dating back to some point in the 20th century, long before Linux, before the Internet, before smartphones ... this issue--this philosophy--goes waaaay back, and there's just no fighting it at this point.

But also, I do not want to live in a world where I have to surrender hours and days and years of my life, fighting with software that doesn't work, because "that's just how software is".

So, that's my gripe. Is there any kind of viable middle ground here, that is less extreme than "cabin in the woods"? 'Cuz I am (yet again) seriously weighing that option this morning.

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.

I'm getting a new phone (OnePlus 13, not that it really matters) and I'm considering the benefits of flashing over something like LineageOs straight away rather than using the stock OS.

Normally, I expect? You'd run stock until security updates stop or something changes where you want a longer running OS, but I'm considering it because I cannot be bothered with all the bloatware they put on modern phones these days.
Plus it should save a heap of battery.

What are people's thoughts on this? Is it something you always do anyway or do you usually run stock for a while?

I'm not sure where to bring this up and I wanted an outside perspective. This may seem like I'm doing the same thing here but I honestly just want to know if anyone has any insight. The trend in talking about is the act of creating a reddit post in the form of a question. I've seen so many posts on Reddit popup that are just questions or screenshots/pictures with a question as the title.

For instance in gaming subreddits I'll see a post with the title of something like "What do you think is the best game in X series?" And they will have a screenshot of what would be the perceived most popular game in a franchise like final fantasy or halo or something. This is only one example, I see so many questions constantly in my home feed.

Is this some kind of concerted effort to train an LLM or is it simply some unspoken advantage that karma farmers use to drive engagement? Or am I simply just diving into conspiracy theories created by my own ignorance?

I think most people would agree that the internet and technology in general have absolutely gone to shit over the past decade or so. There is no corner of the internet nor of the software world that hasn't been affected by enshittification. Everything exists to serve you ads. Everyone wants to extract as much money from you as possible. Every website is in a race for the bottom as they try to find the lowest effort content that makes them the most money. Every piece of software is pushed out half-baked and/or stripped down to the bare minimum with the rest paywalled or with the devs pinky promising to fix it 5 updates down the road.

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of. And it's probably the one that's doing the best at the moment, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, all of them are just bots and propaganda and engagement farming the whole way down. And the worst thing is, they're complicit. Hell, they're actively encouraging it and trying to find ways to make it worse. And I have no doubt Reddit will bend the knee soon enough too (they just banned /r/whitepeopletwitter because Musk made a tweet critical of the sub).

There's probably some element of rose-tinted glasses here, but the old internet was just so much better looking back. Like, early 2000's to maybe 2012, 2013 or so, that was the peak. No colossal data harvesting schemes feeding into algorithms designed to keep you engaged on their site 24/7 for the purpose of shilling you advertisements and selling your data, no mass propaganda, no Dead Internet Theory (which can hardly be considered a theory anymore). Yeah there was shit content, there was tons of it, but I can deal with shit content and petty forum drama and whatnot; what I can't deal with is all the multi-billion dollar corporations trying to shape the entire landscape of the Web into the perfectly minmaxxed cash-generating machine that does as little as possible for as much data and advertising as possible.

Modern software isn't much better. Windows and MacOS are filled with anti-user features, telemetry you just can't turn off, Windows will often just install shit on your computer without telling you. They turn your computer into a walled garden, where you can do what you want as long as you play by their rules, but without giving you any real control over what your computer does. Yeah you can delete system files and brick your laptop if you feel like it, but anyone who's ever tried to permanently disable Windows updates will know that in the end you're not the one calling the shots: Microsoft are. And... Like, that's insane, right? It's running on my fucking computer, it's my CPU doing the work, I want to know what the hell it's doing and not just the parts it lets me see, and if I want it to do something different then I should be able to make it so.

I hate it all. I'm tired. I want out.

These are my problems. Here's what I've done about it so far.

• Obsessive privacy on the web. No Google services. Firefox with as much telemetry turned off as possible. Protonmail and ProtonVPN for everything (and I'm considering getting out of those too with the pro-Trump stances they've been taking recently). As minimal an online footprint as I can get, I make as few accounts as possible and I don't use shared or even slightly related usernames (my username here is an exception as it's my Reddit username, and no, it's not my real name), I delete accounts whenever I can and I GDPR request the services afterward. Virtual cards for online payments as much as possible. Will probably make a Javascript whitelist at some point too. Is all of this overkill? Yes. Why do I bother? Because fuck them.

• As little social media presence as possible. Real life necessitates some amount of social media interaction of course, I have Facebook and Instagram but use them exclusively for messaging. I often see people excluding Reddit from social media but I don't fully agree, even if it's not exactly in the category it still targets a lot of the same psychological weak points in us, encouraging doom scrolling and shaping our opinions through echo chambers and propaganda (it's always important to remember that echo chambers and propaganda you agree with are still echo chambers and propaganda). I still use Reddit admittedly, but I've tried to minimise my usage as much as possible and I'm shopping for alternatives.

• Free and Open Source software as much as possible. I'm all in on GNU these days. Yes, it's a massive pain in the ass. My job unfortunately requires some Windows-only software so I'm running a dual partition but I'm trying to get as much of my computer usage onto Linux as possible (I use Arch btw). Like I said above, it's my computer, if I can't control what it's computing then it stops being my computer, it's at best shared between me and all the developers of the proprietary software I have installed on it.

That's my rant. It's been a long time coming.

There are still things I'm looking to change, especially with how I use the internet. Getting rid of Reddit is the next big step for me, I think. I just can't be bothered with it anymore, but there is still something about it that I love, every time I look through a small niche topic community, or an interesting new hobby sub I've never seen before with years of cool posts for me to go through. And yeah, I do still enjoy browsing through /r/all even when it's 80% shit and objectively bad for my mental health. But at this point the overwhelming mass of utter shit is just not worth digging through anymore. I'm tired.

Tildes is really cool. It reminds me of the old internet, the ideal usage of the Web. I open the site, I see a link to an interesting article, I read it, I give it a like, I read and/or contribute to the discussion in a comments section. I want more of this.

If anyone has any links to cool sites that I should check out I'd greatly appreciate it.

I'm considering installing some abandonware games, and, as anyone who trawls the internet for old executables knows: they are often rife with viruses/malware.

It's easy to avoid the ones that are clearly malicious using tools like VirusTotal, but it gets trickier when the "is it clean?" is more of a "maybe" than a "no" because you're not sure if something is a false positive.

I'd rather not take chances and will generally avoid anything I find even slightly suspicious, but it did get me thinking: if I ran the games through Linux instead of Windows (e.g. via WINE or Proton), am I equally vulnerable?

Does something like that sandbox the virus? Is the virus rendered ineffective by being in a system it's unable to exploit as intended?

Or is this wishful thinking and it's still risky no matter what?

I'm not asking this as a "help me play abandonware games" plea (though, if there are best practices out there feel free to enlighten me). Instead, it's a curiosity -- a "help me better understand Linux vs. Windows" from someone who's not super techy.

As a Brit who's now effected by the Great British Firewall I'd like recommendations for VPNs that meet the following criteria either directly or via additional software/Firefox extensions:

• Use VPN only for specific apps on iOS (apply to Reddit, Discord, BlueSky and Twitter/X, Wikipedia (if it ends up banned) but not others)
• Use VPN for specific websites on Windows/macOS (apply to Reddit, Discord, BlueSky, Twitter/X, Wikipedia (if it ends up banned) websites)
• VPN considered generally trustworthy and not an American firm

Personal recommendations that you have experience with only please.

Hi everyone, I'm feeling inspired to start a tool library out of a community space. I am resisting the urge to roll the software myself and I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions about existing projects that I might look into, ideally leaning towards the lightweight side of things.

What say you, Tildes community?

Ironically, AI has boomeranged from surpassing human intelligence to having us spot it like a dove in a pond. So now, leave in all the little flubs to make it a bit more clear that a person at least typed this in a keyboard, you know?

Can be viewed here

Is this just the usual pointless Apple fanfare?

I'm not very techy so I'm just wondering why this is a big deal. It seems to me it's just a different theme of sorts? But in this video MKBHD is making it out to be a really big deal. Is it like technologically super impressive? What's the big deal?

I'm starting an archive project of long form interviews with locals in my area. Do any of y'all have advice on what might be the best handheld voice recorder that's high quality sound but small and discrete so my interviewees can forget that they're being recorded?

I was about to recommend wordpress.com (free tier) to someone and realized I have no idea if I should. I am not a tech person but I should have an idea of what to suggest when someone even less technical ask me for advice. Did it all die down? Is Wordpress safe to use now?

I see that in the headline from time to time. Not really sure how prevalent it is and it's pretty disappointing news.

but I also can't help but think:

1. the news articles are probably overblowing it and it's not probably not as prevalent as it's being portrayed
2. that any tech company doing that is shooting themselves in the foot. in total, I was an intern at various companies for a little under 3 years. I don't doubt that the work I did for the majority of the my co-ops were all things that could have been done by a chatBot. writing unit tests and small scripts and etc. but they were invaluable to me (1) understanding what is expected of me in a professional environment and (2) gave me a basic idea of how to code in a professional environment (2) gave me alot of perspective on what technologies and tools I should spend spare time learning cause my university very much focused on dinosaur-era languages, for the classes that did teach any coding related skills. same for the friends I went to uni with. So all I think is maybe in the short term, they are saving money on not hiring interns/co-ops/junior devs to do work that can be done by a bot but I feel like in the long terms that will reduce the number of intermediate/senior devs on the market which means they'll be in higher demand and cost more money.

Most people here dislike AI, more specifically LLM generated content, for reasons such as environmental impact, stealing people's work, etc. Despite that, is there anything that you enjoy?

I've been listening to this artist's music for a while. It's mostly video game music "re-imagined by AI" into City Pop and other styles. Artist says they use AI to generate samples, then do the rest of the work like any producer would. I have no idea if it's true or not, but I gotta admit that most of it is really good.

Today I also watched some "AI ASMR" videos out of curiosity. It's stupid, I know. But watching a knife cut glass can be so damn satisfying. I'm sorry, planet.

Noted smoked meats enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg has recently been running around collecting ML experts for a project involving an organization called Meta Superintelligence Labs, which is set to feature compute clusters with names like "Prometheus" and "Hyperion", and which will attempt to "deliver" superintelligence.

Isn't this sort of behavior on the list of things people are absolutely not to be allowed to do? Or has something changed and we now feel it's safe for Mark Zuckerberg to be allowed control of a piece of equipment that can outsmart all his enemies and also Mark Zuckerberg? Are we all safely convinced he will fail?

If it cannot be permitted, who is responsible for not permitting it?

Presumably, my understanding of Cloudflare is too simple, too rudimentary, or even entirely lacking in some aspects.

As far as I understand it, the main feature is just faster and more reliable access to sites, right?

If I host a website on a server in New York, and someone tries to look at it in Tokyo ... that's a long distance and a lot of potential hops to retrieve the file(s) directly from the NY machine. Cloudflare provides closer-location mirrors of websites so there is less lag time, plus having multiple copies makes my website more readily/reliably available.

That's good, I get that, especially for big, professional business-critical-type sites/services.

But it's not actually essential, is it? Anyone, anywhere on Earth could still visit my NY website w/o the existence of Cloudflare.

Is there more to Cloudflare than this? I realize they are getting into a variety of 2ndary "value-added"-type features, like their own "are you a robot" tests and probably a bunch of other stuff I don't know about ... but fundamentally, are they actually necessary for the Internet?

Why is Cloudflare such a big deal?

I'm starting to use AI increasingly, and am getting some value out of it. I'm curious if paying for paid tiers of the big players (in particular, ChatGPT and Claude) provides significantly better responses.

I'm aware that the paid tiers offer more features and benefits than just higher response quality. For me, those are just nice-to-haves, and not my primary concern.

My main uses of AI are software development and foreign language learning. So far, I've used the free versions of ChatGPT and Claude, as well as "proxies," including Github Copilot and Duck.ai. For both my use cases, I've found the responses usually good and helpful. I just maintain a healthy skepticism about the correctness of the answers, and challenge, test, and double check where needed (especially testing suggested code when developing software).

Have you found response quality to be noticeably and significantly better with paid tiers? I was just randomly thinking, and it occurred to me that the cost of an AI subscription is in the same ballpark as a subscription to a language learning service like Duolingo. So, if I can get value from AI that approaches what I'd get from a dedicated language learning service (even if it doesn't quite match or exceed it), then also getting the value of general AI in the same subscription should make things quite valuable and worth it. Not to mention possibly getting better software development assistance in the same package.

They aren't a startup anymore, but it seems the current CEO, Tony Stubblebine, got it right, according to his latest (long) blogpost.

Although Medium is in a healthy path now, they burnt goodwill so many times in the past that my trust on the business is absent. I wonder how other people perceive them…

I don't have a lot to say myself, yet. I signed up for the beta mostly because people talk so positively of what Digg was like in the past. I never experienced that, as Digg was already on it's way out when I discovered it.

I'd love to hear from those who remember the golden age of Digg, as well as those just curious about the reboot themselves... What are you thoughts, expectations, hopes and concerns?

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!

I love reading but lately I've found myself having to sit in front of my 2k monitor to read PDFs because they're technical documents and render poorly on my Kindle, even with using various tools to optimize.

I've been considering getting a tablet primarily for this purpose. My main requirement is that I really don't want Android or iOS devices, leaving me with either purpose built Linux tablets or Windows tablets that I can replace with Linux. I really don't need much -

• Fast enough that there's no significant lag between page turns/scrolls
• 8"+ screen size
• Video watching isn't necessary but a nice bonus
• Wifi isn't absolutely necessary as long as there is an easy way of getting files on the device (USB transfer, SD card, external adapter, etc)
• SD card storage would be nice but I can also make due with just internal flash
• Keyboard is also optional - I wouldn't mind being able to run an IDE and connect to my gitlab instance for some simple coding on the fly or SSH into my homelab
• Cameras are largely unnecessary
• Decent battery life or the ability to upgrade down the road
• Looking for something around 500$ CAD (362-ish USD, 312€, 269£)

I've been eyeing the PineTab2 as it meets most of the requirements but reviews seem to be mixed on its usability. So I thought I would ask here if anybody has had similar requirements and found something that works for them. Or if the PineTab2 software has significantly improved - this reddit post seems to indicate that it is in a decent state now.

If nothing like this exists, I suppose I could settle for an Android device provided it can easily take a custom ROM and be de-googled. I would just prefer Linux as I know it quite well and I much prefer the freedom of it. I've also used a touch screen monitor with Plasma on my Arch laptop and been pleasantly surprised at the experience - the hardware is just a bit too clunky to reliably read with.

Main constraint: The space it needs to fit in is 7¾ in (19.7 cm) high. Width and length aren't a concern.

Primary use: Gaming. Doesn't need to be top of the line or cutting edge. Most of what I play isn't very demanding, though I would like the option to play newer stuff if I find something that interests me.

Budget: Ideally less than $1500, but I do realize that I might have to pay out a bit more because I want something both pre-built and compact. $2000 is the hard limit.

Important: I am NOT interested in building my own PC. (Yes, I have done it before, including one that was in a compact case that was HELL to get right.)

Me being uninformed: This might be a silly question, but can I lay desktop towers down on their side? Any traditional tower isn't going to fit, but some of them are thin enough that, if put in landscape instead of portrait, they would. I've read conflicting things about this online, particularly regarding liquid cooling and airflow.

If anyone has any recommendations, I'd appreciate it!

I have changed my email more than once, just as part of customizing my online identity and all that.

and that obviously required me to login into any accounts I had and updating the email associated with them.

the most common workflow I have found is
login -> navigate to settings page -> edit the email field to the new email -> go to the inbox for the new email -> click confirm on confirmation email

then you can go to that website and do the forgot password, provide your email and change the password and get complete control.

I have always found that workflow weird cause it's the most prevalent one I have come across and seems so susceptible to tampering.

if someone leaves their laptop unattended for 3-4 minutes in public while visiting a bathroom (which happened often in the library of my university), there was nothing preventing me from going to their Facebook or whatever account they had open on their computer, changing the email to my own email and then clicking confirm on my inbox once I am back at my desk.

and most people don't have 2FA so that would effectively give me control of their account.
Hell, my university once had a potential data breach and they were 99.999% sure the data was not actually accessed by a malicious actor but still sent a mass email saying that they were advising everyone to change their passwords. a classmate of mine in the software systems program's attitude was basically "oh well, who cares?" and I just facepalmed internally.

there are maybe 3 websites I have come across that instead first send a confirmation email to your current inbox and after you confirm on that, then you get a confirmation email on the new email inbox. which isn't perfect but I feel like it's a bit more sensical and the best you can do without involving 2FA.

even then, that's also susceptible to the situation I described above if the user is always logged into their email.

I find it odd that websites don't prompt for a password as part of the email update process (or better yet 2FA with an app as even prompting for a password isn't a guarantee if the user has the password manager as an extension in their browser and they recently unlocked it before leaving their session unattended) to ensure that email changes are always done by the account owner.

I am a big fan of Cloudflare Tunnels, it's let me muck about with quite a few low risk apps and it's been fun.

one thing that's always bothered me though is the SSL setup.

According to their website, only enterprise users are allowed to manage their own TLS private keys.

I can kinda understand the logic behind free accounts not having that perk.

But if you are someone who really doesn't like cloudflare reading your traffic or you are a business, it seems odd to me that it's not being demanded of cloudflare that they make it more available for paid users to not expose their TLS private keys to cloudflare.

Why are so many folks OK with cloudflare essentially being able to read all their traffic?

or am I overestimating how many people are using the Pro and Business account? is the majority of their users just Free or Enterprise?

So I am finally starting the process of designing a personal website that can help manage and organize my finances for me.

So obviously, the security of such data is paramount and for the heck of it, I want to design a webapp where it doesn't operate by the rules of "trust me bro" even though I will be the one designing it and most likely will be the only one ever to use it. Just want that experience of proper encryption setup.

Also, even if I am the one operating it, I'd like to set it up so that even if the database is compromised, none of my information is.

skip to bottom if you want to just see my 2 question

Did some reading online, between reading when StandardNotes does encryption as well as how it does it and some basic reading into encryption

• https://www.baeldung.com/java-aes-encryption-decryption
• https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/14068/why-most-people-use-256-bit-encryption-instead-of-128-bit

and the importance of not having a local unencrypted database like Joplin does

So all that got me curious how Google encrypts the user data it has and would up reading

• https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/269341/how-does-googles-on-device-encryption-work
• https://developers.google.com/workspace/cse/guides/encrypt-and-decrypt-data

and the basic take-aways seem to be:

• utilize encryption on a field before storing it in a database so that even if the machine gets compromised, the data won't be
• if you want to go even further, take the approach of StandardNotes, where it seems even the web server itself never touched unencrypted data it seems? Looks like all the encrypting and decrypting happens locally and only encrypted data is sent to the server

1. But that got me curious. It can't be argued that Google is not secure. they have the best minds working there to ensure just that. and yet its also well known that their respect for user privacy is non-existent. Which means that they've made sure to protect the data [email, google searches, google docs, google maps history] from hackers but they can themselves decrypt at least some user data for the purpose of data collection and selling ads.
   But if Google can decrypt the data and that implies they store the keys on a server from what I can tell from my reading, how it is protected if someone malicious gains access to the database? If that person got access to the database and the keys that Google uses to decrypt the data, wouldn't that compromise the data?

2. if I decide to design my webapp so that all the encrypting and decrypting happens locally, that means that if I were to decide to create a REST API for my application, that would also have to be taking in data in encrypted format, no? Cause if that takes it in plaintext, that means that my webserver would have to be responsible for encryption, which it needs the keys to do that with and if it can encrypt with keys it has access to, then it can decrypt too, no? or are websites that deal with encrypted databases and have REST APIs that can take in plain text information generally coded to be using asymmetric encryption? meaning its different keys being used for encryption and decryption? Or is API Token the key in an encrypted format? or have I misunderstood the whole thing?

I have this Motherboard with 3 hard drives. I want the order to be

• P2
• Windows
• P5

and I have set that order many times, but for reasons I can't figure out, every once in a while, the order changes like you can see in this screenshot or other times, P5 somehow becomes the first option.

I can't figure out how to fix this?

This is probably a very long shot. I was part of quite a few maling lists / email groups back in the 1990s in Brazil. Lists for things like writing, The X-Files, Star Trek, or skepticism. I made a few friends. I know some of them were probably hosted on large foreign companies like Yahoo. I don't remember the actual names of the lists, and the internet provider where I had my email no longer exists. So I don't expect to find them easily, but I imagine that there must be some kind of archive where they may or may not exist. I'm okay with sifting through for a very long time if I have to. That may be facilitated by the fact that the Brazilian internet was fairly small back then. And I do remember possible usernames I might have used at the time, which I can use in a search.

Is what I want possible at all? Is there some kind of centralized archive that is easy for me to use?

Thanks!

I had heard about GLG a while ago and I was just approached by someone from GLG for a project. Does anyone have experience working with them specifically? I have never done any paid consulting gigs and I want to make sure I understand what I'm getting into.

Thanks!

I would like to upgrade my aged 8 years old laptop and I'm completely undecided about which laptop to buy right now.

I considered Apple Intel laptops terrible, bad thermals, overpriced, unreliable, touch bar (uggg), I hated every second working on it, when the company I work for upgraded me with a M1, it was such a huge improvement from any laptop I have ever tried, absolutely no noise, incredibly performant and the longest battery life of any laptop by a lot.

I still don't like the Apple ecosystem, and I would prefer to use Linux as my main OS, but I can't find anything that comes even closer for the price of a Mac Air, If I go with Framework I'll get a less performant machine with a way worse battery, I honestly don't think the premium on repairability is worth for me when I don't have any issues repairing more challenging laptops, at the end repairability will be how easy is to get new parts.

ThinkPads have good reputation and repairability, but for what I see, the quality has gone down the drain in their latest models, and if I go with their premium models I get similar performance to Apple with worse battery, Dell has similar issues.

Gaming laptops are not an option, I don't do any PC gaming and the size and aesthetics are a dealbreaker for me.

The main issue seems to be that until ARM processors become better competitors to Apple, the battery life will be always the bottleneck, and I don't know how good the new Snapdragon X Elite compares right now.

Besides web development, photography edition and video editing (4k), I don't do many demanding tasks, I'm more than fine with the performance of a M1 as the baseline.

As an alternative, I'm thinking about getting a powerful desktop for the demanding tasks and a less powerful laptop with a good battery and screen, but ideally I would prefer a single machine.

I went down the path of thinking about switching to Passkeys but it seems like more hassle than it is worth, so I hoped this community could tell me if I am crazy.

I use Bitwarden to generate and save passwords for anything important and always use an authentication app when the option is present. I never use the same password. Sadly, most Canadian banks are awful and only allow SMS 2FA if anything at all. That said, of the two banks I primarily use, one does allow an authentication app and the other uses its own app to send authentication codes.

I always read that Passkeys are better for people who are lazy/bad with their passwords. For someone like me, is the security practically the same or is there still some benefit to switching everything I can to Passkeys?

When Musk bought Twitter and "unleashed free speech" on the platform, it made me curious about other social media platforms, specifically one where data and privacy are much more respected.

That inevitably lead me to mastodon. I opened an account and all that, but I must be doing it wrong, or maybe mastodon just isn't what I want it to be.

I don't really know who or what to follow on there that would create an experience that draws me in.

In fairness, it could just be that I am not following interesting accounts but I follow 7 accounts

• grapheneOS which is just updates about their O.S.
• Daniel Micay who hasn't posted in a loooong time
• James Gunn rarely posts
• nixCraft is just memes

and the rest are just news outlets like Ars Technica, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Propublica, which ain't bad but like, they post links to long-form articles, which isn't really what you are really looking for if you are just doing a light skim of your feed for a quick 5 minutes.

Are interesting folks not on mastodon? or I am just not following the right accounts? Im interested in tech stuff and social issues and some politics (but not much cause that can get doom scrolly fast)

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.

I have a Moto G 5G 2023 and 2025 Chevy Trax that I'm trying to troubleshoot why Android Auto cannot last more than 10 minutes without crashing out and needing to either wait for the connection to be available again, or unplug and replug the USB cord to get it to reconnect. Sometimes it goes for an extended period of time, and sometimes it won't last for longer than a minute before it crashes with no visible error on the phone. I think it might be something in RAM, but more often than not it's when Google Maps is up, with Audible in the background and I'm not sure if it's one of those or possibly my Launcher or having the three buttons turned on for my phone, or some weird esoteric thing.

I'm one of those mythical Linux users who has been using it for years but has little to no idea what's going on behind the scenes or under the hood.

In my time using it, I've sort of passively gleaned that certain things are controversial, but I don't necessarily know why. It's also hard for me to know if these are just general intra-community drama/bikeshedding, or if these are actually big, meaningful issues.

If you're someone who's in the know, here's your chance to lay out a Linux controversy in a way that's understandable by someone like me, who can't tell you why people always make "GNU/Linux" jokes for some reason whenever people mention "Linux."

Here are some things that have pinged for me as controversial in my time using Linux:

• Unity
• Canonical
• Deepin
• systemd
• Arch
• GNOME
• Manjaro
• Kali
• Rust in the kernel
• elementaryOS
• Linus Torvalds
• Snaps
• Wayland
• Something about a university being banned from contributing to Linux
• NVIDIA drivers
• Package managers vs. Snaps/Flatpaks

There are certainly more -- these are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

Replies don't have to be limited to the above topics. I'm interested in getting the lay of the land about any Linux controversy.

IMPORTANT

This topic is intended for learning, not bickering.

• Please try to explain a controversy as fairly as you can.
• Please try to not re-ignite a flame war about a specific controversy.

It's fine to discuss these in good faith, but I do not want this topic to become yet another Linux battleground online. There are plenty of those already!

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)

A while ago some of the keys on my Dell XPS laptop started working poorly, they were only registering the presses half of the time or if I pushed them really hard. I tried removing the keycaps and cleaning the keys on the inside, but to no avail. Well, I thought, that means it's time to get a new laptop. So I was choosing the next laptop to get. One of the options I considered was the Framework laptop, which is supposed to be super repairable - I mean, if only I could just replace my laptop keyboard, I wouldn't have to buy a whole new laptop just because of a few broken keys!

Then I thought about it again. I realized that a repairable laptop is only useful if you actually try to repair your laptop, which I've never done. So, I looked it up, and turns out Dell, while obviously not as easily repairable as Framework, has very well-detailed official service manuals as well!

Two weeks of waiting for a Chinese copycat keyboard from AliExpress and three hours of work later, I finally have a fully working laptop! Turns out it isn't hard at all to replace a broken keyboard - but I'm still very proud of myself for doing it, mostly for even deciding to do it instead of just turning a fully functional laptop into e-waste as I would've done otherwise. I was also really surprised that Dell laptops are that easy to fix (though they don't officially sell replacement parts to consumers), since it's known to be a company that makes a ton of money on expensive support offerings.

I don't really know what the lesson of this post is, I just wanted to share this small achievement with y'all.

So since the USB-C spec came out, there are so many different cables advertising different optional capabilities.

Even if you are careful to select a cable which does what you need, there is a good chance it won't have all capabilities as advertised, you only find out when it arrives.

The situation on Amazon is particularly bad, with co-mingled stock and questionable brands like XZZTTG and EIUTOO dominating the listings.

For me, now, I'm specifically struggling to find a short replacement cable for my Samsung T7 SSD, which came with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 cable which was ~15cm and flexible. It was very nice, but they're not sold seperately!

So, where do you look these days to find a listing of decent and reliable accessories like USB cables?

UPDATE:

Great recommendations on brands to look for.
Thanks all!

Hi, so I've been thinking about this for several days now, and thought it might be an interesting topic for Tildes.

Earlier this week, YouTube suggested this AI Sitcom video to me. Some of the jokes are actually very cohesive "Dad jokes", and it got me wondering how much of the video was AI generated. Are the one-liners themselves AI generated? Was this script generated with AI, and then edited before passing it on to something else to generate the video and voice? Or are we at the phase where AI could generate the whole thing with a single prompt? If it's the latter I find this sort of terrifying, because the finished product is very cohesive for something with almost no editing.

I'd also be interested in discussing where this video might have come from. The channel and descriptions have almost no information, so it seems like this may be a channel that finds these elsewhere and reposts? Or maybe the channel is the original and just trying to be vague about technology used?

Also side note, I have no idea if this belongs in ~Tech, so feel free to move it around as needed.

I have a project I'm working on that could be performed by a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM. But almost everything on the Pi's board besides the SoC and RAM will be unused. And for this project size is important. I don't need WiFi/Bluetooth/ethernet/USB3/PCIe/Cameras/etc.

Here are my requirements:

• Performance at or above the SoC on the Pi5
• At least 8GB of RAM
• Either one USB port (for a mic/headphone jack combo USB sound card) or integrated analog audio input and output
• A couple of GPIO pins for buttons/LEDs
• Cost around the Pi5 - $80
• Runs Linux

Looking at the Pi5 I feel a properly stripped down version that meets my needs could be as small or smaller than a Pi Zero. I looked around and other SBCs are either much slower, much bigger, and/or much more expensive.

My current best option is to buy a Pi5 and trim its PCB as best as I can. But given there are so many competing options I assume one of them will have what I'm looking for.

I'm a web designer and web host. I've basically been doing this for almost 30 years - I registered my first domain back in 1996, and I've had my own dedicated server(s) since 2002.

I've gone back to starting up a business to do design and hosting, and so I'd like to get my business out there a bit, so that is a motivation for this; but also, I have long supported hosting projects that I believed in. The longest project I've hosted has been the Simutrans community - since 2002, I have hosted most of the resources used by the community, including being the primary source for most downloads of the game for a number of years.

One thing that makes me different from most webhosts? I believe in quality, speedy, secure hosting. You can get budget hosting on overloaded servers with support that doesn't care about you. That's not what I do. For my paid customers, I charge a bit more, but that's because I make sure that the sites run as quickly as possible.

I primarily host WordPress-based sites, and I use Divi on most of those because while it's pretty easy for non-techie people to understand how to make minor changes for those that want/need to do that, it's powerful and allows me to design websites for businesses.

I'm writing this post to offer hosting and help for up to six projects that people want to work on.

What I will provide:

• Website running WordPress+Divi
• Help using Divi
• Some design help, possibly a complete design, but at least some help with design ideas
• If your project doesn't use WordPress+Divi, I'd still consider hosting you. The server is a shared server environment, meaning PHP apps - a LAMP environment, essentially

What I will not provide:

• A domain name. But they are cheap through https://Namecheap.com/. And you wouldn't need one initially as I can set you up with a development subdomain on na1.site. (And if you were happy with a subdomain, I'd certainly allow that to be permanent)

For how long? Indefinitely. I'd say permanently, but you can't predict the future. That said, as long as I'm around and you still want the hosting service. Again, I've hosted the Simutrans project for more than twenty years. So I've been around and will be.

Questions? Lemme know. Interested? Lemme know.

I'm trying to keep this relatively short, so please, if you do have questions, please do ask.

I'd normally post this on reddit...but I thought I'd give the Tildes Tech Support Team a try.

I have a Ubiquiti Unifi Cloud Gateway Ultra and I'm trying to better understand zone firewall management and VLANs and all that.

I'll start with a screenshot. I'm only changing the two settings highlighted in red.

I'm trying to understand the difference between two firewall policy settings:

1. Action = Allow ONLY, AND Connection State = Return Traffic
2. Action = Allow AND Auto Allow Return Traffic checked, AND Connection State = All

I have two VLANs -- "Internal" and "Lab." Each is in their own policy zone, also called "Internal" and "Lab." The "Internal" VLAN does not have the "Isolate Network" option checked, but "Lab" does.

What I want is devices in "Internal" able to initiate and maintain connections with devices in "Lab." But I don't want devices in "Lab" able to initiate connections to devices in "Internal."

With Policy 1, "Internal" can't reach "Lab" nor vice versa. Hmm.

With Policy 2, "Internal" can ping and SSH into devices in "Lab," but not the other way around. Perfect; that's what I want.

And now my question(s): What is the difference between these two policies? To me, they look the same. But clearly the end results say they're not. So what's actually going on here? Additionally, assuming I could get Policy 1 to do what I want, is Policy 2 more vulnerable from a cybersecurity perspective than Policy 1?

If it helps, here's a screenshot of my zone matrix, with focus on source "Internal" and destination "Lab."

Thanks!

I like to periodically audit my home computer infrastructure for upgrades/replacements. Mostly this is so I don't have to make an impulse purchase when something inevitably fails, but it's also nice to keep up to date on the state of the art.

I'm currently trying to reassess my home home networking, and I am a bit overwhelmed by everything. So I'm hoping that the residents of Tildes can help me out a bit with recommendations.

I would classify myself as a fairly budget consumer. I'm on a less than 1Gbit Xfinity plan, and have mostly cobbled together my current system from collected parts over the years. My DNS/DHCP is handled by my primary router, an aging T-Mobile Asus device I picked up years ago and loaded with Merlin. A few years ago I picked up an Eero system on discount, and I have been using that in bridge mode to provide mesh Wifi around the house.

The system I have in place is working great. It occurs to me though, that most of the parts are getting old enough that I can't replace them directly. I'm definitely not going to be able to find my specific router easily, and the first gen Eeros are also getting harder to find. I also think I might not be doing myself any favors with the chain of multiple devices being cobbled together. Perhaps it's time to look for a mesh system with the flexibility that my Asus/merlin router offers.

So let's hear it. What sort of networking equipment is everyone using these days? What do you like about it? Any killer features that I have been missing while living under a rock?

So, I want to achieve something particular regarding my home network.
I want to have 2 routers, one is my main router that everything connects to except for my devices where I stream things from, and when it comes to streaming devices, I want those to use a different router that plugs into the main router

Why? I have been selected for the focalmeter panel and that device is connected to a router to

1. intercept all packets going to the router it is setup with
2. replaces the hostnames of all the devices with a random selection of letters (think HH123-4) and I don't want that to happen with my servers. (aka it takes over the DHCP service on the router)

part 1 kinda bothers me but 2 is such a nuisance for when I am doing SSH, So my solution is to get a secondary router for the "streaming" part of my network, hook that router up to my main router and then let the focalmeter take over the DHCP service of that secondary router and so everything it does impacts only the streaming part of my network. Like the focalmeter could literally fuck up the secondary router and my servers and machines I use for non-streaming reasons would not be affected in any way.

My streaming devices need to be able to access my servers to be able to access my jellyfin but that's the only necessary connection I can think of atm. Although it would be nice if I can have the devices on my main network access my streaming devices over the network too.

All that to say, when looking up how to get 2 routers work side-by-side like that with both their DHCP services up and running but not conflicting, I dont really know what to look for. Am I trying to setup a subnet or is there some other word for the network architecture I am trying to achieve?

Between Meta announcing that its AI, Meta AI, reached 1 billion users[1] and Google saying that AI Overviews are used by 1.5 billion[2], I’m curious to know how many of these people intentionally use the feature, or prefer it to what the AI replaces.

AI Overviews appear at the top of searches, with no option to turn them off. Meta AI, I suspect many people trigger accidentally by tapping that horrible button in WhatsApp, in search results across its three core apps, or when trying to tag someone in a group by typing an @ symbol.

It’s very easy to reach enormous numbers when you already have a giant platform. I don’t think that’s even part of the discussion. The issue is trumpeting these numbers as if they were earned, rather than imposed.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/28/zuckerberg-meta-ai-one-billion-monthly-users.html
[2] https://www.theverge.com/news/655930/google-q1-2025-earnings

Hello to everyone who's reading this post :)

Now LLMs are increasingly so useful (of course after careful review of their generated answers), but I'm concerned about sharing my data, especially very personal questions and my thought process to these large tech giants who seem to be rather sketchy in terms of their privacy policy.

What are some ways I can keep my data private but still harness this amazing LLM technology? Also what are some legitimate and active forums for discussions on this topic? I have looked at reddit but haven't found it genuinely useful or trustworthy so far.

I am excited to hear your thoughts on this!

I am arguing here in regards to personally owned hw.

I personally think that the arguments in recent years were very heavily skewed in support of this and I would like to propose here counterarguments that I don't feel are considered enough are when I see this come up in various places. Or at least not said enough.

First and foremost what forcibly pushing updates actually means is the developer being given blank check to change the functionality of your device in any way they please. In case of various locked down hw such as smart things, game consoles, tvs, ereaders or others there is often not even a choice to use different sw because it is artificially blocked. Only real check against negative effects of this is legislation and potential of enough public outrage to impact future sales. From the state of various mainstream sw products it can be seen how well it works.

It creates a culture where pushing anti features is significantly easier and tech literacy is significantly harder to attain if only as a secondary effect of less transparent, more obtuse and more complicated systems, frequently with no actual need for more complexity which is not rooted in desire to increase monetization.

It also means it is harder as a user to guard against faulty updates.

Normalization of this behavior also means that any can do this with no pushback because it is the fabled default, the one where fundamental flaws are brushed aside while alternatives are rejected over cosmetic problems.
There could be argument meant for critical parts of critical sw such as os or browser, but if so it should be made individually and not be implicit. There is usually no meaningful individual control over feature updates, not just security ones. I also don't think forced updates for games on Steam for example can be argued to be something that benefits security.

I usually generate ebooks in two ways. One is to export directly from Emacs Org-Mode with ox-epub. That doesn't give me a lot of control and export options are a bit of a crapshoot. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. The other is to export from Org-Mode to either odt or docx and use Libreoffice Writer to export to EPUB. I will then open the ebook on Calibre to fix the metadata, the table of contents., and generate a cover.

That works fine for my personal use, but in the near future I may need to generate an ebook that looks proper and professional. I don't even know what "proper and professional" really means for an ebook, but I assume there must be tools and practices that are universally recomended that I am not following.

Hence the question: are there "pro" tools for authoring ebooks? Are there any rules, standards, workflows, or guidelines I should be following? If those exist, where can I find tutorials and documentation on how to generate the best books?

EDIT: I use Windows and Linux.

Thanks!