Basically the title. I've been an Android user since 2012, but have have an iPad and a Macbook that I really like, especially how well they work together. My pixel 5 was on its way out, so I finally took the plunge and bought an iPhone 15 Pro earlier this week. I'm still getting everything set up, and I'm particularly excited to play with the different focus modes and shortcuts. I'm curious what apps and features should I be using to make the most of this switch?

Back in 2022, Tildes helped me build my current PC (Thanks everyone!). Back then I knew that eventually I would have to replace my motherboard, which underwent corrosion and became unreliable. I never turn off or even put my PC to sleep because, otherwise, it won't turn on for hours. I'd like to change that. I'm pretty confident that is an issue with the motherboard, which underwent repairs before. Other components are much newer and my power source is top notch.

Here's the machine on PC Part Picker. Should I just buy the same motherboard again? I mean, I don't have any complaints, I just happened to live by the sea back then, leading to premature failure. But it's still working. It's cheap, too.

I might be up for a better processor, but price is a concern. What would be the next affordable step from what I have now? In any case, the CPU is rarely an issue for any of my tasks, and the only game I play that could use a more powerful processor is World of Warcraft, which I only play intermittently anyway. Maybe it isn't worth it.

I'm getting a 1TB SSD, those seem to have gotten much cheaper since 2022!

Because, unlike me, most Tildes users are in the US, Canada, and Europe, when taking prices into account, multiply them by 5 in your head to have a sense of what that expense means in my country.

Thanks!

As the title suggests, I am looking for a free chrome or firefox plugin that can locally scrape data from multiple URLs. To be a bit more precise, what I mean by it:

• A free chrome or firefox plugin
• Local scraping: it runs in the browser itself. No cloud computing or "credits" required to run
• Scrape data: Collects predefined data from certain data fields within a website such as https://www.dastelefonbuch.de/Suche/Test
• Infinite scroll: to load data that only loads once the browser scrolls down (kind of like in the page I linked above)

I am not looking into programming my own scraper using python or anything similar. I have found plugins that "kind of" do what I am describing above, and about two weeks ago I found one that pretty much perfectly does what is described ("DataGrab"), but it starts asking to buy credits after running it a few times.

My own list:

• DataGrab: Excellent, apart from asking to buy credits after a while
• SimpleScraper: Excellent, but asks to buy credits pretty much immediately
• Easy Scraper: Works well for single pages, but no possibility to feed in multiple URLs to crawl
• Instant Data Scraper: Works well for single pages and infinite scroll pages, but no possibility to feed in multiple URLs to crawl
• "Data Scraper - Easy Web Scraping" / dataminer.io: Doesn't work well
• Scrapy.org: Too much programming, but looks quite neat and well documented

Any suggestions are highly welcome!

Edit: A locally run executable or cmd-line based program would be fine too, as long as it just needs to be configured (e.g., creating a list of URLs stored in a .txt or .csv file) instead of coded (e.g., coding an infinite scroll function from scratch).

The machine will be a laptop.

So let's say I'm doing this on Antix Linux or MX-Linux, which are both based on Debian. I already set up everything that I want. Now I wish to make that installation incapable of accessing the internet ever again -- even if I want it to. However, I wouldn't want to achieve that in a way that will negatively affect any application I might need. How can I do that?

You may be curious about my motivation. It is simple: that machine should be only for writing and nothing more. Maybe I'll use YLINAT, @Areldyb's Timasomo project.

For the purposes of my usage, it is nothing more than an electronic typewriter with a screen. That is a drastic measure but I have ADHD and I need to write. I'm afraid that if I don't do something about it I'll see myself in a difficult situation regarding deadlines. I'll just take the laptop with me to a quiet place and leave the cell phone at home.

Every day I will take my writing off the laptop via USB and back it up.

I already have the best ear muffers money can buy in my country, and it is still not enough. I cannot use ear plugs because of my tinnitus hearing aids. I'm in an area with a lot of noise and this is not going to change. The main issueI face is loud music. Could a noise canceling headphone provide some solace?

There are a lot of awesome open source projects that I'd love to donate to, however, I can't afford to donate to all of them.

It would be great if there was something like a charity fund (eg. GiveWell), but for FOSS. So a lot of people donate to it, and it distributes all collected money between some curated projects (most influential/important/promising/underfunded/etc.).

Do you know if something like this already exists? if not, could it potentially be a good idea to do? It seems like the idea of donating to open-source is currently more prominent in the community due to the xz backdoor thing.

I've noticed that my phone's home screens have become a bit cluttered and figured it's about time to clean it up. So I tried searching online and found tons of recommendations and suggestions, but figured I would ask users here if anyone has any tips for productivity or efficiency, or just something that works for you. Might give me some good ideas to try out, and hopefully can benefit anyone else reading this thread.

Do you have tons of home screens or just one with a ton of folders? Do you use many widgets or not at all? Do you organize apps by how frequently you use them? Or how similar the apps are to each other? By color of the app icon? Or something else entirely?

Seriously, any help/suggestions/ideas would be appreciated.

It’s been a few weeks now since the release of iOS 17.4, which

[…] provides new options for app marketplaces, web browsers and payments for residents of the European Union. […]

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a firm believer in the underlying regulation to it, and have been ever since the possibility of this becoming a reality was in the Brussels air. But so far, I haven’t really been able to come up with a truly practical use case.

Furthermore, I haven’t seen any marketing for an Epic Store, Meta Store, or similar “app marketplaces”, but this may be attributed to the still rather… wobbly legal situation surrounding, notably, still having to direct payments to Apple while not using their store for app distribution. I don’t think there has been any follow-up from Apple (or the EU) that retracts these conditions.

So: Have any fellow EU resident ~tech’ies done anything fun or interesting with this new freedom yet?

To those not affected by this regulation, what would you like to “sideload”, or are perhaps already sideloading on Android?

Do any of you think big companies will move their entire palette onto an alternative store anytime soon, e.g. Facebook and sister products? To be honest, I doubt this will happen, otherwise it would’ve long occurred on the Google Play Store as well.

My ideas were:

• I’ve thought about trying to install Minecraft (the full version, probably using Pojav), or a game of similar caliber, on my phone just for fun and to see how well the iPhone GPU really fares against a “real” game, but didn’t find the time yet for looking into it.
• Also personally, I’d love to see a real “root-capable” shell on iOS, but I don’t think that will ever be a thing irrespective of how much sideloading Apple is forced to allow into their OS.

Since I know quite a few tilderinos use Kagi (far higher percentage than the standard population) I figured this might interest some of you.

Kagi pushed out a new Dark theme that is not dark. It's possibly even worse than Googles non-dark official Dark mode.

Here is a CSS fix you can throw in your custom css section in settings that I whipped up for some people in the Discord, should be useful.

    :root {  
  --custom-bg-color: #090c10;

  --search-result-gap: 20px;
  --search-result-gap-mobile: 10px;
  --app-bg: var(--custom-bg-color);
  --search-result-title: #fff;
  --primary-visited: #aaa;
  /*! --quick-search-bg: #000; */
  --color-search-input: var(--custom-bg-color);
  --result-item-title-border: rgba(255,255,255,0.25);
  --search-result-date-bg: rgba(255,255,255,0.15);
}

.__sri-time {
  font-size: 12px;
  border-radius: 2px;
  margin-right: 3px
}

.__sri-desc {
  padding-top: 3px;
}

.__sri-title {
  margin-bottom: 5px;
}

.__sri-url .__sri_url_path_box {
  margin-top: 0px;
}

@media screen and (max-width: 1300px) {
  .search-result, .sri-group {
    padding-top: 0px !important;
    padding-bottom: 0px !important;
    margin-bottom: var(--search-result-gap-mobile) !important;
  }
}  

This fixes the colors, padding, and some other general weirdness they introduced. They also don't follow their own variable specs so I introduced two new ones in there so you can modify to your liking (namely padding between links on mobile and desktop).

This is a question I eventually ask about every social media site I use(d). I like Tildes, and the discussions here are much more constructive than any other place I've seen, however I've seen it to be true even here. When one doesn't curate their feed, and use the default home page, the negative topics seems to dominate. I'm talking about the topics that talk about problems and what's wrong with something, often with titles implying the awfulness or emergency of such a problem. I think I don't need to elaborate on how this is much more prevalent and extreme on other sites. But nevertheless, it's a recurring pattern even here.

I know the argument that goes that humans are problem-fixing machines, and that there are psychological incentives to focus on problems. However, this seems overly reductive and lacking in explanatory power to me. Outside of internet, this is not a phenomenon I've experienced with people, unless they were mentally going through something very rough. Otherwise, people generally seem to talk about neutral or positive issues. And even while talking about negative issues, the tone often isn't grim, and doesn't leave a depressive aftertaste.

Even on the internet, in smaller spaces and more closed spaces, like chatting servers, this doesn't seem to hold true. Sure, there are politically-oriented, and therefore problem-oriented spaces even there, but most spaces don't seem to be that way. Back when I used Facebook too, while the posts were vain, most of my friends and acquaintances were just interested in sharing and commenting on social lives.

So I think this is a problem that is more endemic to "open" social media sites, with easily accessible and open-to-public spaces, rather than applying to the whole humanity or even every internet space. Its one of my biggest head scratchers about social media sites. So far I couldn't find a satisfactory explanation in the literature either. Doesn't mean there isn't, but I haven't stumbled upon such.

So, I'm interested in your opinions: Why do negative topics dominate on open social media sites, even here, unless curated against? Why is this such a strong recurring pattern for sites structured like this, while it's not in other online and physical spaces and interections I mentioned?

I'm not talking about the unsubscribe button that is at the bottom of an email that takes you to the sender's website to unsubscribe. I'm talking about the button that occasionally shows up in outlook or apple mail that is delivered by the application.

I have clicked unsubscribe using the built in unsubscribe button in outlook and apple mail, only to receive more junk mail from that origin later that day. These buttons don't seem to do anything. What are they doing behind the scenes that is supposed to be getting you off mailing lists?