I haven't really messed with printers in probably 15 years or more, but it felt like any time they were brought up, there were two flavors:

• Older printers, which decided if they wanted to work or not based on absolutely nothing at all
• Newer printers, which are covered in DRM and mostly a nickel-and-diming scam

Now, for the former I remember having some issues, but generally just clearing the printer's cache (or whatever it was called) would fix most of the problems. I think the bigger issue is that I always helped people set up cheap Walmart-sold inkjet printers that had more hardware issues than software, along with ink that would go to shit instantly.

But I was out today at a thrift store and they had a Brother for $25, with an entire extra unopened toner cartridge (I think that's what it's called?). I asked them if it worked, they said it did, but if it didn't I could return it by tomorrow.

So I brought it home, assuming something would be wrong with it, but in about 10 minutes I had it plugged in, connected to my wifi network, and connected to my computer. I tried scanning-- it worked fine. I tried copying-- it does that no problem. It took longer to install the drivers on my PC than set up the printer itself.

So are printers really as straight-forward as I experienced with this cheap used one, or am I just lucky?

I'm making an effort to declutter and trying to get rid of my old electronics. I have a bunch of old Oculus hardware, my old gaming PC with a Ryzen and a RX480, an old Xbox console and other things around the house. Do you recommend going through eBay, or Swappa or another specialty website, or if there may be a hobby shop willing to take things off of hands, or just go to Goodwill and accept the resale value as sunk cost?

For a long time now, I have been using KeePassXC for desktops and KeePassDX for Android. I keep everything synchronized neatly with Syncthing, which can be configured to operate over your WiFi or the internet through their gateways. This allows me to share a single KeePass file with another individual, provided I tell them the password.

I have a co-worker who is loving 1Password and while it looks great, something irks me about paying monthly for a password manager. I looked into Bitwarden for a "local cloud" and have seen very mixed results as well as not being sure if I could trust my own security configurations to do so.

I am primarily wondering what everyone else is using in search of something a bit more convenient (I'm not opposed to using the cloud) that has an app like KeePass that I can use for desktop apps, and not just in the browser (though I don't use that function often, truthfully).

Edit: Passkey support was mentioned in this comment and made me realize how important such support will be in the coming years. For those of you with password management solutions supporting it, how has it been?

Just wondering how other technically inclined individuals go about this.

For my daily driver machines I usually buy Macs and build towers, which are simple enough — on the Mac, figure out needs and slightly overbuy, and on towers put some research into parts to find those with the best reviews and bang for buck. Pretty straightforward.

I also keep around a generic x86 laptop though, and I might be replacing the one I have currently in the coming months. Shopping for its replacement unfortunately is not so clean and simple. There is to my knowledge no laptop-shopper analogue of PCPartPicker for laptops for instance and retailer search tools are terrible (especially Amazon's), which makes filtering out the noise practically impossible. It gets even harder if you're looking for certain features and especially less tangible things like build quality, QC, and battery life. Review sites often aren't of much help, with skin-deep reviews that frequently miss major points and pay little mind to things that may become issues in long-term usage.

And yet clearly, plenty of people are buying laptops, which brings me back to the topic question. How does everybody go about their laptop shopping?

What was your favorite web page back in the day that you would visit religiously and tell all your friends about but have since lost? Did it shutter permanently or did you lose the bookmark when switching computers never to find it again?

Back in the days of printed web page yellow pages and search engines you had to submit your page to be reviewed before it was listed, I had found a page about movie easter eggs, errors and insider information. It had factoids about nearly 1000 movies ranging from obscure facts, mistakes in editing, anachronisms, funny on-set stories and the like.

It was fun to read that this character was named after the art directors niece, the stunt car is visible losing 8 hubcaps in the main chase, etc. It was amazing to read how different movies would interact (IIRC, Kim Bassinger's gasp/jump reaction to opening the door in "Batman" was real due to them having a xenomoprh from Aliens there instead of Jack Nicholson since they were filming at the same time). It was also cool to read that certain characters made cameos in other movies (most people caught that Randolph and Mortimer Duke from "Trading Places" were in "Coming to America" but there are so many other not as obvious blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameos). I never would have noticed the car visible in the background of Johnny Cage vs Scorpion in the orchard fight in "Mortal Kombat" without this page--and now I can never unsee it when I watch it.

I don't know if I lost the bookmark or if the page shut down so I deleted it but any search I've undertaken for this page in the last few decades only seems to return listicles like "21 obvious anachronisms in modern movies!" but not my all comprehensive target.

Honorable mention to Damn Interesting (although I did find that one again after a few years). Although it's underwent some turbulance and changes since I first disovered it, I would often reread the articles and gleefully looked forward to each new article when I was younger. With article names like Lake Peigneur: The Swirling Vortex of Doom it was hard not to be intrigued.

I recently switch browsers from Safari to Orion after many, many years. I imported all of my bookmarks and then realized that I couldn't remember the last time I went through them to see what was still useful (or even around).

I also realized that I don't save a ton of bookmarks anymore as I keep all of my browsing history available and search through that.

How often do you all go through your bookmarks/favorites?

What are those programs that you used back in the day (or even recently!) that you look back on fondly and think about how they once were-- or worse, programs that seemed to have just up and disappeared?

What made me think of this question, for me, was Opera. It had everything: browsing, RSS, and torrenting all in one browser. However, a lot of sites loved to break in it since it was the least supported and I eventually moved to Firefox (then Chrome, then Firefox...). Looking at the browser now-- and unsure if I'm just picky or its a case of enshittification, or both-- I'm just "meh."

This is more focused towards those that use custom domains for their email. My current plan is up at Zoho for my team in a month, and even though I've used them for the past few years its been hit-or-miss (especially when using third-party apps or programs).

Who do you use? Who do you not trust? Who would you never go back to?

Sidenote: I hope this might eventually kick off a ~privacy group, one day.

Hi everyone, I'm struggling with contact management and was wondering if anyone could recommend some good solutions. My Google Contacts and iOS contact management has become unmanageable and I personally find them very awkward to use.

As an ex-Redditor, I only subscribed to 3 subreddits:
/r/dumbphones
/r/nosurf
/r/simpleliving

As someone who is incorporating more of an "offline" vs. "online" life, and downgrading some elements to live a lifestyle that's more focus on the present and get out of the house more (family, kids, pets, walking, etc.) instead of just reading and absorbing tons of information on my laptop.

Are there any people here who are interested in this or is there a section on Tildes for this already? (I know Reddit is a much bigger site, just dipping my toes in the water to see if there is something like that on here already.)

About a week ago i made A post asking people what their favorite BBS board is, so I'd be curious to see what people answer to his question. Personally the only one i remember is emptyclosets, a forum for queer people.
Edit: By drama/story, it doesn't have to be something someone did that pissed people off. You can also include something interesting that happened on there (e.g on a Nirvana forum that used to exist, theres a micro-famous story about a user who went to a prostitute and talked about it on there)

I have two that I will highly recommend:

Vimium has completely changed the way that I use my browsers. They have extensions for firefox and safari as well, but the link I provided is for chrome. If you are used to vim keybindings, it makes websites almost completely navigable using only your keyboard! Here's a video demonstration of it in case you're interested.

My other is SponsorBlock for youtube. This one makes using youtube a little more bearable by automatically skipping the baked-in sponsorships and advertisements. It has literally cut down my viewing times of some channels by like 20%.

Are there any other extensions that you absolutely love?

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?

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.

The recent PKM thread had me thinking about what folks are using as journaling app/portal. I do use Obsidian for my second brain right now and genuinely love it. But I find the mobile app on Android to be a bit clunky, if I'm honest. Seems slow to open even with very few plugins. For jounaling I've used DayOne for years. I started back when it was iOS/MacOS only, but then switched phone to Android and haven't been back. But now they have an app and web app for that. What I don't like is the somewhat goofy format it saves in and it's on their servers. They used to allow you to at least leverage your own Dropbox, but no longer.

For the past several months I've tried several FOSS options. Main criteria is that I could host it myself, supports offline entries stored in an open file format (preferably MarkDown), and had either multi platform app or a decent web app. That lead me to try these:

Memos
Pros:

• Great persistent web app
• Slick UI that is light and snappy
• markdown support
  Cons:
• Stuffs the .md inside a database file so can be a bit cumbersome to export data
• No offline support. There is a 3rd party app that hopes to implement it

Flatnotes
Pros:

• Incredibly simple
• Another easily deployed app
• Flat Markdown files
  Cons:
• Web app on mobile is almost unusable as in it doesn't scale well to smaller screens
• Very early development, but very likely to stay as minimalistic as it is now.
• No offline and very unlikely to ever have it

Joplin
Pros:

• Multi platform apps that perform well
• End-to-end encryption supported
• Could replace both DayOne and my To-do solution (Google Keep)
• Offline support
  Cons:
• More database stuff instead of flat markdown files

One solution I've been testing lately is using IAWriter to write to a 'Journal' folder within my Obsidian vault on Google drive Obsidian Vault > Journal > 2023.... for example. This works surprisingly well. Of course IAWriter is a bit spendy at $29 for Android and then more $ for other platforms as they're sold separately.

So I'm curious what other people are using for just simple daily journaling, random thoughts, etc. If there's an approach I've missed I'd love to hear it. Joplin is so dang close but not having the structure of plaintext files is a no go for me as I don't want to be trapped by any one product should something happen to the development down the road. Doesn't have to be free, but I want control of the entries either on my own server or cloud storage.

javascript:window.location='[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU%27+ytInitialData.metadata.channelMetadataRenderer.externalId.substring(2)](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU%27+ytInitialData.metadata.channelMetadataRenderer.externalId.substring(2)

This puts every video of a channel into one playlist. Makes listening to music channels so much easier.

I also use Pilgrim.

P.S. https://tildes.net/~tech/10ko/little_12ft_io_bookmarklet

This is currently going on with me. Someone has spoofed my home phone number, and has been using it to call other people. Whenever the other person misses the spoofer's call they end up calling me. I have answered quite the handful of calls from this. It has been happening since Wednesday, and it has gotten often enough that I have been carrying around a wireless phone in my pocket. I did end up reporting it to the fcc, but that hasn't done anything yet.

Anyway this gets me wondering, have you ever had your phone number spoofed? If so, how did you deal with it?

Just interested in how people's smart homes are set up and how they enjoy things or what they may dislike/wish was changed.

Alexa? HomeKit? Google? A mix? Other?
Glitches?
Any complex or otherwise unique use cases you've set up?

I am really struggling without r/selfhosted. I truly believe it is, by far, the best community for self-hosters that I have come across. What I am missing most of all is, whenever I search for questions to self-hosting problems - especially for smaller projects - the answers are nearly always found within posts on that sub.

At least with things like programming, there is stackoverflow and a bunch of other small communities.

I'm going to end up going to Discord to find my solutions, which is the next big community. But it means having to go on there and ask the question (that has probably been asked hundreds of times before), rather than just searching the issue.

+1 for slashdot, mainly because of intelligent topics and conversations about science, technology, scifi, games and all that fun stuff. Community participation and quality discourse made it interesting.

Everything on popular social media "out there" now is about click bait and sound bites, even comments and replies. Posts (and communities) are reduced to nothing more than grabbing a few seconds of attention.

It seems that Obsidian is a very popular note-taking software within the community here, so I would like to know what plugins you use for your daily workflow in Obsidian. I will start:

• Advanced Tables: Very useful for adding and managing markdown tables using simple intuitive keyboard strokes.

• Callout Manager: I tend to abuse the callout function (in my academic vault, I organize any kind of information inside a callout with the source of the info as the title), so it is good to have control of the colors for different kinds of callouts.

• Minimal Theme Settings: Nothing much to talk about. Just some eye candy to make my notes easier on the eyes. Plus, the focus mode is very good for study sessions.

• Obsidian Matrix: Allows me to organize some mathematical LaTeX code properly.

• Reading Time: Useful to grasp the length of a longer note at a quick glance.

• Recent Files: Helps me set myself around my files.

• Style Settings: Complement of "Minimal Theme Settings" to achieve maximum eye candy.

• List Callouts: I use it only in my personal projects vault. It helps me give particular emphasis to specific topics within my lists.

• Table of Contents: Useful for longer, heavily-structured notes.

Aside from that, I also have four CSS snippets:

1. Align: Aligns my linked figures to the center of the page.
2. Callout: Specifies the size of callouts (useful, as I mainly structure my notes inside callouts).
3. Hide: Hides my "resources" folder from the Obsidian explorer (this folder contains files such as figures and PDFs that I link into my notes).
4. Justify: Justifies all the text in read-mode.

Akin to this: https://tildes.net/~tech/1670/redditors_of_tildes_which_subreddits_are_you_missing_the_most_during_the_blackout

What can we leave behind?
What should we leave behind?

For me, the one BIG thing is the stupid puns.
Threads full and full and full of puns, one after the other.

Case in point:
https://tildes.net/~movies/16bf/chasing_horse_faces_sex_assault_charges

I can so live without that side of reddit.

edit: Yeah, that "thread" is two comments long, but I just got reddit flashbacks just seeing those.

Mine is a Facebook group called ALDI Aisle of Shame. I don't know if it's okay to link to it, so I'll just let you all google it if you want to check it out!

Not too long ago on /r/femalefashionadvice, someone mentioned a product in a comment section and I went to look for it online. This lead me to said group and the place was so unexpectedly incredibly wholesome..! It is the silliest thing. There are more than one and a half million members all praising the quality of ALDI products, and posting pictures of their hauls.

Recently, a trend was to post pictures of your dog and even a pony in hats gotten from ALDI and it is just so much fun! Even women doing the Spiderman meme in real life as they spot each other with the same outfit from ALDI.

PS: I am aware Tildes is text-focused so please let me know if this many images in a post is against the spirit of Tildes! Wasn't sure if it's ok to include images in a text post like this.

I really like tinkering with older PC's, trying to make them work for modern usecases which is mostly using web browser.

Anyone else do this here? Or interested in it?

I have old 10" netbook from 2007 or so, it has 1gb RAM and Intel Atom 32bit that barely can handle things. However, I switched it's old SATA hard drive to an SSD, and it is a bit faster at booting now! I also ordered 2gb RAM stick, so maybe that will help it a bit too. It's also running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed 32 bit, but i dont recommend this for linux newcomers since it's a bit different distro.

If you have an old laptop or PC lying around, try breathing life into it by installing a Linux distro like Debian 12. Change a spinning hard drive to an SSD. For even older retro hardware there are even SD card adapters and such, that can work in place of old hard drives.

My goal is to make this tiny netbook good for light web browsing and maybe even scripting on things and having a Matrix chat window open. It's perfect tablet size, but very underpowered, even during it's release, so it's a challenge. But that's what makes this kinda fun! Also it helps tone down e-waste if one can use an old device for modern things.

I'm going to set up my first home server with an Intel NUC, but I can't decide what OS to use. Ubuntu seems popular but I like Pop!_OS and am not sure if that would be a good option. Then there's TrueNas and Unraid, but as a newbie, what's the best choice?

I'm also just curious what everyone else is using :)

Edit: Thank you for your great responses!

The vast majority of free and open source software available is well known for being clunky, having very unintuitive UI/UX and being very inaccessible to non-nerds.

We can see this in Linux distros, tools, programs and even fediverse sites.

I understand that a lot of it is because "it's free", but I also feel like a lot of people who make and use FOSS don't actually value user-friendliness at all. I feel like some of it is in order to gatekeep the less tech savvy out, and some of it is "it's good enough for me".

What are the best theories for why this is the case?

EDIT: A lot of replies I've been getting are focusing on the developers. I'm asking more why the users seem okay with it, rather than why the developers make it that way.

I, clearly along with many others, recently left Reddit and have personally decided not to return unless it sees drastic, lasting change. However, this has made it clear just how reliant I was on the site for multiple aspects of my life, ranging from local and world news, to hobby related announcements, to perspective, advice, and memes directly from marginalized communities. In Tildes I've already found some of what I've been missing, and I'm sure I'll find more as the community continues to grow, but Tildes doesn't have the same setup to allow for finding the same niche communities that I once had (nor should Tildes ever need to have that).

With all of that said, what gaps are you currently experiencing? Have you found any good sites or resources that have helped you or might help others in the thread?

What's it like over there right now? IIRC the blackout was supposed to finish today. I've decided to quit reddit unless something changes, so I want to do my best not to visit the site, but I am very curious about what the website and culture has been like for the past few days. And now that the initial blackout is 'over', how many subreddits have started to emerge again? Are people coming back now and acting like they've won? Has reddit responded to the blackout at all?

I immediately installed iPadOS 17 Beta 1. Apart from quirks with saving images from the browser, it's been about as solid as the latest 16.x.x.

Anyone running the other betas as your daily drivers?

I'm also eager to hear from Sonora users. Considering updating my i7 Mac Mini.

Let's share our favourite mono fonts and maybe we can find some new favourites. I used to use whatever was inbuilt with Visual Studio and JetBrains' IDEs, but since JetBrains released their JetBrains Mono, I've started using it everywhere. I override the monospace font on every website with it. Never was a huge fan of Fira Code, Consolas, or the other popular ones. Personal taste. But somethings about JB Mono just speaks to me!

Are you a ligatures person? Personally, I love them :)

I recently discovered Paperless-ngx and have immediately fell in love. I must now decide whether to host it on my VPS (risky with personal documents), on a Pi at home or finally invest in a proper home server (something cheap but with a bit more power than a Pi4). It can totally be run a Pi, but performance may not be as good.

Does Tildes have a big self-hosted community? What are you self-hosting currently, and what do you enjoy about it?

Further questions:

• If you go by both, do you ever mix them or do you keep them totally separate?
• Do you let your real life friends, family and peers know about your online pseudonyms?
• For people building an online presence as a kind of brand, how does this impact your choice?

Most of the world seems to be settled around Chrome and Safari these days. I remember using Firefox a long time ago myself but then everyone started switching to Chrome and that also turned out to be a natural path of least resistance for web developers like me who had to test web apps in local environment.

This switch happened in circa 2015-16 if I recall correctly, many other browsers have evolved since then and people are looking at alternatives. The Android Kiwi browser, for example, is a great alternative for power users on mobile who need plugins but Chrome won't allow that. Other alternatives have evolved too like Brendan Eich's Brave browser which seems to be promising. Anyone here tried that yet?

I have half a mind to go back to Firefox but I recently learned about how Mozilla Corp is also funded by Google and that turned me off. Wouldn't you rather want to deal with the Devil directly instead of the Devil's assistant or sidekick!

And then there are also those who use Garibaldi, Midori, etc. but I can't go that purist way. I'm way too dependent on the digital way of life and sites like amazon and flipkart won't work in those browsers. What do you think should be the right path ahead from here?

So, what's the hottest new thing in IT today, what's that coolest new tech which might prove to be a goldmine some years down the line? The way PCs, websites, databases, programming languages, etc. used to be in the 90s or mobile computing used to be in 00s? Early 00s gave us many a goodies in terms of open source innovations, be it Web Technologies, Linux advancement and propagation through the masses or FOSS software like Wordpress and Drupal, or even the general attitude and awareness about FOSS. Bitcoin also deserves a notable mention here, whether you love it or hate it.

But today, I think IT no longer has that spark it once had. People keep mulling around AI, ML and Data Science but these are still decades old concepts, and whatever number crunching or coding the engineers are doing somehow doesn't seem to reach the masses? People get so enthusiastic about ChatGPT, but at the end of the day it's just another software like a zillion others. I deem it at par with something like Wordpress, probably even lesser. I'm yet to see any major adoption or industry usage for it.

Is it the case that IT has reached some kind of saturation point? Everything that could have been innovated, at least the low hanging fruits, has already been innovated? What do you think about this?

This could be for any number of reasons. The reason I was thinking of this, was realizing that there are certain topics that I could probably find the answers to online, but I happen to have a friend who is an expert in that field. So it's usually easier to ask them, and trust that their answer is either accurate or that they will tell me "I don't know".

The other aspect of it was, there are certain topics that are likely to be extremely "noisy" with disinformation (intentional or otherwise) or ads online, and so I'll avoid trying to research them and instead ask a friend.

A student asked me this question today. They were looking into lithium batteries and e-waste and whatnot.

My initial response was something low, like maybe five or six, but the more I thought about it, the higher the number kept climbing — old phones, key fobs, wireless mice, flashlights, a food thermometer, etc.

I’m not sure I have an official count yet, but the number is WAY higher than my gut reaction. I also thought it was an interesting thought experiment, so I figured I’d ask here to prompt people to do their own inventory.

How many battery-operated devices do you have in your home? (They don’t have to specifically be lithium batteries, but if you want to limit it to just that, feel free).