kellenoffdagrid

kellenoffdagrid, 14 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

Saw someone post that City Journal article on mastodon a couple days ago and I’m amazed that so few people picked up that the City Journal and the article’s author are basically puppets of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. I know most people aren’t tuned to look out for think tank propaganda but it came off as really obviously FUD-y and unsubstantiated.

kellenoffdagrid, 14 days ago

EagerEagle posted a good comment under this post going over the client code stuff, pretty enlightening stuff.

kellenoffdagrid, 16 days ago

This isn’t really a highly direct solution, but you could try increasing the screen zoom of the whole device by a notch or two. Somewhere in Settings > Display > Font Size/Screen Zoom or something like that may size up the UI enough that it’s comfortable for you. I think you can mix and match font sizes and screen zooms, so you can keep text from getting too big but size up the UI buttons. This will naturally affect all android UI, not just the music widget, but maybe that’s okay in your situation?

kellenoffdagrid, 20 days ago

Yeah, Gnome 46 has been a really solid, small upgrade in my experience. I swear it’s made things smoother and more consistent, plus some of the minor visual tweaks and refinements are welcome. Turns out a lot of what they did is under-the-hood optimizations and improvements to accessibility, so the Gnome desktop update itself has been a small but welcome improvement.

So far I haven’t had any issues elsewhere I’m Fedora 40, but maybe that’s because I’ve checked for new updates pretty frequently and done some restarts since the upgrade, that might be keeping things fresh.

kellenoffdagrid, 20 days ago

It’s wild to me that anyone would say that sentence and not immediately realize they sound like an emotionless robot. Like damn, who would’ve thought people have a great need for authentic human connections? Not me!

This kinda shit you hear from people so deep in the world of product marketing is sickening and really shows how disconnected from they are from both reality and the point of selling a good product: benefitting people. I guess I’m just glad to see more stories of people ditching dating apps as they continue to become more predatory and less helpful.

kellenoffdagrid, 26 days ago

Yeah unfortunately I agree, as much as I dread knowing Meta’s going to be behind a lot of the VR/AR developments as it gets more common, this isn’t really an indication that they screwed up. They’re not the first company I’d want to lead the VR market but it looks like they will be regardless.

kellenoffdagrid, 28 days ago

You and me both, their 13in AMD model has been the best device I’ve bought in years, and their dedicated Linux support team has done a phenomenal job especially considering how small a team they are.

I know nothing lasts forever but I really hope they get close, if they keep selling previous gen hardware at lower prices I think they could end up in more average people’s hands. I guess I’m just very hopeful for these guys.

kellenoffdagrid, 1 month ago

You said it pal, not me ¯_(ツ)_/¯

kellenoffdagrid, 1 month ago

Yeah seriously, I was surprised at how plain and illegible rpm-ostree felt in comparison to dnf, I really wish they put a little color or some extra separation just to make it feel less cramped and give people more glanceable info.

kellenoffdagrid, 2 months ago

It’s in reference to recent issues the Canonical Snap Store has had with letting malware get past the review process. Since Snaps are pretty tightly integrated in Ubuntu, people with concerns about the Snap store wouldn’t want to take the risk with a distro that makes it hard to opt out of an app store with a proprietary backend that seems to have issues with letting malicious apps onto the platform. This matters more to some people than others, but I think it’s fair to question Ubuntu’s safety given the track record.

kellenoffdagrid, 2 months ago

I don’t disagree, the person you were replying to could’ve used better language that didn’t characterize Ubuntu as malware-infested and been more specific about what they were referring to. In any event, a couple scammy malware apps that were installed at the user’s discretion are not enough evidence that Ubuntu is a bigger malware risk than any other OS.

I don’t think people should avoid Ubuntu because their app store had the same problem so many others do, but I do think the fact that they make promises about the security of the Snap Store while also making the backend and review process less open than other Linux app stores is worth noting. Not to say there aren’t security incidents with other distros worth noting, but considering the popularity of Ubuntu, it’s not surprising it’s a bigger target.

kellenoffdagrid, 2 months ago

I would say yes to this, but elementaryOS still doesn’t have in-place upgrades to the next major versions. I recall there being some progress on changing that, but I would wait till elementaryOS 8 before really recommending it.

kellenoffdagrid, 2 months ago

I think one worth adding is ZorinOS, it might feel more familiar and modern than Mint, and it’s worked well on the old hardware I’ve run it on. Still an Ubuntu derivative, so you can’t really go wrong with any of these.

kellenoffdagrid, 2 months ago

Oh true, Fediverse links are still not handled ideally. I know there’s technical limitations to fedi app developers keeping an up-to-date list of domains that their app can open links from, but it would definitely be nice if there were some easier way to do things.

One side note, I’ve noticed that Megalodon (a Mastodon client) has a pretty good workaround for this issue – if you use the share sheet to share a link with Megalodon, it gives you the option to post the link or to attempt to open the link in the client. That’d be a pretty killer feature to have in Sync, if there isn’t some easier/better way to make it easier to choose certain Lemmy domains to open in Sync by default.

kellenoffdagrid, 2 months ago

This might be a bit of a hot take, but fractional scaling is generally not worth it, it almost always leads to some apps rendering things blurry and uses slightly more graphics resources. I’ve got a Framework 13 and I can say that just turning on the Large Text feature in Accessibility settings does the trick for me. This obviously doesn’t work for everyone’s needs, but if you’re like me and just want things to stay crisp but big enough to read, this could be a viable alternative.

kellenoffdagrid, 2 months ago

As long as the blue/red colors are different enough from the current colors, that’d make it a less confusing change. Even if the colors don’t change, I think it’s best to match Lemmy’s setup.

kellenoffdagrid, 2 months ago

Here’s a few I’ve enjoyed in recent memory:

• Koyo - Would You Miss It?
• Militarie Gun - Life Under The Gun
• Tigers Jaw - I Won’t Care How You Remember Me
• Yard Act - Where’s My Utopia?
• Vacation Manor - Vacation Manor
• Hotline TNT - Cartwheel

The Koyo album is great if you like punk/hardcore/emo, same with the Militarie Gun one. Tigers Jaw has been one of my favorites for a while, and this album is one of their best imo; great band if you like indie rock/emo. Yard Act’s a British rock band with post-punk influences, you might like them if you enjoy that signature dry British humor in combination with some social commentary. Vacation Manor is a more laid-back indie rock band with more classic Americana/Springsteen influences, I can’t recommend them enough for people who have a sweet spot for classic rock. Lastly, Hotline TNT’s album is worth a listen for people who enjoy shoegaze and indie rock, they have a really great DIY sound with just enough polish to tie the album together and keep it accessible. The 2020’s have been a damn good year for music, at least as far as the bands I’ve been keeping up with.

Edit: added Tigers Jaw, I couldn’t leave them out

kellenoffdagrid, 2 months ago

Ooh that was a solid one too, good catch. Can’t wait to see what else they have in store

kellenoffdagrid, 2 months ago

I second this, my dumb-as-bricks setup for syncing obsidian notes is just running a Syncthing instance on a little Raspberry Pi I keep on all the time, and it works like a charm.

kellenoffdagrid, 3 months ago

The cool thing is, you’re right that you’ve got marketable skills that employers want, you just gotta present them in corporate lingo that sanitizes it of any humanity and fun, lmao. You could rephrase that part about the Minecraft server to something like “Actively maintaining a high-uptime server with [X amount] of daily clients by utilizing [insert type of tools/languages here, e.g. MySQL databases].”

I’ve always hated the process of “translating” real life experience into the marketable buzzwords that employers like to see, but until it seems like hiring managers on a wider scale are willing to listen to words that normal people would write, I’m gonna keep trying to speak their language.

kellenoffdagrid, 3 months ago

Can confirm Zorin has the best out-of-the-box process for getting Windows apps running. I have a family member that’s really gotten attached to Zorin because of its familiar front-end, and even though they have some prior Linux experience from earlier years, they’ve never needed to use terminal knowledge for the basic stuff they’ve been using Zorin for.

kellenoffdagrid, 4 months ago

To be fair, if you’re referring to the “alleged” backdoors in Intel processes, there’s pretty similar stuff going on in the AMD side too. That said, I still totally get not wanting to support Intel since they’re definitely the shadiest of the two, and they’ve been awful value these days.

The Framework 13 AMD is pretty great though, can confirm. It’s all I’ve ever wanted in a decent, repairable laptop.

kellenoffdagrid, 5 months ago

Oto Music (Play Store link) has been my mp3/offline music player of choice for years now. Stable, pretty, performant, and has tag editing features built in. Still gets updates at least once or twice a year, which is all ya really need for an offline player.

Megalodon (Play Store link) is my Mastodon client of choice, tons of little ease-of-use improvements over the official client. Some people might already be familiar with this if they’re on Lemmy, but maybe someone looking for a better Masto client will get something from this.

kellenoffdagrid, 5 months ago

Ah yeah it would be nice if it were open source. Retro is pretty good, I remember having stability issues with it when I used it a couple years ago, but if those got ironed out that’s awesome.

kellenoffdagrid, 7 months ago

Holy shit how have I not heard of that plugin yet, that’s awesome. Yet another point in Obsidian’s favor, at least for me