They’ve been working on the redesign for awhile now, but the version everyone’s used to (Teamspeak 3) still works perfectly fine. TS3 clients can connect to new Teamspeak servers, and new Teamspeak clients can connect to old teamspeak servers, just without the new features like screen share

My group still uses TS3 on a daily basis on a self hosted server

That last part is a huge reason why I’m taking RSS more seriously. I don’t want my information to be limited to what happens to get picked up by the news cycle or worse chosen by the algorithm. I’d much rather get the information from the source. So that definitely meets the criteria :D

Uh oh I might be subscribing to all of these! Thank you very much!

And wow that low tech magazine site is beautiful

Heyy I’ve been looking around at different android apps and I think I’ve also settled on “Read You.” Thank you for the list, I haven’t heard of lots of them like MariusHosting and they look interesting

Which feeds do you watch for automation? I also like automating what I can lol

Wow that’s actually genius thank you

I use Duplicati for my backups, and have backup retention set up like this:

Save one backup each day for the past week, then save one each week for the past month, then save one each month for the past year.

That way I have granual backups for anything recent, and the further back in the past you go the less frequent the backups are to save space

I still think material design 1 (which came out in 2014) is good, which focused on clarity with limited space. The problem started with material design 2 in 2018, which pushed for increased whitespace and homogeny in design. (And Microsoft’s Metro… shudder)

Material design 1 balanced clean and readable while maintaining depth (trying to emulate 3d space by “stacking cards of content” with shadows). But since most of MD1 was guidelines instead of, like, actual components developers could use, it was a double edged sword of forcing people to be a little creative in making their own UIs but cumbersome because you had to make it all yourself

Material design 2 tried to “fix” this by making everything simpler and shipping a ton of premade components that developers could just slap together and call it a day. Good for speeding up development, unfortunate because everything now looks the same. It’s also because of this that material design started to “break containment” and appear all over desktop applications/websites. It’s never good when a mobile design language is applied to the larger desktop space

That’s why I really don’t mind seeing material design 1 on either mobile or desktop, because it was designed to use space efficiently and interestingly. Material design 2 on the other hand favors whitespace and speed to the detriment of us all

If you haven’t heard of the game Blood on the Clocktower, you should definitely check it out! It’s a bit more involved than the other games on your list, but it’s become my holy Grail of social deduction games

Also a big recommend for Manifold Garden for special thinking in a fractal space

I also really appreciate these, a bunch of cool projects I haven’t heard of before this week

The parents are getting a divorce, meaning the kid will celebrate Christmas twice, once with each parent

Oh definitely

There’s plugins for tons of things from customization (like custom boot and suspend animations) to tools (like mangohud for performance/energy monitoring) to quality of life (like kde connect or syncthing or teamspeak right in the sidebar)

And it’s super easy to install and update, just go to their website in desktop mode and download and run the executable to install it, and then you can just install plugins and update without needing to leave game mode

There is a decky plugin that lets you turn on kde connect in game mode, though you have to pair in desktop mode first

https://www.newsweek.com/googles-ai-chatbot-tells-student-seeking-help-homework-please-die-1986471

Make sure to read the actual message, it’s a lot worse than the headline makes it sound lol (It’s also nice that you can look at the link of the full conversation to see how normal it was until the last message)

Recently I had two major problems with Windows updates that needed manual intervention in a very user unfriendly way.

Earlier this year one of the security updates for 22H2 broke my computer’s recovery partition and prevented the update to install and constantly fail. It took like a week for Microsoft to acknowledge the issue, at which point they said they would post a fix shortly. Then a whole month later they said they wouldn’t/couldn’t fix it automatically and anyone affected would have to manually delete the partition, shrink your main disk partition, and recreate the recovery partition. On top of that, there was no notification of the issue or how to fix it, one would have to notice the update keeps failing, look up the error, and dig up the instructions from their blog. And then go through the ugly process of editing partitions which I can’t imagine most users doing.

Either that or just live with no recovery until the next time you reinstall the os.

https://superuser.com/questions/1837245/kb5034441-and-changing-the-recovery-partition-starting-offset-in-order-to-be-abl

The second issue this year was halfway through a windows update (when it just reboots a couple times) my computer just simply stopped booting. I could power cycle and everything and after the bios it would just black screen forever. The only way I got around it was to hop into the bios and change the boot order. Another thing I wouldn’t expect normal users should have to do to just boot the computer

And I personally have seen all the ads in Windows explorer, the start menu, the lock screen, etc. and the massive pushing of Copilot being added to the toolbar even after removing it manually. And readding OneDrive. I’m in the US though so that’s probably why (it’s nice to know the only reason Microsoft does all this because they’re not legally pressured not to. Gives me so much trust in them to do the right thing with my computer and data)

I’ve since moved to Linux (which I’ve used on my work machine for many years) and have had near zero issues. It’s very nice not worrying how my computer is going to make itself worse without my consent next

edit: I definitely wouldn’t consider myself a fanatic that tries to convert everyone to Linux. For a lot of people Windows is the best choice, but in my case in particular it really has made things easier

The pinebook’s privacy switches (for WiFi/BT, camera, and microphone) operate at the firmware level, the operating system has no control over them

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro#Privacy_Switches

The keyboard operates on firmware independent of the operating system. It detects if one of the F10, F11 or F12 keys is pressed in combination with the Pine key for 3 seconds. Doing so disables power to the appropriate peripheral, thereby disabling it. This has the same effect as cutting off the power to each peripheral with a physical switch. This implementation is very secure, since the firmware that determines whether a peripheral gets power is not part of the Pinebook Pro’s operating system. So the power state value for each peripheral cannot be overridden or accessed from the operating system. The power state setting for each peripheral is stored across reboots inside the keyboard’s firmware flash memory.

A couple of favorites that are different from what others already said:

• I strongly dislike autorotate on my phone so I always keep it off, however it makes perfect sense in apps like YouTube/Twitch. So I have one task that turns it on when opening one of those apps, and off again when closing them
• When I’ve got Bluetooth headphones, I can choose to have incoming texts read out to me. Very nice when walking/running outside and not needing to pull my phone out
• Similarly, I’ve got a task that will (optionally) read out the name of the song that’s playing to Bluetooth

Buzzkill is very nice. I’m in a group chat that gets huge bursts of activity (like a hundred messages) and then goes dormant for a bit, so I set buzzkill to only give me at most 1 notification every 30 minutes, and keep the rest of them silent. That way I can still keep up with it without my phone blowing up

Humans evolved finger nails to separate Lego pieces

…I can’t think of a good reason for toe nails though

I also highly recommend libby, which lets you check out ebooks and audiobooks from your library. I don’t have a kindle myself, but this help article says it’s supported “Reading Kindle Books on a Kindle ereader”

You can also add multiple library cards, so if you wanted to go crazy you can find libraries that let you sign up for a card even if you don’t have a local address and get access to both library’s collections to read on your Kindle