To be fair, it is a very long-winded post. I think it’s not an uncommon use case, though, and so deserved a robust sketch of the desired solution; Farmville and chat are sideshows, and what the people left on Facebook are really there for are the Walls.

There are some excellent apps out there, and by and large they look and work better than commercial apps, IME. So I disagree with the assertion that I have to stay with commercial software.

What I was asking for, in my post, was not which apps have better UX than Facebook, but rather which of the very many OSS, federated (although, not necessary for my use case), self-hosted platforms fit the specific use, and ideally with a straightforward iOS mobile app. Doesn’t have to be pretty; just has to be able to quickly take and post photos to a private channel/community/wall.

Circles really is quite nice in all respects. I think they’re hindered by their choice of backend. I’ve been using Matrix for years, and key management has always been a hot mess. I wouldn’t be surprised if the issues we encountered were related to Matrix’s god-awful and buggy PK negotiation & management process.

It looks utterly repulsive, but I kind of love the idea… the sheer convenience.

Dr*g?

So, I was at my pharmacy today getting my prescription dr*gs, and afterward stopped by my dealer to pick up some fucking heroin.

I agree; it probably didn’t occur to them. But it was a fairly common job in IT in the 90’s. Not a career or job description, maybe, but a duty you got saddled with.

I can see that, although TBH I almost never have to “admin” EndeavourOS. I just upgrade every once in a while.

Most important to me is being able to find and install whatever software I want, and I have a string preference that it either be installed in my ~, or be managed by the package manager. I really dislike sideloading software globally. And Arch does this better than most. AUR is massive, and packages are trivial to write and install in the rare event something isn’t in AUR.

What they really got wrong was the clothing: so much anime/hentai.

This is a techno-goth.

Base Arch can be fussy, but that’s because there’s a lot to set up, so many opportunities to forget things and only discover them later.

I ran Artix on a laptop for about a year; that was a constant PITA, although I still value their goals.

But EndeavourOS has been an entirely different matter. It’s a “just works” Arch derivative.

I had so many fewer problems with Arch that I went through the effort to convert my 3 personal cloud servers from Debian to it. I went through a lot of work to replace thee default Mint on an ODroid to Arch, and it’s been so much better. I put Endeavor on the last two non-servers I installed. So, yes, I personally find out far more reliable and easier to work with than Ubuntu, Debian, or Mint.

That said, I had dad install Mint on a new computer he bought because I had to do it over the phone and he never, ever, upgrades his packages, and almost never installs anything. If all I’m going to do is install it once and then never change anything, Mint is easier. But for a normal use case where I’m regularly updating and installing software, Arch is far easier and more reliable.

A studio should be able to afford a good LTO tape drive for at least one backup copy; LTO tapes last over 30 years and suffer less from random bitrot than spinning disks. Just pay someone to spend a month duplicating the entire archive every couple of decades. And every decade you can also consolidate a bunch of tapes since the capacity has kept increasing; 18TB tapes are now available: $/MB it’s always far cheaper to use tape.

They could have done that with the drives, but today you’d have to go find an ATA IDE or old SCSI card (of you’re lucky) that’ll work on a modern motherboard.

But I’d guess their problem is more not having a process for maintaining the archives than the technology. Duplicating and consolidating hard drives once a year would have been relatively cheap, and as long as they verified checksums and kept duplicates, HDs would have been fine too.

F-Droid

Most of the apps I have and use are installed via Droidify. The ones that aren’t are company apps, like banking or airline. I could just used the web sites for those; they’re only conveniences.

My phone isn’t rooted, and I didn’t read the article so I don’t know how this will affect me. If push comes to shove, I’ll simply bite the bullet and get a phone I can install Linux on next time, regardless of how polished for daily driving it is.

Github is full of lists of things. There are even several lists of “awesome lists”. Far more than I can list here, and it starts to get painfully recursive (an awesome list of awesome lists of awesome lists?). Just search for “awesome list” on github; some live outside of github, so you could search for “awesome list” in Ecosia, or DDG, or whatever you use.

• https://github.com/athityakumar/awesome-awesomes
• https://github.com/topics/awesome-list
• https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness

Oh, no. I hate Pumpkin Spice. Pumpkin Pie at Thanksgiving is my bane. It’s probably why I hate Pumpkin Spice. I could live with the stink it for a couple of days, but after StarFucks came out with Pumpkin Spice, it started getting everywhere starting October and running through Christmas.

And it really does smell more strongly than other things. It’s invasive.

How about you having to work next to someone who slathers himself in surstromming every morning for three months, and then come tell me how OK it is for people to invade your space with “a little smell.”

Yeah, probably. Mostly dark and a bit gloomy, but what else would you expect from a Kardasian outpost?

I’m designing off the top of my head, but I think you could do it with a DHT, or even just steal some distributed ledger algorithm from a blockchain. Or, you develop a distributed skip tree – but you’re right, any sort of distributed query is going to have a possibly unacceptable latency. So you might – like Bitcoin – distributed the index itself to participants (which could be large), but federate the indexing operation s.t. rather than a dozen different search engine crawlers hitting each web site, you’d have one or two crawlers per site feeding the shared index.

Distributed search engines have existed for over a decade. Several solutions for distributed Lucene clusters exist (SOLR, katta, ElasticSearch, O2) and while they’re mostly designed to be run in a LAN where the latencies between nodes is small, I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine a fairly low-latency distributed, replicated index where the nodes have a small subset of peer nodes which, together, encompass the entire index. No instance has the same set of peer nodes, but the combined index is eventually consistent.

Again, I’m thinking more about federating and distributing the index-building, to reduce web sites being hammered by search engines which constitute 80% of their traffic. Federating and distributing the query mechanism is a harder problem, but there’s a lot of existing R&D in this area, and technologies that could be borrowed from other domains (the aforementioned DHT and distributed ledger algorithms).

let me know if you have questions.

I have all the questions. I’m peripherally aware of ESP32; my experience with it, and its capabilities, is severely limited, and IME interface changes require recompiling and re-flashing things. Many of my questions stem from that ignorance.

1. Integration support. I assume GadgetBridge on Android is how you’d do it? Or is there another app?
2. How is the battery life IRL?
3. What does the watch face & app space look like? The FAQ mentions a “gallery”, and instructions for contributions describe the github PR process. Is the gallery just the list of watch faces on the sqfmi website?
4. What’s the process for changing faces, and installing additional functionality? From the docs, it looks as if this must be done over a serial cable, despite the device having WiFi capability. I assume that’s because adding faces is basically re-flashing the firmware, which is not supported over wireless? So, to get a new face, you clone the repo, compile a new firmware, and flash the device over a serial cable?
5. The FAQ verbiage is confusing regarding the display technology, but I think it’s saying the display isn’t reflective LCD like the Pebble.
6. Can you have multiple faces on the device, or do you have to re-flash it to change the face? The FAQ says the face is the entire firmware, implying only one face on the device at a time.
7. If you’re part of the community: have there been any discussions about future development to add, e.g. health monitor hardware?
8. Is there any integration with a phone, such as notifications? This is sort of the GadgetBridge question, but more about what integrations - if any - are supported. Vibrate on phone ringing? Quick responses to texts? Phone calls over the watch - yeah, I know it’s not that advanced, but for example.
9. What’s your opinion of the device? Do you use it as a daily driver?

At under $70, I’m not expecting much, but it’d be nice to know what you expect. The sqfmi site is pretty sparse on details. If there’s an additional, deeper FAQ or Wiki, a link to that would be great.

Thanks!

TIL people love their Pumpkin Spice.

It doesn’t smell “a bit.” It pervades a space. You can’t smell someone’s coffee, or their caramel macchiato, or their OJ, unless you stick your face in their cup. But if someone comes into an office with a pumpkin spice, you know it because it stinks up there entire room.

It wouldn’t be so bad, by itself. What makes it aggregious is that stores start pumping out the pumpkin spice scent around October; it’s everywhere. It’s inescapable. It’s like a crowded Austrian bar in the 1980’s, where there’s a literal cloud ceiling of cigarette snake at a meter high and an impenetrable haze that limits visibility to 2 meters. Candles. Infusers and incense.

“Smell a bit.” That’s like calling a nuclear holocaust “a little fire.”

Huh. My memory of TNG was that it was mostly variations of pasty off-white. The LCARS was colorful, but the uniforms were mostly primary colors and everything else was… well, pastel always seems watered-down and bland to me.

DS9 was all browns and blacks, though. It totally made sense, because of the station’s history, but the colors were pretty monotone, like everything was dark sepia, right?

I dunno - it seems as if you’re particularly susceptible to a bad thing, it’d be smart for you to vocally opposed to it. Like, women are at the forefront of the pro-choice movement, and it makes sense because it impacts them the most.

Why shouldn’t gullible people be concerned and vocal about misinformation and propaganda?

Because it’s more than just not drinking milk. Vegans avoid all products that result from the direct exploitation of animals, including eggs and honey. It also includes not using animal products like leather; you can be a vegetarian and still wear leather.

Honey always seemed a stretch to me, as apiaries benefit bees, but veganism is pretty significantly different from vegetarianism; having a different term for it makes sense.

I miss the color schemes of TOS.