Eldritch

That could definitely give you a different perspective. You might not really remember before twitter and Facebook. Heck before MySpace for that matter. Or when companies didn’t advertise their website but rather their AOL keyword.

Activity Pub is a lot like Usenet on steroids. It really is a return to the distributed, democratized Internet. Before all those other things. The only big stumbling block the increasing tighter grip on access and CCP style censorship that many nations are gate-keeping with.

It’s all good though, and with the view you’ve had of it so far I can absolutely understand and agree on how you think things are getting better. Because it is.

Honest question, I’m just trying to understand here. How long have you used the internet? That could definitely color a lot of different perceptions.

I suppose the best way to put it is that I’ve had the privilege of access to the Internet. In one form or another for a little over 32 years I think now. While access has improved, and nearly everyone carries a terminal in their pocket. My usage of the Internet is reverting back to more what it was 25 years ago. Just with much better access. Largely because it was better. The underlying internet hasn’t changed that profoundly. Just control of or access to it.

There were media streaming services before the oligarchs. They just had access to bigger pipes. And people ceded control to them for access to those bigger pipes. But our connections have improved while media size has decreased in many ways. And so has our need of them. The only new/unique thing they brought us. Was a centralized personal privacy nightmare.

If you really want to stretch things, I suppose you could say that the popularity of their services has helped drive adoption and commoditization of access. But that is as far as someone like myself would be willing to give them.

All true, but also all the more reason to acknowledge what we’ve lost. With an eye to the future to make sure that the enshitified centralized internet is one of them.

Whatever you call it, the Internet is changing and enshitifying. For many it’s the death of what it was. The new restrictions and push for chat control/censorship.

AI may just be a tool. And people may be over reacting. But it’s inarguable it’s being overwhelming leveraged by abject evil.

Out of sight out of mind. It’s why authoritarian governments police speech and media. If you control what they see and hear. Then the worst that could happen is they might just feel that something is off. But have no evidence to necessarily back that up. Basically an echo chamber of the size of the nation.

The GIMP shop interface has been the default and iterated on for the better part of a decade, If not longer. This is what I always wonder about people who claim that GIMP is somehow less usable. Have they used it much since 3.0? It’s 4.X now BTW.

I know my experience personally isn’t going to be universal. I first used Photoshop version 2. First version I bought was 3.5. I remember downloading and compiling pre-1.0 unstable binaries of GIMP on Debian back in the 90s. It was wildly awkward back then and for the next couple of versions as someone coming from Photoshop. That hasn’t been the case for a long, long time. Honestly, it reminds me so much of the Photoshop I grew up using at this point.

Honest question. When you learned on GIMP. Was the palette, the tool options, and the drawing area all separate windows? Because the Photoshop UI and layout has been default for a long time now.

Very under appreciated show. You can tell the team that made it had a ton of fun on it.

Shield user since 2015. Literally just started down this myself. Got this yesterday but was too wiped out last night to set it up. Figured if I can spend less than a hundred dollars For a fourth generation i7 which is capable of decoding AV1. But I can’t buy a set top box that will do the same for even close to $100. It was worth a try.

The downside is you lose some power efficiency having a full-blown PC. The upside is configurability and usability. The shield was decent for emulation, but it still can’t compete with a full-blown PC. The one other small negative is casting. I’m not aware currently of any great method of casting media to a PC. There’s probably something that exists. I just don’t know of it yet. But I plan to evaluate a few immutable Linux distributions, including Bazite. With waydroid on top for any Android applications, I find that I just can’t get along without yet.

Quick edit after I got home to hook and use the remote. I had looked at several of them and had forgotten the exact specifications of the one I ordered. But I was pleasantly surprised. It has a decent weight. The buttons feel good. It’s plastic-y overall, but for the price, that’s what you expect. But best of all, it has an accelerometer in there to control mouse pointer movement. It’s more perfect than I ever could have imagined, and I’m going to buy two more soon for the project I’m working on for my parents for Christmas. Gonna hook them up with a home theater PC setup like I’m planning for myself. To replace their aging Chromecast TV.

I already mentioned client support. Stating that I was degoogling my clients and moving to htpc so codec support was largely a non issue in my particular case.

TBF, if you’re just downloading content. Even h265 can be rare still depending. Release groups sloooooooooowly change formats and workflows. And even then. Older content rarely gets new encodes.

Encoding these days is simple. I can do HQ 2 pass encodes of my DVD on a 6th gen i7 in just a little longer than it takes to watch. Yes 1080p can take over 3-4 hours for a movie. But I have a couple of old ewaste systems I can let churn overnight. I’m not concerned about real time re-encoding. I’m using av1 for quality and space saving.

Yes, I have a single machine where most of my storage is. I host my jellyfin server there, as well as all the home directories for all the users of my systems. Login to any system in the house and you always have the same desktop and data. If I want to replace a system, reinstall or distro hop. It’s just a few lines to copy into fstab and a few apps/flatpaks to download at most.

Av1 is better than h256 by quite a bit in many cases. Unfortunately, support is still very spotty if you’re running anything other than a home theater pc. But I’m moving to Av1/opus since, I’m actively de-googling/droiding. And moving to htpc.

This is a great idea, unless you want to game or worry about upgradability. If you want to watch videos, write, code, browse the web or just have a server. They’re fantastic. If you want to add in a GPU. Often you’ll be extremely limited to the rare low profile ones. If you are lucky enough to be able to use regular profile ones, you’ll often still be size limited due to component placement on the board or case internals. You could get a different case, but that often requires adapters too. Oh and you’ll need a new power supply, with more adapters.

If your application for the system goes anywhere near a GPU, such as a Jellyfin Server, spend the extra to get regular consumer parts.

Definitely, the benevolence of corporations is not indefinite. No matter how good the times start out or manage to be, it always goes downhill.

Strictly speaking, nothing really. But competition is good. Federation is better.

It’s certainly not complicated. Just tedious. That said I like the BSD style portage.

These days I tend to run on Arch based distros. Because they are close to those levels of configurability. Just a bit quicker to setup and get to a nice preset. I know there are pre made stages to skip some of the tedious setup for both gentoo and vanilla Arch. But then why not a distro where that’s the base. And some of the sub distros like Garuda provide some really nice configuration tools on top of the base experience.

It’s almost like we shouldn’t rely on just a few central sites. And that everything should be democratized and federated.

People just like what they know. You should spend all your free time making something just like the thing they know. So that they won’t use it because they don’t know it. It’s a catch 22.

As we know it? It already has several times. How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer? The centralized oligarchcentric web that we know today needs to die and great new things are coming along to take its place. Returned to more sustainable collaborative websites and services. Like the fediverse.

The difference between us and them is that we don’t want to do things to hurt them. Far from it. We honestly want to do things to help them. When we do hate them, it’s not for who they are, but who they choose to be. And that makes all the difference.