I use a lot of free and open source software, and some of the stuff I use a lot I support with donations. Python, Mozilla, FairEmail are examples of software I have donated to. Wikipedia also.

This is the publicly owned and funded NHS, not a business.

I tend to use floating or fullscreen for general browsing but often you have to type something while frequently referring back to something else - for example when programming I will be looking at the documentation. Or maybe debugging something on the command line while looking at your code to see what’s going on. In those circumstances tilling is perfect.

It’s possible there’s a regional or generational gap there. If you’re pushing 110 you probably haven’t worked in 40 years. You could even argue that the ones literally working themselves to death are the very ones paying for the older generation’s happy carefree lifestyle.

The man with the gun to his head doesn’t have much of a choice if he wants to live. You, though, have a choice between criticising and defending the man with the gun, and you’re choosing to defend him.

Proton and Tutanota are the most privacy-focused ones, offering zero-access encryption. The flipside is that they are a bit more expensive and less easy to use with third party email clients.

There are a number of alternatives like mailbox.org, Posteo and Fastmail which are cheaper, and less private than the above two but arguably still better for privacy than Gmail (in that their whole business model isn’t built off capturing and monetising your data).

Personally I use mailbox.org and have no complaints. I use it with third party clients like Thunderbird for desktop and FairEmail for Android so can’t speak to how good their web UI is.

I also strongly recommend getting your own domain name to use with your email. It means if you ever want to switch providers in future you won’t need to change your email address.

It helps if you can treat it as a hobby. My partner’s hobby is music, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do in one’s spare time. I always feel a bit weird when people ask me what I do in my own spare time and my answer is basically fixing my shit, then pushing it just hard enough that it breaks again.

To your question, the unfortunate reality is that those of us who care about privacy and software freedom are a small minority. Why overhaul your business model to suit us when they can continue to milk every other consumer out there who frankly doesn’t give a shit?

Phones are, of course, the worst of all for this. People do great work developing FOSS solutions but it is an uphill struggle and I worry that the hill is getting steeper.

They have since announced that it will be capped at 0.1% of a bank’s assets: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/09/business/italy-bank-windfall-tax-change/index.html

Nobody’s sending you to jail for using WhatsApp.

Link, because unbelievably this article about a website does not contain any link to the website: https://sanctions.nazk.gov.ua/en/art/

I feel like half of London could be listed here. Everyone knows about the American candy shops around Oxford St. I live in South London and every other shop is a vape shop or mobile phone accessory/repair shop. Not saying they are all fronts but they feel like it.

Google Maps is the last Google thing I rely really heavily on. I would love to be able to replace it with OSM but searching for places is far better on Google (admittedly, probably because they have more context for your search due to all the spying). I also rely a lot on Google reviews when I’m in a new place and just want to grab a coffee or a drink or something. Could probably use TripAdvisor for that though.

MSN Messenger, Angelfire, Geocities, marquee tags, flame gifs.

And forums, of course. Music forums, mostly. The dopamine hit when you posted enough to achieve the next “rank”. Scrolling flame text in your signature.

I was 9 and had a cringy fan website for my favourite band. I used it to practice HTML and JavaScript (which blew my mind). HTML frames were the subject of a holy war at the time, so I had separate versions of the homepage, one using frames and one without. I would spam the (very few) visitors to my site with alerts and prompts.

Every now and again I would get random emails from (real) people around the world asking me to check out their band or their website etc. And most of the time they were actually good (by my standards at the time).

There was also, of course, the dreaded click which indicated your connection had been lost, most probably because someone had picked up the phone. So you’d have to reconnect and listen to that screechy dial-up sound.

Most of my data is backed up to (or just stored on) a VPS in the first instance, and then I backup the VPS to a local NAS daily using rsnapshot (the NAS is just a few old hard drives attached to a Raspberry Pi until I can get something more robust). Very occasionally I’ll back the NAS up to a separate drive. I also occasionally backup my laptop directly to a separate hard drive.

Not a particularly robust solution but it gives me some piece of mind. I would like to build a better NAS that can support RAID as I was never able to get it working with the Pi.

A lot of country- or city-specific subreddits either aren’t on here or are quite inactive. To be honest they were mostly cesspits on Reddit so maybe it’s no bad thing but you occasionally found useful information there.

Other than that, there were a few subreddits that were good for recipe ideas, like /r/EatCheapAndHealthy. /r/ZeroWaste was good too, on occasion.

In general, non-tech related communities don’t seem to have migrated over as much. Most of the subreddits I followed were related to technology in some way and now have pretty active communities on Lemmy.

I like my Garmin Vívoactive 3. It has all the basic features (for casual walking/running) and looks okay.

I really like the look of the “hybrid” watches like the Garmin Vívomove or Withings watches. They look great but as far as I know none of them have in-built GPS.

Would be very interested in checking out the BangleJS 2 as well.

I don’t think a week is that long to wait for an open source project like this. I suspect as soon as they released 115 they got a deluge of bug reports that are probably keeping them occupied.

Granted, I’m not personally affected because <smug>I use Arch btw</smug>. But on a serious note, it makes sense to me that “bleeding edge” distros where users expect the latest versions quickly would package Thunderbird for their repos, whereas those on more stability-focused distros would wait the couple of weeks for the Flatpak.

There are definitely other win conditions, but it’s still winner-takes-all. So say if an ally is really strong scientifically or culturally it inevitably becomes in your interest to destroy them.

One limitation that games like Civ suffer from is that diplomacy is ultimately pretty shallow because there can only be one winner, so even when you’re building alliances or trading relationships it is generally to gain some temporary benefit until you are in a position to defeat your partner later on (whether militarily, scientifically, etc).

What I would love to see is a multiplayer game like Civ but where each player has independent win conditions (so that a game could have multiple winners, or no winners). The condition could even just be to attain a certain level of happiness or wealth. And if you achieve that then you win even if other nations are bigger or stronger, and conversely if you don’t achieve it you lose even if you are the last nation standing. So decisions to go to war, or focus on technological development, or build alliances or trading relationships, etc, are driven by the wants and needs of your own people and not just a need to dominate others.

I haven’t played ESO but I can tell you the standard of writing in the other ES games is, IMO, very high. Morrowind is my all time favourite, the lore in that game is fantastic.