After arriving a while ago at the conclusion that the best option for reading comics/manga is a full-sized tablet instead of e-ink based devices, got an 8' Samsung tablet for not much. It serves the purpose but even with Blokada in it blocking everything it can, and every "privacy" option tuned to as closed as possible, i suspect it's still leaking TONS of data, and would like to root it if there's good choices for it. Do we have at least decent choices for Android tablets now in 2025? I search for this and people focus on phones with little to no attention to tablets

You have seen them, video clips grabbed off Instagram or TikTok have this EXTREMELY annoying logo and sound at the end (specially Instagram lately, doubly so with headphones). I'd like to just throw a script/command/Bash alias at any of these and have a resulting video without them, and ffmpeg IS the Swiss army knife of video processing, but it's syntax is NOT what you'd call simple. Does anyone have a recipe for this already?

cross-posted from: https://awful.systems/post/2556883

I am very out of the loop with related recent tech, but once in a while i wish i had subtitles for internet clips, and i understand there's good tech out there for this these days. Is there something i can download in a typical headless Debian machine that i can then point at some MP4 clip to get subtitles? Even if imperfect it's better than trying to type that from scratch

A couple weeks ago Discord announced their plans to go down the IPO route. This means that there is now a ticking clock until the platform goes full-on enshittified like so many others before them.

Last time i checked last year there weren't many options to migrate to, mostly Matrix communities (which are not quite the same thing) and Revolt Chat (which is a non-federated but FOSS and self-hostable drop-in replacement for Discord). Revolt sounds like the logical route as it's clearly designed for just this exact role, but it seems it's still early in development and not yet ready for the average Discord user (looks like the voice functions in particular are still in development)

Has this changed or improved since then? I feel like the use case of "IRC servers, but modern!" should have been solved years ago but feels like it hasn't, i have lots of non-technical peo

First focusing on AI and now this, already cancelled my donations, do we have a good fork to move to?

The AnimeBytes outage from yesterday was because of this, DNS registrar seems to have gone down with all it's .tv domains, and this has taken down lots of sites

Initial reaction from one of the main admins was that if in 12 hours there had been no news they'd nuke the servers, seems like they're not gonna do it anymore. Many domains registered by one admin were seized at the same time, so might not even be aimed at the tracker. Waiting for more news.

Update: Looks like the DNS registrar itself was the one that went down and took lots of sites with it, TorrentFreak article: 100s of Pirate Sites Go Dark as .TV Domains Placed on ServerHold - TorrentFreak

Well shit...

Duolingo is very much on the Enshittification path, seems like they fired a number of translators and have the rest just proofreading AI.

For the interested, here's the place where you can request your personal data and delete your account

Twillio just announced they're discontinuing the Desktop version of their popular Two Factor Authentication client. Their proposed solution is for users to move to the mobile app, which of course doesn't fulfill the use case of people who explicitly chose Authy because it had a desktop client.

If you use Authy and depend on the Desktop client you will have to consider migrating to something else.

Today somebody in a group I'm in which has some accessibility issues was yet again complaining that their Dragon Speaking software was not playing nice with Firefox, which led me to see if there was an alternative, and surprisingly i found none workable at the plain user level beyond Dragon, and upgrading for that person might actually be costly (From what they say it starts at nearly $200 but apparently can go as high as $700? Not clear yet).

So, obviously now I'm checking about the FOSS side of things, a search has been inconclusive as i see stuff for developers, multiple different projects (which is a marked improvement from a decade ago when i last tried and failed to do this), but so far haven't found anything at the user level.

Have i overlooked something? Or is it that we're many years later still at the "building libraries" stage without actual user-level stuff people can just apt-get or download?

Quick edit: I must insist, is there something for USERS, not ***DEVELOP

So, a relative that all she plays in her tablet is solitaire, saw ads of some mobile crap full of microtransactions and now wants some of those. I said i'd check if there was games kinda like those (all puzzles of some sort), and would highly prefer if they're all FOSS to avoid or at least highly reduce the chance they're gonna turn into microtransaction-laden crap or start syphoning all the data in the phone or something. But given that i don't really play in mobile i have no idea what's available. Checking on F-Droid it just lists every game in the "games" category, "Show all 467 packages", not separated by genre or with ratings or anything Is there a place to look up this kind of thing?

Somebody I’m helping has an ancient, and i mean ancient (like 3 major versions before latest or so) install of Rundeck doing stuff for them. Might help them upgrade it to the latest (more like reinstall and configure from scratch, it was built years ago with assumptions no longer true), but before i commit I’d like to know if there’s decent replacements/alternatives for it these days.

In case you don’t know Rundeck, it allows you to set it up so that a number of users, with various privilege levels, are allowed to execute scripts on remote machines, with whatever privileges the given script needs, giving them parameters from an allowed set you configure. That’s all, no more, no less.

Sounds like something that should be common, but when you look for alternatives it gives you everything that’s ever been touched by the word DevOps, from Ansible and every “configuration engine” software ever made, to automation libraries and the like. I just want something that does this and no more, le

Original comment, copy-pasted for convenience:

why do so many projects start with a discord and not with a wiki, or github, or web presence?

simply, discord is the fastest, most frictionless way to do the following:

• garner a community of support ensuring that there is an audience for the project
• provide access to idea validation for the creators of that project. rapid feedback for their project = rapid progress
• provide the easy creation of (not necessarily accessible nor good, but) quick resources for the project

forums, websites, hell even github can only hope to match the value proposition of discord, and it's something people fail to take into account when they criticise the move to discord as a file host/forum/wiki/project website

if you want people to make a file host/forum/wiki/project website, they're directly competing with the frictionless, fast, yet unsustainable and frankly web-shit discord. the fast, fricti

We have a machine running some stuff on Docker, and little by little it has started to become important to keep an eye on it. However, looking for information on monitoring a Docker server it always seem to assume you're running it in Swarm mode, which is not and WILL NOT be the case of this machine, Swarm adds a layer of complexity unneeded in this case.

What do you recommend for this case? I for one would love if the thing didn't just give you a view of the things running on it but also gave you notifications if something went wrong (like if a container had to be restarted, or if one suddenly started eating all the CPU or something unusual).

The much maligned "Trusted Computing" idea requires that the party you are supposed to trust deserves to be trusted, and Google is DEFINITELY NOT worthy of being trusted, this is a naked power grab to destroy the open web for Google's ad profits no matter the consequences, this would put heavy surveillance in Google's hands, this would eliminate ad-blocking, this would break any and all accessibility features, this would obliterate any competing platform, this is very much opposed to what the web is.

Linked but also posted as a screenshot for the lazy :P

This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance