It’s proprietary. The repo is plugins and APIs and stuff.

Ownership is a big problem with VPNs. A bunch of them are owned by the same two or three companies, and those companies are not good.

I really have no idea what to trust nowadays. A few years ago, Mullvad and Proton were the industry darlings, but they BOTH have far-right ties. Mullvad’s founder donates to far-right organizations, and Proton’s CEO has AI psychosis and doubled down on some ridiculous comments praising Trump.

It really boggles the mind how anyone can purportedly value privacy and also support any far-right politics. Makes me think they’re all honeypots.

For mail, a few things I’d look for:

• Standard protocol compatibility (POP/IMAP/JMAP/SMTP) so you can use a client that’s not controlled by the service provider.

• Easy E2EE setup with PGP/GPG.

• Custom domain support.

• Email alias support (though this can be done with a third-party service, potentially).

• Server-side filter rules for incoming mail.

Proton and Tuta, for example, fail on point #1. The E2EE promise really doesn’t mean a lot when the service provider ultimately controls the client. If they control the client, they could very easily exfiltrate your keys via a backdoor. This can be mitigated with open-source clients and reproducible builds, but if you’re using a web client or apps from Google/Apple stores, that’s never going to be verifiable.

For VPN:

• No-logs policy.

• Independent audits.

• Port forwarding support.

• Anonymous payment options.

These are not exhaustive lists, just off the top of my head.

No problem until they make every other method more and more difficult. Which is already happening.

I only use passkeys when the alternative is an onerous song and dance.

Let’s grab our popcorn and watch Adobe fight AI companies on this. Because if this isn’t legal, then what does that say for everything else generated by AI?

I would have much preferred if all that effort went towards improving GIMP and existing open formats.

Well… if it was a 4-day vibe-coding project, then that’s not a lot of effort, and I don’t think GIMP wants to deal with that scale of AI contributions anyway.

This is the only sane take on perv glasses.

If someone pulled out their phone to photograph me on our first date, I’d nip that in the bud, and maybe just walk away. I guess I might be okay if there was a scenic background and they said “want to get a selfie together?” but a photo just of me across the table? Creepy.

The microphone would only be used for voice control. So that would fail, but buttons would still work normally.

I want to do this, but I think my housemates would riot if they were stuck with the lower quality most streaming services deliver to Linux. Last I checked, you had to jump through hoops just to get 1080p from Netflix in Firefox on Linux, and 4K was nearly impossible. Same deal with a lot of other services.

Is there a way around that nowadays or do you have to either suffer poor quality or pirate everything? I haven’t actually looked into this in a couple years now.

Perhaps this is specific to the Mac port.

I just installed the Mac version again to test it, and the first thing that appears is the playlist window with an icon telling me to “drop media here”.

Opening a file also shows the playlist window, which then expands to show the video instead. When you close the video, you’re left with the playlist, which now contains that file.

mpv. I like the minimalist UI. I have it configured to show no titlebar, just the video, and open by default in the corner of my screen at up to half the width of my display. It’s easy to customize with keyboard shortcuts, and by default it has sensible shortcuts for nearly everything. It’s easy to make videos with hardcoded letterboxing fit my full screen. It handles HDR and even Dolby videos (use gpu-next if you aren’t already). I can set default brightness/contrast/gamma settings, and then adjust them during playback if necessary with a single keystroke. I can adjust playback speed with a single keystroke. I can fix the aspect ratio of warped videos, again with a single keystroke.

As for VLC, well, it’s fine, really, and I’m not in the best position to say since it’s been a very long time since I used it regularly. So my experience is likely outdated. But back then, I found the UI a bit much, putting playlists front-and-center when I really just wanted to play individual files 99.99% of the time. It had too much going on besides the video. The GUI is great for discoverability but the more time I spend using something, the more I appreciate command-line usage and simple text-based config files.

VLC is my go-to recommendation for beginners, because everything is in the GUI, but mpv suits me better.

Functionally, both are similar. A few times over the years, one has adopted a critical feature a little bit before the other, like hardware acceleration for some specific codec, but for most videos they both do the job just fine.

You mean Emacs?

Sometimes I have to wonder, what’s it going to take to make people leave X?

I mean, it was a shithole even before Musk bought it, 4 years ago, and it’s gotten predictably and steadily worse ever since.

Weird that they don’t even bother mentioning the backup feature they’ve had on Android for years.

The good news is that this is an addition to the existing backup option to back up everything to a local file, not a replacement. At least in the current beta.

I would like to hear official confirmation that this isn’t going to be a replacement, because if it is, then it’s a huge downgrade. The current system backs up everything, including media, with no time limits, for free.

I don’t think you can expect any VPN to work without sign-in for very long. Google’s playing whack-a-mole with VPNs.

I’ve never actually tried signing in with yt-dlp. How easy is it to make a throwaway google account nowadays? Do they require phone verification or something similarly onerous?

This is network-specific. It’s been going on for a few months at least. yt-dlp itself still works without sign-in, if your network is not “suspicious”.

Always worth making sure you’re updated to the latest version of yt-dlp, but this is probably a network thing.

A paper-only journal would defend against the state, but not against people you live with. A digital journal can be encrypted, but an intelligence agency could potentially gain access

A digital journal doesn’t need to be any more government-accessible than a paper journal.

Depending on your threat model, this could require special hardware, special software, or both. In order of ease of setup, I would suggest:

• Keep all your data on your own physical media. No cloud services, period.

• Keep it encrypted.

• Disable network connectivity at every level that you possibly can, such as:

  • OS level: disable wi-fi, disable blutooth, and disable networking entirely.

  • Firmware/BIOS level: If you BIOS has options to disable networking components (especially wireless ones), do that.

  • Hardware level: If your laptop has a switch to disable wi-fi, use it. If ethernet, unplug the cable. Etc.

  • Physical level: Remove any removable wireless cards or antennas.

  • Wallet level: buy a computer than never had wi-fi or bluetooth in the first place. This could mean a retro computer, or could mean using a micro-pc like some models of Raspberry Pi.

Neither of those can stream video in real time AFAIK. They will back up the video file on some unpredictable schedule after you’re done recording. So not ideal for a situation where your phone might be seized or destroyed.

But if that works for you, there are lots of open-source options that work similarly. SyncThing can sync to any server, and all you’d need to do is make sure your sync destination is network-accessible somehow (VPN, internet-facing server, whatever). Lots of cloud drive apps can auto-upload photos and videos, and some of those are open-source.

A better off-the-shelf proprietary workflow might be a Zoom call with cloud recording enabled. Then you’d be protected against a sudden (and perhaps permanent) loss of network connectivity.

Joplin is great. I have its data stored locally with encryption, and I sync across devices with Syncthing. It also has built-in support for some cloud providers like you mentioned, and since it supports local encryption, you don’t need to depend on the cloud provider’s privacy policy.

Setting it up on multiple devices was a bit complex, but the documentation is there. Follow the steps, don’t just waltz through the setup assuming it will work intuitively. I made that mistake and while it was not the end of the world, it would’ve saved me 15 minutes if I’d just RTFM.

Defaults matter. Every time you open a private browsing window, that’s what you’re going to get. Every time you use LibreWolf or Firefox Focus or any other browser that disables/clears cookies by default (which is a good practice), that’s what you’re going to get.

I don’t want anything I search for going into OpenAI. Ever. I’d feel fine about this if they hosted their own models.