When I was still on Windows I used TinyWall and I would just refresh and stare dreamily at the page showing all those blocked connections from Microsoft services to who the hell knows. It was very therapeutic 🥲

Especially considering that absolutely everyone was telling me to use Windows Defender because “it’s good now I swear” but it wouldn’t allow me to block most Microsoft stuff…

Wait really? 😂

Thanks, that’s nice to know!

I had no idea about the second one! I still like having a context menu option, right click + E seems much less of a hassle than selecting the text and copying, but it’s nice to know you can select part of a link! How did I never notice that you could in 20 years? 😅

I think Youtube Anti Translate only works on video titles and descriptions? There’s Youtube No Translate which does the same and also keeps the audio track in the original language so you don’t get a shitty AI dub

Category “how the hell isn’t this included by default” :

• Copy Plain Text: Adds an option in the right click menu to copy the selected text as plain text, without formatting
• Copy Link Text : Adds an option in the right click menu to copy the text of a link
• Markdown Reader: Show formatted markdown. I tried several extensions for this and this is the one I prefer personally. It has an index panel on the left which is sooo useful.

Category “Preserving your mental health online” :

• uBlock Origin: You really need to block those ads
• Consent-O-Matic: Never see a cookie pop-up again in your life (it auto accepts or refuse in your place).
• SponsorBlock: Skips Youtube sponsorships. You can define which ones you want to skip and which you want to watch (paid ads, self promo, etc)
• Return Youtube Dislike: Show the number of dislikes on videos. It’s not a real number, it’s extrapolated based on how many people with the app have clicked dislike.
• Youtube No Translate: Keeps titles, descriptions and audio tracks in their original language

Category “Usefull” :

• KeePassXC-Browser: To access your password database from your browser
• Whatever fingerprinting protection you can find (Canvas, Fonts, WebGL, etc… half those I used have been pulled, haven’t found a replacement for all of them)

Category “Would be nice if…” :

• A user agent switcher… if you want all websites to block you 😑
• NoScript: Block javascript and create custom rules to allow it only when and where you want. Or the reverse. It was great a few years ago but I’ve stopped using it because websites require allowing more and more otherwise nothing works and it’s hell can we cancel javascript please?
• Dark Reader: Dark mode for all websites. Can make some websites unreadable, but you can turn it off for that website. Makes everything much slower though so I don’t use it.

Not sure of the pros, I only see cons…

With software encryption you get updates in case vulnerabilities are discovered and such. With hardware… I guess you might get them if you think to check for them? That sounds like a pain though. Also if the algorithm used suddenly becomes obsolete because of new discoveries, you’re now left with a very expensive unsecure disk?

But I’m not very knowledgeable in encryption so I might be wrong.

Well I do use AliExpress because most of the stuff on Amazon is dropshipped from there anyway so I might as well get it cheaper, it has a lot more stuff than Amazon and more variety, and their website isn’t as awful as Amazon’s and actually makes it easy to find what you want instead of a chore, but I really wouldn’t recommend it for privacy either 😅

Hopefully Mozilla won’t die until Ladybird or Servo is ready 😅

I’m not that pessimistic, development for Ladybird seems to be going well and those crazy people are building it from scratch rather than basing it on Chromium or Firefox. There’s also Servo. When Mozilla dies the forks will hang on for a while then we’ll have alternatives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2YGzaaDXgQ

They don’t even pretend it’s for security reasons and just admit it’s for ads 🤣

audiobookshelf is actually getting there for ebook support :

Any file with an extension EPUB, PDF, CBR, CBZ, AZW3, MOBI is considered an “ebook file”.

AZW3 and MOBI ebook files have limited support and do not keep your progress.

https://www.audiobookshelf.org/guides/ebooks/

What audiobookshelf is really amazing at is not requiring a strict naming scheme, unlike jellyfin it supports lots of different ways to name and organise your files, and it tracks modifications to the files (renaming, moving) without having to rescan the whole library like jellyfin (and without leaving behind entries relating to the old paths that don’t correspond to anything anymore, though that should be finally fixed in jellyfin’s next release !)

I would have liked a dedicated ebook server but I’ll probably try using audiobookshelf in the meantime, of all the various ones I tried it’s the best by far. Just missing a “DNF” status to be perfect 🙂

For a media server :

• Audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts (for podcasts it can fetch them online from a RSS link and download them, you don’t need to manually download them)
• Jellyfin for films, series and music (for music you can use jellyfin as backend and another app as frontend if you don’t like jellyfin’s music player, a lot of people find it lacking)
• Komga for reading comics and manga (there’s also Kavita but I haven’t tried it)
• Komf for fetching metadata for comics with Komga or Kavita
• Suwayomi Server for manga (it doesn’t only act as a reader, with extensions it can find manga online and download them; it can sync your reading progress with AniList, and it’s compatible with Tachiyomi if you need that)
• Haven’t found one yet for ebooks. I passionately hate Calibre and wouldn’t touch it again with a 10 foot pole, but a lot of people swear by it so you might give it a try and see whether you love it or hate it (it’s usually one of the two). Be warned though, it will automatically rename all your books and sort them in subfolders in a very stupid way, making it difficult to find anything again manually. So if you want to test it, do it on a copy of your ebooks first, that way if you don’t like it you won’t be stuck with everything in your ebook library renamed weirdly (speaking from experience -_-).

Cloud :

• Nextcloud : your very own locally hosted Cloud.

Everything can be run in docker containers so your distro or even OS doesn’t matter.

Hardware :

• Personally I run everything from my NAS in docker containers but it’s starting to get overloaded so I’m planning to make a dedicated media server on a cheap mini PC like a refurbished Dell OptiPlex SFF.
• You could also go for something like an OrangePi or RaspberryPi if you don’t mind using ARM.

No I’m really really really lazy… and I hate source installs because you don’t get updates and need to do them yourself. So I guess I’m going to try to figure out how to make an AUR package. Being lazy sure is a lot of work 😅

That looks really cool !

(But I’m lazy so I’ll just wait for the AUR package 😅 )

All they need to know is basically “Just pick an instance close to you and be done, and if it ever stops working well just pick another”, which is the same thing as when creating an account on the Fediverse except that instances come and go a lot more.

So it would depends entirely on whether they can find the list of public instances easily… which is admittedly a problem 😅

You’re right about the website, there is a link to the list of public instances on https://docs.searxng.org/ but it’s a bit drowned amidst all the other stuff. If I was a regular user I would take one look at the website and run away really fast.

The Wikipedia page on SearXNG does link it, in the section about instances, but I’m not sure how many people would check the wikipedia page rather than the website

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SearXNG#Instances

He probably means that people who want extreme privacy and would use such a tool would also not trust anything close source, even if it’s based on an open source project

Since you included decentralized solutions like Peertube, maybe add SearXNG instances for searches ?

There’s so many cool rofi plugins 🤩

Yeah I should have mentioned it, the day I stumbled on rofi-calc and learned that it could deal with natural language thanks to qalculate I was floored ! I don’t know who came up with the idea by hat off to them