Ask Lemmy
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Here's a few! While I mostly use the RSS feeds from these sites, I often read the web versions too:
- Hack a Day, wonderful place to get clued into ground-up explorations of technical topics from the outside
- BBC News, good for a world perspective that's not fully US-centric but still in English
- OSNews, Operating System news for nerds like me who get legitimately excited for things like installing plan9 on bare metal
- Ken Shirrif's Blog, the paragon of long-form teardown & explanation of vintage electronics, deeply insightful, terrifyingly technical but still approachable. Okay, not a daily update, but worth the wait
- Create Digital Music, solid and considered electronic music instrument news and articles, for us unreformed synthesizer geeks
Thank you for that last one.
unreformed synthesizer geeks
That should really be the name of a Lemmy community
That should really be the name of a Lemmy community
Be the change you want to see in the world
Ken Shirrif's Blog is incredibly great!
Damn you're installing Plan9 on bare metal? That's some balls there.
Tried OpenIndiana as a daily driver yet?
I'll admit I haven't tried any OSes outside a VM in a while, the last was Haiku a while ago. But I am always keeping tabs!
Hacker News
SkimFeed
Ground News
The rest is all RSS feeds.
I've been wanting to get back into rss feeds. Have a good feeder? Reader? Compiler? What are the clients even called? I'm drawing a blank.....
I currently use Inoreader, and I could register most sites I visit directly into it.
The clients are called "RSS readers". Most blog sites have RSS feeds you can add to it. And there are services that can easily generate RSS feeds for websites that don't already have them.
Https://Rockpapershotgun.com is one of the few sites I still visit on a frequent basis. I don't care about half of their reviews. Their writing and personality is just entertaining and the commenters are fun.
As a developer, I love https://js13kgames.com/. These masters of JS make games that are under 13k, smaller than font file!
This blog has been my late night addiction. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/ reviews old PC RPG games like Wizardry and Eye of the Beholder. Theyve been doing it for more than a decade.
Have you noticed any changes since ign acquired RPS and laid off some of the staff?
Yes absolutely. There's a slight shift of tone in regards to journalism. A lot of takes definitely come off more neutered as to not offend a company or lose favor. It's unfortunate. But then again, I'm not interested in ragebait so it wasn't a big thing for me. And other sites (and social media) do it already.
They still go into fresh perspectives. Random things like are audio logs a good mechanism for storytelling. Or the best item in Skyrim (which is filled with such cheeky humor to invite friendly arguments)
And some of the newer hires still haven't found their RPS voice. They're trying "too hard" to be zany.
I am still looking for a gaming blog that takes gaming mildly seriously. Ones willing to have both AAA games and incredibly tiny indie games on the front page, sprinkled with opinionated posts about their favorite book covers in RPGs, or if highlighted interactive items is good UI.
Js13k is such a cool find! The top few games are really good for what they claim to be what de hec
couch 2048 is such a classic
Royalroad.com Archiveofourown.org
I visit both hourly, and spend the vast majority of my time reading books on those two sites.
I'm not familiar with either. Taking a quick glance, Archive of Our Own is for fanfics, and Royal Road is for original web serials?
EDIT: No, Royal Road has some fanfics too.
Along the same lines, I've been reading short SF stories here to get away from social media: https://www.freesfonline.net/NewAdditions.html
Royal road has some fanfics, but not many. Most fanfics on Royal road are either pokémon or cyberpunk, at least the popular ones.
Yucata.de - online boardgames
I usually play 1 move a day in 7-8 boardgames with people all around the world.
I just gotta say... we need to bring back those 90s pages that just had a bunch of links
Ah, the web portals.
Think they were called web rings back in ancient days
I miss Fark :(
StumbleUpon toolbar
It was an era of Netscape navigator and toolbars
Wow.. I'm looking and post to slashdot.org, daily, since 1998 or something...
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lemmy.today. I like their "we aim to try to not defederate with other instances" policy, and they're geographically near me.
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Kagi. Search engine that doesn't log or data-mine users; it charges a subscription fee. Does some neat things like specifically index and allow searching of the Fediverse. It works fine, but that's not really my interest: I really just don't want to have a search engine provider logging and data-mining my searches, and I'm happy to finally have an option to avoid that.
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Wikipedia. Being the "store of all human knowledge" may be ambitious, but Wikipedia's been having a pretty good go at it, and has killed off most commercial encyclopedias.
Stuff that I don't use daily, but do probably have a good chance of having used in a given week:
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Google Earth. There's no real alternative to this out there: it sucks in a lot of satellite and aerial imagery to let one get some degree of 3d view of much of Earth. Also convenient for measuring distances, including multi-hop trips.
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Amazon. The world's largest retail selection and is available wherever you live. Twenty years back, one significant argument for living in or near a city was shopping choice. Amazon provides a much larger selection all over. Maybe for some of the younger crowd, that doesn't seem like a big deal, and it's a change that didn't happen overnight, but the change over time is pretty remarkable. I don't buy everything from them -- Walmart.com provides better delivery options for food and some other things that they sell, Monoprice.com has long been my go-to provider for computer cables (which have historically seen obscene markups at brick-and-mortar retail), and I used to use Newegg for their better product database. Aside from the constant nagging to subscribe to Amazon Prime, I'm pretty happy with them.
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YouTube. It's the world's largest provider of on-demand video. Not only that, but for a lot of non-fiction stuff, it's a lot better than any commercial streaming service. I don't subscribe to their premium service, though I would if I could get a "no log, no analytics" guarantee of the sort that Kagi provides.
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Maybe Tineye. Image-keyed index of images: feed it an image or URL of an image, and it will tell you where it's seen it, including the earliest time and the best-quality version of the image. It uses fuzzy matching, so it's capable of identifying similar images with certain kinds and levels of modification. There's no alternative for figuring out where some images may have come from or digging up less-overly-compressed version of images. I'm surprised that some of the image search providers -- which have to build an image index as well -- haven't provided this feature.
Stuff that I used to use daily:
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Reddit. I was kind of sad when they transitioned to the new Web UI, but kept using the old one. But killing off the third-party clients was the breaking point for me.
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Yahoo, then Altavista, then Google. Main search engines. Altavista in particular indexed Usenet for a while, and I believe that Google was the first search engine to introduce image search, which was nice.
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Slashdot. Before Reddit. Didn't have Reddit's variety in topics and wasn't designed to scale up to what Reddit or the Threadiverse are, but it was a good forum for a while. I do prefer Markdown to Slashdot's HTML subset, though.
I really just don’t want to have a search engine provider logging and data-mining my searches, and I’m happy to finally have an option to avoid that.
Aw, c'mon! Have some fun with your searches. Confuse the hell out of google!
"Boy eating family of lions."
"Is Peter Parker Batman's brother in law?"
"MARCO!"
"Ghostbusters all female cast"
"1989 time travelling masturbation"
"If we aim our kelbasas at steam train"
"Is my size Barbie trying to kill me?"
"Romancing the table."
"Home buyers guide to floor pizza"
"Imagining yesterday"
"Does Bruno Mars is gay?"
"Eek! The cat. Rule 34."
"Will Sasso scented laundry soap"
"Happy ninjas go boom"
Really you can make ANY random bullshit up. And google will have to go through one by one and edit or alter their data. Otherwise their AI bots will sound INSANE
"polo....."
I like their “we aim to try to not defederate with other instances” policy, and they’re geographically near me.
Out of curiosity, what is it about this policy you like?
Many years back I got some Monoprice SATA cables. They came from Amazon and I always thought they were just a cheap knockoff. Had no idea the were a real cable company. These days I use Cable Matters if they have the cable I need. Their website is awful though.
Blackgate.com - the remnants of Black Gate magazine, which was published from 2000-2011 and then continued in digital form since. It focuses primarily on vintage literary fantasy, though occasionally the an article will be published in films or new fiction. Of particular note to nerds is the Cinema of Swords column by Lawrence Ellsworth, who fantasy fans may be familiar with as the Principal Narrative Designer for Baldur's Gate 3. I'm not so immersed in the fantasy world that I understand most of what is discussed on the blog, but it is a nice taste of the old Internet, one which might resonate with other fediverse users.
Facebook.com
It's so great, you guys.. You would love it.
Why do we need another social media site when Myspace exists?
But xanga is superior
what's xanga
It's like a hip version of livejournal
aight
I’m surprised nobody listed troll sites..
I read arstechnica.com every day for general tech news.
I read talkingpointsmemo.com most days. It's focused on US politics, but I like that it gives a little more context coming from a perspective fairly similar to mine.
Searxng
GSMArena.com: phone database with lots of reviews
Nanoreview.net: Mobile phone SoC list and ranking
https://www.revzilla.com/common-tread: Daily motorcycle articles
superspruce.org: Fun card game I'm working on