netvor

When I speak, unless I'm sharing the screen I always keep looking at myself. It's kind of strange -- it clearly does not match a real-world conversation, but somehow I can't help it.

Edit: More context -- I'm wondering if others have it, if this is something that can be explained by some "brain" thing, and also how does it affect the conversation.

Every time I try to understand how forces which hold atoms and molecules together work, I find myself wanting to ask this question: why not the other way around? Could there be an atom which has electrons and neutrons inside, and protons outside?

It feels like a silly question, but is there something we know about the universe we live in that implies that this is not possible?

This is not strictly self-hosted but another approach I which is similar in philosophy, and which I actually prefer in many cases: hosted services.

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So about 5 years ago I got fed up with having to update nextcould (or was it owncloud? I don't recall) so I was looking for a hosting service.

Initially I expected this to be a bit of a burden on my budget (especially if one scales with users), but to my surprise, I found OwnCube (owncube.de), where the price was about EUR 18 per year. Great deal. So I went ahead, set it up, tested for a while and eventually ended up configuring my parents' phones to use it for storing contacts & photos instead of Google.

To be clear, I did not use nextcloud myself directly. I had been already paying for fastmail, and it's perfect, except it's single-user, so for myself I kept using fastmail, just synchronizing fastmail (using vdirsyncer) and owncube nextcloud just to have a backup and also alternate interface.

This was working perfectly, until one day, it broke. It just stopped working (throwing some errors on sync). When I opened my web interface there was just this message, saying the nextcloud intrerface is not compatible with PHP 8.0+.

Seemed understandable: they updated the underlying server to PHP 8.0 but not the Nextcloud instance. Not superb, but fine, I'll just open a support ticket.

However, the ticket went nowhere. The support engineer kept repeating something that amounted to,

• they needed to update PHP for security reasons,
• the plan I subscribed to does not "come with auto-updates",
• so

I am responsible for updating the Nextclould instance, not them.

That does not make sense. I don't have access neither to the instance nor to the updater. All I can do now is stare at the message. Their admin UI did not provide anything, either (some "magic" button, URL or SSH access).

I pointed it out but they kept repeating themselves and eventually explained that I can either cancel the service and start it again (pay again!) -- which will give me updated NC but my data will be erased, or I can "book auto-updater" which meant I should pay one time fee about 70 EUR (more than double my yearly plan).

That does not make sense. I understand that I chose the basic mini plan, I can't expect anyone to jump over hoops. I also perfectly understand that any software can break because of version mismatch (after all, I'm a software engineer myself). But nobody knows how many times per year that can happen, so if I have to pay extra every time then my plan is unpredictable.

Sadly the ticket went nowhere, the support sounded like a broken record, with "pay X amount of EUR here" link. Seems like a definition of holding my data hostage.

Eventually I decided to cancel the service.

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So the morale, I guess..?

• Be careful to whom you entrust your data

• Don't get too tempted with great prices. Make sure you understand what is (NOT) included.

• DO keep your backups.

  • For me, vdirsyncer worked great; it is a bit pain to configure and troubleshoot but the architecture is great and it gives you opportunity to sync between independent accounts and even plain text files, which can be a life-saver. (Even sync with google worked.)

• Consider having more instances.

  • Eg. you could pay one and self-host one, use the paid one as a primary access point (public internet, usually much easier), and the self-hosted one as a backup.
  • Alternatively, one could even share a pool of instances with friends, split the bill and sync both ways.
  • (You will still need an almost-always-running cronjob somewhere to sync the data, if you're going with vdirsyncer approach.)

Is there some mature and usable application or tool that would enable tracking desktop activities to aid in time tracking?

Over 10 years (back when I used Windows at work), I recall I was using an app on Windows -- I forgot what it was, definitely closed source, although very well made -- that would sit somewhere in the tray and just track my activities (mostly just active window title and app), and later it would enable me to look back at the data, analyze it and categorize the time.

I recall that for my rather ADD-ish brain, this was a life-saver.

I don't recall name of the app, but it looked kinda similar like timeBro (judging just from brief look at their web page and their demo)

I haven't seen anything like that for Linux -- I admit I haven't really tried to search very hard. Given the vast diversity of desktops (from GNOME to KDE to i3), technologies (Xorg to Wayland...) and work environments (native apps, web browsers, flatpaks, command lines, IDE's, Vim's, even SSH servers) I wonder if it would even be feasible to have something like this that would work reliably everywhere-ish and provide really useful data.

With any question, why is it always so helpful to know why the answer is the one that is? In another words, which principle of thinking and learning is most closely tied to question "why"? Or is it purely social act of expressing deeper interest? Is questioning for reasons mandatory?

I feel I know the answer to this question intuitively, but find it hard to express it into words without it sounding stereotypical and lazy.

This seems bizarre, because it's children who are most "famous" for asking "why" all the time, but: How would you, say explain to a child, why do we need to know reasons behind things?

This might be just EU thing, but is there an effective way to deal with endless "accept/reject cookies" dialogues?

Regardless of the politics behind, I think we can all agree that current state of practice around these dialogues is ...just awful.

Basically every site seems to use some sort of common middleware to create the actual dialogue and it's rare case when they are actually useful and user friendly

or at least not trying to "get you". At least for me, this leads to being more likely to look for "reject all" or even leave, even if my actual general preference is not that. I've just seen too many of them where clicking anything but "accept all" will lead to some sort of visual punishment.

Moreover, the fact that the dialogues are often once per domain, and by definition per-device and per-browser, they are just .. darn ... everywhere, all the frickin' time.

Question: What strategy have you developed over time to deal with these annoying flies? Just "accept all" muscle memory? Plugins? Using just one site (lemmy.world, obviously) and nothing else? Something better?

Bonus, question (technical take): is there a perspective that this could be dealt on browser technical level? To me it smells like the kind of problem that could be solved in a similar way like language -- ie. via HTTP headers that come from browser preferences.

When we go out of our comfort zone, go for some new adventure or new challenge, we will naturally pay more attention to what happens in our minds as we're going through this new experience.

"Demons", i.e. results of past bad, or even traumatic experience can be active during our daily life, often in various activities ranging from getting out of bed to talking to people where we have complex relationships (family members, co-workers, bosses, even kids..).

In daily life, random acts of these demons can go almost unnoticed, but that could be just because we're so much used to them acting that we've already normalized this "mischief" as normal facts of life.

One way of exposing them is talking to therapist.

Another way is learning to be mindful and pay more attention to oneself.

Yet another way is experiencing something new and unique -- our brain will naturally tend towards some sort of mindfulness, merely by instinct of being careful in new environment.

This could also mean that people that are burdened by these demons too much (or in particular "effective" ways) can't easily deal with the things that they discover about themselves, or that their demons act on some kind of "meta" level where they can smuggle themselves into the very process of this growth. As a result, they will tend to avoid these challenges which could lead to further spiraling deeper into "anti-growth", and so on...

I've been using Linux exclusively for over 10 years but I never really understood how things like ALSA/PulseAudio/PipeWire work.

As far as I can remember, I've used pavucontrol for adjusting my settings.

I've noticed that when I'm changing playback volume in Clementine (recently Strawberry, which is its fork) the volume slider in pavucontrol is changing as well -- OK, this means they are connected, or even "the same thing"?

But looks like both of them are working with different percentage numbers? How is this possible and what kind of setting/configuration should I look for if I want to change it? Or is it simply a bug in the player? (Both Clementine and Strawberry behave the same way.)

In this particular case, it bugs me because in the way how my audio is set up now (client is forwarding via module-tunnel-sink, server is Raspberry Pi with USB card and speakers connected via 3.5 jack), all acceptable volume levels as shown in the player are under 10%, which makes the player UI slider pretty much unusable. I'd still prefer to use this UI to set the volume, though.

So while I'd like to fix this particular issue, I'd also like to have a better insight in how PW works and eventually have a better strategy of controlling audio volumes from various sources. My current strategy is "once my 4-5 commonly used sources work, don't ever touch it again and don't ever play stuff from any unknown (web!) players, lest you and your neighbors are heading for a nasty midnight surprise", which is a lame strategy.

404: FetchError: invalid json response body at http://lemmy:8536/api/v3/site

but don't worry, lemmy we love you 🥰, we can wait a while...

Author: me. Taken in 2014 during my trip to Boubínský prales (Boubín Primaeval Forest) north of Šumava National Park.

I don't know what it is.

Author: me. Taken in 2014 during my trip to Boubínský prales (Boubín Primaeval Forest) north of Šumava National Park.

I think we all know what kind of mushroom it is.

Author: me. Taken in 2014 during my trip to Boubínský prales (Boubín Primaeval Forest) north of Šumava National Park.

I don't know what kind of mushroom it is.