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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Not sure exactly what you meant about the fonts but I do routinely install the Microsoft Fonts from my Linux repo whatever system I’m on. It used to be very important when browsing the net as Arial and Times New Roman were ubiquitous. That is less true now, and many sites use their own fonts.

    But in office Times New Roman and Arial are still there. Microsoft has moved to newer fonts now like Calibri and Cambrea but this is proprietary. You could try and get your hands on copies of these (relatively easy if you already have windows).

    When creating documents you can embed the fonts you used in Libre Office in it to ensure if you send it to someone else it renders as you intended. When you open someone else’s documents you can see what fonts were used and try and install those or ask libre office to substitute fonts you do have for the missing ones. A metric font is a font with the exact same size of characters in terms of character width and height (even if it looks different) - this preserves the layout so if you’re missing a font and have a metric equivalent you can subsitute that font and the document layout should then be preserved.

    For Calibri there is a freely licensed Google metric alternative called Carlito. I believe that usually comes with Libre Office but double check. Also Cambria is another common Microsoft font with a free metric equivalent called Caladea that should come with Libre office.

    The Liberation fonts commonly found on Linux and Libre office are metric equivalents of the Times New Roman, Arial and Courier fonts if you want to avoid Microsoft proprietary fonts all together.

    Finally if you are sending documents to be read and not edited or just to print at another location, then save/export them as PDFs. PDFs will look the same on any device and OS and will print the same from anywhere.

    Lastly I would suggest you use a sync service to keep your documents and keep your school docs in folders that sync. Something like DropBox. Microsoft Office uses OneDrive and it is fully integrated which was a game changer when it comes to accessing documents from anywhere but you can do the same with DropBox and Libre Office on other devices to ensure you can get your documents wherever you are and edit them in whatever is available (e.g. a school PC if you don’t have your laptop to hand or your mobile device). Lots you can do with synced documents but you don’t need Microsoft to do it.



  • That’s an interesting take on FOSS - that’s it’s a free buggier alternative to “mainstream” software?

    Linux is ubiquitous across many devices (you won’t even know you’re using it) and servers yet it’s all based on FOSS. There isn’t an alternative for many of those usage cases.

    Browsers like Firefox are FOSS. The alternative is not less buggy, but it is less private and sells you to advertisers. But even propriety software like Chrome is based off an open FOSS codebase from Chromium.

    Other software has no better alternatives. Look at VLC (for video), OBS (for streaming and video capture), Calibre (for eBook library management). There are arguably all the best in their class and they all FOSS, and that is just scratching the surface.

    Tools like WINE are FOSS only but they are revolutionising gaming having been repurposed into the Steam decknfor example.

    Eveb the software that might be characterised as “alternatives” to thebincumbant proprietary software servers a major purpose. GIMP (alternative to Photoshop) and Libre Office (alternative to MS office) are free but also now increasingly important do not require any online subscriptions and data sharing with big corporation. For many people that’s hugely important - why pay money and subscriptions for things you can get for free at high quality?

    FOSS is a huge ecosystem of software, all of it free to use, change and share.



  • This doesn’t make sense. It’s more likely we’ll pack more into a high end device then say goodbye to them in tasks like gaming.

    Computing power has been constantly improving for decades and miniaturisation is part of that. I have desktop PCs at work in small form factors that are more powerful than the gaming PC I used to have 10 years ago. It’s impressive how far things have come.

    However at the top end bleeding edge in CPUs,.GPUs and APUs high powered kit needs more space for very good reasons. One is cooling - if you want to push any chip to its limits then you’ll get heat, so you need space to cool it. The vast majority of the space in my desktop is for fans and airflow. Even the vast majority of the bulk of my graphics card is actually space for cooling.

    The second is scale - in a small form factor device you cram as much as you can get in, and these days you can get a lot in a small space. But in my desktop gaming tower I’m not constrained such limits. So I have space for a high quality power supply unit, a spacious motherboard with a wealth of options for expansions, a large graphics card so I can have a cutting edge chip and keep it cool, space for multiple storage devices, and also lots and lots of fans, a cooling system for the CPU.

    Yes, in 5 years a smaller device will be more capable for today’s games. But the cutting edge will also have moved on and you’ll still need a cutting edge large form factor device for the really bleeding edge stuff. Just as now - a gaming laptop or a games console is powerful but they have hard upper limits. A large form factor device is where you go for high end experiences such as the highest end graphics and now increasingly high fidelity VR.

    The exceptions to that are certain computing tasks don’t need anything like high end any more (like office software, web browsing, 4k movies), other tasks largely don’t (like video editing) so big desktops are becoming more niche in the sense that high end gaming is their main use for many homes users. That’s been a long running trend, and not related to APUs.

    The other exception is cloud streaming of gaming and offloading processing into the cloud. In my opinion that is what will really bring an end to needing large form factor devices. We’re not quite there but I suspec that will that really pushes form factors down, rather than APUs etc.


  • What is suffering about that graph? I do most of it already and it saves me money.

    For example LED light bulbs are nicer and cheaper to run - I have 60W equivalents where I used to have dingy 40W old bulbs.

    Cold washing and hanging drying saves me money. My Hybrid car saves me money and I intend to move to Electric next, and that will help reduce pollution in my neighbourhood so it’s win win.

    Recycling is easy enough when your council provides the tools for it. I recycle paper, metal, glass and separate out my plastics; I just separate at the time I bin stuff. I take batteries back to the supermarket where they legally have to take them for recycling, and take other items to the recycling centre when I need to and put them in the appropriate skips rather than just bag it all as general waste.

    I don’t have a plant based diet and I don’t live car free, and I don’t specifically pay for eco energy yet (I’m thinking about getting solar though).But I don’t have kids and don’t want them so am doing that by default.

    I lead a very good quality of life, and none of the things I do from the graph seem detrimental to it to me. What exactly am I missing out on quality of life-wise?




  • It depends what you use it for.

    If you’re watching your own content within your home then Jellyfin is better. It’s free, open source and private. Your Jellyfin instance is yours and secure, and entirely under your control.

    Plex’s differences are mostly behind it’s plex pass pay wall, and you sacrifice privacy using their platform. The key difference is really offline and remote viewing of content which is easier and slicker with plex (but doable with jellyfin), and the plex App maybe available a few more devices. There are also some credits and ad skipping features. That’s about it - I struggle to see the benefit in plex. The only other thing I can think of is some people prefer the interface?

    I used to use Plex and got annoyed when I couldn’t view my content, which I host locally, because their login servers were down. Made me realise why did I need them so I researched a bit and switched to Jellyfin.


  • I like and trust Proton Mail, and they support setting up custom domains while hosting your email data (for subscriber users).

    You can then access it via their web mail box, via their Android and iOS apps, or via a desktop email client if you install their “bridge” application. The bridge application basically maintains the secure encryption ethos of their email system by ensuring all email traffic between your desktop and their servers remains encrypted, but can still be accessed via your preferred email clients such as Thunderbird or Outlook. The bridge is available for Windows, iOS and Linux.

    I personally recommend Protonmail as it’s primary focus is security and encryption, yet it does this in a very well developed and slick interface, so you get the best of both worlds. I’m a subscriber and moved from Gmail about 2 years ago as I wanted better privacy and security (they even have great tools for importing your old emails from major web providers). I don’t have a custom domain but from my experiences of everything else they provide, I’d be confident it works as intended.

    EDIT: In terms of cost, its €4 a month for the first tier which includes support for 1 custom domain, 10 email addresses, and 15GB of storage, or €10 for 500GB, 3 domains, 15 emails. They also include VPN, calendar, drive storage and a password manager in both.


  • Yeah one major reason RSS has died is because content makers moved away from it as it bypassed their own sites advert serving, particularly if anything more than titles are shared. Reddit will go the same way. Also many content sites have moved to tricks to track and monetise users landing on their pages with share to facebook, facebook like, share to twitter etc buttons (which also passively track people just by a user loading a page with them on). Those all help feed the big tracking systems that social media companies like Facebook use to monetise users data by spying on them, profiling them and selling or using information for marketing; so RSS feeds also deminish that income source.

    Google has done it’s part in this - it killed Google Reader which was a popular RSS reader. It wasn’t a huge product but looking back it makes sense to kill it when it also wants to track people across the internet and also concerns it may have to pay content providers for their content.



  • Yeah I agree Tumblr is a good example of the mistakes Reddit is likely to make.

    Yahoo started the mess with Tumblr by trying to contain “NSFW” content both by restricting access for users and making it harder for content makers. Then Verizon took over and they banned it outright in some bizarre moralising. Ultimately its very hard to keep shareholders and advertisers happy - for advertisers it’s difficult to guarentee their ads wot appears next to nsfw content. Their focus wasn’t they users, it was their shareholders and customers - the advertisers they were seeing their users to.

    Reddit is making the same mistakes. It forgets it is nothing more than a host for content. The users make the content, the users moderate the content and the users want the content. The users are the entire value of the company. When you start messing around with that to monetise it and to keep shareholders and advertisers happy you’re on a road to self destruction. Reddit thinks the content it hosts has value - it does but that content mostly has value when it’s current and if you lose the users you lose the content.

    Power users including many moderators seem to be the first out the door. Those are amongst some the highest value users in terms of generating and maintaining content on the site. It started a couple of years ago when Reddit started banning whole communities - some of that made sense, particularly more extreme communities but I suspect NSFW content will be next.

    Ultimately there is cognitive disonnance in social media. Banning NSFW content to “protect children” and to make it easier for keeping advertisers happy seems like an “easy” choice, but ultimately adult users don’t want to be stuck in censorship black zones, restricted by over zealous rules and rule keeps or frustrated by being caught up in the unintended consequences. Reddit is a site for adults, made by its users - damage that and you don’t have a website.