Paul Browne @bigbrownepaul@fosstodon.org

Kinda feeling rather happy at the moment! I have an old (2008) car that's just passed its MoT (annual mandatory safety check in the UK) without issue. Might sound a weird way of making someone happy but it has normally cost me a LOT of money each year. 😀

Feeling the call of the depression void hard this morning. It feels like it would be so much easier to just let myself sink.

Unfortunately I lost one of my favourite fish in my cichlid tank last night. My beautiful electric blue acara (pic attached).

She was old and had what I hope is a happy life. My son just asked me “Dad...did the acara die of fish Corona?”

Cheered me up. 😊

Hoping #UBPorts start the move from Ubuntu 16.04 to a newer base soon.

Thunderbird to Evolution

gemini://simbly.me/posts/2021-01-28-Thunderbird-to-Evolution.gmi

https://simbly.me/2021/01/28/Thunderbird-to-Evolution/

Day 77. #100DaysToOffload

My last domain would be finally out of Google Domains within the next few hours :) Trying Gandi for this one.

So today I priced up some PC upgrades (MB, RAM, CPU, case fans & GPU). It was all going so well until I got to the GPUs. They’re either out of stock EVERYWHERE or massively over-priced.

I think I’ll hold off upgrading as I’m not prepared to pay over the odds, and I don’t want my current GPU (a 2GB RX 560d) to be the bottleneck in my new system.

Anyone know what’s going on with the GPU market? Cryptocurrency mining?

Lots of naysayers bout #Signal lately. Saw this post from @xiu and I couldn't agree more.

https://xiu.io/posts/20-the-case-against-signal/

If you crosspost from twitter to mastodon I would really appreciate it if you marked your account as a bot (see https://superuser.com/a/1439495 for explanation of the effect).

If it's a dual purpose account (i.e. crossposting AND direct posting), then I would appreciate it if you created a separate account for the twitter crossposting and marked that as a bot account.

Crossposted tweets appear as a mess of broken links, missing threads, and the account is often unresponsive to replies.

Thanks!

Amazing work from @fsfi on Comparison of Instant Messengers 👌

@bigbrownepaul I'm always interested in what providers people like. The difficult thing about self hosting is preventing your emails from going to spam. Your IP won't be trusted 😓.

ha! if you uninstall all of the microsoft store crap from win10, and use powershell to install the WSL ubuntu20.04 .appx bundle, the windows licensing manager service will attempt to connect to microsoft when you launch it. if you block the connection, it won't run.

sysupgrade(8) sure makes things that used to be painful so much easier! #OpenBSD

@bigbrownepaul @Heron @rjkershner and others. I also have challenges completely unplugging from big tech (work requirements). I know it's not for everyone, but I'm currently using multiple mobile devices. #GrapheneOS for my #foss phone, #iphone for work, and an android tablet for those cases where I'm forced to use google play store. Combo of #syncthing and #radicale (https://radicale.org) on the home server to sync photos, passwords, contacts, calendar, etc.

@bigbrownepaul I spent years trying to do the same, I was a pretty entrenched googler. Got pretty much everything moved, but as an Android user I still have an account. I just can't stand the iOS way of doing things, and going full FOSS Android is a no go for my work situation.

Maybe one day there will be a Linux phone that I can switch to.

@bigbrownepaul been trying to do the same myself, but between an Android phone, social media like facebook messenger, whatsapp, Instagram, both gmail and hotmail accounts... It has been a much harder task than I tought initially.
And for some there really isn't much of a alternative, PixelFree is... Barebones in all ways to say the least...