#Google trips over its own words, when they sell you #Android it's the best computing device in the world that does everything. After you bought it Google doesn't let you do anything *you* want to.
#Sideload is a made-up term. Putting software on your computer is simply called “installing”, regardless of whether that computer is in your pocket or on your desk.
What Do You Talk About When You Talk About Sideloading?
What does Google?
Here's #FDroid: https://f-droid.org/2025/10/28/sideloading.html
My “old man yelling at clouds” moment is: we shouldn’t have allowed html in emails, markdown (without any html tag) is enough.
This! Buy from local (independent) stores instead of online giants; attend live shows, and buy merch directly from the bands; eat locally-grown (organic) food; use privacy-focused, community-built online services; buy used gear & equipment instead of brand new ones; and of course, do it all based on what you can afford and as a best-effort thing, without being hard on yourself if/when it just isn't possible.
For sure, it won't change the world, but it will feel good 😎
https://terminal.ahumanfuture.co/posts/2025-10-17/the-world-is-something-that-we-make/
Please support your local decentralised messenger and stop this parasocial relationship with the blue messenger. You will never be able to fix him. Your decentralised alternative may not work as well, but that's because it's not effectively subsidized by big tech hyperscalers.
But hey, maybe we're not meant to have seamless calls everywhere and everytime and not pay anything! *loses 90% of the crowd*
Awww. We're fucked.
A little more than 2 months after Debian, we’re finally releasing Mobian Trixie as our new stable release! We’re also taking this opportunity to start rotating the PGP/GPG keys we’re using for signing both our images and package archive.
You can read more on our blog: https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2025/10/new-stable-rotating-keys/
If you design an on-hold audio loop, you shouldn't put it into production until you spend a day trying to do your regular job while on hold. If so, you'll learn:
1st: offer a callback queue if possible.
2nd: offer user the *choice* of pure silence or audio loop while holding.
3rd: the audio loop should:
* have completely consistent volume level.
* never break in w/ human voices in the loop (eg: “Remeber our website…”) once loop starts. It *will* sound like live agent every time to most users.
apk upgrade when I am on the tube and know I'm about to lose connection?I started migrating from #NextCloud to #Radicale, but iOS threw a spanner in the works (turns out accountsd only checks for A and not AAAA DNS records!) I decided to go into a "half-migrated" state: pointing myself to the new instance to continue testing while leaving my partner pointing to the old one.
That caused a problem: any events we created in the meantime wouldn't be synced to the other's devices.
vdirsyncer came in super handy and enabled a three-way sync between NextCloud, Radicale and my laptop! So, despite being on two completely different #CalDAV servers, we both see exactly the same state and all updates flow through seamlessly. And, when they switch instance, it will be like nothing ever happened, despite being on different servers for a few weeks.
Thank you #openStandards and #freeSoftware!
UK Politics, civil liberties [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
I can highly recommend listening to this Prospect Magazine podcast featuring the late Conor Gearty.It's a scary but very worthwhile listen. It covers public support of civil liberties, the right to protest, the proscription of Palestine Action as well as what Labour should be doing to fortify against an authoritarian takeover.
I have thought a good bit about what government could do, and I believe there are a number of simple things they could do that they're not doing. And those are to fortify democracy against the forthcoming fight.So you could - obviously, obviously - change the voting system. Don't have any stupid internal independent commission, don't have any stupid royal commission, don't consult, just have "Single Transferable Vote - PR Act". You'll get Liberal support, Labour support - push it through. Unfortunately it's not in the manifesto, the Lords would try and delay it.
You would ban foreign influence on elections - it would be straightforward. You would make it impossible to have something like GB News. You would not allow Mr Marshall (lovely man though he is) to run a whole lot of outlets in pursuit of an obvious and transparent political agenda.
It's called parliamentary sovereignty, it's called legislation, it's called having will. There used to a requirement that all media was balanced - return to it. A lot of this is return to the past! A lot of this is recover what Mrs. Thatcher began shredding. The community that benefited from the end of the cold war, through the lack of fear of communism, they destroyed many of the social entitlements originally, and they've turned now to the civil and political, and they're seeking, in my opinion, to perpetually empower themselves. But we can fight back.
Let's have some fights with the right enemies. And if you go down, you go down. That strikes me as a more attractive set of scenarios than simply surrendering on the basis that you didn't achieve some growth that you set out to achieve in 2029.
@neil there are degrees of self hosting, too. I "self host" many services, but it's on rented VPSes on other people's servers.
It outsources the tedious "keeping servers and networks alive", while giving me control over the actual services. Does that count as self hosting?
(to my mind, yes, but not in the purist path of having it running on a computer you can see and touch...)
Over next 1-2 weeks,I'd appreciate an extended thread re: #FrameworkLaptop, #mntreform, & #FOSS.
TL;DR on my idiosyncratic needs:
* minimize binary firmware blobs¹
* Having 2 disks in RAID-1²
* Runs stock Official #Debian stable³
* Understanding best current replacement keyboard options⁴
* Form factor that works for my travel needs.
Is @frameworkcomputer or @mntmn better for me?
I'd be glad if ∃ active engagement on this!
@dianea free open source software on my hardware is something more akin to #droidian and getting away from an android project that is dependent on Google’s aosp -with an uncertain future, also powered by google hardware.
Graphene has a lot of dependencies on google being generous and those gifts are drying up quickly.
We need to be supporting more TRUE open source solutions. More #linuxmobile options and focus is what we need.
“We are not saying we are going to boil the ocean in one go as the public would be really sceptical of that. We startering with right to work checks first but there are loads of other applications for digital ID.” Josh MacAlister. They are literally saying there will be future function creep of digital ID and this is about merging records across Government.
UK politics, digital ID [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
Dear Estonian government: could you please schedule an embarassing leak of all digital ID records for sometime in the next few weeks? That would really help us out.
OV is saying goodbye to his beloved ICR! Bye bye single deck international VIRM 😢💕
Alt...
OV on table with goodbye pin
@jonquark @openrightsgroup It is definitely a significant risk, I think the HO eVisa app works like this. And of course, eVisas don’t work except on an app; in both cases the systems will make some people very dependent on relatives or partners who are abusive.
We're in a cost of living crisis and Labour wants to bring in digital ID cards for everyone 🤡 They're risking turning the UK into a pre-crime state where we constantly have to prove who we are to go about our daily lives.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/25/keir-starmer-expected-to-announce-plans-for-digital-id-cards #precrime #digitalid #idcards
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Older...
People are rightly upset with another Musk intervention in British politics. Yet so many Polticans, organisations and journalists still use X. Polticans and organisations should ditch the platform. Move to federated services and alternatives. Be the change they want to see. #Musk #X #Fediverse #ukpol
Installing #munin on a new server, wondering why it is not generating graphs.
Hmmm, everything is working fine if I callmunin-crondirectly, graphs are generated, and the cron entry is there in/etc/cron.d, so what's going on? Why is it not getting run from cron?
$ sudo service cron restart
Unit cron.service could not be found.
$
Huh? What is up with systemd? Why can't it find cron? Oh, hang on a second...
$ apt search cron | grep -i installed
$
D'oh!
There's something so wrong about it ultimately not respecting your choice.
Mozilla seems to have compromised its values. I don't think it's wrong to struggle with that. It reminds me of one of Karen Sandler's excellent talks on when to say no to funding:
We are fighting to make improvements in the areas that we think are so important, and if people think that that's important, they will get on board and help you find money, and help donate to you - and if they don't, well, you know, maybe it wasn't that important, and you'll have to find something else to do.I feel the same about the forks. I really hope, with all the new browsers with real community involvement, that better days are ahead of us.But, if you don't stay focused on that mission, and you're willing to compromise around the corner, you will never build trust for your organisation, you'll never be able to get the volunteers you need to keep going, and your funding will then constantly be on a downward spiral towards things that take you further afield from the reason you got started to begin with.
feed2exec!I love how flexible it is. I wanted to download each article to a file so I could copy those back and forth between devices. The man pages gave me everything I needed to write a simple plugin to do this, and it was well worth taking the time to learn.
Now I have the ability to do completely crazy and arbitrary things to my feeds before reading them! Well, I'm probably not going to do anything with that, but it's nice to know I can 😀
vidir, available from the moreutils package in #Debian.I can't believe I didn't know about it already! I frequently have to rename many files, and vidir lets me apply my keybinding and hacky macro knowledge to yet another task :D
Censorship creeps onwards 🤐
Ignoring issues with the UK Online Safety Act, the government is using Henry VIII powers to engulf more content.
Aimed at blocking 'self-harm' content, algorithms will misidentify support resources and content will vanish behind age gates.
https://www.digit.fyi/uk-gov-to-toughen-online-safety-act-against-self-harm-content/
#onlinesafetyact #onlinesafety #osa #censorship #freespeech #freedomofexpression #ukpolitics #ukpol
@BBCNews So much of this relates to the tabloidification of social media. Which is about disempowered users, who cannot choose their moderators and prioritisation engines,
@ret 100% especially when you add that the far right are inevitably quite happy to forget FX once they have the power to restrict speech they do not like. We are watching that happen in real time.