Netflix’s disc-by-mail service is better and more convenient than streaming in basically every way. Instead of having to look for the films/shows I want to watch on various streaming services only to find out they’re not streaming anywhere, or on some obscure/expensive service, I can be confident that if they’ve had a physical release, they’re probably in Netflix’s catalog of 100,000 titles on Blu-Ray or DVD. The I can just add it to my queue, and movies will show up. Then when it’s time to watch a movie, I don’t have to waste time mindlessly scrolling my trying to find something to watch, I just pop the disc in the player. Easy. It’s really a shame that it’s going away. My public library has a massive DVD collection that I’ll probably use, but they’re lacking in Blu-Ray discs, and nothing beats the convenience of having the discs come right to your home.

Americans: You’re not tired after eating Thanksgiving dinner because of tryptophan in the turkey, you’re tired because you ate a lot of food.

Seems like all of the most sophisticated filters that the big social media sites use should be made open source. I’m sure they took a lot of time and money to develop, but lack of illegal images should not be an axis that social media are forced to compete on.

Some of the Mastodon-focused clients like Ivory/Ice Cubes look amazing. It won’t be long until we get something like that for Lemmy if it gains enough traction.

This has the added benefit of holding the news organizations accountable to you, as you’re their main source of funding. If they start to go down a bad path, you can pack up and take your dollars somewhere else.

As I understand it, Brave bought Cliqz which had their own existing index, and this is what Brave uses as a starting point for its search engine.

The problem is that I’m a little suspicious about how they’re continuing to update their results, as they’ve been really opaque about this. I can’t find anyone online who’s said anything about encountering Brave’s crawler in their access logs, and in all of Brave Search’s documentation they never once claim to have a crawler, just an index. I’m not saying they’re stealing results from another search engine, but they could be buying updates to their index from another crawler? Honestly I’d just like them to be more transparent.

I’m trying to get away from any search engine that relies Bing or Google’s index. I’ve tried to like Mojeek but unfortunately the results are terrible. I really like Gigablast’s results and have probably been using it the most, but the UI is pretty bad. Petal and Yandex have not-great privacy policies but US sanctions on China and Russia make it unlikely they’ll be cooperating with US-based intelligence/corporations. I actually really like Petal’s results and UI.

Looks like it’s still a work-in-progress.

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If you’re interested in the concept behind Tox, I’d recommend taking a look at Jami. Tox’s development has been sporadic at best and I wouldn’t trust it to be a viable solution long-term. Jami runs with the same concept but has multi-device support and is backed by/part of the GNU project so it probably has more staying power. That being said, it’s still (like Tox) not very user friendly at this point.

Depending on the Android version you have you can specify your own DNS-over-TLS hostname in the Private DNS settings.

The only people I know who regularly use wireless charging have broken ports that make it their only option.

I forgot that one of my TVs is a 3D TV until reading your comment. I remember it came with “Shrek: The Complete Collection” in 3D. I don’t even know if the shutter glasses it came with are still around.

Assuming Musk actually had any original ideas.

Stationary heights are the death of me. I’ve been skydiving and ride rollercoasters regularly, but catch me freaking out on the roof of a building or waiting in line for a water slide.

Something touching the tip of my nose. Just the idea of someone slowing bringing their fingertip closer to the tip of my nose is enough to trigger my fight or flight.

1. Cucumber
2. Zucchini
3. Cauliflower

People intuitively understand you when you say you try to go to locally-owned co-ops/farmers markets instead of Walmart when you can, right? Or that you prefer to avoid Amazon and support your local independent bookshop, right? It’s actually cool to care about these things, people respect you when you make little rebellious political decisions.

My advice is frame your decisions about what apps to use the same way. “I try not to use the big corporate-owned apps when there are smaller non-profit alternatives run by communities of normal people.” Now you’re not some paranoid weirdo who’s afraid the NSA is out to get him, you’re just socially-conscious and care about things like where your time and money is going. I almost never try to explain what “open source” is or anything like that.

A girl on a first date once asked me what messaging apps I used and I said something like “My friends and I have been using this smaller non-profit app, it has all the same features as Messenger but without all the Zuckerberg bullshit.” and she downloaded it right then and there, thought it was cool.