pootriarch

appimages just got less easy…

i don't know which update did it - i think it must have been os-level (i run pop_os, derived from ubuntu) - but appimages silently stopped working. double-click, nothing. finally i looked in the log out of desparation, which said 'appimages require fuse'.

more accurately, appimages require fuse 2 and the os had just upgraded to fuse 3. the fix is to heat-seek libfuse2, and don't mess with any other fuse-related package as things can start wrecking themselves:

sudo apt install libfuse2

originally seen on an omgubuntu post

i'd never heard of this concept! i have a disorganized stack of markdown files - notes, to-do and packing lists - that this looks ideal to tame

this is true. having said that - i follow a peertube-based french outfit called blast (can't speak french, just look at the pictures). if i go to a different site (peertube.stream, liberta.vip) and look at a video, the streams are coming off video.blast-info.fr.

there's no question video is a huge resource suck, and that nobody would want to host a lot of other people's videos. i just wonder, if the model is federated indexes but owner-hosted video, i wonder if there's a use case that can work at scale.

on android, i have three.

• the default browser is an f-droid rarity called 'privacy browser'. it is configured to allow scripting but reject practically everything else (storage, cookies). this will break lots of things, but i feel safer with this as the initial offer. it's wired to a searxng instance for search. i have a personal hosted homepage that it uses for home.
• if i am opening something myself, i use an app shortcut that opens my home page on mull. mull itself doesn't believe in home pages, so i have to use a shortcut. it uses a searxng instance for search. it's configured to discard all data on quit. if something breaks on privacy browser, i share it into mull.
• for sites in which i need a persistent login, i use duckduckgo browser, again with an app shortcut since it doesn't believe in home pages. i don't open links in ddg, instead sharing them to one of the other two. i don't search here since you can only use ddg.

on desktop (all platforms), i use brave with a lot of stuff turned off, homed normally and pointed to the same search instance. i have cookie autodelete to burn cookies as i browse. i spend a lot of time manually deleting local storage.

i don't love this flow. what i really would like is one browser that would:

• load my home page when i click its icon
• burn all cookies and local storage on exit, except from domains i designate

i haven't found an answer for that yet, would love ideas.

i have previously used and discarded, for various reasons: vivaldi, firefox, firefox focus, chromium, librewolf. i carry some of these for occasional use, either for 'let it through' or 'fuzz all the things' threat models.

against which kitchen pots have proven surprisingly useful elsewhere. against all odds

long ago i shifted to vscodium, a packaged version of only the open-source base of vscode that provides most but not all of the available extensions. for two reasons: so that i didn't leak telemetry to m$, and so that i wouldn't get used to features that aren't open source. it's available in a lot of package managers, mac/windows as well as linux

thanks to this post, i'm trying out searxng and then kagi, neither of which i knew. hopefully there's a searx instance configured roughly to how i'd want. i'm not philosophically opposed to paying, but search is a delicate thing to be personally identifiable - and i don't care what your privacy policy is, if you're taking my money, you can connect me with my clicks

to a techie, i'd say, it's open source and if they ever overpushed politics, they'd find they'd become the fork as the community would fork away.

to a non-techie, i'd say, everyone's an asshole a different way, but they don't own the whole place like spez and musk do.

and i wouldn't argue. let them walk away haters. this platform isn't ready for everyone to come right now anyway.

woah are those negative or slide? we have a place here that i used to hand a hundred or so negatives at a time, but that was in the before times. they're still here but don't really advertise scanning anymore, so not clear on what would be possible

this political stuff is a mess that i hadn't been aware of when i jumped into this ecosystem. the two fortunate things are

• that tankie stuff is stuff i don't see in /all, and if they're just unreasonably disappearing content, i wouldn't have known what was missing; and
• i arrived in an instance whose admin's main and self-proclaimed myopia is being a swiftie, which completely lacks the global thermonuclear war of tankie, though the incoming could eventually be a different tune

i'll definitely be watching for this though, and wonder if it will become like masto where they actively try to funnel all noobs into their instance

you can click the recommendations tab from your profile - my recommendations

i have both and i parallel scrobble to both using pano scrobbler (phone) and strawberry player (desktop). you can sync your scrobble history from last.fm into listenbrainz, either one-time or on a continuing basis (though the latter seems to run the risk of duplicates). i chose to do it once and then feed them in parallel going forward.

as a discovery tool, listenbrainz is a bit anemic, except for once a year, and last.fm has declined for me over time.

first the good

listenbrainz does a year-in-music that shows your listening patterns and also top things you might have missed - my 2022 year in music is here. i scooped up a lot of stuff from that list.

now the bad

listenbrainz's recommendation engine is only so-so, not terrible, not brilliant.

many commercial streamers and scrobblers only understand last.fm, so if you stream a lot you may not be able to keep listenbrainz updated except through manual syncing.

last.fm's recommendation engine has declined over time for me and its community is stagnant, so i don't see a lot of neighbour activity. it remains better than listenbrainz week by week, but only marginally.

oss stats

i remix and embed stats from the listenbrainz api on my own websites (profile link). doing this from last.fm requires an existing api key (which it seems they're no longer issuing), and of course they can rug-pull that api at any time, not like we've seen that lately. but listenbrainz stats recalculate only daily.

caveat

my experience of these is different to most people's, as data geeks don't tend to listen to the candyfloss music that i do.

pootriarch@lastfm · listenbrainz · popheads community