I don’t care how big or small it is, as long as it remains real.
I believe I’ve seen more organic conversation in the fediverse than I have on any other platform.
It’s either bots, ads or ad bots everywhere else.
Being tiny makes it less appealing to the megacorp cunts that would want to ruin it.
I’ve posted it repeatedly but I’d like to add the (paid extension) Vinegar extension as a recommendation for iOS Safari.
Enable extension, add YT to home screen and stop seeing ads.
Combined with Banish for Safari - stopping the “open in app” popups on websites, my online experience is golden.
Aah, the good old Motorola Atrix.
One of the earliest Laptop/phone combo devices I remember releasing.
I used to own both a Series X, PS5 and have my gaming PC (all in the same room - desktop currently has an i5 13500, RTX 3090 24GB, 4TB of NVME storage & 128GB ram)
Got myself a 5m hdmi lead capable of driving my 4k/120 TV and just ended up using my pc for everything now.
I just switch sources between my monitor and tv when I want to game on the couch. Any mouse/keyboard input needed, I do it on the Unified remote app on my phone and fire up Steam big picture on the tv.
Sold the PS5 and XBOX and ditched two more subscriptions hitting me every month.
No regrets so far.
No problems! 😀
When I was on Android I used to love the F-Droid open source repository. Both Newpipe (3rd party YouTube app) and DNS66 (local VPN on device that blocked ads throughout the phone).
I switched to iOS and really missed those applications and needed a solution for my new phone. Those 5 things above (Vinegar, Banish, AdGuard, WireGuard and PiHole) have worked wonders helping me when I switched.
Wouldn’t be without them now.
Edit:
If anyone happens be be on android or still uses Android devices with their Apple things, here are the apps I used to use:
https://f-droid.org/en/
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/
Both platforms with compelling solutions to block ads and nagging popups.🤝
To get that ad-free YouTube experience, I use Vinegar safari extension and have pinned the YouTube site to my home screen rather than using any apps.
I also use Banish to remove all those annoying “Open in our app” pop-ups in Safari.
Lastly, I use AdGuard to block ads on the phone locally and have also set up my own Wireguard VPN server at home with PiHole so that I’m always protected ad-wise when I’m out and about over 5G and on any public Wifi (I used to use my own Wireguard VPN with my old Pixels too).
Absolute bliss.
Are classic side scrollers ok to suggest?
On my way home from Spain as I type this, AirTags in luggage as always.
Haven’t had to rely on them at all due to loss luckily but I do like having them in our luggage.
Fighting as the car (hornet) from Daytona USA on Fighters Megamix is the one for me.
Working really great for me. I originally just bought it to run Pihole on a dedicated machine and have a secondary pihole instance on my Unraid server in case either of them went down but leaving it sitting there with just PiVPN and Pihole duties seemed wasteful.
I’m getting even more out of it running some of the lighter containers on it with plenty of spare room to do more.
I’ve logged/uploaded my upgrade process here just so you can get some ideas on what I did.
https://imgur.com/a/ExcLdtt
It is bulkier than a raspberry pi, being around the size of a router but the low cost and being able to utilise hardware that I had sitting doing nothing made me go this route rather than just getting a pi.
If you want something small and cheap, it might be worth getting a used thin client PC.
I got a cheap £20 Igel thin client from eBay as raspberry pi’s were still far too expensive, plus I already had a spare 4GB ddr3 sodimm to drop into it and a 120gb wd green ssd that I’d stripped from its case and fitted internally into the thin client.
After upgrading it one ended up with a 1.2ghz AMD GX-412 cpu, 4gb DDR3, 120gb sata ssd and an external usb 3 1tb hard drive i also had laying around.
As a component of my homelab, it’s running Debian 12, docker with a few containers (pigallery 2, Libreddit, portainer, searXNG), it’s my backup Emby server and my main Pihole and PiVPN client.
Completely silent, sips power and still has capacity spare to run more containers and other projects that catch my interest.
I like being able to use my the same charger universally with my and my families:
I detest the:
This is great stuff.
I’ve got a Libreddit docker instance running on my home server and together with the libredirect browser extension, if I click on a Reddit link through a search or news article with a link to Reddit, my browser automatically goes to my Libreddit instance with the content on full display.
Now, whilst on my Libreddit instance the other day after being redirected from a news article I took a peek at r/all and the whole feed was pure shit, nothing like I’d seen before on Reddit.
For some reason, it was full of doordash posts, rateme style posts taking advantage of thirsty usersand shitty TikTok reposts.
They may well have won, but at the moment there is a glut of absolute shit on the front page of the platform. I’d guess quality content has taken a hit.
Pihole on my Debian system with PiVPN WireGuard server.
Safari extensions:
Vinegar to block YouTube ads in Safari. I don’t use the app at all.
Banish to stop websites showing those annoying “open in the app” pop ups.
Ad and nag free bliss.
I use it to access any websites that I want to that Virgin Media block due to court orders issued by the UK high court.
Just set this up on my Unraid server and it’s amazing. Great suggestion and thank you.
I hate where the internet is right now.
Anyone trying to get information written by a human or decent benchmarks of CPUs is in for a real crap time.
Just tested i5 12400 vs i3 12100f and was met with results in this order:
The crap just goes on. SEO optimised lists of (at best) affiliate link laden spec sheets with no real information form an actual human.
I’ve got 2 pihole instances in my home, one on my Unraid server in a Debian VM as a backup in case the main one goes down.
The main one is running from a cheap Igel M340c thin client I bought off eBay for around £20 ($25) running Ubuntu Server.
Cheaper than a Raspberry Pi at the moment and perfect for running a Pihole on.
If you want something cheap, consider a used thin client machine.
They’re doing the right thing in this case for sure.
Not having one of your official update/news mediums being fundamentally changed in how you and your customers interact with each other by a hostile third party is a good thing.
Shoving things onto twitter/discord/facebook wouldn’t be a good alternative either.
I started with the Black Widow fallout 3 perk figuring there world be more male characters than female when fighting.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Widow_(Fallout_3)
It stuck after that.