There is also last.fm. I would have suggested libre.fm but they are no longer open to registrations it seems

This would replace the “algorithmic” component of spotify, I would still suggest some other options (sharing stuff in your social circle, seeing who opens for your favourite groups etc.)

One thing not mentioned, BTRFS supports transparent compression which hypothetically can increase the longevity of SSD media by reducing the amount of writes to the drive.

I say hypothetically because further information on use case (potential write amplification from CoW) could nullify those gains — but frankly, SSD write longevity has improved so much that it is not a huge issue at this point.

If you don’t mind clarifying, what do you mean by DoD?

Frankly the best solution i have seen is always a combination of things. At least in the city I live in, people can take bikes on buses and trains, many people walk, and for trips that require trunk space (e.g furniture, DIY supplies etc) there is a Car sharing service that is cheaper than owning a car, or using ride share / taxi.

I don’t think waymo is a better option than a combination of what’s above, I think it can perhaps compliment it but it should not be the sole last-kilometre solution.

I would like to see waymo-like tech provide better public transit for the disabled. As of now, people in my city with disabilities can book special routes which are serviced by specialized buses/ taxis, and existing lines are all wheelchair accessible as well.

Self driving cars give the opportunity for those people to have even more freedom in booking, since as of now they can’t do last minute booking for the custom routes. It wouldn’t really create a traffic problem and massively would increase quality of life for those who are sadly disadvantages in society

I’m pretty sure they still are a defence contractor in the US, they also are generally the option for biking computers. There are competitors but Garmin has a chokehold on that sector, with other options just feeling worse.

So while their smart watches are more niche than Apple, Samsung etc, they still have found a solid niche in the smart tracking sector.

I would also like to chime in regarding how the community is quite small, there are two (large-ish) Canadian instances but despite this there isn’t really a large francophone population here from what I’ve seen.

I think the western-anglo bias is in part because the community requires people to host the servers, for the community to even exist in the first place. Smaller regions (such as franco-canada, French speakers only making up ~24% of our population) will make up a smaller portion of the user base and likely found out about the App through other English-language resources.

Mastodon has a bit of a larger more diverse community, but it also has had the benefit of many more years of larger (but still niche) usage and arguably more severe issues with X formerly known as Twitter becoming a hell-hole.

That makes a lot more sense! I’m sad now though I thought this was some cool homebrew-ery going on since the GameCube is just a power pc computer (I’ve seen people run Linux on the hardware before).

For FreeMC Boot, would you put it on a secondary OEM Card? Or is it best to just use one card for everything.

Sadly I don’t live in Europe, and the chain game stores here don’t sell them anymore. But there is lots of local places here that have good return policies / testing of everything before putting it on shelves.

Thank you very much for your insight!

Do you have experience with the MemCard PRO? Would you say it’s a full replacement for older memory cards, or should it be used in tandem with an original memory card in slot two.

If you don’t mind me asking, what exactly is the use of a floppy drive on a game cube?

3d printing an IO shield is a great idea! Retro console modding is a great use of a 3d printer.

Frankly I would like to not use Apple CarPlay / Android Auto — however, the built in software needs to actually usable and continuously updated.

I particularly want to see better non-touch input. Rotary dial + buttons à la Mazda, and much better voice input. I live in a multilingual region, and it consequently renders most in-built navigation voice commands useless, as it won’t understand language switching. Even Google assitant has issues with this despite supporting multiple input languages, usually resulting in me saying the entire command in the same language as the address. (Or just giving up if the name and street are in two languages).

But with built in systems that only support one language at a time, I just can’t say some of the addresses since I don’t know how it wants me to mispronounce them in English.

I also have found media playback frustrating in any modern vehicle. This is likely a lot harder to solve, but the inability to switch playlists or change playback settings without my phone connected to Android Auto is frustrating when in vehicles without it.

I know this is very ranty and not that big of a deal, it’s just frustrating seeing so little progress in the past decade on this front — and in some aspects like human interface design of vehicles, they have frankly regressed. If I look at the voice input systems on cars from 15-20 years ago there has been huge improvement, but even 10 years ago to now it doesn’t feel that different. Maybe a few new commands, but the quality of recognition / utility of the system is lacking.

I will second the suggestion for a dash camera, they can record audio automatically without need for user intervention.

Another option is to just use a voice assistant, I usually quickly ask my watch to start a voice recording beforehand to ensure there is a record of the interaction.

I’m going to suggest an alternative to Samsung Internet or Firefox : https://github.com/uazo/cromite

Out of the options I’ve tried, it’s probably the best bet for reducing tracking, fingerprinting & increasing security without turning to Tor browser (which while it is more anonymous, is frustrating for general browsing)

For clearing cache, there are two options. There’s a dedicated clear browsing data button in the hamburger menu, it can also be configured to “sanitize on close” (similar to Firefox on desktop, or Brave on desktop / mobile) [In cromite, this can be found under Security > Clear the data at open]

I can’t recommend Firefox on Android in good faith, until site isolation (fission) is enabled on the platform. This is a major security regression compared to desktop Firefox, or chromium based browsers on Android

Edit: It seems like Iron Fox (continuation of Mull / fork of Firefox) has site isolation enabled - but it is still buggy and does not have all features enabled e.g no isolated process SELinux labels.

To be fair, even a skilled users may just not notice something like this. There are many things we do in our day to day life without paying enough attention, particularly when it’s routine / something we feel adept using.

If you don’t mind me asking, what music client is pictured?

I find it’s just a lot of effort to go through visual customization for very little benefit, I have spent more time creating rootless podman images for certain apps, custom scripts, keybinds etc.

What I mean to say is there’s likely many people who customize functionality of their systems one way or another — without ever touching the visual side of things much beside maybe changing the font or turning dark mode on.

I’m not surprised by the corporate network, it’s pretty common for those types of networks to severely block inter-device LAN communication. There are two solutions however, for one, KDEconnect has initial Bluetooth support. I think it only support Plasma and Android as of now, and could be documented better, but it does avoid the LAN access problems. The other solution is using a VPN, the easiest off the shelf solution being Tailscale, but I feel this is only worth it if you have multiple use cases for it (I use it for faster Syncthing transfers, Moonlight / Sunshine game streaming. And KDEconnect)

I really wish KDEConnect “just worked”, similar to how Apple’s devices connect to one another, but I guess this is the price you pay sometimes for an open source cross platform solution.

For sending things to devices I use KDE Connect. I realize it is a fundamentally different application, but it is what I use generally to send / receive links between devices, as well as documents, images etc. It also is good for notification mirroring, and really just integrating Android devices into Windows / Linux computers.

For passwords I used KeePass (and I sync them between devices with SyncThing), but I usually recommend Bitwarden (which is what I used to use). Both are open source, have apps for all platforms, can integrate into your browser if you choose. The main advantage of Bitwarden is that it is open source, all necessary features are free, and you can host the server yourself if you want. It also integrates into some services, notably email aliasing ones, to allow you to generate new emails every time you make a new account.

For bookmarks / history your best bet is the extension everyone else is recommending here!

I feel like the major one for me (that hasn’t been listed) is Ape Escape. Growing up i played the (arguably worse) remaster of it for the PSP. Genuinely interesting to play a platformer so different yet so clearly reactionary to Mario 64. And it’s also just interesting how they handle the analog sticks in terms of controls

Like many games of the era the controls are frankly janky, but they are just so much fun

Some older consoles have very negligible size libraries in modern day terms, and who knows what sources of ROMs will be taken down by lawsuits in the next few decades. I feel like there is some sense in making a complete archive of a systems game library, but for my personal use I usually just download / dump / rip what I need specifically.