You could use something like WinBoat to make installing and using a virtual machine for Windows a lot easier. It also makes Windows apps feel almost like they are native to your Linux desktop, which is nice.

Alternatively, you could try running Excel in wine using Bottles, but I’m not sure how well that’ll go since Excel is kind of a monster of an application.

I feel like there’s also a similar kind of perspective that is widely normalized in these kinds of discussions that boils down to simultaneously blaming everyone on an individual level and being defeatist about ever solving it. Specifically, I’m talking about when people say things like:

Oh, we destroyed the rain forests / polluted the environment / strip mined 3rd world countries / ruined space with our junk / killed the coral reefs / etc

No, we the working class didn’t do that. Humanity as a whole didn’t do that. The owner class did all of that to feed their addictions to wealth and power under capitalism. We the working class by and large criticized all of those things whenever we happened to have enough agency to consider it.

I enjoyed it, there are a couple of very decent stories. The fact they could have more deviant species portrayed (like the cat people) is also fun.

The animation quality is horrible, and they often reused scenes very noticeably, and some of the voice actors sound like ridiculous Scooby Doo villains, but despite all of that it was a good run.

No, we don’t force anyone to do anything, electric replacements are offered as a “free” upgrade. We’re a housing cooperative, so technically it’s not free, but it’s paid for by the community’s collective funds.

The other main problem is that people routinely forget to turn off their stoves. We’ve had the fire department come multiple times this year alone because someone left their gas on and filled their unit with it. One resident left his gas open for who knows how long before he passed out in his living room and shit himself. Luckily someone found him and called the paramedics.

I guess if it was one person living in the wilderness and they blew themselves up or suffocated, then that’s on them. In a community though, it endangers everyone nearby.

Gas is not safe.

Speaking as a board member in a housing community where we are actively dealing with residents who claim that their precious gas stoves are safe and they don’t want electric replacements, I appreciate this post being shared.

Isn’t that exactly to be expected, and part of the whole point of the thing? It’s preventing connections to abusive service endpoints, of course it’s going to break things. The idea is that the things it breaks are not desirable, even when it means a game doesn’t work anymore. You have to choose which you want more: privacy, or playing that game.

That’s something I appreciate about the WordPress “block editor”; it tells you when you’ve changed colors in a way that is hard to read for some people. I wish more design software did that automatically.

Didn’t you know? Emojis only exist on Apple devices!

I’m always confused by people saying that Vortex doesn’t work on Linux, when I’ve used it for years now on both my Fedora desktop and my Steam Deck. I didn’t even have to do anything outrageous to get it working. Install with Lutris like anything else made for Windows, press play, it works great.

Edit: Realized this sounded maybe judgmental, when I didn’t mean it to. Not trying to make anyone feel bad in any way. More like encouragement, because once you get over the hump of figuring out how to use tools like Lutris to run games, running Vortex is the same process.

A so-called “neutral accent” is still an accent.

The specific font isn’t as important for me. Mostly I’ll use whatever sans serif option is available in the reader, since I generally despise serifs. Very occasionally I’ll go for a serif font on a fantasy book for “atmosphere”, though.

It did load homedepot.com when I tried it just now, but I don’t have a mouse or keyboard attached, and the monitor isn’t touchscreen, so I have no idea how it performs when scrolling. Probably terribly.

IIRC, mine is an earlier version of this one: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-b-plus/. It has 1GB of RAM, and a 64GB sdcard (which is honestly bigger than it needs), with basic Debian Bookworm installed. It runs essentially nothing except sshd, xwindows, and Openbox configured with the following autostart script:

xset -dpms
xset s off
unclutter -display 0:0 -noevents -grab
export DISPLAY=:0 && firefox-esr --kiosk $URL_TO_VISIT &> /dev/null & disown &> /dev/null

Where $URL_TO_VISIT is a panel on my local Home Assistant.

Granted, it’s not exactly doing much other than showing a single page all the time, and sometimes it does freeze and require a manual restart every few weeks (hence why I said it’s only “running okay”). It does work though, and I expect that an rPi 5 would be a good experience for actual browsing, especially if you used one of the 4GB or higher versions.

If you aren’t already, I recommend running a blocker like adguard on your network. Aside from making the internet more pleasant to look at overall, it might help with making sites more responsive.

Yeah, I have had firefox-esr running okay for years now on an ancient rPi 3 as a Home Assistant panel. I expect an rPi 5 would be able to run Firefox just fine.

Can’t you already do that from Nautilus with bookmarked sftp locations?

I’m not commenting to discourage other tools from being made, just curious if there’s some aspect of that process that isn’t already easy to accomplish on Linux with existing GUI tools, or if you’d like to be able to do it differently is all.

Thanks, yeah I think so. At least, I’ve followed all the steps outlined here https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia but VLC and gstreamer apps continue to tell me that I’m missing codecs. I am stumped, but happy that at least Jellyfin plays everything.

I somehow keep running across videos that won’t load in Clapper, Showtime, mpv, VLC, or Handbrake, and Nautilus won’t show thumbnails for them. It’s very frustrating. Supposedly I’ve already installed all the available codecs from RPMFusion, but still get the “codec missing” error on a bunch of videos.

Jellyfin on the other hand, it plays everything I’ve ever thrown at it. I don’t know what the hell it’s doing differently from the other video players on my system, but it works great.

“Man raised with exact same formative influences in exact same family unit as Billie Eilish, and who spent a majority of his life with her, has similar opinions about what personal aesthetics he appreciates” is not exactly something that gives me any pause.

Oh, and BTW, he’s also a musician, he performs with Billie frequently, they hang out together a LOT, and he’s only 5 yrs older so has had extremely similar musical and cultural influences too.

I’m far more puzzled by the fact that someone out there thinks this is an unexpected situation. It would be more notable if he was into totally different things and dated someone vastly different from the person he grew up with and spends the most time with.

Even if the implied incestuous desire were the case here, that’s also fairly uninteresting. Incest is the most popular fantasy out there, judging by it’s prevalence on porn sites. I don’t even consider it unusual anymore, it’s part of like 75% of mainstream sexual fantasies now. Acting like it’s wild mysterious nonsense if Billie’s brother was “secretly” attracted to his sister is kind of goofy IMO. It would be stranger if he didn’t think his sister was attractive.

I know, I’ve thought about this way too much this morning.

This looks great so far! I love the concept of an app that makes conversions easy for the most typical use cases.

It looks like you’re still early in the UI phase, so you probably have plans for this already, but I feel like the progress screen could use more feedback than only two progress bars.

Overall though, this looks like it could be solid! Good luck!

Making apps with Godot is actually very doable, it takes care of a lot of the typical annoyances involved with that process like UI layout, theme support, and cross platform distribution. The Godot language (GDScript) is very approachable and powerful, too.

The Godot editor itself is made with Godot, and here’s a few other nice examples of apps that I know of:

GodSVG

Wonderdraft (paid app)

Pixelorama

This is probably not an easy question to answer, since, as another comment pointed out, WordPress is both an open source software option to selfhost your website, and also a non-free managed hosting option that you can use to host your website.

For the former, you fully control what plugins are installed, and if you don’t want social media tracking pixels on your site then don’t install one.

For the latter, you also mostly control what gets installed on your hosted website, but not entirely. It’s running on their servers so in theory they could be injecting tracking. I believe they do have some plugins like Jetpack that are always installed on managed websites, with some anti-features included that can be turned on (but don’t have to be).

I always recommend going the self hosted route with WordPress, if you are even the tiniest bit technical minded. It’s very easy to deploy on something like DigitalOcean or your own home server, and then you don’t need to worry about tracking from WordPress.com.