It seems like a lot of european countries have started becoming more concerned with digital sovereignty and some have begun enforcing using open formats like ODF / ODS

I'm struggling to find support though. A lot of software seems to open ODS files but force the XLSX format on save.

I'd expect something like OnlyOffice to have support since it's used by the French government and the government of their German neighbours is enforcing ODS usage + there should be a reasonable library they could import to make it work without a large overhead

This seemed to fit into the channels description but let me know if you want it moved.

So I'd like a 1-3 times a week write up of economic issues around Australia that does not focus mainly on the stock market, investments or the US. I know a few sources like this for the US (Jared Bernstein, Paul Krugman) and even though it's not the main focus the TLDR News on YouTube / Nebula occasionally touches on global economics or something more local. I don't really love podcasts for this (its the sort of thing that should have charts and maths) but even if I did examples of what I think miss the mark in their style (they are all US focused so not what I'm after) are the FT News Briefing and Prof G Markets mostly since they are too focused on stock / investments. I also don't love news sites because they tend focus on engagement so its easy to get distracted and lose a lot of time

Anyway, does anyone know of something relevant?

My macOS computer is downloading gigabytes most days through iCloud and I want to find a way to stop the repeat downloads.

I used this command to find out what is being downloaded:

brctl status

It seems to be media and video tarballs from Whatsapp backups from my iPhone

I don't understand why my computer needs to download these iPhone backups and I haven't found a way to stop the downloads from happening. I also don't understand why these aren't checkpointed in a way so that all of history doesn't need to be downloaded each day/interval (presuming that is what's currently happening).

Does anyone have any ideas for a fix or even next steps?

https://archive.is/20260125031921/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/24/us/pam-bondi-walz-doc.html

The first part is pretty standard Bondi. And then:

You and your office must restore the rule of law, support ICE officers, and bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota. Fortunately, there are common sense solutions to these problems that I hope we can accomplish together.

First, share all of Minnesota’s records on Medicaid and Food and Nutrition Service programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program data, with the federal government. Allowing the federal government to efficiently investigate fraud will save Minnesota taxpayers’ money and ensure that Minnesota’s welfare funds are being used to help those in need, not enrich fraudsters.

Second, repeal the sanctuary policies that have led to so much crime and violence in your state. Removing criminal illegal aliens from Minnesota neighborhoods will save lives, and state and local officials should support this goal. All detention facilities in your state should cooperate fully with ICE, honor immigration detainers, and permit ICE to interview detainees in custody to determine immigration status. I urge you to reach an agreement with ICE that allows them to remove illegal aliens in custody of Minnesota’s prisons and jails and avoids pushing these interactions into your streets.

Third, allow the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to access voter rolls to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Fulfilling this common sense request will better guarantee free and fair elections and boost confidence in the rule of law.

I am confident that these simple steps will help bring back law and order to Minnesota and improve the lives of Americans.

The time has come for state and local officials in your state to change course. As the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, I am committed to enforcing federal immigration laws and keeping every American safe. Minnesota can and should be a partner with this administration. Do not obstruct federal immigration enforcement; do not allow rioters to take over the streets and houses of worship; do not hinder federal officials from investigating financial fraud and violations of election laws. Whether state and local politicians stand in the way or not, we will work every day to protect Americans and make Minnesota Safe Again. I request that you join us in that effort.

Crossposted from https://mander.xyz/post/45937709

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mark-carney-speech-davos-rules-based-order-9.7053350

Some quotes:

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.

But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

You cannot "live within the lie" of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.

But let's be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.

Donald Trump recently made a Truth social post with a doctored Wikipedia page that added he was the Acting President of Venezuela.

What are some examples of past leaders making similar claims?

I assume empires did it a lot, and that it's been done a lot as a pretext for war, but I'm pretty ignorant of historic examples.

Maybe this lives in showerthoughts, but Chile has a lot of large telescopes and you often hear its because they're on mountains above clouds. The border with Argentina goes through the middle of the mountains so it seems like it should be a good spot for telescopes too.

I couldn't find a good reference for why and I was mostly hoping someone would know one. I'm guessing its a combination of:

• Argentina's hyperinflation
• Chile being the rain shadow side
• Chile has more infrastructure close to the mountains

Looking online it looks like there was political pressure from the US for a telescope in Argentina to stop being built because it had some funding from China.

I'm not surprised to see more in Chile, but there seem to be about seven past and upcoming world class telescopes in Chile and none in Argentina. And this list:

https://go-astronomy.com/observatories-chile.php

Is a lot longer than was expecting compared to this list:

https://go-astronomy.com/observatories-argentina.php

Okay, so my airing of grievances post had some issues.

So, lets swap it up:

What events are you looking forward to in 2026?

I just accidentally clicked the "clear all" on the browser URL and wished that it was a bit harder to click but was still there. If it took three clicks to make happen, its still useful in most circumstances but would drastically drop the mistaken clicks

Anyway, what are your unpopular UI opinions?

I'm quite often in low / no signal places so my iPhone is setup to have a lot of offline apps. I periodically have issues where my iPhone "helps" me by freeing up space. Unfortunately, a trigger can be downloading an offline map / wiki just before going somewhere without much coverage. I just turned off "offload unused apps" (and I'm not sure why it was on).

I'm wondering what other settings are lurking that are worth turning off. Any ideas?

(And there are probably better places to ask on the internet but I'm working to use a few less of the centralised sites or US tech.)

Occasionally I look up Dungeon Crawler Carl characters on the Fandom wiki and I've noticed recently that there are a lot more pictures that seem to be created using genAI.

That's not too surprising to me, but it is surprising that pictures I remember from before seem to be missing. Does anyone know why? It could be a memory issue but I thought I'd ask and see if anyone else noticed it too.

A lot of these newer genAI pictures seem to be used as primary pictures now too. I don't like them as much so I don't love that, but it's not too surprising with the enthusiasm for genAI. I'm just mentioning it here incase its related somehow and the mention reminds someone of something

The memo also appears to contradict the department’s shutdown plan released in late September, when it referred to the contingency fund as part of its SNAP plan.

“Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown,” the shutdown plan said. “These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.”

The Agriculture Department said Friday it can’t use a special reserve fund to pay food stamp benefits during the partial government shutdown because the money is meant to be used when appropriations fall short, not when the funding doesn’t exist.

I'd argue the source below is higher quality but got moderated for being substack:

https://mander.xyz/post/40669009/22934422

Resolved since Mlem has all the features I wanted:

https://mander.xyz/comment/22644935

It also solved one I hinted at in a few of my comments, what are the server's users actually like. That's exposed in a tab on a pane summarising a server but you can see some of the information online, like the endorsements here for lemmy.ml:

https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.ml

Edit of original question

Is there an iPhone client that makes it possible to do these three things in the app:

1. To be able to see the different sidebars that are visible if you load these two sites (not only the side bar on server I'm registered to):

• https://mander.xyz/
• https://lemmy.ml/

1. To be able to scroll these community (sorry not channel) lists separately and independent of channels from other servers (sorry not instances) (and not only the channels on server I'm registered to):

   • https://mander.xyz/communities
   • https://lemmy.ml/communities

2. To be able to search "ask lemmy.ml" filtered by communities and see "https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy" show up in some way.

Original post

Maybe it's just the iPhone clients, but they seem to have issues with use cases for other instances, for example:

• If I'm interested in news from a certain country, and there is an instance focused on that country, I basically need to get on the web to search if there is a useful channel on that instance. If you use on of the iPhone clients to search for a channel and only use the instance name then nothing seems to match show up. You can find users from those channels, channels that happen to use that set of characters, or when people write a channel from that instance, but the search doesn't seem to match channels on that instance.
• Clients don't seem to offer a way to navigate to an instance and see all its channels. This is basically the same use case as above, but with more exploration and less targeted. Again, I seem to need to use the web.
• I can't find a way to show the sidebar for an instance, besides the one I've registered for. For a lot of instance+channel combinations this really doesn't matter. But when it matters, it tends to matter a lot. I had a few situations in [email protected] where people basically resorted to saying the instance was lemmy.ml and I had to go look up why that would matter by switching to a browser. (Yeah... a newbie problem, and now I wonder how I could have missed it.)

So, incase this comes across as just statements, here are some questions:

• Am I missing an obvious client / some buttons to click?
• Is this just how communities and users grew to use the echo system?
• Are the iPhone clients all from similar codebases or copying UI layout?
• Is there some technical issue with the exposed search APIs?

This was better placed in c/[email protected] and I can delete this post if it's expected:

https://mander.xyz/post/39865414

Maybe it's just the iPhone clients, but they seem to have issues with use cases for other instances, for example:

• If I'm interested in news from a certain country, and there is an instance focused on that country, I basically need to get on the web to search if there is a useful channel on that instance. If you use on of the iPhone clients to search for a channel and only use the instance name then nothing seems to match show up. You can find users from those channels, channels that happen to use that set of characters, or when people write a channel from that instance, but the search doesn't seem to match channels on that instance.
• Clients don't seem to offer a way to navigate to an instance and see all its channels. This is basically the same use case as above, but with more exploration and less targeted. Again, I seem to need to use the web.
• I can't find a way to show the sidebar for an instance, besides the one I've registered for. For a lot of instance+channel combinations this really doesn't matter. But when it matters, it tends to matter a lot. I had a few situations in [email protected] where people basically resorted to saying the instance was lemmy.ml and I had to go look up why that would matter by switching to a browser. (Yeah... a newbie problem, and now I wonder how I could have missed it.)

So, incase this comes across as just statements, here are some questions:

Is this just how communities and users grew to use the echo system? Am I missing an obvious client / some buttons to click? Are the iPhone clients all just from the same codebase? Is there some technical issue with the exposed search APIs?

Sorry if this is in the wrong community... hesitant tone it's an exploration issue? /hesitant tone

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/10/columbus-day-2025/

This Columbus Day, we honor his life with reverence and gratitude, and we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.

Just over 2 months later, on October 12, 1492, Columbus made landfall in the modern-day Bahamas.  Upon his arrival, he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith.

Before our very eyes, left-wing radicals toppled his statues, vandalized his monuments, tarnished his character, and sought to exile him from our public spaces.  Under my leadership, those days are finally over — and our Nation will now abide by a simple truth:  Christopher Columbus was a true American hero, and every citizen is eternally indebted to his relentless determination

As we celebrate his legacy, we also acknowledge the contributions of the countless Italian-Americans who, like him, have endlessly contributed to our culture and our way of life

Honestly, I'm personally not just after a self hosting solution, I'm mostly trying to replace US services and companies. As part of that, I've started using Jellyfin and I think it's great but the book library part is a bit clunky.

I think I've got three use cases:

• Research papers
• Textbooks
• Novels / Non-fiction

I'm okay with three separate setups for these too. I do listen to quite a few audiobooks but they're currently independent and I'm happy to keep it that way. I'm happy to hear integrated solutions, or suggestions for an audio book library, but this post is focused on the above list.

The main device I'd do most of my reading on is an iPhone but I'd also be wanting to open up the research papers and textbooks on my MacBook. I'd want to be able to add research papers from the iPhone, or at least a light weight way to list them to quickly add later.

Note taking and highlighting isn't an issue, I've started using markdown for this. Syncing how much of the book I've read is. Ideally between devices but on the one device would work too.

I figure I'll have to drop some of my aims here but I thought I'd see if anyone knows of decent setups to try. Neither Jellyfin or Calibre seem amazing but maybe I could just configure them better.

Since there is a mandated image here I'm starting to wonder if I'm really in the wrong place, but I put textbook cover there