The internet used to be more decentralised. There were lots of smaller websites, blogs, forums etc, which people discovered via word of mouth, search engines, and forgotten things like webrings. It's only recently that big monolithic social media platforms took hold.

Tech is often cyclical, we could now be swinging back to a more decentralised web, but with the benefit of newer technologies. Right now it's almost a new "wild west" as new platforms appear and new ideas like federation are experimented with. Some will rise, some will fall, some will go off in the corner and do their own thing. While all that happens it's going to be a bit messy, much like it was in the 90s with the initial rise of the web.

Twitter is now X as the little blue bird disappears

I thought the the new logo was the X11 logo at first, they are bit similar.

Also a bit ironic seeing as Musk wants Twitter X to be an "everything app", while X11's cruft and bloated featureset have led to it being replaced by Wayland.

Unfortunately I already read the headline, is there anywhere I can offload this now unnecessary excitement?

Python in Excel would be great, but nerfing it with some ridiculous cloud dependency is crazy. They could still paywall the feature if they really wanted while still running the Python interpretation locally.

I suppose we should be grateful they hadn’t also stuck ChatGPT on to it too so it could (badly) write the Python for you. Tech by buzzword will be the death of us I’m sure.

Computers and tech in general often feels like magic. The first computer I ever used was a ZX Spectrum, now I have something vastly more computationally powerful, and constantly connected to a worldwide communication network and knowledge repository in my pocket!

It's amazing any of it actually works, especially as we don't always seem to know how it works.

Never mind zero stars, the Reddit app (and new Reddit in general) deserves negative stars.

Thankfully there is plenty of innovation in the market for fediverse apps.

I agree. People can never fully seem to grasp that upvote and downvote do not mean agree and disagree, which discourages real conversation and ferments a hivemind.

People that want to put the effort in to have real discussions also don’t tend to care about internet points. But people that care about internet points are more inclined to only post low effort content and continual reposts.

A company that builds tools for remote working, doesn't believe in remote working? That doesn't seem a great look.

Yes, it’s a sad state of affairs that Apple’s restrictions on iOS and iPadOS browsers are the only thing stopping an effective Google monopoly over web browsers. Ideally Firefox would still keep things in balance, but Mozilla doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing these days in terms of building market share - and I say that as a long time Firefox user.

I still remember the IE 6 era, and I hope we never see a single browser dominate the web again. To those wishing Apple would be forced to open up, be careful what you wish for.

Some older people in the UK still prefer Fahrenheit, Celsius is still the official/default unit however.

A politician here recently tried to promote returning the UK to Imperial units, it has gone nowhere so far.

It’s neat how much motion can be conveyed in so few frames, and fairly smoothly too.

Yeah, you would think a company that would promote remote working would be company that creates tools for remote working.

With hobbies involve lots of data. Anything with an excuse to make a spreadsheet or Grafana dashboard. My latest one is home weather monitoring.

Or if you just want to see a number get bigger, Cookie Clicker is a surprisingly deep distraction.

PiVPN is a simple home VPN solution that's worth exploring.

Is you are interested in smart home/home automation Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform and makes a great Pi project.

They both have security features to lock out unauthorised users. But there has been a cat and mouse game of hackers finding exploits to bypass the device locks, and platform developers patching them to secure the devices again. There have also been various schemes using rogue employees of phone companies to get illegitimate access to official tools that can unlock devices.

So sometimes the phones can be unlocked. But failing that, there is also a thriving black market for phone parts salvaged for stolen phones.

I’ve noticed a lot of German language fediverse content too. Does anyone know why German speakers are so keen on the fediverse?

As a Pokemon fan I understand your pain. It's not like it's an obscure series, or from a small company. Why is it so hard to stream such a popular anime? I'm surprised The Pokemon Company hasn't rolled out their own streaming platform yet.

Before diving in to Plex I would highly recommend looking at Jellyfin first also. It's offers much the same features as Plex but is fully free and open source.

For my own media server I use an old HP Microserer G8 purchased second hand, and upgraded with a Xeon e3-1260L, also sourced cheaply used. It's small, easy to service and happily runs my Linux disro of choice. I know other people using various SFF PCs, or even repurposed old desktops. For best performance look for a CPU (or GPU) with hardware video encoding support. Otherwise, the rule of thumb for Plex used to be a CPU with at least 2000 Passmark score on cpubenchmark.net per concurrent 1080p stream.

It's annoying fragmentation when even for a stable distributable package there's flatpak as a standard, and I've never seen why Ubuntu needs their own with a proprietary store.

It's the Canonical way, just as with Mir, Upstart, Unity, and a bunch of other NIH Canonical projects.

I miss the old Ubuntu sometimes, the Ubuntu that wanted to be an up to date Debian with sensible defaults, easy installation, and commercial support. It seems that wasn't profitable or visionary enough for somebody though, and we've ended up here instead.

With similar legislation in the EU, and other countries possibly following, perhaps the domino effect will force Apple to allow third party software globally. There were rumours Apple would respond to changes in Europe by only allowing side loading etc in Europe. But it seems like turning this on or off for every country/territory would cause a lot of fragmentation in the global app market.

Yes, if there is one lesson we should have learned from Reddit it's that internet points aren't great for fostering real discussion and debate.

Still, with so many new link aggregation platforms appearing to fill the Reddit void, hopefully we still end up with something better.

The Amazon checkout has become a real maze for non Prime subscribers, about time something was done.

I cancelled Prime a while ago, and the few times I’ve used Amazon since I got multiple checkout stages with pre-selected Prime signups and trials.