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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • I heard about star citizen when I was a teen, and it looked soooo cool. Unfortunately my PC was not strong enough. So I saved up for months to buy a PC specifically to play Star Citizen. Finally, I had all the upgrades I needed for the PC. Started excitedly pouring over Roberts Space Industries to pick my ship. Noticed the pricing model was… Off. In fact, this felt like a scam. Hold on, there’s no real game I could actually play? Decided to hold off until something released I could play, ideally with friends, and ideally via a less obfuscated pricing model.

    Anyways, I’ve checked in with SC about once a year since. I’m about to begin the process to finance a house with my girlfriend of 9 years. Exciting times ahead.

    I’m pretty sire SC won’t have released anything close to what was promised in 2012 by the time I retire, MUCH less anything promised since.

    (Btw I was not a smart teen. I fell for lots of things and lost money to scams and stupid games. I got lucky with SC, because in an alternate universe, I might also be stuck in sunk cost fallacy.)










    • MuseScore 4 is a (the!) free music notation software. It is genuinely fantastic. It’s also a lot of fun, if you know some notation basics and want to play around.
    • Darktable is a Raw photo editor in the vein of Lightroom. Except where lightroom is sleek, polished, user friendly and Adobe (🤮), Darktable is FOSS, and clearly so both in the design and functionality: it could easily make a UX designer cry, but if you’re willing to give it a try, there does not exist a more potent raw editor on this earth. Lightroom is a toy in comparison. (Now whether you need that is another question… But I’ve been using it for more than 10 years, and am still finding new, incredibly useful sub-menus, drop-down contexts on hidden sliders,…)
    • rmpc is a really cool TUI music player



    1. Signal
    2. XMPP
    3. Matrix

    In that order. I self-host both XMPP and Matrix, and I wouldn’t want to stop using matrix. Spaces, arbitrary amounts of self-chats, and so on are great. I use matrix every day.

    But for chatting… It sooner or later fails you. It’s slow. Notifications break. Messages are shown as sent, but somehow do not appear in the recipient’s devices until TWO WEEKS LATER (yeah IDK, happened twice already, in different chats and directions. Best part is, I’m not even federated!). Encryption is great IF YOU KNOW SOME CRYPTOGRAPHY BASICS, and utterly confusing otherwise.

    XMPP just works. Especially the calls, holy shit, I had to fight Matrix for so long to make voice and video calls work, and xmpp just… Works. Notifications are way more reliable (as in, have been absolutely perfect). I really like monocles as a chat app on Android. (The downside is: can’t decrypt old messages on new devices, and desktop clients are ugly.)

    So why Signal above XMPP?

    Because it’s not your fault should something ever break in a vital service. Also the encryption and privacy afforded by it a great.


  • I’ll second Pocket-ID.

    I originally had Authentik setup. It worked well enough. However, their packaging constantly broke and no-one seemed to care.

    Switched to Pocket-ID and won’t be looking back. Passkey-based OAuth was all I wanted anyways. (Also, the logins themselves are noticeably faster!)