patter @patterfloof@meow.social

When the Vikings sent ships to pillage the east coast of Yorkshire, I hope that one of those Vikings had a t-shirt which said BORN TO RAZE HULL.

You know, when red asked which movie we would like to see a Muppet version of and I said The Thing, I didn't think much about it. It's just my favourite movie. But now, I imagined some of it and I think Muppet The Thing (with only Kurt Russell as not a Muppet) would be fucking amazing.

Life is complicated enough. Computers shouldn’t make it harder.

@RainierBeringer Fennecs dialing numbers but instead of pressing the keys, they reet the tones themselves 🔢

i find it a little troubling the last decade and a half of social media has caused artists, especially younger artists, to forget about the existence of and importance of having a dedicated portfolio. ideally a site you run yourself that isn't attached to a social platform like fb, twitter, insta, etc

make a site. use a template. but have your stuff front and center without any of the other garbage or algorithm!

@zensaiyuki And *really smart people* have been *absolutely wrong* about the potential negative use of infotech. Herbert Simon very pointedly, claiming the Nazis operated without "mechanized data processing":

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/103059230160200494

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7dc4b8c3e00849ae.pdf

But they didn't: https://ibmandtheholocaust.com/

@xenophora @tastytea

I think ethics classes should be mandatory for computer science majors

Remember your AEIOUs:

Agitate against your employer

Educate coworkers on the cause of their strife (y'all's mutual employer)

Inoculate them against the risks of resistance (bosses bite back!)

Organize for mutual protection against those risks

Unionize to act for y'all's own best interests.

Still in need of help, between putting vet bills on the credit card, housemate's meds and food, and everything. Also travel to Illinois for the funeral. Probably driving.

https://paypal.me/stevesarma

https://www.gofundme.com/f/emergency-vet-care-for-yoshi

The latest update to my Comment Blacklist for WordPress contains over 39,000 spam-blasting terms and phrases to help keep your comment threads tidy.

https://github.com/splorp/wordpress-comment-blacklist

Anti-intellectualism needs to be destroyed. Why do you think scientific racism still exists? Why do you think the whole "XX AND XY CHROMOSOMES DETERMINE YOUR SEX" thing exists? Why do you think people deny climate change? Or think vaccines are dangerous?

There's a dangerous trend of anti-intellectualism and deliberate ignorance. It isn't the source of every problem but it sure as fuck needs to have something done about it. This is why I think it's so important for things to be explained for normies without jargon in ways they can understand. Otherwise, someone else will give them the wrong explanation... and it's that much harder to deprogram.

This is why education is important too. Just not the way we educate our children right now, which is as dull and boring as possible, and overworks them for no reason.

Thought this would be relevant in this time

It's also ska which fedi loves

https://youtu.be/gqH_0LPVoho

anyway god bless instance admins and moderators, running community infrastructure for real-ass people instead of monetisable brandsonas. You are the MVPs, you are the future

liberals really just think everyone chooses to do capitalism

🤔

So I was recently asked why I prefer to use free and open source software over more conventional and popular proprietary software and services.

A few years ago I was an avid Google user. I was deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem and used their products everywhere. I used Gmail for email, Google Calendar and Contacts for PIM, YouTube for entertainment, Google Newsstand for news, Android for mobile, and Chrome as my web browser.

I would upload all of my family photos to Google Photos and all of my personal documents to Google Drive (which were all in Google Docs format). I used Google Domains to register my domain names for websites where I would keep track of my users using Google Analytics and monetize them using Google AdSense.

I used Google Hangouts (one of Google’s previous messaging plays) to communicate with friends and family and Google Wallet (with debit card) to buy things online and in-store.

My home is covered with Google Homes (1 in my office, 1 in my bedroom, 1 in the main living area) which I would use to play music on my Google Play Music subscription and podcasts from Google Podcasts.

I have easily invested thousands of dollars into my Google account to buy movies, TV shows, apps, and Google hardware devices. This was truly the Google life.

Then one day, I received an email from Google that changed everything.

“Your account has been suspended”

Just the thing you want to wake up to in the morning. An email from Google saying that your account has been suspended due to a perceived Terms of Use violation. No prior warning. No appeals process. No number to call. Trying to sign in to your Google account yields an error and all of your connected devices are signed out. All of your Google data, your photos, emails, contacts, calendars, purchased movies and TV shows. All gone.

I nearly had a heart attack, until I saw that the Google account that had been suspended was in fact not my main personal Google account, but a throwaway Gmail account that I created years prior for a project. I hadn’t touched the other account since creation and forgot it existed. Apparently my personal Gmail was listed as the recovery address for the throwaway account and that’s why I received the termination email.

Although I was able to breathe a sigh of relief this time, the email was wake up call. I was forced to critically reevaluate my dependence on a single company for all the tech products and services in my life.

I found myself to be a frog in a heating pot of water and I made the decision that I was going to jump out.

Leaving Google

Today there are plenty of lists on the internet providing alternatives to Google services such as this and this. Although the “DeGoogle” movement was still in its infancy when I was making the move.

The first Google service I decided to drop was Gmail, the heart of my online identity. I migrated to Fastmail with my own domain in case I needed to move again (hint: glad I did, now I self host my email). Fastmail also provided calendar and contacts solutions so that took care of leaving Google Calendar and Contacts.

Here are some other alternatives that I moved to:

Gmail → Fastmail → Self-hosted (via Cloudron)
Google Contacts → Fastmail → Nextcloud Contacts
Google Calendar → Fastmail → Nextcloud Calendar
Google Search → Bing → DuckDuckGo
Google Maps → Bing Maps → OpenStreetMaps and OsmAnd
Google Analytics → Matomo Analytics
Google Drive → Nextcloud Files
Google Photos → Nextcloud Files/Gallery
Google Docs → Collabora Office (Nextcloud integration) and LibreOffice
Google Play Music → Spotify / Plex → Spotify / Jellyfin
Google Play Movies/TV → Plex → Jellyfin
Google Play Audiobooks/Books → Audible/Kindle
Google Play Store (apps) → F-Droid / Aurora Store
Google Android → Lineage OS → Ubuntu Touch on PinePhone (coming soon?)
Google’s Android Apps → Simple Mobile Tools
Google Chrome → Mozilla Firefox
Google Domains → Hover
Google Hangouts → Matrix and Nextcloud Talk
Google Allo → Signal
Google Podcasts → PocketCasts → AntennaPod
Google Newsstand → RSS
Google Wallet → PayPal and Cash App
Google Voice →Ting Mobile

Migrating away from Google was not a fast or easy process. It took years to get where I am now and there are still several Google services that I depend on: YouTube and Google Home.

Eventually, my Google Home’s will grow old and become unsupported at which point hopefully the Mycroft devices have matured and become available for purchase. YouTube may never be replaced (although I do hope for projects like PeerTube to succeed) but I find the compromise of using only one or two Google services to be acceptable.

At this point losing my Google account due to a mistake in their machine learning would largely be inconsequential and my focus has shifted to leaving Amazon which I use for most of my shopping and cloud services.

The reason that I moved to mostly FOSS applications is that it seems to be the only software ecosystem where everything works seamlessly together and I don’t have to cede control to any single company. Alternatively I could have simply split my service usage up evenly across Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple but I don’t feel that they would have worked as nicely together.

Overall I’m very happy with the open source ecosystem. I use Ubuntu with KDE on all of my computers and Android (no GApps) on my mobile phone. I’ve ordered the PinePhone “Brave Heart” and hope to one day be able to use it or one of its successors as a daily driver with Ubuntu Touch or Plasma Mobile.

I don’t want to give the impression that I exclusively use open source software either, I do use a number of proprietary apps including: Sublime Text, Typora, and Cloudron.

https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/01/09/why-i-quit-google/