Novaling

Exciting! I’ve made an effort to let go of Insta for both privacy and hatred of Zuck’s policies, which left me stuck on Tumblr to look at any fanart/fandom content. Hopefully this could replace people’s need for Tumblr in a few years, especially since they also do a shit job of caring about their users.

Edit: Knowing the context of the name is hilarious, wish I was there for the Tumblr exodus. I will be sure to spread to other platforms about this wonderful service.

The whole reason GrapheneOS develops only for Pixels is that you can relock the bootloader though, right? (Along with other security features)

Anyway yeah companies still suck for not letting you relock them.

This chart is fascinating, although it’s unfortunate that so many states don’t have a specific category assigned to them. I just can’t help but notice how many weeabo degenerates (I am part of said degenerates) must be living in Wisconsin, and Oregon being furry makes me wonder how many furries live there.

It’s just a perception thing we have, a phone number DOES feel more personal to me, even if most people’s Instagram accounts are even more detailed. In my case, I literally never posted anything on Instagram, so there was nothing to gather about me besides what posts I liked.

Plus some people my interpret asking for a phone number as wanting to date them or smth (although the same could be said for any messaging service tbh).

Am Gen Z, and currently in college. Clearly am on Fediverse, and I was never a fan of using IG (only got it cause my middle school friends made me since COVID was happening) and I have completely deactivated my account as of last winter. I have met several people at my college who don’t use Instagram for various reasons, and while my other friend is a little disappointed that she can’t message them on insta, at the end of the day, we live and move on.

At my college a lot of clubs use GroupMe (owned by Microsoft unfortunately) and we have an official Discord Hub that a lot of clubs are on also. So there’s two different methods of communication that aren’t Insta that are common on my campus. Some of my friends do have Signal in fact (even my Instagram loving friend), but because more of them don’t we unfortunately don’t use Signal, even when I beg my one friend who has it. She says 'it sucks and who uses it", but I’ve never really had the chance to use it to judge her statement as true or not.

Anyway, yeah, you could do a bunch of crazy shit and make fake accounts on Insta to have superficial conversations with people who won’t give you the time of day for having an app, or you could just not. It’s not that hard to find better friends/people to hang out with, and if you really make a connection with them then they should be happy with any form of communication you offer. Not all Gen Z are adamant Instagram defenders, some even hate it for various reasons (Suckerberg, being data stalkers, promoting bigotry, promoting mental health disorders, etc.)

Unfortunate, I had to use this app when my highschool offered a Europe trip during the summer. The shit barely worked anyway because most of us had shoddy service or didn’t have a plan where we could have our data on 24/7, so it wouldn’t be able to update our location often. It’d make it look like a kid was 3 miles away from the hotels we stayed at, and one time two girls almost got in trouble during curfew cause the app wasn’t updated.

I really wish there were OSS apps out there that let people track their friends/loved ones, because I totally get it, sometimes you can’t call/text at that moment. Hell, if they get kidnapped you might have a chance of finding them if they still have their phone on them.

Reposted it to Mastodon! Hope it makes a change, cause America can usually catch the waves.

I know that they might not be as secure as GrapheneOS, but you should totally give LineageOS or /e/OS a try, as they’re both not limited to Pixels. I haven’t tested them myself however, since I am a Graphene user. The most I ever tried with one of them was testing ROMs by installing LineageOS on my old Moto G7 play.

To add to this, there’s evidence disproving that Apple and Google are listening 24/7. An article goes over how a phone uses way more power when doing an "OK Google/Hey Siri” request than simply scrolling through Meta/Twitter/Snapchat/etc. Basically it’d take a shit ton of noticeable battery power to constantly be listening to people and phoning home, so they don’t. What they did do instead was take secret screenshots and send them to 3rd party sources.

Yep, I used Fedora Kinoite now! I originally used Fedora Silverblue, but that used GNOME + Wayland, and I dropped it cause spectacle couldn’t take screenshots in a Wayland based system. I switched to Kinoite because it uses Plasma instead. I don’t know if Wayland causes clipboard issues, as I never tested/got that far when trying to make Silverblue work. I just rebased cause I couldn’t get ShareX (the tool I used while on Windows) to work with WINE.

I use my clipboard tool with FF and have little to no issues there. The only thing I will note is, Textractor hooks the sentences a little weirdly. None of the hooks are perfect, the best one I can find that isn’t complete gibberish is a hook that simply copies the sentence twice. All the others repeat characters in a sentence like 50 times, so they’re unsalvageable. Not sure if it’s a browser hook thing, or a trying to force Windows apps in weird ways thing, but it’s not as smooth as a process compared to native Windows 😅

Huh? You can totally change the advanced settings (about:config) for Ironfox. I literally had to do that a few months ago to get a certain feature working for an extension I use cause some javascript and SCP settings were disabled for privacy/security.

Now, I completely understand why you wouldn’t want to spend hours tweaking settings and reading Mozilla’s source code forms to get stuff to work, so if that’s the reason for switching then I get it. But you can absolutely change the config settings, unlike vanilla Android Firefox which doesn’t enable about:config

I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little bit of an extensions hoarder, which is bad for fingerprinting 😣, but I seriously do use the extra ones.

Vital:

uBlock - obviously, some people even suggest to only use this extension and nothing else to reduce fingerprinting. Make sure to enable those filters! Also check out the advanced mode, eliminates the need for NoScript.

Not Vital But Really Good To Have:

LibRedirect - Never worry again about visiting the original social media site, you can immediately be redirected to a proxy version of the site that doesn’t stalk you. Great when I’m forced to click a Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, etc. link. Unfortunately, some proxy services are dead (Instagram, Tiktok, Invidious is always under threat, etc.)

Bitwarden - Password manager

Dark Reader - Nice, especially on fingerprint resisting browsers like Librewolf that don’t let your browser/sites see your system settings to automatically pick the dark mode of a website. Have singed my eyes a couple times.

For Language Learners (like me):

Yomitan - The GOAT of tools, a popup dictionary that can be used to instantly look up the definition of a word in your target language, and connects with Anki, a flashcard app. I use it for making vocabulary cards from Japanese media I consume. Literally all the other resources are meant to be paired with this.

Asbplayer - Lets you add subtitles to whatever media you’re streaming and makes the text selectable. Paired with Yomitan, you can easily make Anki flashcards from the TV/Movies/Videos you watch.

Lap Clipboard Inserter - By using a clipboard extension with Textractor, you can hook a game/visual novel and auto-copy all the game text to a webpage, which can be paired with Yomitan (you guessed it!) to look up words. You have to turn it on for individual pages, so don’t worry about it constantly stalking you.

Neat, But Random:

Mastodon Streetpass - Helps you figure out if a person is on Mastodon by looking for a custom link on their site. Collects a list of them and tells you the date that it found the account. Basically just browse as usual and it will passively collect a list.

So happy the article linked to the Fediverse post, immediately liked and boosted it.

Never used SimpleX much really but will be immediately uninstalling it. Saw the guy’s tweets, he’s fucking insane, and retweets RFK Jr 🤢. Will do my best to inform others.

Holy shit I just realized it didn’t say cybercrab 😭

Good a cybercrab sounds so cute and I wouldn’t want to have to associate it with Muskrat

Fucking RIP, someone on Lemmy recommended it to me and I thought it was open source. Should’ve known that Organic Maps would’ve also did traffic data if it was truly open source…

For now, I’ll still use it cause it’s better than being tracked by Waze/Google, but damn… Hope these new maps are good.

Edit: Downloaded Comaps from Fdroid yesterday but it wouldn’t download the maps, and I can’t get into the app. Gave all permissions, wifi was on (but also tried on data), and turned on compatibility mode on Graphene. Downloaded today from the Codeberg repo and it still has an error downloading the maps. Anyone else experiencing this?

My mom really though the Plateau was gonna be the entire game lol. When the game gave her a paraglider she was like “oh there’s gonna be more?”

This was the only one I could think of a good reason to track. I immediately thought of all the grandparents and tech illiterate people who’d probably implode if they had to pick .exe vs .deb vs .dmg/.app (I actually had to look up what MacOS uses…) vs etc. And don’t even try to have them guess intel vs amd.

Automatically guessing the operating system saves us tech people from having to figure out they downloaded a file for a completely different OS.

Yup! Pretty accurate too. Shows the day that it’s most likely to happen, and the two days around it are potential days. Gives you a notif about 5 days before it’s predicted to happen.

Ah yes, the one Nintendo IP that has gone to shit. Not fully by the way, as Legends Arceus was fantastic, and even my mom who hasn’t given a fuck about Pokemon since Yellow loved watching me play it. If Gamefreak would finally make another side game like Mystery Dungeon (or the more forgotten cult classics like Pokepark, Ranger, Conquest, Rumble, etc.) we wouldn’t be trolling them so hard. It’s also more of a Gamefreak problem than anything, as other companies that did Pokemon games (Chunsoft, Genius Sonority, etc.) did fantastic.

Anyway Zelda and Mario are still making bangers, Kirby Air Riders is coming back, Metroid fans are fed, Splatoon is getting a whole new game for Switch 2 (fuck me…), people are still relatively happy with Animal Crossing NH, we’ll see how Donkey Kong’s new game does, and while FE’s newest entry wasn’t so hot you can’t ignore how Three Houses brought in a brand new wave of loyal FE fans.

Literally everyone knows Pokemon mainline has been going to shit (and not the characters, designs, music, etc. imo, just the animations and story writing). Pick another game, even Nintendo (and Pokemon) fans make fun of it.

Exacty, Drip features tracking for temperature, cervical mucus, the cervix, sex (solo or partner), desire, pain, and mood, along with spotting and your bleeding levels. It’s not just about “when will I have my period?” Additionally I love Drip because of the heads-up notif I get from them 3 days before my predicted period date. Also ut’s nice to have a computer calculate when my period will be and shows me if any were a little off or earlier than expected.

Plus since it’s encrypted and local, law enforcement would have to crack that to find my period data. I could totally imagine law enforcement coming up with a bullshit warrant and breaking into someone’s home, and finding a calendar or notebook marked with their period data and being tried for it.