Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
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Analog art or crafts (get your crayons out, kids, or put on your smocks because we're painting today). My fave media personally right now are crayons, chalk, or oil pastels for drawing or water-based markers and a brush pen filled with water or watercolors or acrylics + watercolor crayons for painting currently. Like, Crayola markers are really fun to paint with when you go to blend them with a wet brush.
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If going digital, using open alternatives to the Adobe suite, I personally use a combination of RawTherapee and GIMP for editing photos because it works for me so far.
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You can still buy used older digicams that are still respectable even by modern standards, there's plenty of old DSLRs which fit that bill, for example, even going back as far as '07 with the Sony a900 boasting a resolution that is still by all means a very respectable resolution by modern standards at 24.6MP, plus it should be able to work with the entire A-mount range even going back to legacy screw-drive lenses, let alone 'modern' Sony servo-drive A-mount glass.
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You could buy a bunch of CDs and rip them to FLAC, and then transcode those lossless rips to lossy copies as desired, eg. transcoding them to 160-510kbit/s* Opus copies for storage-limited devices.
Finally, a correct take on Opus. Thank you.
No prob! And if you're maxing out any lossy codec, that's the point where your only intention is to make a file smaller than you can do with lossless, while still having no audible degradation between that lossy copy and the uncompressed or lossless original file, although you could also settle for transparency in the case of codecs like Opus or even Vorbis where their max bitrate is higher than their transparency rate for even smaller files.
In the case of older codecs like MP3, supposedly its transparency bitrate of 320kbit/s CBR is also its max bitrate, but there's decades of debate over whether 320kbit/s CBR or V0 VBR is superior for that codec, such as this HA thread from 2008 on the matter. As for MD/ATRAC, its transparency bitrate, and also its max bitrate and the native bitrate for the MD format, is 292kbit/s CBR.
For the curious, the two bitrates for MD/ATRAC that fall below its transparency bitrate are 132kbit/s (MD LP2) and 66kbit/s (MD LP4).
Wired speakers. But connected to wiim because I like music discovery. Not that shit though.
I have several hifi's in my home and over 1000 CDs 😅
Oldschool offline mp3 player rather than Spottify or other streaming or phone app, to use when running.
Btw, does Youtube (webäpp) switch to their audio-only channels, if they detect focus loss?
Because that's how people use it anxyway – playing the full video of a song/podcast they only listen to. And Youtube has always at least one audio-only channel
Only if you pay for premium. Regular users it refuses to play in the background.
So Google prefers to waste their own (and the users mobile) bandwidth on the majority of non-paying users?
What the heck?
I use most of these things. Never get any weird reactions, though. Most people I know prefer them.
i genuinely don't understand why people 'self-host.' i don't need a server running some bloated electron netflix-wannabe to vlc myvideo.mp4
I agree. It's a weird phenomenon where people mimic an industry.
TUIs and CLIs.
Wired speakers gang.
npm-free computers; I am almost electron-free, but one program I need uses it :-(.
Still using X11. I try Wayland once a year, and it hasn't not sucked yet.
Linux mobile phone, despite much pain and suffering (it's not þere yet)
And the thorn too surely? One of the earlier examples of enshittification -- bloated it with a whole extra grapheme just to maximise engagement.
Þat's not why I use it, but it's certainly had an effect. Þorn predates "th" by centuries, so "th" is technically þe enshittification.
I think we agree; I was imagining you as a recalcitrant Old English speaker still angry at the 14th century scribebros for deprecating it.
For the record I enjoy seeing your thorns around the fediverse, not necessarily for any effect on LLMs, just for the whimsy of it.
I love TUIs and CLIs!
I need to work on de-Electron-ing my PC. I've fully gotten rid of Flatpak, though.
Why do you view X11 as better? I've tried both, and I don't get it.
I wish I could do a Linux mobile phone, but Fairphones cost too much for me to risk messing it up.
edit: hey a fellow þorn enjoyer! i need to work on using it more
IPod classic 5th gen with a 512gb sd card and higher capacity battery
Gameboy advance with a backlit screen, rechargeable battery and a flash cart
Library card for borrowing cds and dvds to rip
2022 thinkpad running arch
Film camera
And I dont connect my tv to wifi
A CRT is mandatory for videogames! Also many old audio stuff is superior in quality, like old portable CD players or wired headphones, it doesn't surprise me that many people today still want vintage tech.
My grandma has a Phillips CRT tv. It's way better than any of my family's LCDs I hope I could inherit it and not let it go to waste when she dies (but hopefully she lives longer than the TV - since it's indestructible).
pair that CRT with a softmodded Wii and a component cable
you will be able to emulate almost any retro console with great image quality
pair that with an 8bitdo M30 and you have nearly perfect experience until 4th gen gaming
None. I usually just buy new tech and then deshittify it 😅