Thanks for sharing, but I imagine it doesn’t get mentioned as much here because from a privacy perspective, that app seems kinds shady.

No source code available as far as I can tell, no builds available from a reputable source like F-Droid (just unvetted APK downloads from someone’s Google Drive), no apparent issue tracker beyond a confusing and seemingly outdated network of thread links from 2016 on a forum.

You could use something like WinBoat to make installing and using a virtual machine for Windows a lot easier. It also makes Windows apps feel almost like they are native to your Linux desktop, which is nice.

Alternatively, you could try running Excel in wine using Bottles, but I’m not sure how well that’ll go since Excel is kind of a monster of an application.

Isn’t that exactly to be expected, and part of the whole point of the thing? It’s preventing connections to abusive service endpoints, of course it’s going to break things. The idea is that the things it breaks are not desirable, even when it means a game doesn’t work anymore. You have to choose which you want more: privacy, or playing that game.

I’m always confused by people saying that Vortex doesn’t work on Linux, when I’ve used it for years now on both my Fedora desktop and my Steam Deck. I didn’t even have to do anything outrageous to get it working. Install with Lutris like anything else made for Windows, press play, it works great.

Edit: Realized this sounded maybe judgmental, when I didn’t mean it to. Not trying to make anyone feel bad in any way. More like encouragement, because once you get over the hump of figuring out how to use tools like Lutris to run games, running Vortex is the same process.

A so-called “neutral accent” is still an accent.

The specific font isn’t as important for me. Mostly I’ll use whatever sans serif option is available in the reader, since I generally despise serifs. Very occasionally I’ll go for a serif font on a fantasy book for “atmosphere”, though.

Can’t you already do that from Nautilus with bookmarked sftp locations?

I’m not commenting to discourage other tools from being made, just curious if there’s some aspect of that process that isn’t already easy to accomplish on Linux with existing GUI tools, or if you’d like to be able to do it differently is all.

Thanks, yeah I think so. At least, I’ve followed all the steps outlined here https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia but VLC and gstreamer apps continue to tell me that I’m missing codecs. I am stumped, but happy that at least Jellyfin plays everything.

I somehow keep running across videos that won’t load in Clapper, Showtime, mpv, VLC, or Handbrake, and Nautilus won’t show thumbnails for them. It’s very frustrating. Supposedly I’ve already installed all the available codecs from RPMFusion, but still get the “codec missing” error on a bunch of videos.

Jellyfin on the other hand, it plays everything I’ve ever thrown at it. I don’t know what the hell it’s doing differently from the other video players on my system, but it works great.

This is probably not an easy question to answer, since, as another comment pointed out, WordPress is both an open source software option to selfhost your website, and also a non-free managed hosting option that you can use to host your website.

For the former, you fully control what plugins are installed, and if you don’t want social media tracking pixels on your site then don’t install one.

For the latter, you also mostly control what gets installed on your hosted website, but not entirely. It’s running on their servers so in theory they could be injecting tracking. I believe they do have some plugins like Jetpack that are always installed on managed websites, with some anti-features included that can be turned on (but don’t have to be).

I always recommend going the self hosted route with WordPress, if you are even the tiniest bit technical minded. It’s very easy to deploy on something like DigitalOcean or your own home server, and then you don’t need to worry about tracking from WordPress.com.

Are you able to recommend any shows or movies that portray Egypt and your culture well?

We Americans don’t get a lot of exposure to Egypt much outside of media like Indiana Jones or Moon Knight (which, despite having scenes set in Cairo, wasn’t filmed in Egypt as far as I know).

Yes, this happens all the time to me. I think it’s a relatively common thing for autists to emote differently, and I’m autistic, so I guess it makes sense for me. People who know me well can definitely detect my smiles though, so that’s nice. I’ve been trying to get used to overcompensating for strangers to make sure they see my expressions, and I just hope that it doesn’t end up looking too uncanny valley.

It isn’t like it’s a niche secret that YouTube siphons people’s privacy and sells their personal information. Creators being ignorant about that might have been a excuse a decade ago, but not now. I don’t think we should be excusing content creators who collaborate with and benefit from the machinery of viewer-exploitative content distribution that is YouTube.

Edit: also, you’re here in a privacy community defending the violation of privacy that you yourself originally described as dystopian. I’m not trying to be confrontational with you, here. I genuinely do not understand how you can think that content creators bear no responsibility for the dystopian situation you’ve encountered. Certainly they don’t bear all the responsibility for what YouTube does, but they chose to support YouTube by uploading monetized content there.

I’m not saying they should be canceled for that, but appreciated for it? Let’s not.

can’t even show your appreciation without selling more information

The content producer you’re trying to show appreciation for is the one who put their content on a platform that forces you to sell your information in order to appreciate them. Maybe let’s not appreciate those who do that.

Calibre will work for this, but it almost certainly won’t give a good result. That’s not Calibre’s fault; Adobe InDesign produces exactly the same horrible output from a PDF. It’s just a reality that PDF does not lend itself gracefully to being converted easily to a well behaved EPUB.

Unless you are converting something extremely simple with no inline images or interesting text layout, getting a nice EPUB will almost definitely be a tedious process of fiddling directly with the HTML and CSS with something like Sigil (or Calibre, but it’s not as nice).

I last left this morning for work. The last I left for my own enjoyment was last weekend for the Pride parade. (State of GA in the USA celebrates in October for some reason.)

(I tried to spoiler this bottom part since you didn’t ask for advice, but I guess I don’t know how. Sorry.)

I suffer from chronic depression, so I might know something of what you’re going through. Hang in there, friend. It gets better, eventually.

Also, I know this probably sounds ridiculous (it does to me when I remind myself of it while depressed, especially since I’m also autistic and antisocial) but the safety of home makes depression worse for me. It’s the last thing that I want to do while depressed, but it really does help tremendously to get out and do something. Anything. Go to the grocery store and buy a ramen or whatever, it doesn’t matter. Go through the human line to checkout so that you have to interact with a person in some capacity. It’s silly, but it does help me a tiny bit.

The next day, try to do it again, it helps a tiny bit again. Eventually all the tiny little bits add up, maybe, but even if they don’t then at least it’s a tiny bit better all along.

The fact that other publications are more right leaning than The Guardian doesn’t make it left leaning. It’s a liberal paper, supporting liberal positions and routinely expressing opposition to leftists like Corbyn. In my book, support for liberalism and opposition to leftism makes it a right wing publication.

We USians often don’t realize that the Guardian is a right wing publication. A frustrating number of people in US circles (especially liberals who don’t know they aren’t leftists) think anything European/UK is ideal and that conservatives don’t have any influence there.

It’s an issue for accuracy in the comparison images that were posted.

Because of investors needing a quick “win” with a game studio acquisition, and because gamers buy the slop that someone managed to shit out while trying to appease those investors.

The investors cash out and are emboldened to go burn some other game studio into the ground again. If the studio hasn’t imploded badly enough yet, the investors demand another game with whatever IP “worked” last time, but at a lesser budget with more aggressive deadlines, so the next result that is shit out is worse, but players still buy it.

The cycle continues endlessly, it’s the same pattern in every industry because it’s all the same tiny group of investors with “diversified portfolios” ruining everything in the name of profit.