Interests: News, Finance, Computer, Science, Tech, and Living

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • flatbield@beehaw.orgtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlJWZ weighs in on Signal again
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    18 hours ago

    The big upside of signal is that it is better then SMS, and has more adoption then any of the other reasonable options. Adoption is still not enough to make it that useful when compared with Messenger and SMS and even with this addressbook thing your complaining about trying to drive it.

    Big downsides abound too including needing a phone number, and being tied to a phone.






  • I talked with a Trump voter. They thought inflation was high. I said no, it is under 3% which is normal. They thought it was like 6%. They even looked it up and agreed. Then I asked them if they were better of now then 4 years go. They said yes. After all that I am sure they still voted for Trump.

    As far as numeric price, everyone should know that prices are sticky. They rarely drop but inflation can be controlled to the 2 to 3 percent range and they were by the summer of 2024.

    I agree with this about hearing people. Dems for some reason are not good at making people feel seen and heard. The other is making a personal and emotional connection which is roughly similar.






  • flatbield@beehaw.orgtoLinux@lemmy.mlSwitching to linux for newbies.
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    20 days ago

    Reguarding apps, you said typewriter, movies, music, games. Office suite look at LibreOffice. Movies and music if it is online just Firefox or any other browser you choose. Firefox is good at working with PDFs too. Any distro should come with a document viewer, photoviewer, video player, and music player. You can choose from tons of other or more advanced tools. Debian for example comes with over 60K packges and Ubuntu and Mint are similar. There are also 3rd party sources too. Flathub or Snapcraft for example if you want something not in the repos.

    If you go with a Debian based distro with a lot of apps in the repos, you probably my not need these other app souces, but some people like smaller distros, something special just not in the repos, or a newer or different version of app. For example I use Joplin which is a notes app that is not in the Debian repos.

    For apps finding an app name and starting links https://alternativeto.net/ is your friend. For distros, https://distrowatch.com/ is your friend. Strongly favor a distro in the top 10 on distro watch unless you have some special need.

    Edit: You will notice that the top 10 are all Debian, Arch, Fedora, or SUSE based in that general order of more to less popularity. Linux distros tend to be based on these base distributions. For example Mint is based on Debian and so is Ubuntu.


  • flatbield@beehaw.orgtoLinux@lemmy.mlSwitching to linux for newbies.
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    20 days ago

    I personally prefer Debian based distros just because of the number of apps in the software repo. Probably consider Ubuntu or Mint in your case. My wife and I have used Linux pretty exclusively for over 20 years. Ease of use is not that much of an issue once your setup. My wife and her dad are not technical and they have few issues.

    Installing, and fixing issues is more technical but it is for Windows too especially if you do not get it preinstalled. You presumably have some stratagy for Windows support. Linux same, have a stratgey for it.






  • I wonder how much of this stems from two stupid IT policies. For decades users have been told to not write down passwords and to change them regularly. The result of this policy is to use a small number of password variations that one reuses. Then IT complaims about it.

    The better plan has always been to use long random passwords that you never reuse and write them down by some method like a password manger and only change them rarely for example when they may be compromised,


  • flatbield@beehaw.orgtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlemail with custom domain?
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    23 days ago

    The two downsides of a custom domain are:

    • Only as private as the least private use of the domain. No crowd to mix with.

    • Delivery through SPAM filters of other providers more troublesome. Delivery to AOL/Yahoo, and one of the AT&T managed mail domains has been the biggest issues for me. GMail delivery seems fine.

    Do get a common mainstream suffix not the cheapest. Some filters may tend to filter some TLDs.

    Edit: By the way, I have my own domain and the email for it is hosted at a hosting provider. I recommend it but the above are the downsides.