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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • I’ve never heard of infrared glasses, this is probably the most interesting/useful thing on this list for me. Too bad Reflectacles is an American company though. Anyone have any experience with them? I’m willing to give money to US companies under certain circumstances if they do good things, like Signal. If Reflectacles does good work, I’m not opposed to placing an order.






  • i came here to say this. I was really frustrated for a while figuring this out and understanding how it really makes things more secure, even if you’re the only one using the computer. At first it drove me nuts when my server would auto create a folder for media and I’d attempt to change some files within and not have permission, like, my account should have access to everything.

    Changing access permissions without understanding how/why completely borked my first install by setting a user without sudo privileges as primary (or something, I still don’t know what I did haha) but I couldn’t sudo anything and was locked on that profile.

    I started by just using Nautilus but this is not good practice so I learned the basics and it finally started making sense.




  • What data breach could there possibly be? Phone numbers are already public information and that’s literally the only info Signal has. Oh no! My phone number that’s publicly available already has been released in a “breach”!

    It’s already been mentioned numerous times but you’re confusing privacy and anonymity.

    Per Cambridge Dictionary:

    Privacy: someone’s right to keep their personal matters and relationships secret

    Anonymity: the situation in which someone’s name is not given or known:

    Using Signal, even after giving them your phone number, fits the definition of privacy in that matters discussed through the app are secret to anyone outside of the sender and recipient. Even if Signal is told to hand over messages, they can’t, there’s nothing to access on their end. Private? Yes. Anonymous? No.





  • Jack_Burton@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlWhy?
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    27 days ago

    About 2 years ago I started the process of moving away from big tech, slowly, starting with transitioning from gmail to Protonmail. Ramped up on Jan 20 after seeing big tech CEOs at Trump’s inauguration. Windows was the last thing I switched. I had kicked it down the list because I freelance with an audio focus, and Linux is sorely less equipped for audio than Windows or Mac. Said screw it about 2 months ago and made the switch, and I’m now completely free from walled gardens and big tech.

    It hasn’t been an easy switch, but I’ve made it work, and in fact have improved my audio quality with Linux. There certainly are limitations, and some things take more effort, but I’ve come to realize a bit of extra work in exchange for freedom is far superior than convenience in a walled garden covered in surveillance.



  • Normalization. Everything the Trump admin has been doing is to normalize the concept for the next bigger thing. Boots on the ground in LA normalized it enough for boots on the ground in DC, which normalized the concept for Chicago, Memphis, and ramping up faster.

    “They’re eating your pets” normalized a stronger fear of immigrants, which allowed Trump to strengthen ICE, which normalized harsher ICE actions, which normalized ICE officer’s anonymity using masks, which normalized random arrests, which normalized ICE raiding an entire apartment complex and arresting kids, etc.

    “Drug boats” suggests cartels. Trump threatened to invade Mexico to “go after the cartels” and Mexico said fuck off. They pivot to an easier target, and set up Venezuela to be the target to “liberate” from cartels, which will normalize the US military entering and operating in foreign countries. Once normalized the US military will enter another country, etc.

    Nothing happening right now would have worked 8 months ago, smaller steps had to become normalized first. 8 months from now, all this will seem tame.

    That’s the thing about fascism; Every day that goes by was the best day it could have been.



  • I’m a voice actor and musician, and moved to Linux about a month and a half ago with Ubuntu Studio. I went from using Adobe Audition and Cubase to Reaper and Bitwig, and highly recommend both. Reaper is WAY more powerful than I realized. For FOSS you could try Ardour, I’ve heard good things. Personally I hated it haha, but that may just be because I tried Ardour first after switching to Linux and had the learning curve of both a new OS/audio setup and a new DAW at the same time with a project due day-of.

    The biggest issues I had was just getting audio to work properly. I was stuck using ALSA for a few weeks, which worked but only allows one program to use audio at once. I very much recommend looking into using JACK and setting up pipewire.

    You can absolutely start just recording via mic and editing from there. If you want to hook up instruments, check out midi controllers. Some plugins are extremely helpful for creating a more polished sound like eq, compressors, limiters, etc. If the space you’re recording in doesn’t have the best sound treatment, Reaper has a great noise reduction plugin called ReaFIR. It’s a little more aggressive than I like but works really well (feel free to ask me how to use it if you’re having problems).

    My recommendation is to start with Reaper (it’s got a free trial that you can keep using beyond the end date) and get your hardware working. After that, record a few tracks, throw them together into your DAW of choice, and play around with them.