Unfortunately I already read the headline, is there anywhere I can offload this now unnecessary excitement?

Python in Excel would be great, but nerfing it with some ridiculous cloud dependency is crazy. They could still paywall the feature if they really wanted while still running the Python interpretation locally.

I suppose we should be grateful they hadn’t also stuck ChatGPT on to it too so it could (badly) write the Python for you. Tech by buzzword will be the death of us I’m sure.

A company that builds tools for remote working, doesn’t believe in remote working? That doesn’t seem a great look.

Twitter is now X as the little blue bird disappears

I thought the the new logo was the X11 logo at first, they are bit similar.

Also a bit ironic seeing as Musk wants Twitter X to be an “everything app”, while X11’s cruft and bloated featureset have led to it being replaced by Wayland.

The aftermarket shells can be very good quality these days, if the original shell is badly scratched up I would just replace it.

Yes, if there is one lesson we should have learned from Reddit it’s that internet points aren’t great for fostering real discussion and debate.

Still, with so many new link aggregation platforms appearing to fill the Reddit void, hopefully we still end up with something better.

The internet used to be more decentralised. There were lots of smaller websites, blogs, forums etc, which people discovered via word of mouth, search engines, and forgotten things like webrings. It’s only recently that big monolithic social media platforms took hold.

Tech is often cyclical, we could now be swinging back to a more decentralised web, but with the benefit of newer technologies. Right now it’s almost a new “wild west” as new platforms appear and new ideas like federation are experimented with. Some will rise, some will fall, some will go off in the corner and do their own thing. While all that happens it’s going to be a bit messy, much like it was in the 90s with the initial rise of the web.

I’ve noticed a lot of German language fediverse content too. Does anyone know why German speakers are so keen on the fediverse?

My Steam Deck experience has been very positive, it’s a great way to play games away from the desk. For me the controls are great, and game compatibility continues to surprise me.

I would say the only problem with the Deck is the size - it’s big. When I got mine it seemed a lot bigger than I realised, and that was after watching/reading a lot of reviews. Depending on your hands the size might be an issue. If you know anyone else with a Steam Deck I would recommend trying it out for size before buying.

Never mind zero stars, the Reddit app (and new Reddit in general) deserves negative stars.

Thankfully there is plenty of innovation in the market for fediverse apps.

Save them as PDFs and store them in your cloud storage or choice or a syncing tool like Syncthing. A basic folder structure can help keep things organised.

No need for anything complicated, for essential documents best to keep its impel and limit the scope of failure.

PiVPN is a simple home VPN solution that’s worth exploring.

Is you are interested in smart home/home automation Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform and makes a great Pi project.

Wow, this is impressive. Already seems quite stable, I got it running straight away on a headless machine with an Intel i5-7400T running Ubuntu 22.04. I think I need to do some optimising, but I can already use it as a somewhat convoluted way to get proper adblocking on an iPad!

I noticed a small mistake in the docs - the docker run command in the quickstart is missing a backslash.

The PulseAudio container also doesn’t stop when the main wolf container stops - not sure if that’s expected behaviour or not.

I’m excited to see where this project goes, I can see a bunch of uses for this running graphical application remotely.

Yes, it’s a sad state of affairs that Apple’s restrictions on iOS and iPadOS browsers are the only thing stopping an effective Google monopoly over web browsers. Ideally Firefox would still keep things in balance, but Mozilla doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing these days in terms of building market share - and I say that as a long time Firefox user.

I still remember the IE 6 era, and I hope we never see a single browser dominate the web again. To those wishing Apple would be forced to open up, be careful what you wish for.

Blink has diverged enough from WebKit that they are separate engines now. KHTML has been sadly laid to rest.

It’s a miserable state of affairs that we are effectively down to just 3 browser engines now, Blink, WebKit and Gecko. But with the ever increasing scope and complexity of web standards I don’t see that changing, unless someone throws a lot of extra support at the Servo project.

Some older people in the UK still prefer Fahrenheit, Celsius is still the official/default unit however.

A politician here recently tried to promote returning the UK to Imperial units, it has gone nowhere so far.

Computers and tech in general often feels like magic. The first computer I ever used was a ZX Spectrum, now I have something vastly more computationally powerful, and constantly connected to a worldwide communication network and knowledge repository in my pocket!

It’s amazing any of it actually works, especially as we don’t always seem to know how it works.

As a Pokemon fan I understand your pain. It’s not like it’s an obscure series, or from a small company. Why is it so hard to stream such a popular anime? I’m surprised The Pokemon Company hasn’t rolled out their own streaming platform yet.

Before diving in to Plex I would highly recommend looking at Jellyfin first also. It’s offers much the same features as Plex but is fully free and open source.

For my own media server I use an old HP Microserer G8 purchased second hand, and upgraded with a Xeon e3-1260L, also sourced cheaply used. It’s small, easy to service and happily runs my Linux disro of choice. I know other people using various SFF PCs, or even repurposed old desktops. For best performance look for a CPU (or GPU) with hardware video encoding support. Otherwise, the rule of thumb for Plex used to be a CPU with at least 2000 Passmark score on cpubenchmark.net per concurrent 1080p stream.

If you go back to Reddit you will probably end up spending hours reading about the protests anyway. Even if you stopped using all social media, chances are you’re going to end up reading and thinking about the latest Reddit drama anyway, because it’s making a new headline on at least one of the tech news sites each day.

Lemmy, kbin and the wider fediverse have attracted a lot of my own attention recently, but that’s because I find it interesting and genuinely exciting for a new community to form and develop. Because of that I don’t think it’s a bad use of my time, so long as I still keep life generally in balance. Perhaps you should ask yourself the same question.

With similar legislation in the EU, and other countries possibly following, perhaps the domino effect will force Apple to allow third party software globally. There were rumours Apple would respond to changes in Europe by only allowing side loading etc in Europe. But it seems like turning this on or off for every country/territory would cause a lot of fragmentation in the global app market.

The article says the Japanese government is still working on the exact regulations to be implemented. Perhaps the Japanese government will require the platforms to promote other options somehow - similar to the browser choice screen the EU mandated Microsoft add to Windows to increase web browser competition.

Google does not block 3rd party app stores, but most users do not use or even know of them, and 90%+ of all apps are still downloaded/purchased from the Play Store.

It’s still a bigger change for Apple though, who block any third party software from outside the App Store entirely. As the EU are also heading in the same direction, maybe Apple will eventually cave and allow third party software sources globally. There were rumours that they would do this for EU customers only at one point, but if more and more countries adopt similar laws it will cause a lot of fragmentation.