I use taskwarrior for this. For example:

task add recur:monthly due:eom wait:due-3weeks clean mesh filter
task add recur:quarterly due:eoq wait:due-3weeks replace charcoal filter

There are quite a few web frontends to it too, although I haven’t tried these out so not sure which to recommend.

It does amaze me how little challenge he received in the article for that.

There were many crazy things, but the one that affected me the most was my RE teacher’s insistence that all non-Catholics would go to hell. My best friend’s dad, who was an atheist and a very kind person, had died a few days before and it made me really upset. My parents complained to the school about it.

I’d quit my job, buy a small house for my partner and I and give enough to my family that they wouldn’t have to worry about money again.

With the rest, I’d set up a trust that donates 1% per year in microgrants to free software maintainers who apply to it. Similar to NLnet, but with no strings attached beyond continuing to maintain the project.

Then, with all my free time, I’d also work on free software.

For me, it’s more that he very confidently and bald-faced lied about saying that he immediately apologised.

I know all politicians lie. But it’s still unacceptable and we should keep calling it out when it happens.

Will you be allowed to lie about the age? If yes, then it’s a pointless law. If no, then whoever is checking needs to have more control over your device than you do, DRM style. That’s gives them an entry point through which they can put whatever they want without you being able to control it.

My partner, dad’s partner, and so many colleagues at my job, wasted so many weeks cramming for this stupid, irrelevant test. If you add up all the people who have to take this, how many person hours have we wasted as a society, all to be forgotten anyway, because it’s useless information.

We really need to get rid of this test, or at a minimum strip it down and make it about how to vote and access public services. But even then, if someone wants to learn that, they will of their own accord and in their own time anyway.

67% for me, looks like I’m getting kicked out

I’m quite crazy:

• Marginalia with the no JavaScript filter, then with that filter turned off
  • Good for finding technical stuff, and sometimes recipes! I often find cool blogs this way.
• SearxNG via farside.link
  • Unfortunately (and understandably) many of these sites use Anubis now, so I have to turn on JavaScript, and thanks to Google’s ratelimits the results are either fantastic or not helpful at all
  • But, the public instances can work, so I try with 3 instances before moving on

Depending on the thing I’m searching for, I have search shortcuts set up. These shortcuts are really handy. It seems much easier to get good results on dedicated search engines for each task, than finding another general purpose search engine that’s as good:

• Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikidata
• Some other wikis
• Lemmy (of course!)
• Peertube and podcast indexes
• Websites of grocery shops near me

Finally, if all else has failed, I use Google (which still unfortunately happens at least a couple of times per day 🙁). Although, reading the posts now, I should switch this stage to DuckDuckGo instead.

I’d quite like to set up my own instance of SearxNG + YaCy at some point. It’d be nice to configure SearxNG to basically do all of these steps at once that I’m doing manually, prioritise my YaCy index, but use other engines to fill in the gaps, and then gradually fill in the gaps in my YaCy index.

Personally, I donate less to more projects. But, if you don’t have a strong opinion of what to donate to, you can get the best of both worlds by donating to NLnet.

They fund open source projects up and down the stack, from open source CPUs all the way up to applications like Lemmy, and everything in between. Some are quite speculative and others are tangible improvements to existing projects.

I used Language Transfer and Michel Thomas’ courses when starting to learn Italian and found them really helpful in getting a foothold into the language.

The Michel Thomas course was longer and went in more depth, but I preferred the vibe of language transfer. The Michel Thomas course seemed to be aimed at people looking to cheat on their wife on a business trip, because a lot of the conversation was about inviting women to get a drink :( Despite that, it was still useful.

Unlike the language apps, these courses did a good job of getting me to think in real-time. Despite only being able to express and understand basic things, they gave me confidence to try and say things. Even without much vocab, I was able to express myself in a simple way: “I like that red thing over there”, and I was able to pick up new words with “what does this part mean?” or “can you repeat?” etc. So far, it’s the best method I’ve found to bootstrap enough of the language to start talking and picking up the rest by osmosis.

For those not familiar with the author, he is a Lib Dem life peer, and was president of the Lib Dems until 3 months ago.

He added that the government would provide an extra £63m to the 21 areas affected.

This issue has trundled on for so long, the concern being cost on local government, and then it turns out it can be sorted out overnight with just £63m.

If you ran on a pledge to clean up politics, and you’re up against Reform saying “they’re all the same and all as bad as each other”, then it should be obvious that delaying elections because you’re scared about the results is not a good look.

Please use the dedicated test instances for this purpose:

• https://enterprise.lemmy.ml/
• https://ds9.lemmy.ml/
• https://voyager.lemmy.ml/

Many very small services will just not bother with compliance. And the risk of enforcement on them might be low.

If you use a federated alternative, you can switch to a server that doesn’t bother with compliance without losing your contacts.

Many of the laws don’t specify how the age check should be done. There are more privacy-friendly ways to comply, like running a server for your friends or family and already knowing they’re over 18.

Ooooo, someone’s getting worried!

I like the idea and also want to support independent journalism, but in the UK context, I don’t think a separate community makes sense. I had a look at !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk and I think most (70%+) of the posts from my unscientific sample would count as independent (in the sense of “free from government and corporate interests, and not controlled by a major media conglomerate”).

I wonder if it would make sense to set up a bot to automatically crosspost articles from allowlisted domains from these general news communities? And if unknown links were found, there could be a mechanism to add them to the allowlist?

These were the sources I found:

• The Guardian
• Al Jazeera
• Novara Media
• The Canary
• Socialist Worker
• Morning Star
• Democracy for Sale
• BBC
• Politics Joe
• ITV
• New York Post
• Metro
• The National
• Associated Press
• Big Issue
• London on the Inside

A lot depends on the definition of independent, and I’m focused on the text rather than perhaps the intent of the definition. If that was stronger, a lot of these could be excluded and a separate community might make more sense.

Bangor debating and politics society responded that “in line with our values” it was declining his offer, expressing “zero tolerance for any form of racism, transphobia or homophobia”.

Reform’s Zia Yusuf thundered on X that Bangor got £30m from taxpayers and he was “sure they won’t mind losing every penny of (their) state funding under a Reform government”. And that’s where it suddenly got serious.

Anyone who thinks that Reform will not just copy every part of what has happened in the US, has the wool over their eyes.

I agree with you, and I think there’s a tension between the technical solution (meeting users where they are) and political solution (persuading the users to come to our way of thinking).

The technical solution is an unequal fight. We have to provide a familiar and equally good experience - integrating everything into these easy-to-use everything apps, on a shoestring budget compared to the proprietary apps. And, without the “education”, users will converge on particular instances because that’s what’s most convenient, giving a lot of power to particular players in the network.

If we can persuade people to prioritise freedom over convenience, then we end up with a much more resilient userbase who will go help with the existing networks.

I don’t know how we can make people care, though. The free software movement has been trying for 40 years to make regular users care, but the message only really lands with developers. There’s certainly more interest in taking down big tech nowadays, but convenience still seems to come first.

Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for.

This is the most interesting part to me. Can users be persuaded to have different expectations from the proprietary apps they’re used to?

Whenever these sudden migrations happen, the alternatives that win seem to be the ones that look and behave as similarly to the proprietary app as possible, as the people switching don’t care about decentralisation, and are much more sensitive to any changes in experience.

I think we need to create separate experiences, backed by the same protocol, for people who care about decentralisation and freedom (and discover the fediverse naturally, outside of these big migrations), and those that show up during the big migrations.

For the first group, we want software that’s easy to self-host, customisable, spreads users between instances, ultimately empowers them to have the exact experience they want. For the second group, we should just copy the exact experience of the proprietary networks as much as the protocol allows.

Of course, the risk is that we get even larger influxes of people who never had to learn the community norms. Is that worth it? - I’m not sure.