skepticalifornia

I live in California and I am naturally skeptical of anything you tell me 🤔

I switched to Joplin a few years ago from Evernote and haven't looked back. Take control of your own notes - Joplin is open source and has clients for every platform, and imports notebooks from Evernote.

Yes, I am now 90% on Lemmy - the new Memmy app for my iPad is close to Apollo-quality and Liftoff on my Android phone (S21) is “almost” as good as Sync for Reddit was.

For Reddit, I am using RSS feeds only to browse for any posts that interest me - I am trying to not give them traffic if at all possible.

The content on Lemmy is getting better every day!

Just go to your subreddit, copy the URL and add a .rss to the end, for example https://www.reddit.com/r/news/ becomes https://www.reddit.com/r/news.rss I've been doing this for years, using Protopage as my start page in Chrome and I make widgets with these RSS feeds. Lemmy and Kbin have RSS feeds as well, but you either just put in the URL and the RSS feeder recognizes it, or you click the little RSS icon by the sort selection and use that.

These jokers like to use the term “freedom” to describe what they are doing, but I would like for someone to tell me how he (and his ilk) have done anything to promote freedom? Freedom for women and their doctors to do what is best for them? NO Freedom for everyone to be able to more easily vote? NO Freedom for people to disagree and have debate about what is best for them? NO Freedom for teachers to teach students to think about and see different views? NO Freedom to date or marry whomever you choose? NO

Is it really only the freedom to carry around guns? Hell, I lived in Florida for 20 years (I left a decade ago) and it was pretty easy to get a concealed carry permit even then, so what exactly is more “free” there than before DeSantis came on the scene? I know he and his rich buddies are free to pretty much do whatever the hell they want, but for the common Floridian?

I've been pretty happy with Tidal. MQA gets a lot of criticism, but I have a DAC that decodes it and those re-mastered tracks sound great for the most part. They are moving toward lossless FLACs in addition to MQA. One thing that keeps me with Tidal is their support for play lists with basically unlimited numbers of songs (at least 10,000) - I have a "thumbs up" playlist that I have been curating for many years that is about 4,000 songs and Spotify in particular does not support playlists of that size as far as I know. Tidal also give more money per song to artists that the other companies. I believe Spotify is among the lowest per song, but they have many more users so probably pay out more in total.

This is probably a confirmation that Apple (or to lesser extent Tidal, Amazon and Qobuz) has siphoned away a fair number of Sportify subscribers who care about high quality audio. I'll probably stick with Tidal although Spotify offers some really good features.

r/HarryPotter missed a chance to only allow pictures of hairy people operating a Potter’s wheel.

This sounds like something the management saw on a Mexican soap opera, what a bizarre way to treat employees. The settlement comes out to around $5k per employee - not enough, they should really feel some pain from doing something like this. I live in the area and have seen these restaurats - thankfully I have never eaten at one that I can remember.

Apollo on my iPad and Sync on my Android phone.

You may be interested to know that any Lemmy community can become an RSS feed. Look for the little RSS icon to the right of the Sort Type drop down, click that and it takes you to the RSS feed. That URL can then be pasted into just about any RSS reader and you will see a list of the latest topics. I use ProtoPage as my browser home page and have widgets that show me Beehaw Technology, News, etc. I clicked on one of those stories to come to this post. (By the way, Reddit works this way by just putting an ".rss" at the end of the subreddit's URL. I used that a lot and am ecstatic that Lemmy allow a similar thing!)

This does nothing to address one of the most expensive aspects of attending college - room and board. With rent and real estate prices climbing dramatically, this is a huge (>50%) part of the expense of college for those who cannot live at home. Students get loans to help cover that and over four years it adds up to many tens of thousands of dollars.