Obsidian can be almost anything you want it to be. Try searching out some videos from folks who use Obsidian for journalling.

Uh, yeah it does. Not to mention the US has killed more people through colonisation, direct and proxy wars, etc. than any other nation in human history.

Because the US is so much better?

Steam Deck is modified Arch with KDE desktop so probably not beginner friendly.

This only really works in cases where people are making a free choice. But since people don’t live in a vacuum where consumerism, capitalism, advertising, greed, power imbalances, class divides, poverty, platform decay, planned obsolescence, geoblocking, price gouging, etc. don’t exist, a significant portion of piracy comes from either having little choice (I’m poor and I either pirate or I miss out) or making a choice based on ethical considerations (such as not giving money to a corporation that is known to engage in unethical behaviour). Or that we’ve had decades, if not hundreds of years of elites/corporate propaganda telling us that poor people are poor because they’re bad and we must listen with zero critical thinking to our capitalist overlords who are wealthy because they’re smart and know what’s best for us stupid plebs and here you go, have some bread and a circus so you can ignore your long work hours for pittance pay which is totally your fault for being dumb and not because the system is rigged against you, also don’t ever cross us because we control the politicians that make the laws that say piracy is worse than corporate fraud, even though corporate fraud and tax evasion costs countries and communities infinitely more than piracy ever did…

Yeah, piracy isn’t simple.

I used to be one of those people. It was a much different place then. It genuinely felt like a place to share useful information and help others or connect with folks from all over the world. If you had a question, or needed to fix something, it was usually pretty easy to find.

I used to prefer Altavista over Google as I found it served results closer to what I was looking for.

Now most of the internet is trash - pages and pages repeating the same crap, useful information or tutorials are hard to find without first wading through irrelevant search results or tutorials that are unhelpful but know how to capture the algorithms to generate cash, my ad blocker now telling me it’s blocking hundreds of ads instead of just a few, tracking and spying almost everywhere, clickbait hot takes, artificial and disingenuous lifestyle filtering, information desert eeeeverywhere…

Many days now I long for the internet of old.

My use case is probably a bit more niche but I have Memory Impairment and bookmarks don’t work that well for me. I’m a very organised person and did previously use things like bookmarks extensively. But since my memory has gotten really bad I need more visual representations. Visual bookmarks could kinda work for this but I am yet to find something that’s private, easy to set up (or just works out of the box) and isn’t fiddly to use. Bookmarks that aren’t visual, don’t stay in my memory so I forget about them. Search bar helps a bit but sometimes I also can’t think of the right words to use to get Firefox to bring up the right bookmark (even with extensive keywords - because I also can’t always think of the right keywords to set).

So I have heap of tabs open. I need things to stay in my recent memory and recent use, otherwise they just get forgotten. It does mean over time more and more tabs get left open. But I do fairly regular sort throughs where I go through each tab to make sure it’s something unimportant where I’ve just forgotten to close the tab or something I am actually using/working on.

It’s not ideal but it’s the only thing that works for me right now. I have so many things going on at once, it sucks that I have to remember so much at once when I have memory issues but such is life when disabled folks aren’t properly supported, lack of volunteers means I have to take more volunteer work that I should, western society sucks for supporting parents, and sexism means that I’m still default parent (mother) despite my husband being more progressive than most hsubands/dads are (he’s also woefully disorganised which is in part just him and also in part how boys and men are socialised). Anyway, this isn’t meant as a commentary on the differences in organisations levels and how that affects tab usage between mothers and fathers lol.

Ditto KDE

I think you may be way underestimating the number of people who have no idea the software they use is spying on them.

They also monitor outbound streaming. I’ve twice had a documentary movie I was watching at a theatre stopped because so one was supposedly live streaming the movie to the internet. The second time it happened they stopped the movie until the person doing it stopped, only it turned out they made a mistake and no one was live streaming it at all - they just interrupted the movie for fucking ages because of wanky attitudes. What made it even more stupid was that it was a special screening for a one off event AND a pretty niche documentary that most people wouldn’t give a fuck about let alone pirate 🙄

Ironically I also just got an email from on online service encouraging me to swap from 2FA logins to Google (or Apple) logins because it’s “part of [their] commitment to [my] privacy”. 🤦🏻‍♀️

uBlock Origin. Annoyances, and Fanboy Anti-Facebook is also enabled. I’ve noticed lately that a fair number of ‘sponsored’ ads have been slipping through. Facebook is always freaking Whack-a-mole with ads. This so far takes the cake for shady advertising practices though.

I have ads blocked and avoid using Facebook as much as possible but this insidious ad literally slid out of the bottom of the video I was watching (part way through the video) and would not let me close it or bring up the menu - clicking on either of those things just acted as though I clicked on the ad itself.

Facebook taking shitty advertising practices to a new low.

Maybe break down by gender could be related to how accessible technology is to genders based on barriers like sexism and gender-based hostility? A bit like how IT jobs have less women (despite things like the first programmers being women and it originally being a “woman’s job”), non-binary folk and tend to be male-dominated? You have to ask why something that shouldn’t have a gender bias is gendered. In this instance, I would be looking at why there’s a difference between Western/W.E.I.R.D. countries and Indonesia - what in Indonesia is making it more accessible to women when the reverse is true in countries known to be hostile to non-males in the technology world.

(Possibly I have way overcomplicated what I’m trying to say lol but I’m a bit sick at the moment so not easy to think through a woolly head).

I used to almost exclusively pirate because I couldn’t afford much of anything. Steam has actually enabled me to purchase most of the games I use since I can wait till they’re on special and cheap. There’s also a huge amount of indie games that would never have seen the light of day if they could only release on physical media or through their own website or whatever.
no Steam isn’t perfect, I would like Valve to take less of a cut but in terms of making games more accessible, I think they’ve done a decent job.
No shade on my fellow pirates who still exclusively pirate and don’t want to feed the corporate beast.

We’ve used a couple of different Pis and a couple of different Odroids. The Odroids have been excellent and trouble free, the Pis not so much. Initially we got a Pi because we thought with the bigger community and better software support it would be easier to troubleshoot issues. Except that they have been regular problems that we haven’t always been able to work around or fix. One of them got relegated to a retro game ‘console’ because it was more trouble than it was worth. We’ve had little issues with the Odroids that wasn’t easily sorted.

That sucks to hear. Back when I migrated to the Fediverse, I chose Kbin just simply because the interface suited me better. Frustrating when aholes ruin a good thing.

I might just be really tired and feeling dense this morning, but what do you mean about kbin.social?

If your TV is Android based then there’s the SmartTube app. YouTube without the ads and tracking.

Calibre Content Server
https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/server.html

Or Calibre-Web
https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web