Accessibility direly needs more volunteer work in almost all projects. So you could, for example, pick your favorite desktop and get involved in their accessibility efforts (e.g. start here for KDE).

+1 for Kate

If anyone would like to chat about degoogling, there’s now the IRC channel ##degoogle on LiberaChat.

+1 for used Brother models. Mine is a MFC 27XX YY, which has decent Linux support and accepts third-party toner without complaints.

Yeah, unless one happens to have one of the beefier Raspi 4 or Raspi 5 variants (which, of course, would be an overpriced choice if their sole purpose is to be a home server). To give specific recommendation for cost-effective beefier home server hardware: Used Thin Clients. For example, Dell T530 Wyse (or T520, or T540, or the 6x0 series).

Non plus ultra: Download the video and then upload to whichever PeerTube instance you use. At least if you’re confident enough that this won’t cause you legal trouble (e.g. cases like “fair use” should be safe).

FreeTube has a neat function to download comfortably (but make sure to pick an option with both audio and video).

I LOVE Freetube, but can it be linked to?

Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)

Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)

For German-speakers, one such directory is lila.schike.de.

Für Leute, die Deutsch sprechen, gibt es u.a. das Verzeichnis lila.schike.de.

I think nothing stands in the way of doing this on local metal, as far as technology goes. Something similar has already been achieved for personal photo sorting, e.g. https://ente.io/

The only thing I disagree with is this:

This continuing saga shows how important regulation and legislation are to protect consumers, whether it’s individuals like us, or companies that are being bullied into complying with some pretty odious demands.

This makes it look like anti-repair lawsuits were something that can natuarlly occur, and that the solution were some form of government intervention. By and large, that’s not true: It’s the existing copyright laws which are the government intervention — what we are calling for is not a restriction of freedoms for the greater good (regulation), but a return of freedoms that were unjustly taken from us.

(Just so no-one misunderstands me: I’m no opponent of regulations, and am wholly aware that, very often, they actually protect freedom in the greater scheme of things. My point is that terms like “regulation” and even “new legislation” do have a bad ring to many people in the Western hemisphere and beyond, and we needlessly cease discursive territory if we neglect the fact that we are victims of overreaching, oligarch-serving regulation, which we seek to abolish.)

For an ongoing discusion on Lemmy and a more detailed article see here

ffmpeg is usually the tool of choice.

An example for batch converting of all AVI videos in a folder:

for i in *.avi; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.mp4"; done

Source & further reading here on StackOverflow. The comments to the answer provide examples of how to explicitly tweak the quality level. Inverting what this specific comment suggests, conversion from H264 to H265 could be done by something like this, assuming all your videos’ names end on .mkv:

for f in *.mkv; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -map 0 -movflags faststart -c:v libx265 -c:a copy -c:s copy "${f/x264/x265}"; done

I wonder: if one wants to make things run in parallel, would that be as easy as adding " & " before the last semicolon here? I suspect this could work as long as there are only a few handful of files, but lead to troubles once there’s more.

Like I said: it can be gamed to some degree, but what system can’t?

Besides finding better ways to positively recognize bots, we also need to invent ways that make it quicker to realize “false alarm, this user is actually legit”.

For example, users should have an option to pin posts and comments to their profile, and I suggest to provide at least two different ‘tabs’ for this in the public profile: One tab just for the usual “posts and comments you would like the world to see”, but another tab for “some recent, complex interactions between you and other (established) users that in your eyes prove quite well you’re not a bot”. The purpose is simply to save others, worried that you could be a bot, some time of going through your posts in search of signs for humanity. Yes, this can be gamed to some degree (what can’t?). However, at a technical level, the feature is little more than a copy of the “pin” feature that would be very nice to have anyways, so we can get an appreciable improvement in our ability to tell users from bots for very little programming effort.

What hardware do you currently use and what software do you intend to run on the new machine? And what’s your budget situation?

In any case, I would always recommend to buy used or refurbished hardware. Even if it’s not necessary financially, it’s better for the environment.

That’s very cool indeed – although I dread the moment he starts talking to his followers about Lemmy.

This is in all likelihood the way to go. These instructions from VeraCrypt might lead the way.

Of course, OP should create an exact duplicate of the disk to another drive before making any changes to it.

As an aside, I know that GPT partition tables likewise come with a backup header at the end of the disk. Whether LUKS encrypted devices also have backup headers, I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem so. So, my fellow LUKS users, perhaps you would like to run the following:

sudo cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup /dev/LUKSDEVICE --header-backup-file ~/nas/backups/lenovo_x280.luks.bin

Last time I wanted to automate something on Windows (3 years ago), PowerAutomate did the job quite well.