I’ll get the ball rolling with 3…

• Huxley. Brave New World. The concepts in this book are taught at business schools, and sometimes it is required reading. Not really clear at the start, but at the end…
• Stephenson. Snow Crash. Just read it. This is where the metaverse was born. This is where MMORPGs were defined.
• Divya. Machinehood. Talks about where we could go with AI.

If you read French you need to read the books by Alain Damasio. They are phenomenal.

avidemux? mpv (the thumbnails may be possible through the config…)?

Another interesting read is this write up on User Domestication https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication-of-users.html

If you actually plan on posting things?

Use a different email account to connect to each one, and don’t use that account for anything else.

Maybe run the browsers in a container of some sort? Create the account through a VPN so Twitter things you are in France, for example, where privacy laws are a little stricter, and you have “the right to be forgotten”. Somebody else will have better answers than me, but it is an interesting question.

Rufus and Unetbootin work fine as well.

I’ve only ever used Etcher on Windows.

Formatting can be handled with gparted and a few other utilities like gnome-disks. Some distros, like MX and openSUSE come with their own software that you can find on other distros.

I know about them, yes. if you don’t use Trakt you can still use the app and that takes care of point 2 and maybe point 1. It scapes info from places like IMDB, TVDB and TMDB so of course there will be some tracking.

Maybe MuPDF? Use the browser? Okular? I am not a Sumatrapdf fan either.

Librera Pro and PDF Viewer Plus in f-droid

seriesguide on fdroid?

Amazing work

I have seen this cartoon all over the place…and I just got it.

Looks like they prefer they/them. The link in the article will lead you to their mastodon profile where you will find a pinned toot with her home address which I find…peculiar.

I use the Linux Zoom client as a teacher 35 hours a week. It is quite annoying. There are options to turn off the full screen mode when someone shares their screen. What distro are you on? I install directly from the website. My complaint is that it sometimes crashes when I am moving around breakout rooms which can be awkward if students are looking for me. Zoom in general is bad when it comes to screen real estate! Horrible even!

I’ve been using OpenBoard for awhile. I like it. I never used swiping so i t doesn’t bother me that it isn’t present. I do like being able to scroll with the space bar and the long-backspace option (hold and swipe to erase longer passages).

All of the choices mentioned here work quite well. I use ghostwriter (well, I use just a text editor most of the time for speed) because it is available in the repos on debian without adding an extra repo. Typora is very nice but it is a little heavier. I vote to give each one a trying out and see which one you like best.

I start with this: https://12bytes.org/articles/tech/firefox/the-firefox-privacy-guide-for-dummies/

I could switch and have tried. the last time I tried a KaiOS phone and took the time to strip all the Google stuff and WhatsApp and make it closer to a dumb phone. Then for work reasons it became a little bit of a necessity to get a smartphone again.

Making a temporary switch to a feature phone is a fun exercise that I recommend BUT it takes time to find a suitable phone. Nokia phones are good but either have KaiOS (which is usable but slow when it comes to switching languages and switching between caps and predictive text) or Series 30+ which nowhere near as good as the previous Nokia OS.

if to are patient and want to drop some cash on a rather different device, the Mudita Pure should be interesting. The OS will be made open source upon release too.

Your device will only be as private and secure as the apps on it. I have used Lineage in the past, it worked as advertised so if someone wants to leave behind all the google apps including things like Maps and the apps that require different google services it is worth considering. Before doing that you can also take a look at the Smartphone Hardening guide https://lemmy.ml/post/38770

Signal seems to be the ideal replacement for WhatsApp at the moment. It would be fairly simple to get someone to install it if they want to switch. I am going to attempt to get my mother to switch in the coming weeks.

Element/Matrix would be my choice but I would bet my life savings and first born son that I would never be able to get more than one person to switch.

Just as a side note/side question: RE: the upcoming changes to WhatsApp, what will be the deal in Europe? I did see that the changes won’t be the same, will there be any changes made at all for European users?

OpenBoard. ASK is cool too. I might give FlorisBoard a spin tonight.