Talk amongst yourselves.
I hope that people from the US have finished their shopping in Europe: Postal services in many European countries have stopped commercial deliveries towards the US, because of the tariffs. Some private companies will continue to operate.
This is good and everyone is happy. Nothing is wrong. Everything is wonderful.
Obviously. And let me take this opportunity to say: thank you.
PieFed (https://wetshav.ing/) has been running smoothly from what I can tell.
Fun fact, since the images are handled differently than Lemmy and I still want to keep them in an object storage bucket, I was forced to learn how to route everything through Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a corporation and is therefore evil in some eyes, but it does come with a lot of free features that prevent being spammed by AI bots, for example.
Lemmy sometimes suffers from AI bot attacks (at least I think that’s what causes the slowdowns). In the future I’d like to get Lemmy routed through Cloudflare as well, but I’ll need @djundjilla’s help.
PieFed does run smoothly and everything is loaded very fast.
Cloudflare has a few critiques, but if the alternative is AI bots and DDoS attacks I think it’s the better alternative. Just look at how vanilla YT comment sections look nowadays. You can’t say certain words but the spambots for crude scams run rampant. I really hope the Fediverse finds a good way to combat this and if Cloudflare is part of the solution, so be it. They also work with Mozilla, so they can’t be totally evil IMHO.
Piefed works well! Feels much snappier than Lemmy.
You’re in Europe, right? I would have thought PieFed would be slower since the server is in the USA. Lemmy is in Finland.
Yes, I am in Europe. Lemmy still feels slowers
I’m currently in the final phase of preparation for the last part of my exam: the oral exam. TBH, it’s 60% knowledge and 40% luck of the draw: if I draw an envelope with topics that I’m well-versed in, I’m sure I can pass it with flying colours. It’s next Tuesday and currently I just want it to be over, I’m so tired of studying. I want to convert my school laptop into something for personal use, in case anyone is familiar with running Linux from an USB drive hmu - I have a few interesting distros installed but I can’t seem to get it running.
However, since a peculiar bout of melancholy overcame me as I suddenly realized that after 3 years of constantly preparing for new things and always preparing for something different will end, I got myself an online piano/keyboard course today. Of course I won’t ever be a classical pianist, but since this course seems to focus more on playing contemporary music instead of reading sheet music and complex arrangements, I should be alright. My end goal is to be able to play some ambient music that sounds more interesting and unique than the awful AI ambient music circulating YT and streaming services. I also have taken up listening to Ambient while I shave now: it helps me to be more “in the moment”, so to speak. It’s difficult to explain and maybe it’s an ADHD thing. Relaxing Ambient and Drone can help me to be calmer, Dark Ambient generally helps me to stay alert and keep my focus, Experimental stuff helps me to try out new things. I often think about certain situations and events and definitely connect some kind of music or melody to it. Perhaps that’s strange, but that’s how my brain works.
I can also happily report that I successfully got back into reading as a hobby thanks to the tip of a YouTuber: he recommended reading before sleeping and starting with short stories or shorter books. I have read “The Stranger” by Albert Camus this month, and even though this wasn’t the most motivating literature, I like how I could finish an entire book just by nighttime reading sessions.
One of my favorite bands used to be semi-ambient. Have you listened to the album Slave Ambient by The War on Drugs?
I’m familiar with Linux and using a USB. My experience is pretty limited, just using the USB to do a quick test and install it on a computer. What kind of troubles are you having?
I haven’t until now. After 3 different songs, it feels pretty smooth IMHO. A bit of prog rock, a bit ambient, some britpop influence (mostly in the vocals). Thanks for the suggestion! It sounds a bit like artists I’d find on Digitalis by soma.fm (I don’t know if you’re familiar with their different online radio stations). Maybe you’d like something like this here too?: HTRK - Gilbert and George Most of my other ambient consumption is from the darker side of things and soundtracks.
The problem is that I downloaded a Linux distro on the stick but it says that it can’t be opened. Judging by the files, I don’t know where/how to run them from. It seems like I need something else on the USB stick to compile & run the files in the right order, I guess? I’ve unfortunately done my research pretty superficially, I admit 😅
Ah, so you’ve just placed an ISO on the USB stick? There’s more to it than that, but it’s not too difficult.
Ventoy is a tool that let’s you try out multiple distributions at the same time. Take a look at that project, they undoubtedly have instructions.
Otherwise you can only try one at a time. You’ll need a tool like Rufus to turn the USB stick into something bootable.
Next step will probably be change settings in your BIOS to 1)disable secure boot (I’m pretty confident this is a requirement, but maybe not) and 2)make it boot from USB instead of your HDD/SSD/NVME.
Thanks! That’s super helpful. I’ll check this out soon.
