go through the normal login process and login with empty credentials. It will prompt you to connect as guest.

Thanks for this tip - I never would have thought to try that if I hadn’t found this comment through a search. It’s a very unintuitive process, and it also seems buggy (I can’t do guest browsing on a server where I’m also logged into an account; instead of the guest option I get an error message demanding that I supply a username and password).

Have you considered making the guest browsing workflow more obvious at the join/login screen? Or perhaps better yet, providing a mechanism to see the list of default communities a server recommends? By that I mean whatever shows up in the communities list when browsing a server anonymously (such as viewing https://vger.app/posts/sh.itjust.works on the web).

But even that wouldn’t cover what I really want, which is to see a list of all communities on a server, so that if I notice one interesting federated community I can easily browse what other communities exist on the server that might also pique my interest. Maybe the thing I want is being able to put an empty “@server.tld” into the search box and be shown all communities registered there.

Why have you never been able to do it? I set up a full mail system years ago on a Xen/Linux VPS with stuff like Postfix, maildrop, Courier IMAP, a custom set of MySQL tables for aliases and such, and at one point migrated my TLS from CACert to LetsEncrypt. I enjoyed some aspects of the huge pain in the ass that all of that was, and having it work nicely was great. Spinning up a new email alias was easy and free, so I created a new one for damn near every site I interacted with, which later turned into a form of lock in having to continue running my server.

The continual server maintenance was a pain in the ass, requiring me to remember in substantial detail how it all worked so that I could appropriately integrate new things I had to learn like SPF and DMARC. I’m glad to have had some detailed sysadmin experience, but I was so glad in the end to finally migrate away from all that and just pay Fastmail instead.

I still have nearly the same flexibility with Fastmail and my custom domains, but they’re the ones that need to do all the maintenance. I can’t scale across unlimited domains for the same zero marginal cost, but I can make it work for a reasonable price with a few domains and scale arbitrarily within that. I’m sure there are other hosts out there that do a similarly good job, and Fastmail hasn’t been without its own troubles, but it’s been a net win for me.

I don’t recommend running your own server. I won’t do it again. I do recommend building an army of custom aliases all at your own custom domain(s).

Here’s a ~30 year old excellent law article on jury nullification by James Joseph Duane, who is also somewhat well known for his excellent “Don’t talk to police” lecture on YouTube. Click through the SSL warning in that first site to get the pdf - I think that’s better than the JSTOR library-login-wall link but you can see it there too.

It’s a pretty comprehensive positive treatment on jury nullification, with a bunch of history and context, well worth your time.

Leaders at Allied Universal, which provides security services for 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies, said their phones were “ringing off the hook” on Wednesday with potential clients. Allied covers a wide spectrum of services — including stationing guards outside offices, chauffeuring executives, surveilling their homes and tracking their families.

Protecting a chief executive full time costs roughly $250,000 a year, said Glen Kucera, who runs Allied’s enhanced protection services.

NYT article

For $4.2 million, the administration had just sold off the first 561 acres of Blue and Gold, an estimated 83,259 trees.

They’re selling off rights to log (miscategorized) old growth forest for an average of Fifty. Fucking. Dollars. Per. Tree. That’s damn near free.

Actually I’ll agree with you that a spreadsheet could do a lot, but that’s a niche solution. Building a good one requires a fair bit of technical know how, and even using one well requires a lot of understanding.

Why would you assume the cycle is regular? It’s a biological process that can vary quite a bit, which is part of why you would want to track it in the first place. There’s also much more to track that just the expected start date of your next cycle. The various tracking apps are quite a bit more involved than just a calendar.

deleted by creator

The article is very misleading. It says

The research paper…notes that the human body is particularly efficient at generating 40 MHz RF energy. Tapping into that through a ‘worn receiver’ provides power without using any invasive means.

But I read much of the pdf linked at the bottom of that link, and there’s nothing about the human body generating energy at 40MHz. The trick is that skin is pretty effective (sort of) at conducting energy at that frequency, so the authors hooked up a power transmitter worn on the forearm, 5 or 15cm away from a receiver on the hand.

This isn’t about powering anything by body energy, it’s about strapping a battery-powered transmitter somewhere on your body and then having another device pick it up when strapped somewhere else on your body. No thanks.

Oh and it’s actually pretty inefficient and won’t provide much usable energy.

You can get tiny rubber hands that each go onto one of your fingers. There are lots of vendors that sell these on Amazon, and presumably many other places. Different skin colors exist.

I’ve also seen even tininer ones that you can put on the first set of hands, so maybe you can find those as well.

This is super cool and looks quite polished in the video. It’s awesome that we live in an era where it’s possible for one guy to create this as a solo hobby project. Too bad it’s Android only but that’s a me problem.

Also interesting is the language they used in the email they sent me after I requested account/data deletion:

We received your request to permanently delete your 23andMe account and Personal Information. The following apply when you submit your deletion request:

• If you chose to consent to 23andMe Research by agreeing to an applicable 23andMe Research consent document, any Research involving your Genetic Information or Self-Reported Information that has already been performed or published prior to our receipt of your request will not be reversed, undone, or withdrawn.
• Any samples for which you gave consent to be stored (biobanked) will be discarded.
• 23andMe and the contracted genotyping laboratory will retain your Genetic Information, date of birth, and sex as required for compliance with legal obligations, pursuant to the federal Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 and California laboratory regulations.
• 23andMe will retain limited information related to your deletion request, such as your email address and Account Deletion Request Identifier, as necessary to fulfill your request, for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims, and as otherwise permitted or required by applicable law.

The first bullet point makes sense - you agreed and they already published something, so too bad. The second bullet is doing the right thing. But those third and fourth bullets sound like they don’t really have to delete anything, and they’ll keep a bunch of data even if you ask them to trash it. I asked them to trash it anyway.

Well I’m already here, and clearly I chose sh.itjust.works. But my point is that for a lemmy (or any fediverse) newcomer it’s a little daunting and that added friction slows adoption.

Oh that’s interesting. Twitter never interested me, and I’ve never created a mastodon account either. I guess it makes sense that the best way to write a long post when microblogging is in a macroblog and then link sharing. Seems like massive irony there, highlighting the funny nature of microblogging.

That kind of verified identity management for particular users would be great!

The collective of federated servers is still a huge impediment to public growth, since Lemmy isn’t just one thing, and I expect it will continue to hamper growth here for a long time, as new users are confused about how to choose a home base.

I started out with local forums on 2400–9600 baud dial up BBSes with banks of only maybe half a dozen modems for simultaneous use, run by self-funded hobbyists (who has the time and knowledge for that?). Pre-internet, if you will, although really internet did exist then, just primarily with academic and DARPA users and not public ISPs. The pinnacle of software evolution there was MajorMUD (on MajorBBS), with great adventures and full ANSI-colored text and ASCII art, but the local forms were fun too. We even had an occasional IRL picnic since everyone was within a reasonable area (not to have long-distance phone charges). But it meant the niche topics were few and far between, lacking a sufficiently broad user base (hello Lemmy!).

Boy I really hated the mess of forums you described as one of the golden eras. It wasn’t just the fractured identity management. BBcode was functional, but damned ugly, and difficult to navigate.

I hope you’re right about the future. Reddit was far and away the best forum discussion ground I had ever used, until it wasn’t anymore. I particularly like the idea mentioned in another comment of a future where (journalism, academic, professional, etc.) organizations might provide identity services in the fediverse and we could interact with either known or anonymous users. Bots and AI training are ugly issues you don’t address at all though.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts about publishing a post like that on your blog and then publishing a link to it here in the fediverse. Obviously you expect the discussion to occur here rather than in the curiously-still-enabled Wordpress comments. Would it be better to post the original content on Lemmy, but you still feel tied to Wordpress and having an RSS feed? Does Lemmy still feel like an experiment that might end whereas the blog is more still your own content repository?

Meta: I’ve noticed a lot of VOA links on Lemmy lately, and I’d like to understand why. As I understand it, VOA is essentially a national propaganda news organization targeting an international audience (similar to RT). Why is that a good source for article sharing? Especially in the case of the article at hand, which is just a VOA republication of an Associated Press piece that could have been linked originally.

Liquid gels are absolutely faster acting than compressed powder. I buy both generic naproxen pills and name brand Aleve liquid gels so that I have two different available delivery mechanisms (and unit prices) for the same active ingredient, and I choose which to take (or to give my dependents) based on the circumstances at the time of use.

Finish in a day isn’t a great requirement to put alongside “best ever”, as others have already covered. That aside, check out The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. You’ll be surprised by how fun it is to learn about medieval technology development and stone cathedral building techniques when it’s all wrapped up in a gripping narrative.

I got some that were nicely finished bamboo but they didn’t have enough of a sharp edge at the business end to really give a good scratch like the ones from my youth. Fortunately that was easily rectified with a couple seconds on a belt sander.