Marques Brownlee (a.k.a. MKBHD).

A few weeks ago he posted a new episode of his podcast with him and a few others. They talked about Nothing Chats and Sunbird, the iPhone getting RCS and the usual OpenAI drama. At some point Marques mentions the fact that iMessage with RCS will still be "unencrypted". Following that they ponder over why RCS wouldn't have this fabled encryption, such a weird thing that RCS doesn't support encryption from the get-go, and after brainstorming for a bit someone adds the information that it indeed will be encrypted in-transit, but not end-to-end encrypted. And what comes next boggled my mind: Silence ensues. No-one says anything. You only see the faces of four grown-ass tech influencers that are stunlocked and completely unable to process what this neverheard difference between encryption methods might mean. It all just ends with "I've been trying so hard to figure out what that means. I can't." And then.......then they simply move on, not even addressing for a second this knowledge gap and solving it right there on the spot. You can watch it if you want. What hurts the most is that Marques' co-star, David, the guy that looks the most confused, made a 1+ hour history-lesson type video a few months ago about the history of the internet and the importance of HTTPS encryption.

Now, if we're talking about visual quality and overall visual production quality, his videos were insanely enjoyable to watch. I also don't want to shame anyone for not knowing something and I understand that this is in part the consequence of an ever growing company at this point. The channel is still growing and has reached 18 millions subs. Him (and his team) also cover a constantly growing tech sphere, from phones to laptops, from e-vehicles to supercars, from tech politics to tech blunders. But coming from a guy that has been a "tech influencer" on YouTube for 14 years, a guy that over the years had the chance to interview Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Sundar Pichai and surely had the chance to surround himself with experts on all sorts of topics, a guy that dedicated entire videos to Nothing Chats, the role of Quantum Computing in encryption or the dangers and potentials of the Metaverse, this kind of shocked me. I just couldn't take him seriously anymore and I hate myself for it. But it's like my grandma not knowing the difference between a normal call and a WhatsApp call, expect that he's been talking about tech for more than a decade.

Hey db0 and mods!

Since you're just humans and we never know if the insults are slowly getting to you or you're just having doubts, I want to give a voice to the lurkers in here and reiterate one thing: I feel exceptionally well taken care of in this instance! I'm extremely happy to be a part of it, I don't even know what a downtime is and I don't see much drama or toxicity if any at all. I'm simply loving Lemmy (yes, seriously!), I'm loving my time on it and I can just focus on following the communities I'm passionate in, which is the main point of Lemmy. I'm also aware that this does not happen without considerable hard work from the people behind it. So while I'm sure most of it goes unnoticed, I hope to at least convey with this that it's not taken for granted or unappreciated in the slightest bit. A very big thanks to you all (and I try to donate where I can) <3

As for my personal experience, whenever a hexbear post makes it into my feed it's mostly an overly aggressive political take or straight up trolling. It reminds me of the League of Legends kind of humour: It's supposed to be a joke, but it's not explicitly spelled out that it's a joke and it attacks the individual. It's a mix of aggressive trolling and just straight up toxicity. You just never know if you're supposed to take it serious or not. But I personally like to have a choice if I eventually want to block them or not, and I feel like having a choice is one of the common threads between FOSS, Linux, the fediverse, self-hosting, piracy and so on.

But, while I do appreciate this, it isn't crucial to my experience on Lemmy. So, if at any time this balance is taking too much of a toll on you guys, it wouldn't be a big deal for me if we would "lose contact" with hexbear. Last thing I want is to slowly cook your sanity bit by bit, with each passing day a bit more, over something that is frankly not that important. I'd rather prefer you focus on what you love doing, be that doing technical stuff, improving the instance, memeing around, learning new stuff or simply discussing things with other people in peace. Life is much too short to argue with people, and over the internet it's even worse!

I'm trying to finally switch from Windows to Linux, meanwhile this mf is already trying out alternatives to Linux. That's when you know you're late to the game.

Have you tried simply uninstalling and reinstalling?

I'll see myself out...

Often times on this sub there's always an alternative being proposed, so I'm a bit shocked that this time most of the answers are simply "no".

I have nothing against buying what I enjoy. But I also want to use my own streaming service (be it Plex or Jellyfin), I want to watch it offline, I want to not live in fear that it gets taken away, and most importantly I want to know that atleast 50% of my money rightfully goes to the artists of said content.

As I've said in another comment, it's shocking that even the notoriously copyright-obsessed music industry allows retailers to sell high quality digital copies, while the film-industry just plainly doesn't.

Spotify currently does not work, apparently they got blocked and are currently arranging a new proxy.

I tested it with Qobuz. I copy-pasted the link directly from Qobuz, and it somehow managed to pull a full 24 bit, 48KHz, flac file from source with just the Qobuz link. I still don't understand how. It works with full albums too.

Hey!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Joplin has all of what you're asking for and if you self-host, even a few more big things like note sharing and note collaboration.

As for multiple users: You can have multiple users ("Profiles") locally inside the app, or if you mean different accounts altogether, you can indeed have and manage them all in your own self-hosted Joplin server instance. Again, Joplin has collaboration and that necessarily entails more than one user/account! But we might mean two different things, happy to help in either case :P

Edit: added collaboration.

Interesting concept. If I understand it correctly it didn't truly let you own the stuff that you bought. It instead gave you a proof-of-purchase allowing you to stream your purchased content on different streaming platforms (like Netflix, etc) as long as you have that one proof-of-purchase. However, if the platforms remove your purchased content from their catalogues at any time, it would be gone. So you're right, almost but not quite like DVD.

I wonder why the notoriously copyright-obsessed music industry allows retailers to sell digital copies (and high-quality ones), while the film-industry doesn't.

I'm glad that not even a year later we've completely moved past the whole "fuck spez" shtick (it do be funny tho). I see this as an absolute win, as we've developed our own identity and finally embraced what we really are: A defederated link aggregator named Lemmy, not a Reddit clone or sidechick.

P.s. Altough, I have to agree that we do have to chill with all this My Little Pony stuff🤣

Every week that passes I find myself looking forward to these more & more. Thanks for sharing this resource!

You're right but the same argument goes for the music industry, yet they still allow direct downloads. I have phrased it incorrectly, I certainly don't expect a solution for everything from you kind people, I'm simply taken aback by the fact that it truly wasn't my bad googling skills that prevented me from finding such a service, it's that for visual media there simply isn't one.

To your other point, there are many people involved in the creation of music as well, altough not as many as those involved in movies and such. After I've made my purchase, may that be a DVD for a movie or a song on Qobuz, I do assume that my money passes through many more intermediaries and studios and execs that all want their cut before it finally gets distributed to the people that it took to create the content. That's another huge can of worms. I was simply looking for a service that offered a digital file for money, just like with DVDs but without the plastic.

If I remember correctly they added this feature right around the time they announced Stremio Web (basically their web interface/web-app).

The web-app was mainly intended for devices that cannot download the fully fledged app (coughIOS....cough). I think this "remote HTTPS connection" is related to that: You basically have the fully fledged Stremio app on one device, the limited web-app on another device, and use this remote server setting to give the web-app all the missing features as long as you have the fully fledged Stremio app running on one device. Never got it to work though.

Maybe this helps:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/Stremio/comments/xct6ad/comment/iufrhzq/

If you want to "share" you stream to friends, you could also look into the Peario add-on. They don't need to have Stremio installed, share the Peario link, press ready and you're done. Didn't manage to get subtitles working though.

Edit: correction about Peario.

Why stop there, we could make a religion out of this!

Honestly, after seeing that there's truly no GOG equivalent for movies, neither now nor probably ever, this is the solution I like the most.

If I want something fast, I get the file through "other means". If I like it and want to support the production behind it, I add it to a list and at the end of the year I do what you've said.

This way I neither accumulate DVDs nor throw them in the trash, I support the production, I make my neighbors happy and get a high quality file on top. Sometimes it's the simplest things, thanks for the reminder and the idea :) Hopefully in the future this will all be possible digitally.

No worries, 'twas a very interesting read!

"Wait, so you're telling me you can watch a movie you bought without using the official app?"

Ahhh yes, google dorks, the duller brother.

Well, he's played a role in getting me and I'm sure many others interested in tech in the first place (remember the OnePlus One days?). So I'd say he has a bit more going for him than just video editing, he summarizes tech really well and he just....sparks that tech passion in his viewers! But I simply can't believe that in all these years he never stopped and pondered what in-transit encryption vs. end-to-end encryption might mean!

To hammer my point home: This means he doesn't understand why people would use Signal instead of sending a DM on Facebook or Instagram. Why any sane mind would pick Proton Mail over something like standard Gmail. He's absolutely clueless as to what a data breach into popular password managers like Bitwarden or LastPass might mean. When Apple says things like (and imagining this in Tim Cook's voice makes it a hundred times better) "What stays on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone." or "end-to-end encrypted, meaning that not even Apple can access it", he doesn't understand any of it and just moves on. And mind you, these are Apple presentations we're talking about, catered to the simple understanding of an average consumer.

Yes, naturally everyone has to start somewhere, but I wish him and his team (c'mon guys, I KNOW you'll read this!) would put a bit more effort into fillling knowledge gaps as soon as they come up, instead of just relying on their selective research each time a new video gets made and arrogantly thinking that in all other aspects they must still be ahead of 99% of all other people. Don't take my word for it, see for yourself: After one of his co-hosts asks people watching the podcast to tweet at him to explain it, Marques replies: "Good luck getting a tweet."

But hey, I hope these are only the first of many steps they'll take in the big world of data protection, transparency, open-source, privacy and, of course, encryption ;)

P.s. sorry for the wall of.....text.

Edit: clarification at the beginning.

Hol' up: Let's say the average size for a song (in FLAC format) is 30MB. 125k × 30 = 3'750'000 MB, or 3TB+!

Thas a lot of storage. O.o

I don't know anything about what you just asked but man, if there's such a thing as a well formatted post, then this is it!

Ahh yes, the well known dilemma of "data portability", also know as "If you can't leave with your stuff, you might as well stay with us". That's something I'd definitively recommend you look out for in the future, here, I'll make the first step for you [for Joplin]:

• Joplin stores all your notes on your device and allows you to export them in several nonproprietary formats, including markdown and HTML, which are human readable and directly importable by generally all open-source note apps. Joplin being open-source helps too, as it means that anyone can directly add new ways of exporting notes into different formats should you ever want to switch. Joplin is not perfect since it still changes your files during usage, but one could argue that it's well within reason since it adds several features on top that the raw markdown format doesn't have.

As for your problem at hand, imma be honest chief, it's not going to be perfect. You have two options, but both of those options will require that you manually adjust some notes, that's just a consequence of today's world in which different note apps are built completely different and there not being a universally agreed on format that can easily contain all the contents of a single note in one file. Synology using their weird format doesn't make it easier either so you're going to have to put in the work to break out of that file format first. This is true regardless if you ultimately decide to switch to Obsidian, SilverBullet, MoeMemos, Nextcloud Notes, you name it. With Joplin at least, you'll be able to automate the import of 98,9% of all your notes, but even that still means that you'll have to manually adjust some notes. Here are your options:

1. Automate the process:

   • There are several scripts that automatically take the Sinology .NSX export you just created, then they translate all it's content into .md files that you can then easily import in one-click into Joplin. Here are the ones I've found:
     • https://github.com/Maboroshy/Note-Station-to-markdown/
       • "It creates md files and puts all attachments into a sub folder."
     • https://github.com/xinbindai/Note-Station-to-Joplin
       • A customized version of the above script "to export notes/images in markdown + Front Matter (Directory) that can be [more] easily imported into Joplin."
     • https://github.com/andreas-vester/notestation-to-joplin
       • This script might be worth it if the above scripts don't work. Some people had issues with this script, but managed to mostly fix them. See here.

2. Copy-paste each note:

   • This sounds tedious at first, but once you get in the flow, it isn't that bad. It isn't doable if you have 10'000+ notes, but in my case, I got it in a few hours. Remember that even if it takes you one hour a day for a week to move them all, since you're switching to a nonproprietary format you only have to do this once and then you're set for life. This person on the Synology forum had your same problem and ended up choosing this option.

Lastly, my personal experience: I moved from Google Keep to Joplin and I know nothing about scripts or code, so I copy-pasted most of my notes manually into Joplin, downloaded the attachments and added them manually, then reformatted the notes manually. It was a pain in the ass. But nowhere near as painful as importing 1000, 20'000, hell possibly 100'000 notes that will probably accumulate in the years to come. Importing them in a different note app would be straight up inhuman or at the very least impossible without a script, so I'd personally recommend you and your family make the switch to a more flexible file format right now, while you still can.

Good luck!

Just wanted to chime in and give a +1 to Anytype. While I haven't self-hosted the backup node and I can't help you with that just yet, the fact that a free, P2P decentralized, end-to-end encrypted and source-available notes app like Anytype even exists is awesome!

I'd be curious to see if you manage to get the backup node up and running 👀

I have no clue what Warhammer is or how to solve any of this, but I consider myself a jolly guy. Probably for the entirety of last month I've never laughed as much as I did while reading your post.

So hey, I wouldn't wish harm on anyone, but if a horrible chain of misadventures like this ever happens again please be sure to share it with us. So we can comfort you, of course.

+1 for Qobuz.

I simply buy the songs singularly, ~2€ a song for the best high-res flac 876Khz 36bit snakeoil-imbued quality one could ever want. You buy it once, it's yours forever. You can even re-download it if you lose it. It's converted me from pirating music to buying it. Best example of "piracy is a service issue".

Not an expert, but I think they're actually Latvian.

Oh I nearly forgot but specifically Prime Video is indeed a service that allows direct movie downloads, thanks for the suggestions!

Altough......now that I've looked at it more closely and if I understood it correctly:

1. one can only use their proprietary app to initiate a download
2. one can only watch the downloaded content on their proprietary app, and
3. the downloaded movie expires after 30 days.

I'll try it out as soon as I can, but if true then this is just a horrible experience.

My fellow self-hosting noob, I gotchu!

Here are three solutions that are easy as pie:

1. Keep using Syncthing, but add additional devices to that folder to ensure one is always online and ready to receive and sync.
   • Pro: You can use an old laptop, a PC at home, your parent's phone and so on. It's like your own torrent network, as long as one peer is online it will always be synced.
   • Con: Your notes will be on those devices too. But in my personal experience Joplin notes don't take much space and as for privacy, you can always E2EE them.

2. Use a different sync method that uses an always-on server for guaranteed sync.
   • I used Nextcloud for half a year and it worked flawlessly. I used the free 8GB hosting that tab.digital offers. Maybe give them a try again?
   • Alternatively, for an even faster experience (almost "Joplin server" levels of speed), use the S3 sync method in combination with Storj.io. They give you 25GB of free, decentralized, open-source, E2EE storage. You can DM me you need help setting up the S3 "bridge" with Joplin but it's fairly easy.
   • You could also use OneDrive or Dropbox and encrypt your notes end-to-end first, but let's assume you want to try to move away from closed-source services, not the opposite. Although the thought of making them pay the electricity bills without giving them your data can be quite amusing :P

3. Use Elfhosted.
   • It's a newcomer in the "managed self-hosting" space that specializes in installing and setting-up all kinds of open-source software on a server for you. For some it's not really self-hosting since you don't have root access to the server, but at least it's not "Google Drive" levels of control and we're trying to get away from that. The guys at Elfhosted give you 10$ for free (no payment method required) to use on all of their offerings and as luck would have it, they also offer a Joplin server instance. The Joplin server instance costs 0.05$ a day, meaning that with those initial 10$ you could try it out for 6 months for free. As far as I can tell, at that price it can't be beaten, not even by a VPS. I used it two weeks ago and had no issues. You even get cool features like note sharing, multiple users and note collaboration. Or, always with Elfhosted, you could just use a Syncthing instance that's always-on, although they price that at 0.10$ a day.

P.s. There's a Joplin community on Lemmy too, at !joplinapp@sopuli.xyz. Happy syncing!

Edit: Hell, here's a fourth solution: Just use something like the FOSS app Round Sync and set it up so that it backs up your local Syncthing folder to a cloud of your choice (like those mentioned above) every 24h, or 2h, or even every 15 minutes. That way, once you come home and power on your laptop, your phone will automatically sync all your notes via Syncthing, but in the event that you lose your phone, you will have a "checkpoint" as recent as you want it to be. This way, you don't have to change your current setup and at the same time you're prepared in case something bad does happen. And in my case seeing that "Joplin Notes: Backup Completed" notification every 24h is something beautiful.

Very insightful, thanks. All this does seem very fishy at best. Best to stick with LibreOffice then.

Splitting the "file getting" from the "supporting artists" part is generally an approach that I'm fine with, but I fear that Prime Video isn't a very good service for the "supporting" part since their cut is so big.

Dope! Lemmy know (;) if you have other questions.

Yeah....thanks for the clarification, when I read the download part I expected to get a file, not just an offline viewing experience. I'll be more careful now whenever I read that a service offers downloads, I came in from the perspective of someone buying music and thought I would get a file.

Good on ya, with that much storage I would do that too :P

I'm about to build my first NAS, and intend to start with 8TB - for family backups, photos, music, TV shows, and self-hosted apps. That's why the thought of dedicating 3TB, or ~1/3 of my entire storage, to music alone sounds nuts in the eyes of a beginner like me😂

But I guess it's true what they say: Storage grows with time! Although I don't wanna know how many songs you'll have when I catch up to your current number...

Splitting the "file getting" from the "supporting artists" part is my current approach for movies and such, but I fear that Prime Video isn't a very good service for the "supporting" part since their cut is so big. But as you've already correctfully said, if I have to split my approach to movies, then I'll be on the lookout for a service that offers digital purchases and that I support, which entails that it doesn't take half of my money before it even reaches the movie studios that will want their cut too.

Thanks a lot for your suggestions, admittedly those are all fairly niche and don't really have up to date content but they do indeed offer a digital video file for money (apart from iTunes, I've tested it and can't seem to get a DRM free video file). Who knew that GOG had a movies section!

As for my personal takeaway from your suggestions and those from others, I guess the best approach is to continue to split the "supporting" part from the "getting a file" part.

Hey, thanks for the suggestion! The website does work for me (although the web-app doesn't, yeah). As for the project: Decentralized sharing, on-chain DRM, p2p social features and payments? The project seems ambitious to say the least. Although many of its features stand in stark contrast with what Disney, Apple and co. currently exploit, so I doubt they would ever have the motivation to join in.

I'm going to follow its development for sure, thanks again for shining a light on it.

All fine on my end....how long has this been happening to you? Might be something random or temporary.

Damn, you've definitely put in the work. Thank you for providing such a detailed feedback, meaning that thanks to you this is now the most up to date resource on how to move from Note Station to Joplin for future peeps that have your same problem!

I think you can rest assured that you've made the best choice in moving to a more flexible format now, regardless of any future "Joplin vs. Obsidian vs. whatever" discussions that might come up. Because if you're annoyed with Note Station now, I can absolutely guarantee that moving decades worth of .nsx notes for all your family, potentially manually, would have been hell on earth in the future.

One last experiment, now that you can: Let's say you wanna move from Joplin to Obsidian tomorrow. These are the #1 and #2 results when searching for "Import Joplin to Obsidian". Just take a look. It's almost comically easy compared to now, so I'd say bright times are ahead :)

This might not be very popular, but I find their games section to be lacking as well. I've recently tried GOG for the first time expecting a "money for an .exe file" kind of approach for every game that had its Denuvo removed on Steam. I couldn't wait to get my hands on Dragon Quest XI without DRM!

Oh boy, how naive...

Somehow wasn't expecting this in the context of games but of course makes perfect sense. Denuvo =/= DRM, the latter being much more broad. Thanks for the knowledge nugget!