An Icelander asked if I had Twitter. I said I have Mastodon. Their response was, “Mastodon? What the hell?” So… it sounds like we need to do more Iceland-promos on here. So here are some pretty Iceland shots I took recently
Let's try to do a Countdown to Karstmas! Every day I will post one of my cave photography images. If you'd like to enjoy them along with me, follow me or at least follow #karstmas which I just made up and will be using.
To start off I'll share this photo of Sótano de las Golondrinas, often referred to as simply Golondrinas, which is a very deep pit in Aquismón (Mexico). The rappel is 1200 feet (365 m), straight down. No breaks, just one long rope. It was, at least at the time I did it, the deepest cave single pitch rappel in the world. I think it still holds that record - there are deeper, but not that can be done as a single rope, straight down, no rebelays or deviations.
This image of mine has been *widely* stolen and used, usually by travel companies. They are screenshot images of my work, with my watermark cropped out. You have probably seen this image if you were ever on Facebook, it makes the rounds almost annually on "best of" type pages. Despite it's popularity, I've barely made any money of
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Let's try to do a Countdown to Karstmas! Every day I will post one of my cave photography images. If you'd like to enjoy them along with me, follow me or at least follow #karstmas which I just made up and will be using.
To start off I'll share this photo of Sótano de las Golondrinas, often referred to as simply Golondrinas, which is a very deep pit in Aquismón (Mexico). The rappel is 1200 feet (365 m), straight down. No breaks, just one long rope. It was, at least at the time I did it, the deepest cave single pitch rappel in the world. I think it still holds that record - there are deeper, but not that can be done as a single rope, straight down, no rebelays or deviations.
This image of mine has been *widely* stolen and used, usually by travel companies. They are screenshot images of my work, with my watermark cropped out. You have probably seen this image if you were ever on Facebook, it makes the rounds almost annually on "best of" type pages. Despite it's popularity, I've barely made any money off of this, but others certainly have!
Just wondering since you've been sharing on Mastodon and the fediverse, have you ever considered starting your own Peertube channel? And if you don't want to trust any instance to stick around for the long haul, you can get managed hosting ... someone pointed out this deal to me recently. $1/mth from fedihost.co/pricing it comes with 10gb !!! Wow:)
@LPS I want to make something when I have the brainspace because everything I have (timelapses) is really outdated. I didn't even use selection tool, nor larger airbrushes!
Recording is out of question for the time being, my current computer hates it, and it'd have to be silent haha, but at least a proper timelapse would be nice.
I toyed with recording a pencil sketch last year but they're tiny and so is my phone storage. Couldn't catch much of it. 😅
@LPS I've been trying one feature at a time and I didn't have the energy to look at this one yet.
I'm not sure how it'd play with my habit of versioning files. I'm afraid it'd eat up unnecessary space too or worse, make files slower to load.
I've been having a few performance issues in recent weeks and I'm playing with GParted right now, extending my / partition to see if I can stop my system from freezing under load. 😂
Julien goes into details on the conception and functional design of Project Gold's shattered modeling and animations. The first article of a series. #b3d #BlenderStudio #ProjectGold #shards #modeling
@openSUSE Linux this is a question for the entire #linux community, has anyone figured out how to get #adobe functioning yet, it's literally the only software I cannot replace...for my livelihood:(
@lps no and there is no great replacements for Photoshop possibly krita since you can add the machine learning stuff, but it will never be the equivalent you want it to be unless you put in the work. 
You’re better paying for that $13 a month service that gives you photo editing, canva or something.  Video paid daVinci resolve is the best but at the same time it’s a nightmare to install so I recommend installing it via nix pkg manager 
@Yuki Linux @openSUSE Linux is there a technical reason that it can't work that someone can explain to me? I'm hoping at one point there could be an interpreter to make it work like what Value has done for gaming. Sadly when working in an environment where files are being shared on larger projects, I have no choice:(
@lps If CC allows for multiple installs, you can test in a virtual machine…
I used PS (well, camera raw really) in Wine; was a bit of a hassle to set up but worked reasonably well. Then again, Wine has improved enormously over the last few years but it'll always be an uphill battle to keep up with modern software, so YMMV.
An alternative would be to keep the old win10 license for a virtual machine that you use exclusively for Adobe®™ stuff.
There used to be these few strange CDs, free to download and then burn yourself. With software that bore the name OpenSUSE 9.0. Crazy cool. And the foundation stone for W2K being my last Windows and me not even installing MS products in a VM. So this Windows 10 is an update of W2K and has a built-in split-view for the file-manager?
While I love the recent Bluesky rally, I also want to remind everyone that Mastodon is the only major social media that is properly decentralized, billionaire-proof and VC-free for now. I get that most people couldn't care less about protocols, but if you do, I recommend maintaining a presence here :)
@singe Totally. And even if some future VC were to offer Eugen a truckload of $$ (I think he's mentioned being approached by certain money-having parties and turning them down), but even if he were to take it, the larger Fediverse would live on through the variety of forks and other AP-compatible platforms out there. This is the place to be for sure 😄👍
Mastodon shouldn't be resting on its laurels though. Needs many improvements urgently:
- multiple domains per instance - support for all #ActivityPub object types, event if minimal - support math notation - simpler tech stack for smaller instances (solid_queue etc) - Better support for alternative user interfaces (eg: Whalebird which emulates Slack/Discord and Elk that emulates Twitter)
And one step back, Akkoma doesn't want to implement multiple domains per instance. Worse, a single dev closed the issue without any discussions of pros and cons, indicating that it's mostly a single-person project. 🫤
This was a great talk, thank you! Before studying graphic design I used Inkscape a lot, and of course in class we used Adobe but I switched to Affinity after graduating. Since installing a Linux partition I've been trying to return to Inkscape and I'm having a hard time getting used to the clunky interface so everything is a lot slower - do you have any tips? You mentioned an Inkscape book in the video that your kids are using - can you share the title?
@scopefilter Oh, thanks! My main advice is to persist, because it will take time to reprogram your brain. You'll get there though. @CRogers presentation hasn't been published yet, but it is eye opening. His book is called "Design Made Easy with Inkscape" amazon.com/Design-Made-Easy-In…
Reach out if you hit a roadblock. Thanks again for the kind words!
@ProdigalFrog @harrys_balzac Friendica, together with Diaspora, is a founding father/mother of today's Fediverse. 14 years ago it was still called ‘one Network’ or ‘The Federation’.
It supports various protocols and can therefore connect different networks. You can integrate any other services via an add-on system. Since Lemmy and Friendica support groups, we can natively join the threads and play along with them as if we were on Lemmy ourselves
@Matthias @ProdigalFrog @harrys_balzac I love #friendica, it connects to all the protocols.. Just seems the level of polish/design/marketing of #mastodon stole the show...let that be a lesson to devs everywhere, design matters ;)
BTW not sure how many people know #raccoon the android app on #fdroid, it's an amazing friendica app!
@marqle @lps @feb , @ProdigalFrog @harrys_balzac I still have a couple of #Friendica accounts, & historically had a few others. For me, all the functional advantages Friendica has over other software, including Mastodon, are largely negated by its comparatively hideous lethargy. It is commonplace that sending posts can take several minutes to complete, & even on the best days it can take 30 - 60 seconds, vs nearly instantaneous on my Masto instances. Similarly, incoming posts often lag badly behind what i see in my Masto instances [on bad days by hours]. Given the large majority of my friends & regular interlocutors are on Masto instances, having ~real-time chats with them is nearly impossible in F, but elementary in M. It's such a pity.
@LPS Technically, it's incredible. For the front end, you need people from the community who are able to translate the complexity into a simple structure.
@ProdigalFrog @harrys_balzac I totally agree with this, I have a feeling more people coming from #facebook would greatly prefer #friendica ...marketing is everything. That and a polished mobile app ... And cross platform:)
@LPS In my opinion, from the fediverse point of view, the really interesting thing about Raccoon is that, since it is compatible with mastodon, it manages to give even Mastodon users the pleasure of using Activitypub groups, whether they are Lemmy communities, Magazines Mbin, Friendica groups or gup.pe.
Mastodon's design in fact penalizes users of groups, but this app solves the problem for Mastodon users too
Facebook alternative from 2010. Pre-dates diaspora* by a few months.
Remember diaspora*? In summer 2010, four young fellows asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding so they could spend the summer developing a free, open-source, decentralised Facebook alternative. Mind you, summer 2010 was when Cambridge Analytica was still a hot topic. So they got $320,000, and the mainstream media wrote about a "Facebook killer" in development.
They started in May, 2010. It was in late autumn when they delivered a first, very early alpha release that was very incomplete and only ran on Mac servers. It took years until even a first beta release, not to mention replacing the whole dev team.
Friendica (originally Mistpark) was developed by one man. In four months, from March to July, 2010. With zero budget. And Mistpark, as it was when it was first released in July, 2010, could have easily mopped the floor with today's diaspora*, feature-wise, without even breaking a sweat.
Friendica does not try to be a Facebook clone. It tries to be "like Facebook, but way
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Facebook alternative from 2010. Pre-dates diaspora* by a few months.
Remember diaspora*? In summer 2010, four young fellows asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding so they could spend the summer developing a free, open-source, decentralised Facebook alternative. Mind you, summer 2010 was when Cambridge Analytica was still a hot topic. So they got $320,000, and the mainstream media wrote about a "Facebook killer" in development.
They started in May, 2010. It was in late autumn when they delivered a first, very early alpha release that was very incomplete and only ran on Mac servers. It took years until even a first beta release, not to mention replacing the whole dev team.
Friendica (originally Mistpark) was developed by one man. In four months, from March to July, 2010. With zero budget. And Mistpark, as it was when it was first released in July, 2010, could have easily mopped the floor with today's diaspora*, feature-wise, without even breaking a sweat.
Friendica does not try to be a Facebook clone. It tries to be "like Facebook, but way better". With lots of unnecessary cruft not taken over, but with all-new features integrated. For example, Friendica can be used as a full-blown blog with all text formatting shebang you could possibly imagine a blog to have, all the way to an unlimited number of images that can be embedded within the text, like, with text above the image and more text below the image.
By the way, Friendica comes with a built-in file storage complete with a file manager where you can upload images or whatever. Unlike on Mastodon and Lemmy, your images don't sink into some data nirvana.
Unlike all the microblogging stuff in the Fediverse, Friendica does not have any arbitrary character limit.
Remember Google+? It was a full-on diaspora* rip-off. Everyone things Google+ had invented circles. Google+ had actually stolen diaspora's aspects. But Friendica had them first, even before diaspora, and calls them lists.
Also, Friendica has been supporting moderated discussion groups at various levels of privacy from the get-go.
But Friendica's biggest killer feature is and has always been that it can connect to a whole lot of stuff. It can connect to the entire ActivityPub-using Fediverse, it can connect to diaspora*, it can connect to anything that uses OStatus, it can cross-post to WordPress and compatible blogs, it can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds while generating its own Atom feeds, it can "federate" via e-mail, its built-in chat is XMPP-compatible. You can also integrate a Bluesky account, you can integrate a Tumblr account, you can integrate an 𝕏 account (but the node admin still has to shell out a couple million dollars for a full API key to be able to make full use of it), and for a few months around 2012, you could even integrate a Facebook account into Friendica until Facebook made extracting content to third parties illegal.
The idea was that your friends are all over the place, you're on Friendica, and you can stay in touch with all your friends without having to use all the stuff that your friends use. You can stay in touch with them on Friendica even though they're all over the place.
@ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝 @Jupiter Rowland Hubzilla is a project that has been in a critical phase for several years. Too ahead of its time, too difficult to use, too little known and too little funded.
Before asking for an app for Hubzilla, you should personally commit to supporting the project:
@The Pirate Post @Fediverse @𝔻𝕚𝕖𝕘𝕠 🦝🧑🏻💻🍕 thank you do much for your hard work on this app, it's beautiful, well thought out and was so needed for friendica 🙏
@LPS extending the acknowledgement to @macfranc who talked to me about the need of an app for Friendica and helped me determining the roadmap, plus a big thank you to all beta testers: this is a very young project and it wouldn't be what it is without the help of all early adopters. 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
I don't know if it's from the same developer, but I still have the Racoon for Lemmy app. It was sad to see them give up, I hope someone archived jthe community and the APKs. It was a good Lemmy app.
Its honestly mindblowingly cool just scrolling through this comment section on lemmy and seeing people from all different platforms and instances just chatting with one another
Concert goers dancing next to your concentration camp, who know exactly what's going on in your concentration camp, who often set up picnic chairs to watch your concertation camp get bombed.
Made the GUI on #fedialgo a lot more user friendly. At this point I don't know how I could really use Mastodon without having an adjustable #algorithm curate my feed a little bit.
@lps couldn't agree more... the tyranny of reverse chronological order is by far my biggest issue with this app. when i found @pkreissel's original implementation of #fedialgo it was like manna from heaven.
instead of “VC Funding” we should call it “Faustian Bargaining”
ie. “Another company is proud to report they took $61 million in faustian series A bargaining. They assure us that they will be the first company to somehow avoid calamity from this cursed arrangement. We are told they plan to enjoy the riches in the short term and then pass the fated collapse along to someone else down the line”
If you are reading this, know that you are deeply loved and cared for by the universe. Trust in the journey you are on, and remember that every step you take is guided by a higher wisdom. Embrace the challenges as they come, for they are shaping you into the person you are meant to be.
Rusty Bertrand
in reply to Carly Sagan • • •Derick Rethans
in reply to Carly Sagan • • •Yes! Here are some more #Iceland photos.
#photography