No surprise that Alexei Navalny died....unfortunately the situation in this world is not like a movie, where the bad guys are defeated. It seems to me like we've built a society that encourages villains and give little chances to anyone who wants to do anything in a more just way in this society.
Navalny had a huge following and was able to pierce with his campaign through the thick and foggy blanket of propaganda that the Russian government is so good and persistent at. And Navalny may not have been a saint or may not have changed much in Russia, who knows considering the level of corruption that infected all governments around the world, but for sure he was attacked, silenced, and eventually killed (directly or indirectly through a lot of abuse).
Many journalists have been imprisoned or even killed, and now we can see these publicly and so clearly. It is naive to think that pretty much anyone who challenges Putin drops dead or in prison and this has nothing to do with Putin. But probably these wannabe dictators do not even mind to cover up anything anymore.
We
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No surprise that Alexei Navalny died....unfortunately the situation in this world is not like a movie, where the bad guys are defeated. It seems to me like we've built a society that encourages villains and give little chances to anyone who wants to do anything in a more just way in this society.
Navalny had a huge following and was able to pierce with his campaign through the thick and foggy blanket of propaganda that the Russian government is so good and persistent at. And Navalny may not have been a saint or may not have changed much in Russia, who knows considering the level of corruption that infected all governments around the world, but for sure he was attacked, silenced, and eventually killed (directly or indirectly through a lot of abuse).
Many journalists have been imprisoned or even killed, and now we can see these publicly and so clearly. It is naive to think that pretty much anyone who challenges Putin drops dead or in prison and this has nothing to do with Putin. But probably these wannabe dictators do not even mind to cover up anything anymore.
We are noticing the modern public beheading of those who challenge the status quo. But these modern dictators do not have yet the courage to admit that they did it. They only make it very obvious that they did.
Russia seems to have become an authoritarian regime, the old school one. And this is increasingly concerning. Silencing the protesters, killing the political opponents, and infecting the media with terrible propaganda.
"make no mistake" (to quote the chief of USA), the other tribes are flavors of the same medicine. USA, EU, and the rest, are abusive in their own way, and have killed, and still killing, many innocent people. Russia is just worse. So don't let the degree of "doing bad things" take away from the fact that the other tribes are also abusive. USA may not kill the political opponents, but it is damn good at giving no chance to any radical change in the good direction of their tribe.
Anyway.... it is a sad and scary world. Humans, what a deplorable species.
I am making the documentary about Navalny freely available on our Peertube videos.trom.tf/w/b17jsjV11Khxv… and will be featured on the homepage. See how obvious it is that the guy was targeted and almost killed not long ago. Terrible.
Are we ever going to be an "intelligent human species", floating in space on a marvelous ball of wonders that we can take care of? Exploring the in and outs of it? Or are we going to continue as tribalistic and primitive creatures, exploiting and killing?....
The film tells about the events related to the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the subsequent investigation into the poisoning. On 20 August 2020, Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent,[6] falling sick during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, and was hospitalized in serious condition. Navalny was taken to a hospital in Omsk after an emergency landing there, and put in a coma. Two days later, he was evacuated to the Charité hospital in Berlin, Germany. The use of the nerve agent was confirmed by five Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) certified laboratories. Navalny blamed Russian president Vladimir Putin for his poisoning, while the Kremlin has repeatedly denied involvement.
I would love to share the category "software & hardware" for todays #ILoveFreeSoftware day: directory.trade-free.org/categ… - you can find hundreds of trade-free applications that educate, teach, inspire or let you be creative. You can share your thoughts, your opinions and ideas. You can help others, improve things and share your contributions with others. Let this directory be something valuable to our society. Something that helps other people and people can be inspired from. Thanks to all the volunteers who create these wonderful tools and share them for free! #trade-free #tfd #tradefreedirectory
Friendica (TROM Social) upgrade failed. In truth it went well, but there are a lot of settings and tweaks we need to do, so I had to postpone it for now and so I restored it...
Funny how whenever I try to watch some videos about motorhomes (useful ones about how to do this or that, or the other), and I search in English, I get the american taste of the motorhomes. Huge, massive, immense, power hungry hahaha. Like...here in Europe you can't even drive those, you'll get stuck.
A big motorhome here (over 7 meters) apparently is a small one in USA. :))
So no, I do not think I need 1000W of solar panels....or an 8 meter motorhome, or a full size fridge and a trailer for my motorbike :D.
Funny to see these differences. In America people have massive houses, cars, fridges. I think that's a lot of waste. I hate having stuff. I want us to have a very small motorhome, no bigger than 6 meters, a small fridge, some 300W solar panels, and a few things. Easier to drive, maintain, and it forces you to have less shit.
Let's see if we can buy a motorhome by the end of this year. It is going to be challenging money wise. I may try to get a job if I can, at least in the season cleaning houses and all that. Of course I'd love to focus on TROM, to do
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Funny how whenever I try to watch some videos about motorhomes (useful ones about how to do this or that, or the other), and I search in English, I get the american taste of the motorhomes. Huge, massive, immense, power hungry hahaha. Like...here in Europe you can't even drive those, you'll get stuck.
A big motorhome here (over 7 meters) apparently is a small one in USA. :))
So no, I do not think I need 1000W of solar panels....or an 8 meter motorhome, or a full size fridge and a trailer for my motorbike :D.
Funny to see these differences. In America people have massive houses, cars, fridges. I think that's a lot of waste. I hate having stuff. I want us to have a very small motorhome, no bigger than 6 meters, a small fridge, some 300W solar panels, and a few things. Easier to drive, maintain, and it forces you to have less shit.
Let's see if we can buy a motorhome by the end of this year. It is going to be challenging money wise. I may try to get a job if I can, at least in the season cleaning houses and all that. Of course I'd love to focus on TROM, to do more stuff, more projects, etc., but I cannot. If there were 200 people donating 5 Euros a month for our 200 for TROM campaign tromsite.com/donate/ then it would be enough and I would not have to trade myself for money.
In any case this month I need to focus a bit on WebApe and a few things here and there for TROM, then I plan to start a video series for TROM or personal project. But I need to figure out how to make some money in case I really cannot get enough support for TROM by the end of this year. Maybe I can grow something with a new video series and that in turn can get TROM more supporters.
Telemarketers - really good documentary. videoneat.com/documentaries/26… - and such a crazy ride. Another example of how this trade-system makes us all scumbags.
Telemarketers is an American true crime documentary series directed and produced by Adam Bhala Lough and Sam Lipman-Stern. It follows two office workers who stumble upon the truth of their work at a telemarketing center and are determined to expose the industry.
For the first time since 2014 we are able to provide access to our own RSS Feeds for TROMnews, for those who want to keep in touch with what we curate via TROMnews, but want to do so via their RSS readers. See https://tromnews.com/about/
The plugin that we've used for TROMnews for the past many years stopped working so we had to find a new one. When that happened I was sure I will have to let go of this website, simply because I need to focus on other things, especially personal stuff. If I were to get at least half the financial support that we need for TROM, then I could focus on these projects more.
But anyway, after talking to Sasha I realized that the website is indeed important, despite the fact that I am sure not many are using it. We will talk more about that. But first:
TROMnews is more work than you may think.
The idea is to pull news/videos/photos/etc from many online sources and coalesce them all into a website that makes sense. But choosing the sources, finding and RSS feed for them, and all that, is not as easy. Plus, some do not have an RSS feed so I have to use other services to create it on the fly. Also, the way I pull the RSS feeds is not arbitrary. For example I cannot grab all of the videos from a Youtube channel since that would include the absolutely retarded "shorts", so I have to tell the RSS to only pull the videos that are at least 2 minutes long. And so forth....
I ended up with over 200 sources: from websites to Youtube, from subReddits to playlists. I want to make sure we pull a featured image for each (or most posts), and to not overwhelm everyone with whatever I pull. Like I choose to pull from the subReddit "Sky Porn" only the images that have over X amount of votes. This way we make sure that add only a few a week, but the good ones. The amount of X in this case depends from subReddit to subReddit - I test these to see what's the best value.
Now you get 200 feeds that each can pull several items every hour or so. A server may struggle with so much stuff. And so the old plugin disabled many feeds daily, and I had to reactivate them to make them update...one by one, manually.
On top of all of this, I had filters for many of these feeds as to what posts can pull or exclude, based on keywords. Just to make it more relevant.
I use TROMnews daily, and so are a few friends. But I bet no one else uses it.
I want to stay in touch with what is happening in the world, but not the world of politics (the nonsense world), I want to know about science, tech, and the natural world mostly. I can so that via an RSS reader on my local machine, but my goal with TROMnews was always to provide a tool for others to stay informed and sane.
I started this project exactly 10 years ago. Because I feared that if people are idiots and feed their brains with bullshit then we have 0 chances to ever change anything in this world. Humans live inside of their brains, and if what's inside is bullshit, then they are bullshitters and we live in different worlds altogether, despite being on the same planet, inside the same reality. How can we build the future together?
If some think that gods made them, others that money is real, or that climate change is an invention, then we are fucked. And such a website makes it easy to keep your brain sane.
For me no other website is enough to use it as my news source. From BBC to PBS, or Scientific American, and so forth, they are plagued by politics and promotional articles. It is a mess.
Anyway, I spent many years trying to find the best sources, and subcategories on some good news websites that were still relevant, and I wanted them all in one place. This is why I use TROMnews. It is my main, and many times only, source of brain-food.
10 years ago when I released it I had some big hopes for it, because people were still able to choose stuff for themselves. Like they were intentionally visiting websites. Nowadays the vast majority of people are on maximum 5 platforms (Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, or Instagram). And they are all fed whatever these companies want.
A vomit of ads and retarded content. And people stay, and eat. Scroll through an endless stream of whatever they are fed with.
Sick.
So I know that I cannot make people use TROMnews. And I do not care anymore. I and a few friends use it. Plus it is a very interesting website. That's enough for me.
The new website needs more work, but it is a bit more "interesting" in my view.
Before the website was simply displaying the same kind of cards for all categories and that's all. A bit boring. Even I was not that motivated to read the news - too many of the same cards, too many news. Now the homepage looks like a news website, highlighting every category.
We even have a Recommended Documentary section that automatically pulls from VideoNeat. :)
Every page is a bit more unique to emphasize whatever category is showcasing. Here's a cool photo I just found on TROMnews:
Freaking spider! :) - that's what I love about TROMnews - it is a bundle of interesting stuff, ranging from important news, to wonderful photos or super interesting videos. It is my place, and I am not giving up on it :P.
The advantage now is that I can have a lot more control over the individual items. I can probably add a proper search and even allow others to subscribe to our own feed. So that you can subscribe to our TROMnews NEWS. How cool....
I still need to add the Dark mode and tweak it for mobile screens, but also monitor it to make sure it all works well. I came across a bunch of issues with the auto-updating of sources so let's see if it is able to keep up with updating from over 200 rss feeds.
I also lack the ability to filter the feeds based on keywords, but I can live with that... What I'd like is the ability to showcase from where an item is. Like who posted this or that, as it was before. I can only do that if I buy the pro-bro version... So if I get enough financial support for TROM I will make TROMnews a bit better.
Oh, when I was searching for a replacement WordPress plugin for TROMnews I came across many RSS Aggregators. And all, without exception form my findings, are geared towards making more money. Of course.... Who is using them like I do, to pull science/tech/interesting news for all to see? No ads, no bs...
But I was aware of this, it was always the case. People use these plugins to pull stuff from other websites into their own, to then inject ads and make money. In turn destroying the internet, which has become a garbage bin made of vomited and re-vomited content. And now it is getting easier:
The same plugin that I use, has a "pro" version that can integrate these "chat bots" to not only import the full content form other websites, but automatically rewrite it so that search engines cannot detect it as being a duplicate.
Welcome to the Internet 3.0. The complete fuckery, a tsunami of nonsense.
TROMnews is a little place of sane stuff. I hope some people appreciate it.
Stay tuned for a new TROMnews! :) - today or tomorrow. I worked so hard today to bring it back, and bring it in a new more interesting way :P #tromstuff
TROMnews needs a revamp....and that may take some time...unfortunately the plugin we used before stopped working so there are no more "news"....I am trying to fix it these days and move to another plugin which may be a good idea anyway since I wanted to get rid of the plugin that we originally used.
Man it is a shame that I cannot get enough financial support for TROM, because I could focus on these things fully, and do more....let's see how this year's going to be, but I need to focus on making some money somehow. If there were were 200 people to donate 5 Euros a month tromsite.com/donate/ I could relax and focus on these tools. I could create new video series, new projects, and scream more. Plus do new things with the project.
Sometimes I feel guilty for not doing more, but then I have to remind myself that I can't fully focus on TROM with 300 or so Euros a month.
Anyway, it is also that I was crazy busy with learning for the driving school. I should go for the bloody writt
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TROMnews needs a revamp....and that may take some time...unfortunately the plugin we used before stopped working so there are no more "news"....I am trying to fix it these days and move to another plugin which may be a good idea anyway since I wanted to get rid of the plugin that we originally used.
Man it is a shame that I cannot get enough financial support for TROM, because I could focus on these things fully, and do more....let's see how this year's going to be, but I need to focus on making some money somehow. If there were were 200 people to donate 5 Euros a month tromsite.com/donate/ I could relax and focus on these tools. I could create new video series, new projects, and scream more. Plus do new things with the project.
Sometimes I feel guilty for not doing more, but then I have to remind myself that I can't fully focus on TROM with 300 or so Euros a month.
Anyway, it is also that I was crazy busy with learning for the driving school. I should go for the bloody written exam in a week or two - am waiting for them to call me to basically go for it. From what I've heard it is quite hard to pass that exam in Spain and many need to try 2-3 times (more money, more time). But let's see....they tested me with 2 random exam tests today, at the driving school, and I passed them perfectly fine. But will see about the real exam.
I think the difference between a cult and a religion is the number of followers. If Islam or Christianity were to have a few thousand members (a little minority) we would 100% consider them cults. And terrible/crazy/primitive ones for that matter.
In Rome: "Rejection of the state religion was tantamount to treason. This was the context for Rome's conflict with Christianity, which Romans variously regarded as a form of atheism and novel superstitio"
So wait the Roman Empire adopted Christianity but the people living in Rome thought of Christianity as atheism and superstition? I don't get it :D - I have to read the sources :P
We've updated our TROM Videos too. Now Peertube has more cool features like the storyboard - you can hover with your mouse over the seekbar of a video and see thumbnails. Pretty nice!
We are currently generating the thumbnails for all of our videos (may take a while to finish), but any new video uploaded from now one will have this feature.
You can also add chapters to your videos and more. Awesome job @PeerTube !
From now on we will post a "must watch" documentary from VideoNeat on our Peertube's homepage - videos.trom.tf so make sure you check that out and subscribe to our VideoNeat channel - videos.trom.tf/c/videoneat/vid…
This year we will try to focus on the content for our TROM Videos and bring new creators, plus create new videos ourselves too.
So please, if you can, help us here tromsite.com/donate/ - we only need 160 more people to donate 5 Euros a month to support TROM forever.
Another great video by @Dima - you know that when he releases a new video, it is a good and important video, about good people doing good things. Great job man! Keep on exposing these heroes trying to do some good in this fucked up world. But also, it is great to see that you do not forget to mention that it is this society of trade that makes us do these terrible things. It is important to not forget where the infection starts....
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Another great video by @Dima - you know that when he releases a new video, it is a good and important video, about good people doing good things. Great job man! Keep on exposing these heroes trying to do some good in this fucked up world. But also, it is great to see that you do not forget to mention that it is this society of trade that makes us do these terrible things. It is important to not forget where the infection starts....
I was visiting conservation organization "Carpathia" in Romania. They're doing so many different activities to preserve and restore nature and wildlife. Bringing back European Bison's, restoring and rewilding forest, support local community, do all kind of monitoring activities for wildlife. And much much more. To find out more about Carpathia - carpathia.org/
Thank you Tio. In this situation it's so absurd that people have to buy the forest to keep it alive or pretend to be hunters. It shouldn't be like that at all, it shows how rigid and fucked this system is. Carpathia is awesome organization and they came up with such creative ideas, but it's sad that in order to keep something alive you have to buy it. And you don't buy it for yourself, that's actually will benefit everyone. absurd... #fucktrade
Even I forget that I released a massive documentary some months ago...and that I worked so hard on that. I honestly forget about that quite often and deep down I feel a bit frustrated and sad that I do not do more. But maybe I just forget that I have put so much effort into that and perhaps that drained me of energy. Of course I am crazy busy with the driving license now and am doing other things in the background for TROM, but I need to remind myself that I've done a lot to scream, and I will do more, but I cannot be always like a machine that never stops. So I need some more time to get myself back on track and create new things, scream more and in different ways, and so forth.
I am trying, but the world in which we live is like a bullet-train of nonstop things happening. Most of them are idiotic and ugly. So most people are trapped in this race. Myself included many times. That's why I forget about the documentary.
Wars, disasters, debates, problems, noise. Too much
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Even I forget that I released a massive documentary some months ago...and that I worked so hard on that. I honestly forget about that quite often and deep down I feel a bit frustrated and sad that I do not do more. But maybe I just forget that I have put so much effort into that and perhaps that drained me of energy. Of course I am crazy busy with the driving license now and am doing other things in the background for TROM, but I need to remind myself that I've done a lot to scream, and I will do more, but I cannot be always like a machine that never stops. So I need some more time to get myself back on track and create new things, scream more and in different ways, and so forth.
I am trying, but the world in which we live is like a bullet-train of nonstop things happening. Most of them are idiotic and ugly. So most people are trapped in this race. Myself included many times. That's why I forget about the documentary.
Wars, disasters, debates, problems, noise. Too much noise. And not much progress into any saner direction.
I ponder sometimes if I should stop trying, and live a quiet and simple life and not give a shit. I don't know...it is hard to imagine that "me". I started my "online activism" back in 2007 or so. That's a scary 17 years ago. And the world has only gotten worse. So why continue I ask myself....
Maybe I just need to recharge myself this year and change my personal life quite a bit. To then have some new energy and motivation to do more, and newer. But also different.
It is also really difficult to try and manage all of these projects and the stuff that I do, with 20% of what I need financially in this trade world...if at least I had enough support to keep me afloat, I could have the confidence of doing more, and doing other things too in this direction.
For now I will be busy with the retarded driving test for the next 1-2 weeks. Then if I manage to pass the exam, it should be easier. I will have to wait a few months for the practical test (driving) but I am quite sure I can take that one. So let's see how I organize myself and the TROM projects for the next months. I will post updates on my Friendica if course.
take some time off... The world will keep falling down, don't worry about that. It's better not to burn out, spent some more time outside with Sasha, travel more. Then you will also have fresh perspectives and new ideas. You don't have to run all the time... You only hurting yourself without any reasonable results, you've done more than enough already.
Am so busy and tired of the driving test bullshit....I will make a video about the retardation at some point....but man...thousands of questions that no one driving a car can ever pass. No driver I tested so far passed any test.
The image is a composite - I took separate photos for each with the telescope and the phone. The original photo looks something like this through the binoculars:
But you can zoom into the first photo and you can even see Jupiter's moons :)
There are 4 services that we use for TROM.tf via @YunoHost that are either broken or not updated in some time. I will try to look more into, but these are :
If anyone can help out that'd be awesome, because it would help us all. If not at least support Yunohost financially if you can afford that donate.yunohost.org/
Yunohost is a fantastic project that allows us to provide so many trade-free services for everyone.
I hope they/we can find a solution for these packages....
Big thanks to those who support our 200 for TROM donation campaign https://www.tromsite.com/donate/ - there are 44 people donating 5 Euros a month and we need 200 in total. We provide a lot of materials and tools - see the donation page. Your support allows us to keep these alive and relevant, and if enough support to continue to produce more.
Remember, among many things, we provide a video platform with unlimited uploads for anyone, a file hosting platform with 10GB of storage for any user that registers, a social network and a chat platform. Also a Linux Operating System. A lot, and for everyone. So please, consider donating 5 Euros a month if you can. It is the only amount we accept.
This post is a little later than I wanted it to be, because where I live just got buried under 24" +/- of snow and I haven't had internet for a couple of days. So, here we go:
Disclaimer: The day after I downloaded and installed TROMjaro, a new ISO was released. I downloaded and installed that new ISO because some changes were made and I wanted to be as current as possible for this post.
1: TROMjaro is not a beginner's distro. There are some things that need to be set up after install, and if you don't know how to go about it or where to find the setting before hand, you're going to have a bad time. CUPS for using your printer is a prime example. Like most things ARCH/ ARCH based, this is an RTFM moment.
2: TROMjaro is pretty privacy foused. Not on the level of Whonix or Tails OS (obviously), but the preinstalled software is all centered around not collecting any of your data. Even the customized Firefox is configured to block all ads, most tracking cookies, and browser fingerprinting. If that isn't enough, there is a preinstalled VPN that is beyond simple to use.
3: This distro is seriously snappy and light weight. None of the customization done to XFCE lags it down. Processor and RAM loads for daily usage on my machine are around 10% or less, which is actually pretty incredible considering I'm running a Ryzen 5 and 8 gigs of RAM on an HP Pavilion business class laptop with built in graphics.
4: There is NO BLOAT. "Out of the box", TROMjaro doesn't give you a bunch of useless software to clean out because you aren't going to use it. That's pretty much unheard of with most distros.
5: Speaking of software.... Between the Add/remove software app that has the AUR, Chaotic AUR, and Flatpak already enabled and set up, as well as TROM's Trade Free Software web app, it's pretty much impossible to not find the software you need for your specific use case. It's almost impossible to find any other distro that does all that work for you, though.
6: This distro is gorgeous. Seriously. Out of the box, the theming makes TROMjaro a pleasure to look at. The only things I've changed are switching to a different pre-installed wallpaper,and the Mac OS layout.
7: The Layout Switcher is one of the coolest things I've seen from a distro in a long time. I usually spend a bunch of time customizing a desktop environment to my liking after installing a distro. For the first time since I switched to Linux ( some time around Windows 8 - 8.1) , I haven't had to do that. Which is awesome.
8: "The Trade Free Apps" has got to be one of the best curated FOSS repositories I have ever seen. Currently there are 700+ pieces of software there, from video editors to matrix clients, none which collect data or have any telemetry. It's truly incredible.
I'd Like to be able to say "Now on to all the bad things about TROMjaro", but I can't. At least, not yet. I haven't had anything that I would consider a major issue. A lot of work has obviously gone in to the development of TROMjaro, and it shows. I think I've found my new permanent daily driver distro,
Xantulon :mastodon: :pixelfed:
in reply to Tio • • •In Rome: "Rejection of the state religion was tantamount to treason. This was the context for Rome's conflict with Christianity, which Romans variously regarded as a form of atheism and novel superstitio"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary…
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Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Tio
in reply to Xantulon :mastodon: :pixelfed: • •Xantulon :mastodon: :pixelfed: likes this.
Xantulon :mastodon: :pixelfed:
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