Many thanks to Rafael who became our 83rd supporter - https://www.tromsite.com/donate/ - some 100 more people needed to sustain TROM forever. 5 Euros a month is not a big amount and you will support a ton of projects - see the donation page for details.
200 people x 5€/month = TROM FOREVER 76 200 for TROM 50 of 200 donors Donation Amount: 5 € Monthly CARD Select Payment Method Stripe Personal Info First Name * Last Name Email Address * Make this an anonymous donation.
I will delay with the video series I wanted to make for TROM. I am working for a WebApe project/website, so it is what it is. If I had the minimum support that I need (see here https://www.tromsite.com/donate/ ) then I would focus 100% on TROM.
But the video series will come.... ;). That I know for sure!
200 people x 5€/month = TROM FOREVER 76 200 for TROM 50 of 200 donors Donation Amount: 5 € Monthly CARD Select Payment Method Stripe Personal Info First Name * Last Name Email Address * Make this an anonymous donation.
Tested the move to a new server for our Matrix/Synapse. 60GB database, 15GB of files. All worked great! We are ready to move. I am trying to find the safest and easiest way to manage the entire TROM.tf server.
So. I bought a Hetzner Auction server for 45 Euros a month - similar to what I am currently paying for Contabo. But this server has 4TB of SSD, 8 core i7-6700 CPU and 32GB of RAM. Overall better than Contabo's. What we needed was more storage space. And now we got double.
So Matrix being so massive takes around 25 minutes to backup and around 40-50 minutes to restore from a backup. But this is by far the worst of them all....
Basically for the new server I want to be able to easily restore a service/app in case it fails to update. Now I can. Plus I am setting up Timeshift since you do not have snapshots for a dedicated server....but with Timeshift I can restore in case I fuck up the system itself or cannot, for some odd reason, restore an app from a backup.
I did so many tests and @
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Tested the move to a new server for our Matrix/Synapse. 60GB database, 15GB of files. All worked great! We are ready to move. I am trying to find the safest and easiest way to manage the entire TROM.tf server.
So. I bought a Hetzner Auction server for 45 Euros a month - similar to what I am currently paying for Contabo. But this server has 4TB of SSD, 8 core i7-6700 CPU and 32GB of RAM. Overall better than Contabo's. What we needed was more storage space. And now we got double.
So Matrix being so massive takes around 25 minutes to backup and around 40-50 minutes to restore from a backup. But this is by far the worst of them all....
Basically for the new server I want to be able to easily restore a service/app in case it fails to update. Now I can. Plus I am setting up Timeshift since you do not have snapshots for a dedicated server....but with Timeshift I can restore in case I fuck up the system itself or cannot, for some odd reason, restore an app from a backup.
I did so many tests and @Roma helped out a lot. He is also looking at another option, using Proxmox to manage the server, this way we can have snapshots. Snapshots are fast and I have used them a lot on Contabo, but the massive downside is that you restore the ENTIRE server with snapshots, losing data from any other services that are running between the time you took a snapshot and restored it. In other words if I take a system Snapshot before updating our MAtrix, and takes me 15 minutes to update Matrix without backing it up, and then I realize it failed to update....with a snapshot I can restore the ENTIRE system in seconds. Nice. Matrix works now. However, it will revert back how the entire system was 15 minutes ago for TROM Files, Friendica, and everything else...
It means that if you made posts on friendica, synced files on TROM FIles and so forth, they will be LOST. Yeah I could easily restore a failed Matrix update but I mess up the rest of the apps, at least a little bit.
Therefore I need to do this properly per-app basis, despite taking around 1h to restore Matrix, is worth it I guess....
The following days we are ready to move the entire trom.tf!
Thanks for reaching out to Contabo customer support. For internal reasons we had to take the decision not to provide you with any new products this time, we are awfully sorry to say. "For internal reasons" means we are not going to communicate our motivation. Our decision is not up for debate; we kindly ask for your understanding. Please do not take our decision personally. It has nothing to do with you but rather with reasons that we are not going to explain since we do not want you to misunderstand us or misinterpret our statements. Exactly because of this, we consider all information as internal company information. Still, we are always available for you personally and will respond to all of your questions as soon as possible. Always feel free to contact us.
I am not even sure if this is legal to refuse without explanation. But it is time to move away from these terrible human beings. It is already a struggle to work on these trade-free projects and provide for everyone, last thing I need is t
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Yeah so Contabo will not sell me any new service:
Thanks for reaching out to Contabo customer support. For internal reasons we had to take the decision not to provide you with any new products this time, we are awfully sorry to say. "For internal reasons" means we are not going to communicate our motivation. Our decision is not up for debate; we kindly ask for your understanding. Please do not take our decision personally. It has nothing to do with you but rather with reasons that we are not going to explain since we do not want you to misunderstand us or misinterpret our statements. Exactly because of this, we consider all information as internal company information. Still, we are always available for you personally and will respond to all of your questions as soon as possible. Always feel free to contact us.
I am not even sure if this is legal to refuse without explanation. But it is time to move away from these terrible human beings. It is already a struggle to work on these trade-free projects and provide for everyone, last thing I need is this kind of shitty treatment and unfair.
I'm sure Hetzner would want your business. This is making me rethink the server I have at Contabo too to be honest. I don't wish to support businesses that treat people poorly (employees or customers).
Hetzner seems to be the only viable option but I've heard horror stories from people using it too. And the sad thing is that I do not have a business, I do not make any money, I provide free services for people, and materials. So I have these servers for other people basically, and yet I am treated like that.
Contabo has shockingly low prices, and shockingly terrible "customer support" and overall relation with the "customers".
Take this for what it's worth but I moved all my servers off of Linode when they were bought out by Akamai over to Hetzner. Most of my servers are in Falkenstein Germany, and a few are in Seattle. When possible I'm using ARM64 servers (only available in one data center last I checked). Hetzner has been very good both service wise and customer service wise. But I use auto-pay and have all charges going to my credit card. In all I spend about 100€ with them a month. I also have one Contabo server (my mail server) and I've been loathe to move it over to Hetzner because ... knock wood ... anybody that runs a mail server knows this ... my subnet is not blocked anywhere. It's $15 a month for the server. I could probably pay less at Hetzner but honestly I'm afraid to "fix something" that's not "broken" there.
But you're the 2nd person in about as many months where I've read horror stories from Contabo or about the way Contabo has treated a customer. You're the first I've heard where Contabo flat out refused to sell any servers to, too.
I had been looking to diversifying
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Take this for what it's worth but I moved all my servers off of Linode when they were bought out by Akamai over to Hetzner. Most of my servers are in Falkenstein Germany, and a few are in Seattle. When possible I'm using ARM64 servers (only available in one data center last I checked). Hetzner has been very good both service wise and customer service wise. But I use auto-pay and have all charges going to my credit card. In all I spend about 100€ with them a month. I also have one Contabo server (my mail server) and I've been loathe to move it over to Hetzner because ... knock wood ... anybody that runs a mail server knows this ... my subnet is not blocked anywhere. It's $15 a month for the server. I could probably pay less at Hetzner but honestly I'm afraid to "fix something" that's not "broken" there.
But you're the 2nd person in about as many months where I've read horror stories from Contabo or about the way Contabo has treated a customer. You're the first I've heard where Contabo flat out refused to sell any servers to, too.
I had been looking to diversifying my server deployments and using Contabo more because I really want to deploy some servers to Canada and Hetzner doesn't have a Canadian presence and OVH flat out won't sell me any VPSes in Canada since I'm a US citizen.....
@gme I’ve been using hetzner dedicated servers for 6 months now and they’ve been nothing but amazing as far as service AND customer support. They’re very technically competent and have been able to handle whatever request I throw their way. I haven’t come close to a bad experience except when I accidentally didn’t masquerade my VMs on a host and they sent me a mail about that but that was my issue and an easy fix. I also love that their installimage tool and others are open source too! https://github.com/hetzneronline
You know I can't remember. I think they did. But I also opened an account under my business. I do remember they asked for my business registration information. I didn't have a problem with that. I've worked is security and in internet/ web my entire adult professional life so I completely understand KYC (know your customer) type requirements and laws.
@gme a third party service had to verify I was a human being and that was one of the verification methods. I think it’s honestly to combat fraud and bad actors (paying customers or not).
Awful.. Sounds like a typical message from the bank or something when they refuse you to open an account or dismantle an existing one with no explanaition. Sadly, banks are allowed to do so by the law now. And this is considering you can't survive sometimes without a bank account at all. But some hosting provider? Give me a break 😤
With banks in many countries no reason is code for money laundering, since laws often make it illegal to tell someone that they're under investigation.
For example under UK law it's a crime carrying a maximum 2 year prison sentence.
An Act to establish the Assets Recovery Agency and make provision about the appointment of its Director and his functions (including Revenue functions), to provide for confiscation orders in relation to persons who benefit from criminal conduct and f…
Today's TROMcast - https://videos.trom.tf/w/1ACdcCjdTdVsuugbPP6K1y - streamed using our own Jitsi Meet instance for the call, to our own @PeerTube instance, and using a remote runner for transcoding the stream. Worked flawlessly. This Peertube feature (the remote runners) is truly game changing. Thank you boys and girls! :) #tromlive
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Today's TROMcast - https://videos.trom.tf/w/1ACdcCjdTdVsuugbPP6K1y - streamed using our own Jitsi Meet instance for the call, to our own @PeerTube instance, and using a remote runner for transcoding the stream. Worked flawlessly. This Peertube feature (the remote runners) is truly game changing. Thank you boys and girls! :) #tromlive
TROMcast: TROM II - A Message to the Aliens (cast)
In this TROMcast we will discuss about the recently released TROM documentary "A Message to the Aliens".
The documentary description:
We live in a world where everyone is busy, everyone is consumed, everyone seems confused. Money, social credits, ads, data collection, prices and billionaires. Climate change? Who cares!
A one-marble world, floating in a giant soup of stars and planets, clustered in donut-shaped galaxies.
What are these humans living for?
In a 5 hour, 4 parts documentary, we try to explore their world, to understand what makes them human, what makes them enslave their kind, destroy their habitat, and be unaware of their place in this universe. But also what makes them so special.
Through the lives of 5 humans, we look at the culture that creates them, their struggles growing up on this planet, and where they are headed toward.
TROM II: A Message to the Aliens Year: 2023 / Duration: 4 parts, 5 hours We live in a world where everyone is busy, everyone is consumed, everyone seems confused. Money, social credits, ads, data collection, prices and billionaires.
So today I made a poster for TROM II that I may release tomorrow or at the same time that I release the trailer. This week for sure. I've also worked on tromsite.com to get the release pages ready 😛. Not public yet but did a lot of work today. 5 nonstop hours on my laptop, battery mode, and still 20% more battery left. Not bad at all considering that I pushed the CPU a little bit here and there.
Anyway we will try to release the trailer with several subtitles so maybe it will take us a few more days to do it. #tromstuff
I have finished the bloody color correction for TROM II. Again. And you bet this is it. I can't handle it any longer. It is good. I'll make a big post about this "behind the scenes" work for TROM II, after I release it in June. The trailer is almost done too. Next week I will send the documentary to those who come for the TROM Meeting and to a few close friends. I will also release the trailer this next week.
After that the focus will be to first make a transcription of the entire monster, to then have others translate it into several languages before the release. Ideally at the beginning of June we will release it on our Peertube with a Spanish, Romanian, and Russian subtitles. Maybe more. Maybe French and German too. Let's see.
Today I felt inspired to work on the documentary trailer and I think I found a perfect combination. It gives me goosebumps and I watched it 40 times already haha. Only the backbone is made but that was the important part. I just got inspired and things worked great.... There is a particular song that many may not know, it is a few decades old, that kinda describes the society/world we live in. And that song, as you'll see is quite a powerful part of this documentary.
Anyway. Making some progress with the color correcting too and now I am more hopeful that i may finish the color correcting in a week and by mid May there will probably be a trailer released.
Let's see. But damn I am happy that I could put together something for the trailer, even if it is far from being done. We need a good and relevant trailer for this massive documentary. If most people would like this documentary even 20% as much as @Sasha @Georgi @Aaron and @Dima liked it, it would be a success.
I am completely losing my mind over the "color correcting" bullshit for TROM II. 5 people, recorded over some 6 months period. For each we recorded 2-3 days, for me a few weeks probably. Each recording was some 3 hours long. We had to pause every 20 minutes because the camera was overheating.
Now the idea was to have everyone filmed on a dark background. We had a dark piece of material behind us, but a small room, and powerful lights. That created a non-dark background. At times it looked grey, at times blueish, at times brownish....
Combine all that with so many interruptions while filming over a period of months, and of course you realize that you can't have the lights placed in the same way. So you end up with some interviews being super exposed, some having different shadows, etc.. Georgi had a very white tshirt which made the lights reflect back a lot making her face washed out; I had a dark-blue shirt which made it so difficult to try and make the background pitch dark....
Also, people change colors while recording...Sasha for example has bright red cheeks... show more
I am completely losing my mind over the "color correcting" bullshit for TROM II. 5 people, recorded over some 6 months period. For each we recorded 2-3 days, for me a few weeks probably. Each recording was some 3 hours long. We had to pause every 20 minutes because the camera was overheating.
Now the idea was to have everyone filmed on a dark background. We had a dark piece of material behind us, but a small room, and powerful lights. That created a non-dark background. At times it looked grey, at times blueish, at times brownish....
Combine all that with so many interruptions while filming over a period of months, and of course you realize that you can't have the lights placed in the same way. So you end up with some interviews being super exposed, some having different shadows, etc.. Georgi had a very white tshirt which made the lights reflect back a lot making her face washed out; I had a dark-blue shirt which made it so difficult to try and make the background pitch dark....
Also, people change colors while recording...Sasha for example has bright red cheeks at times 😀 - it is a feature of her own genes. haha. So at times she is normal looking, at times very red in one cheek. And so on....
And my task was to make them all look like it is ONE recording since I often switch between recordings in the same scene.....
And I did it but I made us all kinda darkish and Sasha's cheek overexposed 😀).
Now combine this with the fact that originally I did the color correcting on my old laptop that had an LCD screen, and later on, I did it on the new laptop that has an OLED screen and I realized that some things looked very different. I had to redo this so many times. Also when I do color correcting at daytime vs night things look different....
I am going INSANE. And for what? The message matters....
Oh and add to it that Kdenlive is buggy when it comes to this so pretty often when I color correct it ruins the entire documentary and I need to move the clips (tens at times) from one track to another...it really fucks the entire documentary.
And I have to do this for a 5h documentary.
This is not healthy. I will give it 2-3 more days to see if I can do something, if not I'll probably give up and leave it as it is. I am telling you this is something no one notices unless you start to talk about it, then you start to notice some things. And if you want to "correct" that, then you fall into this black hole where there is no end in sight in terms of what and how you can improve.
Damn that sounds frustrating. Do you think it would've been better if you used a green screen or something? As a viewer I don't care much about what the background is, just that the people in foreground are clearly visible. And if you think people won't notice it unless someone points it out then that's probably true, minor details like colors go under the radar while watching a 5 hour documentary, so unless something's really bad and sticks out to the viewer you shouldn't worry about it 😀
idk if using a green screen would have been better....but overall it is fine, even how it is now. I just have to accept that I can't make it "perfect" and that Kdenlive has a nasty bug that should be the reason not to continue this for more than a few days 😁.
And yeah am telling you for sure that you wont pay attention to these things at all. Even I forgot completely when we were watching it last time with Sasha.
I just spent 5 hours re-watching the TROM II documentary with Sasha 😀. That's it I won't watch it ever again. I watched it a million times by now haha. Am sooooo tired. But yeah I think the documentary is ok. Maybe good. Maybe great for some. IDK anymore. Can't wait to make it public. We at least spotted some errors that I have to fix. No big deal. Let's see if the rest will find anything new.
These days I was "derailed" from the documentary work. I have some minor issues with my head holes (ears) and what bothers me the most is waking up early in the morning to go to the hospital. But also we have to deal with the paperwork for Sasha.....so my sleeping schedule got fucked up severely and I struggle to do the color-correcting for the documentary.
It is what it is. I will try to work more these days to see how it goes. I did a bunch of improvements but I'd like to do more. #tromstuff
Ok I can finally confirm the documentary is all done. I checked the last part, all good. I am only fixing the colors for some interviews. This is my task for the next few days. #tromstuff
Part 4, the last part, of the TROM II documentary is done! Finally! I still have to check the final render tomorrow but that's only for video purposes to make sure all looks good. I struggled with this part a lot. I hope it makes sense and it is not boring.
I also realized that some interviews look kinda red-in-the-face and some yellow :D . And I may have to take a few days to fix that for all of the parts.
Let's see....
But yeah the documentary is done, except for what I just said.
I really hope the color-fixing won't drive me crazy, but I will do my best to be done in just a few days time. Then send it to all who were part of the documentary. Let's see how it goes....
My laptop also freezes for the past weeks, randomly, when I work on the documentary. I hope it won't go nuts now....maybe be software related, may be hardware although I cleaned it recently...
Today I was a bit in the mood to work again on the documentary. I finished 55 minutes in total now. Still some 25 minutes to improve. Thing is it seems that I got a bit lazy towards the end of the documentary when I made it and I left a few parts that are not as good in terms of video editing as I would want to. They are too simple....
I am also trying to add a few more minutes to it. Even record something new, for like 3 minutes. I tried today and I recorded 20 minutes. No good. I need 3 minutes! No more! 😁
I have tortured myself with this documentary beyond belief haha. I will NEVER make a project that lasts more than a few months to finish. NEVER. At least not in the next decade! It is really tiring.
I just kinda hate myself for not putting more work into this last part, at least towards the end of it in some parts. And now I need to work a lot more than I expected. It is also frustrating to know that there are only some 25 minutes left....the rest is done. But annoying 25 minutes!
Anyway. I will try to calm down, relax, take more breaks if need... show more
Today I was a bit in the mood to work again on the documentary. I finished 55 minutes in total now. Still some 25 minutes to improve. Thing is it seems that I got a bit lazy towards the end of the documentary when I made it and I left a few parts that are not as good in terms of video editing as I would want to. They are too simple....
I am also trying to add a few more minutes to it. Even record something new, for like 3 minutes. I tried today and I recorded 20 minutes. No good. I need 3 minutes! No more! 😁
I have tortured myself with this documentary beyond belief haha. I will NEVER make a project that lasts more than a few months to finish. NEVER. At least not in the next decade! It is really tiring.
I just kinda hate myself for not putting more work into this last part, at least towards the end of it in some parts. And now I need to work a lot more than I expected. It is also frustrating to know that there are only some 25 minutes left....the rest is done. But annoying 25 minutes!
Anyway. I will try to calm down, relax, take more breaks if needed, and then work little by little. At times it happens that I wake up and be so in the mood that I can do a ton of work. Anyway, will see...
I finished 44 minutes for the last part of the documentary but....for one I need to work a bit more on this than I expected. To make it a bit better in terms of video editing. Second, I got so tired these past weeks I feel like I'm gonna pass out haha. I wake up tired, I work while being tired. I am tired. Maybe I need to put it in my head that I have to finish the documentary this month, not this week.
IDK how I'm going to find the energy to make a trailer. Maybe I'll leave that for May. I may need to take a break for 2 or so days. Go out. Not think about the documentary at all. Then come back and finish it.
The reason I am pushing myself so much is because of the TROM Meeting in May, but also because I am sick of working on this documentary for so long. I want to finish it.
Here are 3 scenarios:
The IDEAL: I finish it and the trailer this month. Plus deal with the poster, tromsite.com, and the sources. I release it in the first week of May.
The ACCEPTABLE: I finish it and the t
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I finished 44 minutes for the last part of the documentary but....for one I need to work a bit more on this than I expected. To make it a bit better in terms of video editing. Second, I got so tired these past weeks I feel like I'm gonna pass out haha. I wake up tired, I work while being tired. I am tired. Maybe I need to put it in my head that I have to finish the documentary this month, not this week.
IDK how I'm going to find the energy to make a trailer. Maybe I'll leave that for May. I may need to take a break for 2 or so days. Go out. Not think about the documentary at all. Then come back and finish it.
The reason I am pushing myself so much is because of the TROM Meeting in May, but also because I am sick of working on this documentary for so long. I want to finish it.
Here are 3 scenarios:
The IDEAL: I finish it and the trailer this month. Plus deal with the poster, tromsite.com, and the sources. I release it in the first week of May.
The ACCEPTABLE: I finish it and the trailer this month. Deal with the poster, tromsite.com, and the sources in the first half of May. I release it in the second half of May.
The UNCOMFORTABLE: I finish it and the trailer before the second half of May. I deal with the rest after the TROM Meeting. I release it in June...
Fast and Furious I finished 45 minutes for part 3 of TROM II. Yummy fast 😀 - some 15 minutes left but I may have to add some 5-7 minutes more to the mix from some leftover footage....In any case I am quite sure I'll finish it this week. Maybe even tomorrow if I am in beast-mode.
Kdenlive has a weird bug with the text tool that makes the entire Kdenlive project freeze. And you can only kill that process and restart it over again. Kinda pissed me off today 😁. Crashed at least 20-30 times on me. I could report it but I don't even have time for that now, I work work work.
The second part, the huge one, of the TROM II documentary is done! Man that was a lot of work to fix/improve some stuff.
I can't fit the entire timeline in one screenshot but here it is:
Could it be better? Of course. Will I work more on it? Of course not. :)
2 more parts left. And these ones, from what I remember, are a lot less work. They are together as lenghty as this second part so there is a good chance I am done with them all in less than 10 days.
A new TROMjaro ISO is out https://forum.tromjaro.com/t/tromjaro-2023-03-31/164 - with a few minor fixes and a lot of updates coming from Manjaro's Stable. I love it when we do not have to do anything new to TROMjaro. It just works and that's it. Functional, user friendly, and I'd say beautiful 😀.
Also, how wonderful that now we are not blasted with spam-accounts on our Peertube instance. A simple solution I asked Peertube for, improved the situation immensely. A simple form when registering forcing everyone to say why they want to join. And their accounts are held for approval. This way I can filter out most spambots. Beautiful!
The normal Manjaro Stable updates plus: Docklike stuff The apps panel, where the opened apps are displayed, got an update. One minor change for our default TROMjaro: right click on any app from Docklike then Properties.
50% of TROM II, second part, done 😀. This part is the biggest and probably the hardest to finish the editing for. But in just 2 days I checked and fixed 50 minutes. This is much faster than I expected. But I worked like a motherfucker these past days. Maybe I'll take it easier tomorrow.
Oh yes, I meant to say more about what drew me to TROMjaro. The first thing that is important to me with any project is understanding what the true motivations are that are driving it.
Ok I finished the first part. It is ready to be sent to the ones who took part in this documentary for review. But I won't accept any suggestions except if there are any that are a must, like some subtitles are wrong, or something is incorrect or really bad. Because I don't care anymore 😀. It is time to move on ;). I can work 5 more years and continue to improve it, I know, but wtf 😀.
It is 1h 24 minutes long, full HD quality, 2.8GB in size. And I do not know if it is great or not, or confusing at times or boring. Cannot judge anymore. I watched it too many times. At the end of the day, I am not obliged to make this any other way but the way I want to. Whoever likes it, great. Who does not, great. 😀
Anyway, I shall start the final editing for part 2, and that's the hardest of them all because I wanna do some more edits there. But since this part was quite fast to edit, maybe it won't take me longer than a week or so to edit the second part. Will see...
> At the end of the day, I am not obliged to make this any other way but the way I want to. Whoever likes it, great. Who does not, great. 😀
I like that attitude, haha 😄
BTW, one question - In the origin of most problems book you go a little deeper than just the trade-free idea and also introduce people to things like the VADOSE acronym, does the documentary have something similar in it or is it purely focused on the trade-free idea alone?
No, actually like I explained in the book too, it is far more important to understand the problem (trade) than any solution. Solutions will arrive for sure. I will focus more on the VADOSE via different projects into the future, but the documentary is more personal, more made for those who do not know about these ideas. We also injected a lot of facts, but I'd still consider it a "light" documentary. We talk a bit about the trade-free idea too ofc, but mostly is about how we, humans, grow in this society, what influences us, how the society works, what are the biggest issues, what we could do about them.
I finished some 40 minutes from TROM II part 1, final editing. I call it final because I am basically checking stuff and improving bits here and there. After that is done I will have to render this part fully to see it all in high quality and make sure all looks good. Hopefully yes, if not there should only be minor things that are easy to fix but were not obvious while editing in Kdenlive.
I've done most of the hard stuff I wanted to fix for this first part so I expect the rest to be done in just a few days.
Feels great to now simply edit for the sake of improving here and there, and not having to think about how to "create", where the documentary goes, what next.... 😀
I expect part 2 to be more difficult to edit and fix/improve stuff, since it is also the biggest. Then the last part may need a bit of improvement here and there. Anyway, will see. That's my mission now: the final editing!
I am bringing back our TROMsite.com Live Updates page :) - am excited for that. I wanted to bring it back for some time now. Basically I pull the ATOM feed from our Friendica profiles like mine, @Aaron , @Sasha and so forth, and filter them by a keyword like #tromlive. So you get automated updates from us all.
The problem was that Friendica only provides an ATOM feed while the plugin we use for pulling these feeds and filtering them, only uses RSS. I found https://granary.iohttps://github.com/snarfed/granary and open source converter so let's see how that works.
I am getting our tromsite.com more and more ready for the documentary release. I want to make it active again and TROMlive was one of those things that kept the website breathing.
Though I found a small bug - if you click on the profile name that says "Tio", " TROM" or "Aaron" then it just brings me to a page that doesn't exist. Not a big issue, but just letting you know.
Yup I can't fix that unfortunately....also it won't display the photos inside posts....these are some limitations I tried to fix before and could not. But it is fine even with these little bugs. Thanks for reporting!
Any federated platform: Mastodon, Friendica, Peertube, Pixelfed, you name it - will get as corrupted as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and the like if the trade society we live in takes a hold of them. What do I mean by that?
If your platform is based on trades, it means that it wants something from the users (a trade). Their currency (say a subscription for access or for more features, a badge and such), their data (it collects the user data and trades it for currency or influence and the like), or attention (will insert ads into the platform). These are the methods used to trade in the online world. And any federated platform is subject to these practices.
When any platform engages into trades with their users, the balance of motivation tilts. And the owners of that instance will have to prioritize whatever it is traded (data, currency, attention). And you guessed it, they will become just like Facebook, Twitter or Youtube. Business as usual, quite literally.
Does not matter that these platforms are "federated" since big instances can user their influence and power to keep users on their platforms. Can stop defederating with any other platform and force their users to only use the instance via their own trade-based apps.
This is what we are trying to scream about at TROM for the past 10+ years. Everything gets eventually corrupted by TRADE. Nature, websites, people, projects. Everything.
So don't get fooled by "federation", "open source", and the like. All of them can and are being corrupted by this trade based society. Therefore we need trade-free platforms more than open source or federated ones, so that we remove the bad incentive of trade. Trade-free can also be federated and open source, and in fact it encourages these other practices.
I will try to eventually move all of my 500GB of photos and videos to files.trom.tf via an object storage extension. This Photo App is now better than perhaps any Linux Photo Gallery apps out there.
We have updated our TROM Files https://files.trom.tf and now we provide a much better Photo Gallery app. An almost complete alternative to the Google Photos. You can sort your images in albums, sort by date, add tags, folders and more.
On top of that you can now directly edit your photos from the app itself:
You can add text, resize photos, add filters, tweak the brightness, contrast and the like.
We give 5GB for free for everyone. And if anyone needs more you can let us know. We do it trade-free of course.
Enjoy the beauty of Nextcloud!
PS: a few features are missing now, such as the ability to extract archives or convert videos. We will enable them as soon as they become compatible with this new version of Nextcloud.
A huge and massive thanks to one of the most friendly and overall amazing friends of TROM, @Roma who helped again in a tremendous manner. 1.000 Euros donation for the TROM Laptop campaign. Unbelievable. https://www.tromsite.com/tromlaptop/
Now the campaign looks a lot more different and doable. Amazing help. Unbelievable! #tromlive
So welcome my friend, glad I can help you! 😊 I do not know anybody who deserves some powerful hardware more than yourself with all the amount of the nicest projects you do..
This is a donation campaign to help me, Tio, buy a new laptop that will allow me to become more mobile while having all I need to work on TROM and its baby projects. Please see the donation campaign for a detailed explanation and help if you can.
Basically I need to take what is in this photo (except those galaxies):
With all of the shoeboxes full of HDDs and cables:
They are talking about how this global trade based society pushes us all, from individuals to companies, to pollute, mostly care about profits, destroy the nature, enslave others, coerce. And are taking direct steps to overcome this by providing humans with their basic needs trade-free (as a first step), so that we help humans have a good life, and not pollute and waste as much, and get involved more to reverse the effects of pollution and destruction.
They have also started to ban all advertising because they rightly say that this is only going to create more needless consumption. I am so hap
They are talking about how this global trade based society pushes us all, from individuals to companies, to pollute, mostly care about profits, destroy the nature, enslave others, coerce. And are taking direct steps to overcome this by providing humans with their basic needs trade-free (as a first step), so that we help humans have a good life, and not pollute and waste as much, and get involved more to reverse the effects of pollution and destruction.
They have also started to ban all advertising because they rightly say that this is only going to create more needless consumption. I am so happy about that. Online or offline, ads are illegal.
They are working with all governments around the world to make a global transportation system that is trade-free, so that we phase out cars entirely. Universal healthcare is also on the agenda together with trade-free education. Two meals a day for everyone, trade-free access to the Internet, investing a lot of resources in non-meat food alternatives, and kick-starting a massive sharing platform (online/offline) so that we can all share the vast amounts of wasted and unused stuff that we have around. Even sharing a room/place to stay. How amazing! This, they hope, will incentivize people to re-use, rather than buy useless shit all the time.
Lastly, they realize that laws and rules do not work, so their overall approach is to create a better society from within the current one. One that does not rely on trade but on share. This way we can make companies and profiteers obsolete, with time. The focus will be on how to protect us and the nature, using renewable energies, less polluting practices, and so forth, since there is no incentive to do otherwise. All, while decoupling ourselves from the need for trade. Have a lot more free time, get more educated, get involved.
The current FIFA event shows a few things that should have been obvious anyway:
1. Slavery was not abolished, it was reduced and redefined at best. 2. High level sport is a business, nothing more. 3. Greenwashing is the most popular practice of pretty much all companies and organizations. 4. Not many people care about climate change, slavery, dictatorship regimes, and so forth. 5. The ones in power (from states to organizations like FIFA) care only about profits and lie endlessly. 6. We are fucked, nothing changes. The same trade based society keeps on being in the driving seat, deciding where we go.
Qatar promised to deliver a carbon neutral World Cup. But did they deliver?
Reporter: Kai Steinecke
Camera: Henning Goll
Video Editor: Kai Steinecke
Supervising Editor: Joanna Gottschalk, Michael Trobridge, Kiyo Dörrer
Fact-Check: Kirsten Funck
#P…
A massive thanks to Olaf for the 200 Euros donation! If you want to support TROM and all of our projects (see them all here), please consider a donation! Again thank you so much Olaf! #tromlive
Tomorrow I will 100% finish the first 40 minutes of the TROM II documentary, part 3 of it. So fast! Awesome! Basically I am almost done with those 40 minutes. Only need to work for an hour or so to finish it. After that I will probably be able to finish the next 10 minutes or more this month. But the rest is a bit unknown and needs some serious work. In any case, am doing it much faster it seems. And so far I love it. #tromlive
He is one of the few Linux reviewers that takes time to look into distros. So we are more than happy to see this review and the context he puts it into.
So many thoughts on this one. Inspired by a recent videos by @Chris Titus Tech and @The Linux Experiment I make the argument for why we need new Linux distributions for the desktop using a pretty sweet distro based on Manjaro - TROM Jaro.
I finished 29 minutes for TROM II, 3rd part! So much progress these days. I like it. I work like a crazyman! I want to finish it! go go! I will for sure finish around 40-50 minutes this month! Which is fabulous! But that's my only focus now. Be fed, be warm, be relaxed, be hydrated 😁 and work on the documentary! #tromlive
When the trade based society we live in, makes us all want to trade like insane robots, then you can't fix anything unless you fix society. Period. And these "technological" solutions are a mere scapegoat for the best players of the game, who have no interest in changing the game. After all, they are having lots of fun.
So yeah....no, carbon capture is no more than a scam. #tromlive
Finally an invention that doesn't suck . . . CO2 out of the atmosphere. Ba-dumm tss.
Check out my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/adamsomething
Join my Discord: https://discord.gg/2YcarWsc8S
Second channel: https://www.youtube.
Big thanks to those that still support TROM monthly https://www.tromsite.com/donate/ ! We will release a sequel to the TROM Documentary, in a few months time. Probably at the beginning of the next year. Follow my profile https://social.trom.tf/profile/tio if you want to get more updates about the work I do on it.
A little change to the donation page, I have removed the "how much money we currently have" for 2 reasons: 1. Luckily we have enough for an entire year so I'd rather say something like that than how much money we have, and 2. For the past 6 or so months the bulk of those money did not come from TROM donations, fortunately or unfortunately.
So it was not a good way to showcase much of anything.
I am all for being transparent but now that I and Sasha make some money ourselves, outside of TROM, things have changed. For the better in terms of the ability to support ourselves, for the worse in terms of getting less and less financial support via TROM, which means the focus has been taken away from TROM in the past months, and towards trading to make some money.
So I hope that people will keep on supporting TROM!
Release TROM II, have a wonderful TROM meeting in May, save as much money as possible + work to make some more and buy a motorhome. By October next year have the motorhome, some monthly income from WebApe (hopefully) and then go travel across Spain, Portugal, go to Norway see the Fjords and other parts of Europe :) . Basically see the nature side of it.
While doing that make more TROM books, more TROM-Casts, more videos, meet new orgs and projects, spread the word about "trade is the origin of most problems" and the antidote "trade-free".
If we manage to buy a motorhome and all works great with that, and if I manage to make WebApe a monthly income generator (or if we find other sources), then we can support ourselves and TROM for a long time. Maybe we can get enough financial support from donations for TROM...that'd be amazing but idk...
After that I'd like for us to go to Hawaii for a bit, because I'd love to see that place, then USA and buy a motorhome there (sell the old one) and travel across USA and see the national parks.
... show more
My plan for the next year.
Release TROM II, have a wonderful TROM meeting in May, save as much money as possible + work to make some more and buy a motorhome. By October next year have the motorhome, some monthly income from WebApe (hopefully) and then go travel across Spain, Portugal, go to Norway see the Fjords and other parts of Europe :) . Basically see the nature side of it.
While doing that make more TROM books, more TROM-Casts, more videos, meet new orgs and projects, spread the word about "trade is the origin of most problems" and the antidote "trade-free".
If we manage to buy a motorhome and all works great with that, and if I manage to make WebApe a monthly income generator (or if we find other sources), then we can support ourselves and TROM for a long time. Maybe we can get enough financial support from donations for TROM...that'd be amazing but idk...
After that I'd like for us to go to Hawaii for a bit, because I'd love to see that place, then USA and buy a motorhome there (sell the old one) and travel across USA and see the national parks.
That's my "dream" now. And I am working on it.
Because you see, I want to have a wonderful life while also screaming about this bullshit society and propose realistic solutions for this BS. But I can't just scream and be angry, this won't even last. I want to also enjoy life, see the nature that is left, meet the humans that are still humans and not citizens, and so forth.
So let's see....for now I will get back to work on TROM II.
18 minutes from the 3rd part of the TROM II documentary, done! The work is faster than I first thought. I worked today a lot on color correction....I usually do not bother with these but I had to do it better for TROM II since when we filmed the interviews we did not do a great job at dealing with the lights and camera settings.... But now looks great in my view.
The next bit, how I approach it, will be defining for the rest of the 3rd part....so let's see.... #tromlive
07:30 in the morning...worked like crazy on TROM 2 tonight. Very happy with the work I've done. These next few days I can have a clearer picture of where I am going with this 3rd part and perhaps how long it will be. #tromlive
gme
in reply to Tio • • •Anmol Sharma likes this.
Tio
in reply to gme • •Hetzner seems to be the only viable option but I've heard horror stories from people using it too. And the sad thing is that I do not have a business, I do not make any money, I provide free services for people, and materials. So I have these servers for other people basically, and yet I am treated like that.
Contabo has shockingly low prices, and shockingly terrible "customer support" and overall relation with the "customers".
gme
in reply to Tio • • •Take this for what it's worth but I moved all my servers off of Linode when they were bought out by Akamai over to Hetzner. Most of my servers are in Falkenstein Germany, and a few are in Seattle. When possible I'm using ARM64 servers (only available in one data center last I checked). Hetzner has been very good both service wise and customer service wise. But I use auto-pay and have all charges going to my credit card. In all I spend about 100€ with them a month. I also have one Contabo server (my mail server) and I've been loathe to move it over to Hetzner because ... knock wood ... anybody that runs a mail server knows this ... my subnet is not blocked anywhere. It's $15 a month for the server. I could probably pay less at Hetzner but honestly I'm afraid to "fix something" that's not "broken" there.
But you're the 2nd person in about as many months where I've read horror stories from Contabo or about the way Contabo has treated a customer. You're the first I've heard where Contabo flat out refused to sell any servers to, too.
I had been looking to diversifying
... show moreTake this for what it's worth but I moved all my servers off of Linode when they were bought out by Akamai over to Hetzner. Most of my servers are in Falkenstein Germany, and a few are in Seattle. When possible I'm using ARM64 servers (only available in one data center last I checked). Hetzner has been very good both service wise and customer service wise. But I use auto-pay and have all charges going to my credit card. In all I spend about 100€ with them a month. I also have one Contabo server (my mail server) and I've been loathe to move it over to Hetzner because ... knock wood ... anybody that runs a mail server knows this ... my subnet is not blocked anywhere. It's $15 a month for the server. I could probably pay less at Hetzner but honestly I'm afraid to "fix something" that's not "broken" there.
But you're the 2nd person in about as many months where I've read horror stories from Contabo or about the way Contabo has treated a customer. You're the first I've heard where Contabo flat out refused to sell any servers to, too.
I had been looking to diversifying my server deployments and using Contabo more because I really want to deploy some servers to Canada and Hetzner doesn't have a Canadian presence and OVH flat out won't sell me any VPSes in Canada since I'm a US citizen.....
So..........
Tio
in reply to gme • •Hetzner Online GmbH Reviews
Hetzner Online GmbHJoseph Hanson
in reply to Tio • • •Hetzner Online GmbH
GitHubTio
in reply to Joseph Hanson • •gme
in reply to Tio • • •Tio likes this.
Joseph Hanson
in reply to Tio • • •Tio likes this.
gme
in reply to Joseph Hanson • • •gme
in reply to Tio • • •Roma
in reply to Tio • • •Tio likes this.
Mark
in reply to Roma • • •With banks in many countries no reason is code for money laundering, since laws often make it illegal to tell someone that they're under investigation.
For example under UK law it's a crime carrying a maximum 2 year prison sentence.
Proceeds of Crime Act 2002
www.legislation.gov.ukRoma likes this.
Roma
in reply to Mark • • •Tio
in reply to Mark • •Xantulon :mastodon: :pixelfed: likes this.