I really don’t understand this trend of websites working against their own users by concealing more information, stripping away the interactive and social features people used to rely on. Features we once took for granted are disappearing.

Look at YouTube, for example. First, they removed the dislike button, and now they’re inching toward changes like hiding certain metrics entirely like the ones of the picture. Xitter has taken away or restricted many core functions, and Netflix keeps reversing decisions that initially made them the go-to streaming platform.

I know a lot of people shrug and say, ‘Where else are we going to go?’ And maybe, in cases like YouTube, that’s fair since true alternatives are rare. But just passively accepting these changes only encourages platforms to keep eroding the experience. They’re free to make it worse without much consequence.

Personally, I’m cutting down on my reliance on these sites that keep ‘pulling this kind of crap.’ Sure, it means I miss out on some things, but it’s worth it to avoid all the compromises they push on us. Since YouTube cracked down on ad blockers, I’ve minimized my time on the platform. Sorry, YouTube, but I’m not waiting through the hottest indian music hit or an hour-long ad or unskippable content.

Then there’s Reddit. I’ve recently stopped using it as well, and I’d probably quit Xitter if they pushed things too far. The limits on daily views they introduced a while back already made me take a year-long break. Luckily, I haven’t found myself affected by the likes being hidden or restrictions on blocking since those aren’t features I use much, but who knows what’ll be next? Nothing is off the table if i get my experience messed up with.

I get that these are for-profit companies, aiming to increase revenue and engagement, but so many of these choices feel counterproductive. It makes me wonder, are these decisions even human-driven, or is an AI behind these changes?

Are we heading back to square one, where websites start to feel like TV channels, giving users no say in their experience? The only choice left to us is to watch or walk away.

It’s a pretty bleak outlook if you ask me. But there’s a bit of hope, sites like Neocities and the Fediverse seem to keep alive the community-driven, user-oriented internet that i'd like to see make a comeback.

The Fediverse! I have stuff to say about the fediverse... but that’s a topic for another post.

Who would have thought! Life-saving data to know i guess.

Company claims has technology that can identify almost any person with a snapshot of their face

I mean, sounds crazy but i wouldn't be surprised it's true. Almost everyone uploads photos of themselves of from other people without any kind of regard for privacy to ALL social networks.

Facebook, Instagram, Xitter, TikTok, et al. In almost all of them people upload daily pictures of their face and a lot of times the access to these photos is free for everyone outside of the networks.

Someone could say, "but i haven't uploaded my photo anywhere!", probably not you, but i bet people have taken photos of you "as a group" and uploaded to one of these sites, it's something people do all the time in social gatherings.

It's worriesome that these things happen, but everyone of us is to blame to some degree.

There's one and ONLY ONE reason why, despite using Bodhi Linux as my main driver for more or less one year now, there's still a dual boot system booting Windows 7 on my computer.

Well, aside from the fact that Blender for me works better on the Windows partition (but that's another story), there's only one piece of software that makes me be still kind of chained to Windows, and that's Music bee.

Probably not many people knows it since desktop music players have fallen out of preference of many people, leaving them in second place to music streaming sites, and also Musicbee is not one of the most popular ones, but i have to say it's one of the most feature filled music players that i've found ever.

It's a free music player built with the purpose of managing a large collection of music. It has a lot of options for creating a music library, and also options for managing it, you know, tag management, artwork, lyrics, it has a great way of presenting your library, it has music reencode tools AND... i think it has CD burning capabilities (i haven't checked it for sure, but it may have, it super super complete).

What's the problem with it? Well, i love it, it's the software i use to manage my music, and for now no software that i know comes closer to it in amount of features, but the problem is: it is closed source, and it's Windows only.

It is really a bummer, because every time i have to manage stuff regarding my music collection i have to boot into Windows to work into it, and believe me, i have tried several other Linux software that does similar stuff, and it always lacks features that i need.

Let me explain a bit how do i manage my music: Aside from having albums stored in their own albums and stray songs stored in genre folders, lately when talking about the music i listen the most, i have all the music files that i like and listen frequently pooled on a single folder, then i created a bunch of playlists, each one of different genres or themes.

On Music Bee it's super easy to manage, i add new music to several of the created playlists and Music bee keeps track of it, if i delete the file phisically on one playlist it deletes the file on all the playlists where that file is, and it also prevents me from adding the same file twice to a playlist.

When i finish adding files to my playlists, i just drag them to a "virtual hard disk" that i created for this purpose and Music bee copies the playlist and the new tracks to it, if the source files aren't in mp3 it transcodes them first before copying them, so i don't have to deal with multiple file formats.

I've become so used to this way of working with my music that i think i would have problems trying to do the same with other software, or all the steps involved would make it too cumbersome. so far i've tried Guayadeque (no longer maintained sadly), Quod Libet, Clementine/Strawberry and several others, and for now almost all of them suck one way of another, particularly when trying to manage large playlists or copying them to other folders/devices.

Some people would say that i could try running Music Bee on WINE, but a lot of people have problems with this too. To this day, no one has made Music bee run successfully on WINE, not at least with a lot of bugs that make it unworkable.

I'll keep trying to find another music player that i can install on Linux that allows me work on my music collection the way i want, and, who knows, maybe i could try coding it myself if the challenge is not big enough!

Ok if by any chance you haven't disabled javascript in your browser, you will note that i added a little chatterbox to the sidebar of the site, it's meant as a little corner so you can say HI if you want, but i feel i will use it more as a kind of a "nano" blog to post short thoughts haha.

Originally i was gonna add exactly that, some kind of "nano blog" where i could dump small info without updating the microblog, then i remembered that chatboxes existed and that i could add one to add a bit more of interactivity to the site, so there is it.

Anyways, feel free to post anything you want on it, i'll style it later.

I had to scout and re-add all the blogs i had on my feed reader before i reinstalled Linux, because there's something i always forget to backup, and this time it was my entire RSS feed.

Anyways, i am susbscribed to the blog "Futurism", but i almost didn't added it again. I don't even like the guy and i'm pretty neutral towards him, but it's ridiculous how so anti-Elon Futurism is, it's kind of ridiculous and cringe how they manage any kind of note that have to do with Elon and sometimes try their hardest to make him look bad.

Like i said, i don't even care about the guy, but this worries me as i try to have my RSS feed as un-biased and impartial. I guess i will give them a chance one more time but only once again.

After some months of hiatus of doing any kind fo 3D stuff with Blender, i just uploaded a new piece, albeit simple, to help me stretch the legs. It's simple because it's mostly comprised of simple shapes (mostly boxes and cylinders) that don't require that much modeling.

I almost never have problems modeling stuff (well, i do, but i can get by just fine most of the time after fidgeting the vertices a bit), what i have problems with is with lighting, because modeling and texturing shit is one thing, but that's like 40% of the work. Lighting is the other 60% and just lighting alone can make a piece look good or ugiy.

Overall i think i did pretty well on it, i like the ambience, i think it could have used more variety on the elements of the board but it's good nonetheles...

I'll post the image here but you can also see it and give it a like on my Pixelfed profile, on the links of the sidebar:



BTW, the title of the piece is "Quantum Computing".

Being embarrased by saying this is nonsense because i am not even obligated to say it, but i still don't have proper hardware to run newer versions of Blender, and most if not all pieces i have done ever (and probably will for a bit of time) are done in pre-3.0 versions of Blender (newer versions are already on 4.0).

To be honest i don't feel like i am missing too much anyway, i know Geometry nodes are a big thing and everyone is using them already to their best but i haven't made anyting too complicated yet that guarantees me wanting me to use them. I think geometry nodes are more useful for people that animate and to people that needs speed in pre-generating assets, but my approach on Blender is more "artisanal" so i woudln't use them that much i guess.


Hopefully on the future i can get ahold of better hardware.

It is me, or pages look too round nowadays? Just look at pages like Google and Twitter, it looks like they're afraid of having elements with corners.

The idea of reinstalling my computer was, for one part a re-partition of the disk because i had set too little space to the Linux partition, and being that it was gonna be the main partition from now on i should have allocated more than 40gb to it.

And second, i had seen that the last Linux Mint seemed to have better drivers or something, but i could open Blender again with it, the problem is that it had several other problems that didn't made sense so i had to brush it off and go back to Bodhi Linux.

Not blaming Linux Mint tho, my computer is OLD so i blame it more on the age of the computer.