So I am the web admin for a non-profit that deals with and discusses private medical information. My country has laws around keeping this information safe which ironically I take more seriously than a lot of the public health services I personally interact with but I digress.

With all the push for increased surveillance lately and my trying to keep pushing people towards safer alternatives, the idea I’ve had for setting up a private forum is starting to become more important (maybe that and my yearning for the internet of old where people on the internet were people and not a high chance of being a bot). Currently the orgs main discussion is on Facebook (yep, don’t get me started on that - I did not decide that, it was many years ago and I’ve always hated that it excluded people who don’t use FB).

We have shared hosting for the website but this severely limits options. All the software that I can install on shared hosting through cpanel has resulted in ugly, difficult to use options or gotchas like not being able to make the community private (i.e. people will want to talk about their own medical situations with other group members, not the whole world).

So my next steps are to investigate what hosting infrastructure is secure and what software will best allow for a private and secure community. I was considering Discourse but this might be overkill and I don’t know if posts and DMs can be encrypted, etc. Interested in suggestions for other forum or community software that is better.

I could get AWS for non-profits but it’s Amazon and I don’t trust them as far as I can kick them so I don’t know how safe it would be to have or if encryption would help mitigate the Amazon factor.

My knowledge of these sorts of things is pretty outdated (I’m mostly just a web des).

Instead YouTube gives me literally nothing but AI spam. :/

I scrolled down a bit more and got this: https://i.postimg.cc/fJcPhG45/Screenshot-20251118-150802.png

Scrolled down some more and this: https://i.postimg.cc/v1khnhRp/Screenshot-20251118-151325.png

I kept scrolling until I ran out of relevant results. Not a single video was legit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much AI slop in one search term and by the gods there is a lot of crap on YouTube.

Anyone have a good comparison video? I’m just wanting a decent comparison of Actual, Firefly III and possibly HomeBank. Feel free to also give me your 2 cents on whatever you use :)

I have some sewing patterns that I would like to share (and hopefully swap) but all of the PDFs have a

“This was purchased by John Doe john.doe@email.com #ordernumber - if you are not John Doe, please dob in the person you got this from to company@example.com so we can sick our lawyers on them”

sorta footer on every single page.

Obviously for privacy reasons (and because I don’t actually want lawyers sicked onto me), I need to remove this footer.

These are often complex PDFs with more than a hundred pages and multiple layers.

I managed to successfully remove the editing password (not user/viewing password, just can’t edit without password) with qpdf --decrypt. But removing that footer has left me at a dead end. I have even tried manually removing every single instance of those footers using Master PDF Editor but saving the file flattened it and you are no longer able to show/hide layers which is essential for correct printing. (Please don’t ask me how many different PDF editors I have tried because it has been so so SO many I have lost count).

Not that I really want to have to manually edit this out on what could amount to over a thousand pages but searching for a command to remove a certain phrase has come up empty. Even Master PDF Editor doesn’t seem to have a bulk remove or search and replace function (just search).

I use Linux btw.

I’m ditching streaming services and just going with local music. However all my CDs are converted to either flac or 320kbps mp3 files on my PC and thus far too large for the limited storage I have on my phone.

I was hoping there might be an app that would automatically downconvert to something like 128kbps and then copy over to the Music directory on my phone. A bit like how Calibre can automatically convert eBook files (e.g. mobi to epub) and then send them to your ereader?

Finally a distro has me tempted into considering moving from Arch which I’ve been using for almost a decade (kudos to the CachyOS devs on a job well done!).

But one of the things I love about Arch is that I choose what is and isn’t installed and after my spouse installed Cachy (also previously on Arch) I can see a number of apps come pre-installed (like Meld).

Is there a list somewhere of what CachyOS installs by default so that I can uninstall it post-install? Or is there a minimal install ISO somewhere that I’m missing that just installs the Cachy ‘tweaks’ and Cachy-specific apps (like Hello) + a DE?

I have considered converting my Arch install to Cachy but since this install is 3+ years old now, it would be more difficult to find and get rid of all the tweaks I’ve made here and there than just start a fresh CachyOS install and remove unwanted packages.

EDIT: Here is the answer: https://github.com/CachyOS/cachyos-calamares/blob/cachyos-systemd-qt6/src/modules/netinstall/netinstall.yaml

Hazel still also only gets minimal timeshare of the brain cell but she’s a survivor, having recently recovered from hepatitis! 🎉

My spouse and I have played NMS since release. After switching to the Steam version a number of years ago, we were lucky enough to start our current save in a system that had a paradise planet. While we weren’t the first to discover the system, we were the first for the planets, flora, fauna and minerals.

Anyway, we both started bases on the paradise planet and have had those bases ever since. This planet was one of my favourites with gorgeous fields of glowing flowers (at night), purple grass, no storms, pretty water… you get the picture.

When settlements came along, we moved our main bases to settlements, one of us on the paradise and the other on a toxic planet in the same system.

I spent many, many, many hours adding to my settlement, doing clever things to make it look nice and RPing the hell out of everything.

On the paradise planet I also turned my first base into a ‘tourist attraction’. Then discovered this absolutely gorgeous flat field surrounded by hills. Inside one of the hills was a natural cave entrance. Low and behold the cave also looked spectacular with glowing fungi. So I also RP’d this as a tourist attraction - land in the field at night for a rolling field light show, enter the cave and go spelunking lit by cave roof covered in glowing fungi…

Then the first planetary generation update came. All seemed well until I reached my ‘Cave of Wonders’. The glowing fungi was gone. It was just a barren boring cave now. That hurt, but fine. It wasn’t as bad as some people got as we still had a beautiful purple glowing paradise.

Then an update to settlements wrecked all my decoration. So I meticulously fixed it all and made it even better. I have cared for my settlement, made good choices for the inhabitants…

So, I was super looking forward to how beautiful our slice of paradise was going to look after the 5.0 update. I could only imagine how much more gorgeous the water and sky would look.

Imagine my horror when my spouse said that our main planet was showing as “Worm infested” when scanning. My anxiety rising I head to our paradise and my heart sinks as my ship clears the clouds. It is indeed now infested.

Worse is that my settlement is completely gone. The pin for it is still there but the settlement interface is non-existent. All that remains is all the base parts I added - now either floating in the air or completely buried as the landscape has radically changed.

I then visited every single one of my other bases. Some are still functional as the landscape hasn’t changed but the planetary type has in about 90% of them (weirdly some planets are still completely the same but most are different). My runaway mould farm has been replaced by metal fingers.

Worst off is our paradise planet where both the type and landscape are different.

There’s other weirdness like the Discoveries being simultaneously reset but not - it will say a planet is undiscovered but when I land, it’s suddenly gets the proper info back for it. But on other systems, the discoveries are completely reset - in my AI Valve farm system, the system comes up as discovered by me but none of the planets were until I landed on them. The one that I have a base on has the name I gave it but all the other planets in the system are completely reset to their original names (and this system had some sentimental names as it was my final Atlas story system).

I’m going away for a week soon and was looking forward to playing some NMS beforehand. Now just have a sour taste in my mouth. So many hours lost and funnily enough I’ve lost any motivation to play at the moment. :(

This isn’t a gloat post. In fact, I was completely oblivious to this massive outage until I tried to check my bank balance and it wouldn’t log in.

Apparently Visa Paywave, banks, some TV networks, EFTPOS, etc. have gone down. Flights have had to be cancelled as some airlines systems have also gone down. Gas stations and public transport systems inoperable. As well as numerous Windows systems and Microsoft services affected. (At least according to one of my local MSMs.)

Seems insane to me that one company’s messed up update could cause so much global disruption and so many systems gone down :/ This is exactly why centralisation of services and large corporations gobbling up smaller companies and becoming behemoth services is so dangerous.

Brand new Pelikan Twist came with multiple scratches at the top of the barrel. One on each side. All about the same length as the one in the photo except for one that goes under the sticker (not counting the mould line on that side).

Kinda feels a bit 1st world problems but I’m poor and this is the only Pelikan I will ever (short of winning lotto and getting incredibly lucky) get to own and feels disappointing to get a brand new pen that’s already scratched.

There’s a documentary that’s more than a decade old that now only exists on Amazon Prime. I have searched everywhere for this but the website (and thus DVDs being sold) doesn’t exist any more, there are no torrents, no second hand DVDs for sale that I can find online… I’m OK with buying the doco from Amazon (albeit not happy about giving Amazon any money) but once I’ve bought it I don’t want to be locked into Amazon’s infrastructure (I do not trust streaming services to keep such niche videos available indefinitely).

So how would I go about downloading and removing DRM from Amazon videos?

I read an old post about mp4decryptgui but that hasn’t been updated in 3 years so I don’t know if it works any more.

The only other methods I’ve found involve buying expensive Windows only software (I’m on Linux but can dual boot if absolutely needed).

Thanks!

(Also please excuse the freshness of my account - for some reason Kbin threw an error every time I tried to post using my usual account.)