Software Endorsements

[Darkholme's Dungeon]

It's worth noting that Mullvad stopped support for port forwarding back in 2023. It's not a huge deal, but if you're someone who torrents a lot and helps seed torrents for others then it can be a pain.

I should mention that for those who have to deal with censorship heavy areas and run their own solutions look toward or Hysteria and/or Hysteria 2 Protocols instead of Shadowsocks or Trojan (non-v2ray, still good if outside China) which the Chinese spend a great deal of time trying to break.

Also sing-box is an interesting proxy platform if you self-host. Unfortunately they are all coded in Go. Trojan is C++ if you prefer that

 

[Slav Power]

After daily driving Flow Launcher for a week, I gotta say that it's worth the extra bloat and jank since after setting it up it's a much better experience.

The major advantage is that it supports Everything search directly, meaning you only invoke the launcher, start typing away and you're instantly getting file search results. Combine that with the fact that it has a preview panel, the ability to navigate a folder and support for third part file managers like Total Commander, you've just looked up and also drag-and-drop, with the right adjustments your workflow becomes way faster. Less keystrokes and actions to find what you wanted to find.

It also has some plugins that Keypirinha didn't have that are very useful.
-FendCalculator that uses Fend I've posted her earlier replaces the calculator and unit conversion plugins. It's fast and very capable.
-AppUpgrader instantly shows me what I can update with winget without having to fire up a terminal and typing out the command.
-Vim cheatsheet is helpful when you've already forgotten which one of those damn shortcuts did what when you LARP as a l33t hackerman.

I did find alternatives to Keypirinha plugins I rely on as well, like the ShareX plugin, currency conversion, Google translation, timezone conversion, string utilities and so on. I can honestly apologize it being even more jeety than Microsoft's code because goddamn is it comfy to use.

Speaking of Microsoft, recently they've released Command Palette in PowerToys which you should check out if you haven't already, been recommended ITT numerous times already, which is shaping up to be a worthy first-party competitor to both Keypirinha and Flow Launcher. It has less features than both but it does have the basics, and the major improvement over the old PowerToys Run is that it now has an integrated plugin manager, with essential community made plugins like Everything search already being available.

Hopefully it'll get better and better as time goes on, this niche of keyboard launchers desperately needs more variety, both on Windows and Linux since it's in a pitiful state on both.

And yeah, if you've been living under a rock, install Everything now. Forget about Windows Search or grep, instantly finding everything that you need via drive indexes is life changing, and having it all integrated into a keyboard launcher? Nirvana. I recommend switching to Everything 1.5 Alpha, as it improves on just about everything and is already stable enough for daily use. Do note that Flow Launcher will require you to go into Tools > Options > Advanced and switch "alpha_instance" to "false". Then 1.5a will act like 1.4 and it'll just work. Will also let you avoid having to edit your Total Commander config if you integrate it with it.

 

[Kazuma]

How does Total Commander compare to Directory Opus?

 

[Slav Power]

How does Total Commander compare to Directory Opus?

Probably not as advanced as DO, but still very robust, depending on what you use DO for you could probably migrate to TC. The major upside is that with TC you pay for one perpetual license you can use on all of your computers, and it works all the way back to the Windows 3.1 versions, with the latest 32-bit version running flawlessly and natively on Windows 95, with Christian Ghisler explicitly fixing bugs introduced in the newest versions for Win9x. Also, it works on an infinite trial, so even if you don't buy a license, all you get is a nag screen every time you launch it with no functionality lockout.

Note that I never tested DO, but feel free to point out which DO features you rely on so that I could have a point of reference to how it compares to Total Commander. I'm guessing that a whole bunch of things that come OOTB with DO need plugins in TC, and some, like the flexible UI panels, are just not a thing in TC as it was designed as an OFM from the ground up. But it has a lot of power user stuff baked in. Like I said, it's an infinite trial, and you're free to use it way past the 30-day period, or even "crack" it to remove the nag screen. That's how most people use it or have been using it before paying their dues to Mr. Ghisler, myself included.

 

[Flaming Dumpster]

How does Total Commander compare to Directory Opus?

If you're in that market also check out Q-Dir. I use it at work as a tabbed two-pane file explorer for browsing around shares under a privileged user and it works great. Never crashes, fast, the quick bookmarking feature is handy and it's freeware. Though the website for it is pretty terrible, it looks like you're about to download a browser toolbar.

https://www.softwareok.com/?Download=Q-Dir

 

[Slav Power]

I have discovered that Flow Launcher now has 1.20 prerelease builds available, so I gave them a shot. Already I feel an immense improvement in UI responsiveness which was one of my biggest issues with it so it's good to see that they're improving it. There is now a home page option so that you can see all the plugin shortcuts on an empty query, as well as a placeholder text when you haven't entered a query. The new option to add a logon task for more reliable autolaunching is good. The only plugin that got broken was Screen Brightness, but it was a fairly easy fix, only needed to adjust the import commands slightly. Right now I feel confident in this preview version and it is a significant improvement over 1.19.5.

At this point I'm sold on Flow Launcher and I can excuse it being a bloated, resource hogging .NET mess given how much more robust it is compared to Keypirinha.

Recently I have also switched to RetroBar both on 10 and 11 to get a more basic taskbar and they did make some nice improvements in the recent updates. You can how completely hide the taskbar when it's set to autohide, you can enable seconds on the clock, and I made a custom theme that removes the start button. Hopefully it'll only get better as time goes on, as it's still missing some QoL elements, like being able to reorder the tray icons or disabling the autohide sliding animation. It's still at a very good point right now, and I do like that it's so non-intrusive, it just hides the system taskbar and puts it's own standalone one in it's place. I recommend giving it a try if you (rightfully) hate Win11's taskbar and want a FOSS alternative since StartAllBack is paid.

 

[moocow]

Android: Accessibility settings > Color and motion > Remove animations

It blows people away when they see this for themselves. Even shit-tier hardware runs Android very well when you turn off all the stupid animations. Interactions are damn-near instantaneous, and you immediately learn how to recognize when something is actually struggling when it shouldn't be because it doesn't snap to attention the instant you touch it.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

>tfw Audition does some really dank shit quickly that Audacity will be done handling roughly when Christ returns

 

[Reverend]

Is there a solid X/Twitter archiving tool to pull in a different users posts and dump them to a file? Everything I see is limited to 3000 and I'm looking at over 25k that I need to pull down.

NOTE: Yes I searched on the boards, the internets, and various places and got jackfuckall.

 

[August Levasseur]

Is there a solid X/Twitter archiving tool to pull in a different users posts and dump them to a file? Everything I see is limited to 3000 and I'm looking at over 25k that I need to pull down.

NOTE: Yes I searched on the boards, the internets, and various places and got jackfuckall.

iirc, after Twitter became X they started significantly limiting access to their API. It may not be possible to pull down more than 3k without some chicanery and/or paying Elon Musk a substantial amount of money.

 

[Eddie Riggs]

Privacy-oriented Android users - if you're looking for a good adblocker, firewall and vpn in one, RethinkDNS is fantastic AF

It includes multiple proxy setup options (the ability to use Tor's very own Orbot among them), customizable DNS types and app blocklists, plus other things you can set up to your liking! Plus it doesn't require root access.

I know privacy's become a big deal and this is one particular app i consider a gem that seriously delivers on what it advertises without any shadiness attached.

 

[Cyanocorax]

Does anyone have any experience or knowledge on Plebbit? It bills itself as an alternative to reddit and 4chan running on a peer-to-peer pubsub network. At first it seemed promising, but then I found out that it has an associated crypto with it, which is stated to be for "governance." I think its interesting but anything crypto-related makes me hesitant.

Also found picrel browsing there and it made me giggle.

 

[August Levasseur]

Does anyone have any experience or knowledge on Plebbit? It bills itself as an alternative to reddit and 4chan running on a peer-to-peer pubsub network. At first it seemed promising, but then I found out that it has an associated crypto with it, which is stated to be for "governance." I think its interesting but anything crypto-related makes me hesitant.

Also found picrel browsing there and it made me giggle.
View attachment 7447106

P2P Internet/Social Media has been tried before, see ZeroNet, Retroshare, and a couple others. Technically it works but there are macro-level issues with it. Anything like this that, by design, cannot be moderated will become a host to content that would be moderated anywhere else, including and especially things that just about everyone thinks should be banned such as child pornography. The crypto governance stuff is probably just a way to do "moderation" by consensus on the blockchain, I think LBRY tried something like that back when it was actually trying to be decentralized. In ZeroNet and Retroshare, your only option is to directly block the things you see that you don't like, there isn't a way to limit the discoverability of universally reviled things.

I think it's wrong to think that less moderation is automatically better, there are certain things that just shouldn't be allowed even in impolite company. Imo, federated services are the better alternative to centralized services because they remain moderateable for stuff that really should be banned, but overbearing moderation is pretty easy to circumvent by migrating instances or just hosting your own. They still have issues, obviously, but I think fewer issues than totally p2p services.

 

[Magicat]

Anyone have experience using a decent alternative light code editor to notepad++. The author's a bit of a sperg and French.

Spoiler

I'm going to try a program called Notepad3 (https://rizonesoft.com/downloads/notepad3/) from a search suggestion.

 

[Niggergante]

Anyone have experience using a decent alternative light code editor to notepad++. The author's a bit of a sperg and French.

Spoiler

View attachment 7455230View attachment 7455232

I'm going to try a program called Notepad3 (https://rizonesoft.com/downloads/notepad3/) from a search suggestion.

The only other text editor that I've used besides word, notepad, or notepad++ was Atom but I wasn't too keen on it, nor do I know if it's particularly lightweight or not. I know a guy who swears by sublime but more demanding and more of an IDE than a text editor.

 

[Slav Power]

The only other text editor that I've used besides word, notepad, or notepad++ was Atom but I wasn't too keen on it, nor do I know if it's particularly lightweight or not. I know a guy who swears by sublime but more demanding and more of an IDE than a text editor.

Atom has been abandoned once Microsoft bought out GitHub and didn't want a competitor to VS Code. Both of which are bloated webshit garbage.

Anyone have experience using a decent alternative light code editor to notepad++. The author's a bit of a sperg and French.

Spoiler

View attachment 7455230View attachment 7455232

I'm going to try a program called Notepad3 (https://rizonesoft.com/downloads/notepad3/) from a search suggestion.

I tried moving to Notepad3 at one point and I found it's lack of tabs a major detriment. As much of a sperg Don Ho is, Notepad++ is still the GOAT, and I trust his judgment about what to do and not do when preaching his message in the software. Because when Charlie Hebdo happened, he released an update that would autotype his virtue signal and people would question whether or not N++ got compromised. After that, it only appears if you open the About page of the software, and if you download it from the website, but then again, winget is a thing so why would you.

In short, Don Ho really mellowed the fuck out and that's saying something. And there is no good alternative to Notepad++. Maybe Neovim if you want to be extra autistic, though nvim deals with gigantic files really well so it's worth having installed, and it's worth to get the hang of vim basics in case you end up managing a Linux server that has it as default.

 

[Magicat]

I tried moving to Notepad3 at one point and I found it's lack of tabs a major detriment.

I've been using Notepad3 for a few hours today and that's the first (and only) irritation I've found. It's not a big deal for what I plan to use it for, so I'm sticking with it for now.

I'll check out Neovim, thanks!

 

[Neodanthril]

i know there are programs for archiving websites, but are there ones for archiving webpages that are password protected?

 

[Retard Marine]

Log in to the website using a browser, export cookies, then use those cookies in whatever program you're using to archive it. If the program can't do that, it is a shitty program. (edit: to clarify, wget and curl can both do this, for example)

If it's a site which is using oldschool HTTP usernames and passwords (I mean ones you put into the URL, are there any public ones in today's Internet anymore?) it's even simpler to support and should be supported in any decent program for this purpose.

 

[fartsnstuf]

any good software in downloading archived YT videos from archive.org?