Software Endorsements

[Banana Hammock]

I have a deep and seething hatred of .webp and similar fucking garbage image formats whose only purpose is the make my life hell when I wanna share a image I found on the internet.

Is there a good simple program I can keep on my computer to convert these atrocities into formats useful for human beings? I hate having to go onto sites to convert it every time I run into one of them. Something like HandBreak, but for pictures.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/webp-avif-image-converter/pbcfbdlbkdfobidmdoondbgdfpjolhci

 

[Cascade]

Is Lokinet good?

It's made by a private company and uses a weird ass cryptocurrency reward system. Maybe it's not as bad as it sounds, but I'd rather stay on Tor.

I'm tired of getting blocked while browsing the Internet with Tor

You mean when certain sites block exit nodes, or when the government fucks around with Tor connectivity?

 

[BMO_]

You mean when certain sites block exit nodes, or when the government fucks around with Tor connectivity?

Both.

 

[Bossmanralph]

K-9 mail is great! It's being maintained by the thunderbird team and is effectively the mobile bird

 

[anustart76]

K-9 mail is great! It's being maintained by the thunderbird team and is effectively the mobile bird

I think there are plans to officially turn it into Thunderbird for Android.

 

[elastic eye]

I have a deep and seething hatred of .webp and similar fucking garbage image formats whose only purpose is the make my life hell when I wanna share a image I found on the internet.

Is there a good simple program I can keep on my computer to convert these atrocities into formats useful for human beings? I hate having to go onto sites to convert it every time I run into one of them. Something like HandBreak, but for pictures.

I have this downloaded/saved to a folder that is part of my system path so cmd/terminal sees it: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/dwebp. Then I just hit a batch file with the following in it for that folder:

for %f in (*.webp) do dwebp.exe -o "%~nf.png" "%f"

Outputs as png.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

I remember way back in the day when Skype first got big a lot of hype was made of the fact you could call phone and cellphones using it always paying local prices instead of the exorbitant fees of interurban and international calls.

Given Skype has been hot ass for almost a decade now are there good alternative for such VOIP services to call landlines and phones? Preferably one that accepts crypto and is open source but any suggestions are good.

 

[Betonhaus]

I remember way back in the day when Skype first got big a lot of hype was made of the fact you could call phone and cellphones using it always paying local prices instead of the exorbitant fees of interurban and international calls.

Given Skype has been hot ass for almost a decade now are there good alternative for such VOIP services to call landlines and phones? Preferably one that accepts crypto and is open source but any suggestions are good.

So basically the exact same type of voip service that scam callers use?

 

[General Emílio Médici]

So basically the exact same type of voip service that scam callers use?

Is it? I guess it is actually. Huh, didn't occur to me it to consider that.

But yeah basically I guess. Though I won't be using it for scamming boomers into installing malware.

 

[Betonhaus]

Is it? I guess it is actually. Huh, didn't occur to me it to consider that.

But yeah basically I guess. Though I won't be using it for scamming boomers into installing malware.

Those kinds of providers are not going to be compliant with STIR/SHAKEN phone authentication so you may have difficulty calling people. Might be better to use a more legit service, like one from your internet provider.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

I don't think my ISP offers a VOIP service, and I am not paying for a landline.

 

[generic sauce]

I don't think my ISP offers a VOIP service, and I am not paying for a landline.

voip.ms

 

[General Emílio Médici]

voip.ms

This seems pretty close to what I want. Other than the fact they don't offer a crypto payment option and likely gonna make me need to either dust off the PayPal or a wire transfer it will do. Thanks.

 

[Betonhaus]

I don't think my ISP offers a VOIP service, and I am not paying for a landline.

...and?

 

[Flaming Dumpster]

This seems pretty close to what I want. Other than the fact they don't offer a crypto payment option and likely gonna make me need to either dust off the PayPal or a wire transfer it will do. Thanks.

You can get a virtual prepaid card with crypto if you're concerned about privacy. I've used these guys for coin swaps and they're good https://trocador.app/en/prepaidcards/

 

[General Emílio Médici]

You can get a virtual prepaid card with crypto if you're concerned about privacy. I've used these guys for coin swaps and they're good https://trocador.app/en/prepaidcards/

Privacy is half of my concerns but also the use of my credit card on random stuff is not something I like to do. This is a good solution.

 

[Snorky]

It's been posted before but whatever: MakeMKV.

I've been building a physical media collection for the past few months and I wanted to rip the movies I own on Blu-ray to serve as both a backup (in case the disks rot or some shit) and as a more convenient way to watch movies without having to get the disk out. Their forum offers downloads for modified firmware that you can flash your Blu-ray drive with to remove certain firmware-level DRM that would prevent you from ripping 4K UHD disks and they offer advice on what drives to get and what firmware to use on their forum.

As the name implies, it quite literally takes the contents of whatever disk you're trying to rip, converts the data to the royalty-free MKV format, and then saves the output to your computer. As far as I know, it doesn't fuck with the contents of whatever you're watching in the process of converting the data, so it's perfect for making backups of movies without doing any bullshit compression. Converting the resulting MKV file afterwards sometimes isn't even necessary, as many operating systems and consoles support the format out of the box.

 

[balupton]

For search engines, I recommend Kagi. They run their own index, have customisable filtering, including one that promotes the small wide web, and do not filter kiwifarms.

Since 2012 or so I used DuckDuckGo, then used Brave Search for a few years, however:
- in the past 5 years both of them became as useless as all the rest with the onslaught of seo junk downsampling real knowledge
- both of them censor speech (which became a forefront of my attention in 2020-2022 with covid and russia/rt censorship)
- both are primarily just rebrandings of Bing.

Been using Kagi for a year now, and have zero complaints.

 

[Betonhaus]

For search engines, I recommend Kagi. They run their own index, have customisable filtering, including one that promotes the small wide web, and do not filter kiwifarms.

Since 2012 or so I used DuckDuckGo, then used Brave Search for a few years, however:
- in the past 5 years both of them became as useless as all the rest with the onslaught of seo junk downsampling real knowledge
- both of them censor speech (which became a forefront of my attention in 2020-2022 with covid and russia/rt censorship)
- both are primarily just rebrandings of Bing.

Been using Kagi for a year now, and have zero complaints.

View attachment 5699425

I was surprised to see it's a paid service, but I guess that makes sense. In a honest future we may have a lot of things move from advertising to subscriptions.

Would be nice if there was a subscription managing service, like a browser plugin service that you authorize payments and it gives you a monthly bill or a prepaid balance to cover it, so that random sites don't have your credit card information and only the initially agreed on fees will be paid by the browser plugin service.

 

[Betonhaus]

The Original (((Coincidence Detector)))
A browser extension that (((highlights))) the names of jews and jewish companies