Notices by leighelse{} (leighelse@mastodon.nz)

Germany funded a pilot project to provide a clearer picture of the outcomes when citizens are given a UBI. The results should go a long way to dispelling scepticism about the benefits of such a programme.

https://www.pilotprojekt-grundeinkommen.de/en

@aral Thanks for pointing that out. I've never seen that popup. Isn't it annoying?

(I don't have a subscription to Der Spiegel, but I do access it only through RSS on a very locked down Firefox, and live in Aotearoa New Zealand.)

Political scientist Steven Levitsky talks with Der Spiegel reporter Claus Hecking about Donald Trump's authoritarian playbook.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/harvard-professor-steven-levitsky-right-now-the-u-s-is-ceasing-to-be-a-democracy-a-d6595df5-68a5-4b74-ab09-1dbf5179ddbd

"Autocrats are most destructive when they enjoy high levels of popular support: Politicians like Putin or Chávez sometimes have or have had 70 or 80 percent support. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, on the other hand, was able to do much less damage because he lacked this backing. And Trump is not a popular president."

NZPost's parcel booking form doesn't work as designed on Firefox; specifically the courier pickup form, which is supposed to drop down when you click a button.

I've contacted NZPost about this, including screenshots and dev console messages. I've had no reply and, two months later, the form is still broken.

The button often does nothing apart from give itself a duplicate icon. Sometimes the form does roll down ... and immediately rolls up again.

Grrrr ....

[more ...]

@madeindex You either love it or are unconvinced that it's a serious phone.

I read books on mine, browse Reddit, Slack and Mastodon, listen to music, manage shopping lists etc. It has an infrared feature: I can control our TV with it.

I get frequent casual comments, usually along the lines of "What's that? It's not a ... phone, is it?"

Plus it's small and light enough to wear on a lanyard around my neck, which I sometimes do.

@madeindex @calyxinstitute @jifi Calyx is only available for the most secure hardware. Currently this means exclusively large phones, and the reason I bought my new phone was to get something smaller. I was previously running #SailfishOS on a Sony XA2+.

During my research I found a Reddit how-to on installing LineageOS 20 on a https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-star which is about as small as you can get.

I've not been disappointed with either the hardware or the OS.

@madeindex @jifi The best of the bunch is Calyx, and the Calyx team has an account on Mastodon: @calyxinstitute

I use LineageOS, and there are several others as well as Graphene.

Research into the effects of social media is being skewed by social media itself.

https://theconversation.com/is-big-tech-harming-society-to-find-out-we-need-research-but-its-being-manipulated-by-big-tech-itself-240110

Wow. I'm pleasantly surprised to wake up this morning and find that my entry in #fedivision2024 came in sixth! https://soundcloud.com/else-music-ltd/leigh-harrrison-tap-my-toes

I'm looking forward now to Fedivision 2025.

#Fedivision is an annual contest between amateur songwriters with ActivityPub accounts. It's loosely modeled on Eurovision. This year there are 72 entries, and voting is now open until next Sunday.

Anyone with an ActivityPub account (that's you, dear reader) can vote for up to three entries. Learn how to vote at https://fedivision.party/vote/

You can hear the songs at https://fedivision.party and there's a popup channel on Radio Free Fedi playing entries: https://party.radiofreefedi.net/

“In Google’s proposed world, five dollar bills aren’t fungible anymore: the store can ask you about the provenance of that bill, and if they don’t like the answer, they don’t sell you the newspaper. No, they’re not worried about the bill being fake or counterfeit or anything like that. It’s a real five dollar bill, they agree, but you can’t prove that you got it from the right bank.” https://rants.org/2023/07/the-right-to-lie-and-google-wei/

Excellent insights into Google’s device verification proposal.

Apple’s already done it. Google wants to do it. Microsoft will gladly join the party. Entrenched Big Tech has found the perfect way to pull up the ladder behind it.

If only “verified devices” are permitted to access the most important internet resources, innovation will be stifled at all levels, and software development will become the preserve of large and moribund corporations. https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/

Google’s Android is based on an open source platform called AOSP, which can be used as a base for phone operating systems that are not integrated with Google’s proprietary spyware. However, Google is the primary maintainer of the AOSP project, and it’s about to remove the Dialer and Messaging apps from AOSP and instead include them in Android. This is bad news for open source phone operating systems like Graphene and Lineage. https://www.androidauthority.com/google-kill-android-aosp-dialer-messages-app-3334980/

Rowan Atkinson discusses the trade-offs between internal combustion and electric vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/03/electric-vehicles-early-adopter-petrol-car-ev-environment-rowan-atkinson

@lightweight @michael @anildash This is me too. I do have a Mac specifically for music-making, because collaborating with others requires licensed plugins that aren't available on Linux. To balance that I have a #SailfishOS phone and don't use Google maps.

And my quality of life is in no way diminished by these choices.

@mastohost Well managed.