Depends on what you are trying achieve.

You can send sms via foss no problem as long as you know what carrier the recipient uses. All of the carriers seem to have email bridges to the sms network. Receiving sms is another question entirely. To receive sms, the network needs to know where to send the message. There are commercial platforms that can link you into the sms network.

Another option is KDEConnect which can link your Android device to your computer and you can send and receive sms that way.

https://simpletexting.com/blog/how-to-text-from-computer/

Sleeping. Possibly borrito’d into a blanket.

Heads up on the copyright thing. Copyright is different nation to nation. @ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world seems to be out of the UK or EU. Not sure what the copyright situation is like there but here in the US, anything you write is already protected under US copyright laws from the moment it’s published (such as when I hit “post” here), subject to any applicable agreements you’ve entered into, of course.

You don’t HAVE to register your work for it to be under copyright protection, but to doing so would give you a stronger case if you ever decided to go to court over copyright. To register a work in the US you would do so through the Copyright Office.

In general though, @ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world is right though, you should assume anything you put out in the wild will be used in a manner you never intended, and that you may not like.

For examples of how helpful copyright protection is in a practical sense, might want to check out c/piracy.

For something like this, I think I would use Hugo to generate a static site. You write the post using markdown then tell Hugo to regenerate the site.

If you want to publish and receive comments or feedback via the fediverse, you might take a look at WriteFreely. Simpler to use but more complicated to setup.

Wordpress is also an option, but I personally don’t like it much. I spend all my time playing with all the knobs and never actually publish anything.

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#blogging-platforms

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#content-management-systems-cms

Pirate Bay? I don’t know. I haven’t run that sea in close to 20 years. Went open source instead. Might check the Mega Thread for more up to date info.

Well, I use NextCloud (via Nextcloud AIO) as my cloud backend for almost everything. If all you want is contact syncing, that is almost certainly overkill. It’s a Big project that does just about everything.

If I remember correctly, there were a few more focused projects listed in the Awesome-Selfhosted repo that may be useful to you.

I’ve never played guitar hero so I don’t know what you mean by that.

If you’ve seen the Simply Guitar or Yousicion ads (I’m not linking them, too cringe!), you’ve got the general idea.

UG Pro’s midi player didn’t exist when I first started playing with the guitar, so something I’ll do with tab or sheet music, when I need to hear something to understand what I’m reading, is to enter the tab or standard notation into MuseScore and use it to create a midi track I can listen to. You can speed it up or slow it down as necessary.

It’s also possible to take a midi file, open it using MuseScore, and it will convert the midi data into standard notation. From there you can have it translated into tab. Tab created this way isn’t great, and you will have to modify the fret choices it makes to make the song playable, but it will get you in the ball park. The rest is just learning your instrument/tuning, what notes are where, that sort of thing.

Most popular songs should have a midi file available, especially popular music pre-2010ish. Downloading mp3s on a 56k modem sucked! Midi’s were a much faster download.

Another thing you can do is take the audio track your interested in learning from and load it into a DAW. Use an EQ filter to isolate the instrument, and add a boost after the EQ so you can hear the instrument clearly. Depending on the DAW, you may also be able to slow down the track and pitch shift it back up into the correct frequencies. This is a bit more difficult but will let you learn directly from the musician you’re interested in. I seem to recall an application that could do this in a more automated fashion, but I don’t remember what it was called.

Without knowing what you’re looking for? Might try archive.org. They’ve got a large collection of archived disk images. Might find what your looking for there. Otherwise you might try a public torrent search engine.

The logistics issue is not that big of one. We’re a warehouse that runs our own trucks. We could get it there with only a bit of extra fuel burn. HOS might cause issues though. Additionally, the need is great enough that many food banks and shelters would be willing to come pick it up if we weren’t all (Grocery industry and food banks) afraid of getting sued to death by some person that got sick after eating something that was a day after it’s arbitrarily set use by date.

We at the warehouse salve our consciences some by donating fresh products directly to some food banks local to our warehouse, and a few of our stores order a little extra to donate locally, but it’s nowhere near the amount that gets tossed by the stores.

I work in the grocery industry. For us it’s a liability thing. If you get sick and sue, it winds up costing us even if we win. Given the razor thin margins we operate on, we would have to increase prices to cover the extra cost.

The result is most grocery stores toss anything that doesn’t sell and lock the dumpster.

Some is donated, to be sure, but most is just tossed out.

If you had time I would say to try contacting CNN directly. Most news outlets don’t mind sharing old reports. Can take a while though.

Another option would be to contact the reporter who did the report as they might save such things for whatever reason or might be willing to put you in touch with the outlet’s archive department, but again might take a while.

But since time is an issue, YouTube may be your best bet.

I haven’t really followed most protests in a while, but I do recall more than a few occasions where there was a particularly hot-button issue being protested by two separate groups in close proximity and the police were there solely to keep the different protesting groups away from each other. I seem to remember that they (the protesting groups) had gotten a bit rowdy but that not much came of it.

The riot squads committing war crimes against civilians stick out in part because of the brutality but also because of the relative rarity of it.

As everyone else has said, if your time is limited, your best path is docker. You don’t need to learn all of docker, but understanding how docker compose works at a fairly high level will drastically speed up setup as well as administrative tasks like updating and backups

As for what to run, you mentioned wireguard and a notes app. The notes app could be solved without needing a central server with Obsidian and I’m not seeing the use case here for Wireguard.

I would start with what problem or pain point are you trying to solve for.

In my case, I had a bunch of IOT devices all making excessive DNS queries and I wanted a network level ad blocker so I setup PiHole (2 in fact, they run my network’s DNS).

I had a large music collection and burning mix CDs was no longer practical so I setup Jellyfin (Navidrome might have also worked), and use FinAmp on my phone.

Google started being a pain in my backside so I setup Nextcloud.

Someone got me some smart devices so HomeAssistant was setup.

I needed a way to find these services so I setup Heimdel as a dashboard.

I wanted some of these publicly available so I setup Caddy as a reverse proxy.

That would definitely solve the immediate question, but I’ve a feeling it would create more problems than it solves.

The idea does give me the warm fuzzies though!

I’ve bounced between both over the last 20 years. The main difference between Gnome and KDE is that KDE has always been far more customizable. Gnome has better support for Wayland over KDE 5, however that is not true for KDE 6. I’m not sure which is default currently for the Fedora KDE spin.

My personal take on the current Gnome DE is that it is a very different way of conceptualizing the desktop from what I’m used to, to the point that it puts me off. I had the same issue with the Unity DE on Ubuntu back when. While it’s not for me, a lot of folks do seem to like it. I’ts quite usable, but I wind up spending time fafing around trying to figure out how to get things done rather then just doing what it is I’m trying to do. Muscle memory runs deep and KDE keeps to the traditional Windows desktop feel (Win95 - Win 7) with a few nice upgrades. Gnome ( at least current Gnome) does it their own way.

Love of Tolkien is sadly not universal. I married a heathen that hates Lord of the Rings. 😩

Fifth Element

For pretty much all big spending projects it’s a bit of all of the above. Also how the money is actually spent is usually the far more interesting part.

For example, while I haven’t looked at the latest aid package for Ukraine, if it follows the same pattern as the previous ones, most the the money doesn’t actually go to Ukraine. What actually happens with most of it is that the US military is told to give Ukraine some of their old kit, the US military then uses the money from the aid package to replace what they shipped off with new kit. The money stays in the US and effectively doesn’t get spent as it winds up back in Uncle Sam’s pocket one way or another.

At the scale of governments, especially governments that control their own currency, the money isn’t what’s truly important. It’s the resources that matter. Manpower, materials and energy.

I’m going to have to take a look at this! Thanks!

Didn’t know they existed. Thanks!