The issue with Google's personalised search results is, imo:

1. Not only is it not opt-in, but you can't even opt out of it. Personalised search results should be opt-in and disabled by default.
2. The data kept on you is used to sell you ads
3. The data kept on you will be handed over to state entities fairly easily

Given those three problems, how feasible would it be to self-host a search engine that personalises your results to show you things that are more relevant to you? Avoiding issues 1 & 2 as you're self-hosting so presumably you have made the decisions around those two things. And issue 3 is improved as you can host it off-shore if you are concerned about your domestic state, and if you are legally compelled to hand over data, you can make the personal choice about whether or not to take the hit of the consequences of refusing, rather than with a big company who will obviously immediately comply and not attempt to fight it even on legal grounds.

A basic use-case example is, say you're a programmer and you look up ruby, you would want to get the first result as the programming language's website rather than the wikipedia page for the gemstone. You could just make the search query ruby programming language on any privacy-respecting search engine, but it's just a bit of QoL improvement to not have to think about the different ways an ambiguous search query like that could be interpreted.

Basically I have a lot of friends who self describe as bad at tech. It seems like a lot of learned helplessness and refusing to even listen to instructions because they've already told themselves they can't do it. But they would like to get better and do trust me. So I was trying to come up with some "tasks" to give them to help them gain confidence and to gain some basic skills as well.

I have zero qualifications in tech/computer stuff, and no professional background either, so I know that all this stuff can be self-taught.

I was thinking gaming-related stuff might be a good entry point: setting up a Minecraft server, installing mods for games, hacking your 3DS. These things boil down to following instructions so maybe it would help people learn that if you follow the documentation/guide you will get things done. It doesn't require much thinking or problem-solving, just following instructions.

Would like to hear what other people think and what "tasks" they suggest tech illiterate or tech-averse people try in order to build their confidence and gain some basic competence.

I've finally started having some free time lately and have been working through my Steam library, most of which is Windows games I'm playing with Proton.

I wanted to install some mods, and wanted a mod manager for this. Nexus Mods has Vortex, which is not available for Linux. In any case, running Windows games on Linux through Proton on Steam is fairly specific; the game files will be at certain locations on a Linux filesystem, not at the same locations as they would be on a Windows filesystem. So I think I would need software that has specifically been designed for this use-case (Windows games from Steam running on Proton).

Are there any such mod managers out there? What do other people do when playing games on Linux? I can't be the only person who wants to play video games with mods.

One example is bread. I was baking bread the other day, and obviously the cost of the ingredients I put in the loaf are less than the cost of buying a loaf at the supermarket, but that doesn't include the cost of putting the oven on.

Or dry beans vs canned beans; does the cost of boiling the beans actually bring the cost up to be equivalent to canned beans?

I know that everyone's energy costs are different so it's not possible for someone to do the calculations for you, but I've never bothered to do them for my own case because bills I get from the energy company just tell me how much I owe them for the month, not "you put the oven on for 30 minutes on the 17th of June and that cost you X". It sounds like a headache to try calculate how much I pay for energy per meal. But if someone else has done that calculation for themselves I'd be interested to read it and see how it works out. My intuition is that, in general, it's cheaper to make things yourself (e.g. bread or beans like above), but I couldn't say that for sure without calculating, which as I said seems like it would be a pain in the ass.

For a while, I was running a conduwuit server. Conduwuit has been abandoned, and I wanted to migrate my server to upstream Conduit.

Has anyone done this before? I'm using Docker Compose for Conduwuit.

Meaning that the author is maybe not very good at their craft, but inadvertently created a work with a lot more meaning than they intended, or they accidentally did something quite clever that they didn't mean to. Or maybe a work which is good in its own right but there's a particular "unofficial" interpretation which makes it so much better.

Obviously a bit of this question involves knowing authorial intentions, but in a lot of instances authors have been able to state that they did or didn't intend a particular interpretation.

It appears to work fine (it contains my home partition for my main machine I daily drive) and I haven't noticed signs of failure. Not noticeably slow either. I used to boot Windows off of it once upon a time which was incredibly slow to start up, but I haven't noticed slowness since using it for my home partition for my personal files.

Articles online seem to suggest the life expectancy for an HDD is 5–7 years. Should I be worried? How do I know when to get a new drive?

I've been thinking about this for a while, that there's kind of not a great solution, that I know of or can think of, for long-form internal political discussions within an organisation. There are of course existing platforms that are not private (like you could have a Facebook group for instance).

There's obviously a lot of encrypted chat apps out there but they're all more "texting" form and are not great for like forum-style discussion.

The best I can think of might be Matrix, but it's more of a chatroom style format and I've not tried using it for this forum-style of discussion which I'm not sure if it works smoothly for.

Tbh a mailing list would kind of be my ideal (I assume there's mailing list software out there that integrates with PGP so we can protect our emails) but so many people in organising spaces are pretty tech-resistant boomers (no offence to the older generation, I'm aware it's a generalisation that doesn't apply to everyone) and it'd be hard to get everyone to use PGP I think. Also email is just not very secure in the first place and would expose a lot of metadata, making it not suitable for organisations that are heavily criminalised or otherwise have a higher threat model. Not to mention that the mail server in question would be able to read the emails sent to the mailing list, as it has to decrypt emails sent to the mailing list in order to encrypt it with all recipients' personal PGP keys. And there's just so many points of failure in terms of all messages to the mailing list getting accessed if just one member gets compromised.

Maybe I'm missing an obvious solution, in which case please tell me of course. But this is just an issue that's crossed my mind over the years as I've watched organisations use insecure platforms for long-form discussion, and I cringe, but I don't think I know the ideal solution either.

I was interested in hosting my own mail server that provides a similar level of privacy for users as Protonmail, ie the server admin cannot read any emails, even those which are not E2EE with PGP. Is there a self-hostable solution to this?

I'm aware the server admin can't read emails that were sent encrypted using the user's PGP key, but most emails I get are automated emails from companies/services/etc without the option to upload a public key to send the user encrypted email. If you're with a service like Protonmail, the server admin still cannot read even these emails.

I don't own any controllers.

I started playing Dark Souls 3 which I now understand has a controller strongly recommended. I may as well just look into getting a controller of some kind as I have a few games that have somewhat janky kbm controls and are better enjoyed with a controller.

I just wanted to ask for general advice about what controller to get in terms of compatibility. Also if someone has made a controller that's more in the spirit of foss that also works fine with Steam and Proton games that would be nice?

I know Steam is pretty good with Playstation controllers and I used to use a PS controller (don't remember what generation) with some native Linux Steam games, not sure how the whole PS vs Xbox controller thing is affected by running games through Proton if at all? If it matters let me know, and I'll see if I can procure a controller for myself.