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Technology Resource - Blog Posts
im sure someone already made a post about it but i came across a ublock origin add-on that blacklists around 950 AI websites and disables AI overview ☝️ so u can be free from seeing AI in your search
I think every computer user needs to read this because holy fucking shit this is fucking horrible.
So Windows has a new feature incoming called Recall where your computer will first, monitor everything you do with screenshots every couple of seconds and "process that" with an AI.
Hey, errrr, fuck no? This isn't merely because AI is really energy intensive to the point that it causes environmental damage. This is because it's basically surveilling what you are doing on your fucking desktop.
This AI is not going to be on your desktop, like all AI, it's going to be done on another server, "in the cloud" to be precise, so all those data and screenshot? They're going to go off to Microsoft. Microsoft are going to be monitoring what you do on your own computer.
Now of course Microsoft are going to be all "oooh, it's okay, we'll keep your data safe". They won't. Let me just remind you that evidence given over from Facebook has been used to prosecute a mother and daughter for an "illegal abortion", Microsoft will likely do the same.
And before someone goes "durrr, nuthin' to fear, nuthin to hide", let me remind you that you can be doing completely legal and righteous acts and still have the police on your arse. Are you an activist? Don't even need to be a hackivist, you can just be very vocal about something concerning and have the fucking police on your arse. They did this with environmental protesters in the UK. The culture war against transgender people looks likely to be heading in a direction wherein people looking for information on transgender people or help transitioning will be tracked down too. You have plenty to hide from the government, including your opinions and ideas.
Again, look into backing up your shit and switching to Linux Mint or Ubuntu to get away from Microsoft doing this shit.
Nooo i just saw a TikTok of someone calling their mom a hoarder cause she has a CD collection and going "i can play these faster on an app" and telling her to throw them away BITE BITE BITE BITE KILL KILL KILL KILL if someone said that to me i would rip them apart with my teeth i would burn them alive the violence that would take place would be unimaginable i would be an unleashed demon hungry for blood and meat. unimaginable horrors. death and destruction. killing. maiming. no one could survive that. it would be a nuclear apocalypse. leave the fucking CDs alone
Instructions for how to download a Youtube video using VLC on Reddit
Instructions for how to navigate the underworld on an Orphic gold tablet
I’d like to share this Tumblr tool with everyone. You give it a Tumblr URL, and it identifies the most popular posts (by note count) for each month in your history. It was quite useful for determining which comics to reblog for a “best of” week.
Note: To have it also include posts from 2013, click ‘advanced options’ and use the checkbox for 2013. It’s an old tool, which is a bit embarassing for Tumblr. Why isn’t this functionality built into the Tumblr interface?
Attention non-artists who commission artists: don’t fuckin do this???
hey instead of bullying or scaring you into switching to firefox, let me tell you why i LOVE firefox and how my online life has improved significantly since installing it
- the setup process is easy, and even fun! if you’re using tumblr rn, you can handle it, and if you’re the kind of tumblr user who likes customizing your blog or tinkering with xkit, you can have a lot of fun personalizing really granular settings and picking themes and extensions and everything, it’s very customizable and i happily spent like 2 hours getting everything perfect.
- you can use a command line entry tool to change specific settings right from the search bar! i did this to make firefox stop auto filling my email information since i use a different password locker (which you should too! try bitwarden!), and it was easier than digging through a bunch of submenus for a setting i wasn’t sure existed. you can just turn shit off!
- there’s a preset theme called aurora that’s purple and VERY pretty
- once you get ublock origin and as many other blockers as you’d like set up, no ads, anywhere, ever! streaming sites, youtube, all the basics, totally no stress and no compatibility issues for me
- in browser screenshot and picture in picture functions!! holy shit i use these every day, the PiP is especially helpful, it replaced an extension i used to use on chrome and it’s leagues better and works on all video content pretty much
- overall better downloads management imo, it’s a lot easier to get to your downloads and find them later
- better bookmark system, with the ability to organize your bookmarks with searchable tags and assign them a shortcut you can type into the search bar to go to
- containers! you can have two accounts to the same website open in two different tabs and switch between them without having to switch accounts. also gives firefox the ability to contain facebook and their trackers, so you can click that party invite link without feeling like you just let mark zuckerberg into your house
these were just off the top of my head, i love firefox a lot and actively enjoy using it, which i never felt with chrome! please download firefox!! you will not regret it!!! where’s your fucking rage!!!!!! go!!!!!!!!!
So uh….some dude apparently recreated Adobe Photoshop feature-for-feature, for FREE, and it runs in your browser.
Anyway, fuck Adobe, and enjoy!
Skip Google for Research
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
Sometimes I’m looking for something online - often “how to” articles - and I want to filter for - like - a website that was clearly built in 2010 at the latest, which may or may not have been updated since then, but contains a vast wealth of information on one topic, painstakingly organized by an unknown legend in the field with decades’ worth of experience. I don’t want a listicle with a nice stolen picture in a slideshow format written by a content aggregator that God forgot. I want hand-drawn diagrams by some genius professor who doesn’t understand SEO at all, but understands making stir-fries or raising stick insects better than anyone else on this earth. I don’t know what search settings to put into Google to get this.
I miss the days when, no matter how slow your internet was, if you paused any video and let it buffer long enough, you could watch it uninterrupted
girl typing a very specific question into google search bar, scrunching her face as she takes time to make sure she hasn't made any spelling errors, hitting enter, shaking her head as google only presents her with unhelpful websites that don't answer her query at all, moving her cursor back to the search bar and clicking on it so she can carefully write 'reddit' at the end, hitting enter again, sighing with relief as she finds a link to a reddit post asking the exact question she needed answered posted in a subreddit for a very niche topic, finally moving her cursor to click on the link, wondering why she didn't go straight to the subreddit earlier, only to be met with a deleted comment with a reply from the OP stating 'that was very helpful, thanks', sighing with frustration as she moves her cursor back to the search bar so she can copy the link and paste it into the wayback machine,
how to find literally any post on a blog in seconds (on desktop)
there are so many posts about ~tumblr is so broken, you can’t find any post on your own blog, it’s impossible, bluhrblub~
I am here to tell you otherwise! it is in fact INCREDIBLY easy to find a post on a blog if you’re on desktop/browser and you know what you’re doing:
url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant. every single post, every single time. in chronological order starting with the most recent post. note: it will not find #croissants or that time you made the typo #croidnssants. for a tag with multiple words, it’s just /tagged/my-croissant and it will show you everything with the exact phrase #my croissant
url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant/chrono will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the exact phrase #croissant, but it will show them in reverse order with the oldest first
url.tumblr.com/search/croissant isn’t as perfect at finding everything, but it’s generally loads better than the search on mobile. it will find a good array of posts that have the word croissant in them somewhere. could be in the body of the post (op captioned it “look at my croissant”) or in the tags (#man I want a croissant). it won’t necessarily find EVERYTHING like /tagged/ does, but I find it’s still more reliable than search on mobile. you can sometimes even find posts by a specific user by searching their url. also, unlike whatever random assortment tumblr mobile pulls up, it will still show them in a more logically chronological order
url.tumblr.com/day/2020/11/05 will show you every post on the blog from november 5th, 2020, in case you’re taking a break from croissants to look for destiel election memes
url.tumblr.com/archive/ is search paradise. easily go to a particular month and see all posts as thumbnails! search by post type! search by tags but as thumbnails now
url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio will show you every audio post on your blog (you can also filter by other post types). sometimes a little imperfect if you’re looking for a video when the op embedded the video in a text post instead of posting as a video post, etc
url.tumblr.com/archive/tagged/croissant will show you EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant, but it will show you them in the archive thumbnail view divided by months. very useful if you’re looking for a specific picture of a croissant that was reblogged 6 months ago and want to be able to scan for it quickly
url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio/tagged/croissant will show you every audio post tagged with the specific phrase #croissant (you can also filter by photo or text instead, because I don’t know why you have audio posts tagged croissant)
the tag system on desktop tumblr is GENUINELY amazing for searching within a specific blog!
caveat: this assumes a person HAS a desktop theme (or “custom theme”) enabled. a “custom theme” is url.tumblr.com, as opposed to tumblr.com/url. I’ve heard you have to opt-into the former now, when it used to be the default, so not everyone HAS a custom theme where you can use all those neat url tricks.
if the person doesn’t have a “custom theme” enabled, you’re beholden to the search bar. still, I’ve found the search bar on tumblr.com/url is WAY more reliable than search on mobile. for starters, it tends to bring posts up in a sensible order, instead of dredging up random posts from 2013 before anything else
if you’re on mobile, I’m sorry. godspeed and good luck finding anything. (my one tip is that if you’re able to click ON a tag rather than go through the search bar, you’ll have better luck. if your mutual has recently reblogged a post tagged #croissant, you can click #croissant and it’ll bring up everything tagged #croissant just like /tagged/croissant. but if there’s no readily available tag to click on, you have to rely on the mobile search bar and its weird bizarre whims)