Agreed, it's so good.

I got an invite to join last year and signed up to test it out.

Felt like there was a lot less people and a lot less content on it than Mastadon.

Unless the users/content now really starts to take off, there's not enough on there to make it interesting.

Loved the house used for the indoor shots in this scene. I believe it's a famous piece of brutalist architecture in the LA Hills.

Some forums are still reasonably active. I use Whirlpool fairly regularly. Mostly tech related, but has lots of other sections too.

https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/

If you search around you can find others.

Yeah, it seems to work now. Didn't used to work reliably a few years ago. Now, text within any document I save seems to come up in search shortly afterwards.

This happened to me once.

I forgot I had contraband on me and jumped to New Atlantis. I got scanned and asked to hand it over, but instead I just jumped out to The Den to sell the Contraband.

As soon as I got there security started shooting at me.

Had to load a previous save.

An interesting read. Yeah, it's complicated.

I think sound has been a bit under-appreciated compared to visual effects/quality in recent years.

In summer, I'd rather have more daylight at 7:30pm than 4:30am.

Yes, I remember that! I recall thinking, imagine how good this will get in the future. Sadly it didn't.

Exactly the same in Australia.

This.

I use Adguard, if a site blocks me for it, then it goes on a black list of "never visit" sites.

In a few cases, if I use and like/support a specific site a lot and that site is ad supported with no other ad-free option, then I white list it.

But to read the odd crappy article? No I'm not disabling my ad blocker.

Yeah, I really liked the movie and it's hard to describe exactly why.

It's not an amazing story, or amazing characters, it's not exciting....but it has a certain vibe/mood to it that I liked.

I was also a bit fascinated by Japan, so that's part of it. Got to visit a couple of times in the years after seeing the movie and whenever I've been in a Tokyo hotel room it's reminded me of the film!

Yeah, that's on my to watch list.

Yes, they are less prevalent due to Reddit and other social media sucking up a lot of the users.

They are still around though. One Australian forum that I've been on for years which is still very active is Whirlpool. Started as a tech forum and expanded. It's very useful as source of info as it's been around over 20 years and a lot of questions have been asked and answered there.

I watched Amsterdam, a 2022 comedy/mystery set in the 1930s, starring Margot Robbie and Christian Bale and a big cast of others including Mike Myers, Rami Malek, Robert De Niro and Chris Rock.

It is loosely based on The Business Plot, an actual political conspiracy in the US in the 1930s. I'd never heard of this before.

It was an interesting and 'different than the usual' type of movie. A lot of the focus was on the witty dialogue between characters. Pretty nice movie visually too. Overall I enjoyed it and would give it about 7/10.

Nice. Thanks for the tip.

Not one I recognise.

Nice! Took me to a site full of movie themes in midi format👌🏻

Got stuck in hospital for a few weeks recently and used the opportunity to finally learn Affinity.

I'm now really liking it. Takes a few tries to get into it though.

I particularly like it on the iPad with the Apple pencil. A bit less so on my windows laptop.

I thought Mass Effect had a great soundtrack that really fit the game perfectly. Moody in parts and rousing in others.

Mass Effect 1 Soundtrack

I wondered the same thing.

It's definitely the best one after Sync.

Connect is awesome. The fact that it is only a month old and that good is honestly mind blowing and it's totally free with no premium options or ads. I have really enjoyed using it up until now.

I'm a previous Sync for Reddit user though and I do love the app. The customisation options are insane. I can literally make it look and act exactly how I want, even down to things like specifying download locations for pictures, whether they go into subfolders by community, whether pictures show up as media files in your gallery or are hidden, the spacing between comment lines, etc.... It's also customisable by account if you have multiple accounts, so all of this can be different or the same for each account.

So once you spend some time setting it up, it almost feels like you've designed your own interface/app.

It's hard to beat.

That long slim beak, perfectly designed for urban rummaging!

🤔 Probably why they seem to be booming in this city.

I got sick of subscriptions, so I got Affinity Photo 2 for iPad as it was a reasonably priced one time purchase.

I cannot recommend it highly enough. I made a post about it here:

https://lemmy.world/post/1402700

So true!

Most things I do on it can be done as well or better elsewhere.

However, I really like Photo editing on my iPad Pro using the Apple pencil.

It's now my preferred platform for that.

What I would find useful is a way to follow specific Lemmy users on Mastodon.

Nice. I'll participate whenever I have some time.

I'm spending way more time!

I didn't really like the community in Reddit that much. I used it more like a news feed. So I never read 'all', I just read my subs for a few minutes here and there, but I didn't post and comment much.

Since coming here I post and comment a lot more. There seems to be more proper discussion here, despite being much smaller and quieter.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

In terms of blocking ads, I run Adguard (lifetime sub), which blocks ads system wide - even in apps.

Synced bookmarks could be good though.

I have been with idrive since 2009. At the time they were the only ones that allowed backups of network attached storage on their cheaper personal plans. Everyone else saw that as an "enterprise" feature which required a business plan. Which was bullsh*t, because lots of home NAS devices were being sold.

Anyway, I haven't done a recent comparison of services, but I remain happy with idrive.

Thesedays I no longer backup on a computer with a mapped drive, but directly from my NAS which runs the idrive software.

I had a catastrophic dual drive failure a few years ago, one failed and another failed during the raid rebuild! I was able to restore about 1tb of data and didn't lose anything important.

They also offer backup and restore by shipping a drive to you if you want to avoid the huge initial backup or a total restore, but I haven't used that feature.

They do also have a mobile app, but last time I tried it, it wasn't great.

Wait - this changes everything!!

On desktop it's mainly Firefox, on mobile it's mainly the stock Samsung browser.

But I've started using Edge a bit more on mobile lately since I discovered its reading mode, which makes for a very clean readable format to read articles.

Nice. Do you know where this is?

I nearly scrolled past this headline as usual. But it ended up being an interesting well written article.

Worth a read if your interested in the topic.

Yeah, I want they opposite of that, all meat no shell!

Yeah, I'm only keeping it because of the grandfathered deal. If they scrap that I'll just cancel and save the money. Better in my pocket than Google's!

I've been a bit stuck on Samsung phones.

If I think about why, it's mainly due to two things, in order of importance:

1. One UI and Samsung Goodlock. I'm probably going to get roasted for this, but I like Samsung's UI a lot more than other varieties of Android. When My Note 10 went in for repairs in 2021, a friend lent me their Pixel 6 Pro (they didn't like it and went back to an I iPhone) For me it felt very basic and I was happy to go back to my Note. People hate on Samsung's UI, but I reckon it's gotten really good in the last few years.

2. The S-Pen. I'm not using it constantly, but I am using it several times a week and love having it there. Main uses for me are not to make notes (I'd rather type). I use it as a shutter button, planting my phone somewhere stable and taking less shaky photos. I use it to edit photos, so much better than using my finger. I use it to sign documents (probably only about once a month but it's so handy to have it when you need it).

I do also like Dex for when I'm on holidays and I can plug it into a hotel TV with my mini Bluetooth keyboard/mouse. But that only gets used once or twice a year so I could live without it.

Given the above, I feel like Samsung has me by the b*lls right now when it comes to phones! I don't know if that would be described as "loyalty", but I have been sticking with the brand.

I'm relying on some of you folks to do a "trial" for me and let me know. Your efforts are appreciated 😛

Yeah. If it gets enshittified or sold to a dodgy company, I'd not hesitate to migrate.

Might bookmark this thread for if (when?) that time comes.