Tl;dr I unclouded my RSSs (RSS’s? RSS’? RSSes?)

How long will it be before your Facebook stream is so full of promoted content, bizarre algorithmic decisions, and tracking cookie based shopping cart reminders that you won’t be getting any valuable information?  For as little as $60, a business can promote a page to Facebook users.  It won’t be long before your news feed is worthless.

Ben Wolf of Old Reader fame wrote this back in November 2013. (And I found it in this Wired article, credit where credit is due.) It was true then in 2013, it was true in 2018 when I started writing this blog post (LOL), and it is true now. More amazingly, that 2013 slug still works! Anyhow, today I want to write a bit about RSS so time to dust off this draft!

RSS is one of those old holdouts of open technologies that kind of went away, but akshully never really went away. We kind of left it, but actually we (some of us) never did. Contrary to common belief it did exist before Google Reader (if I’m not wrong, I used Liferea before migrating my feeds to Reader), and contrary to common belief, it’s not dead. Like IRC. Or Usenet. Or punks.

Meanwhile, with AI rising the internet by and large became unusable on the “traditional” channels of the past 10-15 years — your “for you” feeds, and the like. Algorithmically curated sources are inevitably polluted by algorithmically generated crap making human content very difficult to find and follow.

But I digress.

When I started writing this post in 2018, I was a happy Inoreader user — Pro, for no other reason than to support them. But now, 3 (+1) things happened:

So I finally made the move from Inoreader to (selfhosted) FreeRSS.

FreeRSS is a PHP application so install is trivial. Subscribed feeds can be simple exported to OPML from Inoreader and then imported to my FreshRSS instance, so that’s also trivial. I encountered 2 gimmicks:

On my phone (and tablet), I installed FeedMe for those cozy cross platform vibes, connecting to my instance through the (anachronistically named) Google Reader API. The app works much like Inoreader’s, swipe to refresh, scroll to mark as read, etc.

I also installed the RSSHub Radar addon in my Firefox to help discovery: it will discover feeds in pages I visit, so if I decide I want to add a site’s feed to my reader, it’s 1 click.

And now with no limits on number of feeds, I do it much more often too: when I  stumble upon an interesting/valuable post in a “human” ghetto of the internet (like Reddit, or Lemmy, or Mastodon), I can immediately subscribe to the whole feed if I want to, making for a very simple, but (for now) effective discovery method.

Next up: consolidating my Youtube feeds in a similar way!

#ai #algorithmicNews #feedly #freshrss #g33ker #inoreader #oldReader #rss #unclouding

Tl;dr I unclouded my RSSs (RSS’s? RSS’? RSSes?)

How long will it be before your Facebook stream is so full of promoted content, bizarre algorithmic decisions, and tracking cookie based shopping cart reminders that you won’t be getting any valuable information?  For as little as $60, a business can promote a page to Facebook users.  It won’t be long before your news feed is worthless.

Ben Wolf of Old Reader fame wrote this back in November 2013. (And I found it in this Wired article, credit where credit is due.) It was true then in 2013, it was true in 2018 when I started writing this blog post (LOL), and it is true now. More amazingly, that 2013 slug still works! Anyhow, today I want to write a bit about RSS so time to dust off this draft!

RSS is one of those old holdouts of open technologies that kind of went away, but akshully never really went away. We kind of left it, but actually we (some of us) never did. Contrary to common belief it did exist before Google Reader (if I’m not wrong, I used Liferea before migrating my feeds to Reader), and contrary to common belief, it’s not dead. Like IRC. Or Usenet. Or punks.

Meanwhile, with AI rising the internet by and large became unusable on the “traditional” channels of the past 10-15 years — your “for you” feeds, and the like. Algorithmically curated sources are inevitably polluted by algorithmically generated crap making human content very difficult to find and follow.

But I digress.

When I started writing this post in 2018, I was a happy Inoreader user — Pro, for no other reason than to support them. But now, 3 (+1) things happened:

So I finally made the move from Inoreader to (selfhosted) FreeRSS.

FreeRSS is a PHP application so install is trivial. Subscribed feeds can be simple exported to OPML from Inoreader and then imported to my FreshRSS instance, so that’s also trivial. I encountered 2 gimmicks:

On my phone (and tablet), I installed FeedMe for those cozy cross platform vibes, connecting to my instance through the (anachronistically named) Google Reader API. The app works much like Inoreader’s, swipe to refresh, scroll to mark as read, etc.

I also installed the RSSHub Radar addon in my Firefox to help discovery: it will discover feeds in pages I visit, so if I decide I want to add a site’s feed to my reader, it’s 1 click.

And now with no limits on number of feeds, I do it much more often too: when I  stumble upon an interesting/valuable post in a “human” ghetto of the internet (like Reddit, or Lemmy, or Mastodon), I can immediately subscribe to the whole feed if I want to, making for a very simple, but (for now) effective discovery method.

Next up: consolidating my Youtube feeds in a similar way!

#ai #algorithmicNews #feedly #freshrss #g33ker #inoreader #oldReader #rss #unclouding

PET CT-n jártam, vörös lettem mint az állat.

- https://lipilee.hu/2025/09/22/pet-ct-n-jartam-voros-lettem-mint-az-allat/

El akart hervadni, szabad-e locsolni.

Szóval PET CT-n jártam, és sikerült kikapnom egy “nagyon ritka” mellékhatást, amelynek keretében 2 napig olyan vörös voltam, mint aki elaludt a nyári napsütésben, egy kísérleti atomrobbantás árnyékában.

Ebből amúgy nem csinálnék posztot, de a Garmin órám egészen viccesen tükrözte le az elmúlt (most már) 3 napot a body stress grafikonján:

(Az ízléses és cizellált stilisztikai érzékről tanúskodó markup nyilván én voltam. Meg a

montage -tile 2×1 -geometry +0+0

is.)

Data nördök figyelmébe: […]

#anamnesis #blog #g33ker #garmin #makroblog #petCt

I just healed from what is probably the worst flu I’ve ever encountered. It’s not horrible-worst, and certainly not the worst I’ve ever been — to a cancer survivor everything is relative. But as flu goes, this was pretty miserable. Probably worse than my covid, although the jury is still out (for example, so far I didn’t get pneumonia as a complication. Hashtag crossed fingers emoji.)

But lacking strength to even take a walk, every day (well, when I got better) I did some low brain activity / geek cleanup projects.

• I cleaned up my Kodi mediacenter’s repos (they’ve been very polluted due to a broken Jellyfin addon install some time back), and
• I finally set up my RPi5 (that I got almost as soon as it entered the market — I was on a waiting list), and split my home backup and Jellyfin server. Yes, I’m using a RPi5 as a Jellyfin server now against the recommendation of the Jellyfin folks (RPi5 apparently doesn’t have hw acceleration that Jellyfin needs for transcoding, but I’ll be honest: I don’t notice it. We are a 2-max-4 user household, and watching stuff on Jellyfin simultaneously doesn’t even make the fan turn on.)
• I also fixed an old keyboard (the synthesizer type, not the clickety-typie type), and last but not least:
• I cleaned out our dryer. (Cleaning out a dryer is very satisfying: dryer gunk does not stink, (it’s just wet dust), and there’s a lot of it so there’s a sense of achievement, and it makes a huge, visible impact in the machine’s efficiency.)

I love my Garmin stuff. I know Body Battery and Stress on a Garmin device are more or less arbitrary figures that they calculate somehow and you should treat it as such, but it’s uncanny how well it senses you are sick:

So anyway, I’m back and I have 2 more posts in the making: one on about what is a citizenship and another one about axes. I even have a little teaser for one of these:

https://lipilee.hu/2024/02/07/love-in-the-time-of-influenza-macroblog/

#anamnesis #english #g33ker #garmin #influenza #macroblog

Thought I’d check back at my Samsung switch now after what, 4 months?

In summary: it’s going good (enough.)

In more detail:

The main upside (still): battery life.

I realised that all those years I’ve been saying “ooh I have terrible battery anxiety”, I just had phones with shit battery life. My battery anxiety is gone, reader. I charge my phone when it goes below 20%, or 10%, and I charge it up to around 80-90%, sometimes only 60%, sometimes only 55%. I do this knowing that it will comfortably give me at least a day’s worth of use, and I don’t have to worry. It’s a liberating feeling.

The main downside seems to be: the camera.

After a 3 week long Scandinavia trip (photos here), I can now safely sum up my opinion on the camera as: meh. I was (probably) right in being sceptical about the camera. I’m using both the stock Camera app and Camera FV-5, and the results are a bit hit-and-miss. I’ve installed ProShoot, which gives similar results, although more control over them.

Speed is good enough.

Although this supposed to be a midrange phone, it provides absolutely sufficient speed for my use. I don’t play hardware intensive games of course (although sometimes join MS Teams calls which might be similar), I do some youtube now and then, and I installed Kodi to watch movies sometimes, which is actually very nice.

The app stack is… OK.

What I’m missing the most is proper DAV integration, which is needed for Nextcloud. iOS does this quite well, actually, supporting CalDav, CardDav, and all the others out of the box, which is a little miracle. On Android DAVx5 is the de facto solution, after which one gets a plethora of choice in calendar apps, and a plethora of choice of one (as far as I can tell) in terms of task managers… But neither of them is perfect, owing to that infamous lack of vertical integration. What that means in practical terms is I lost my workflow of adding tasks that I juts remembered during brushing my teeth via Siri. (And, as an extension I also lost the smiles when I read back the tasks Siri created based on my mumbled commands.)

What’s missing and have I switched on my iPhone since?

Sorely missing, and by no fault of Android, is the control of my kids’ Screen Time, which is of course a vendor locked-in Apple solution. If at least they gave a way to approve screen time requests on the web!… but alas, they are Apple, so they didn’t. There is an app for that, just not on your Android device, loser.

Along the same lines, I’ve missed the “Find My” (…children on a map) feature about twice, until I realised this is accessible from the web as well, with SMS as the second factor. So now I have a Firefox bookmark pinned on my Android home screen that takes me directly to “Find My” on iCloud. I’ve never used iCloud, well there’s a time for everything.

Oh and there’s one more thing I miss from my iPhone: its size. Samsung phones these days are just too big. This was a strong factor that almost took me towards a Pixel but then battery life, as my single most important decision driver, convinced me to buy the Samsung, and I ultimately don’t regret it. Still, it could be smaller.

Featured image: a photo taken with the Galaxy A54. Not that bad after all, right?

https://gergolippai.com/2023/12/12/4-month-check-in-hows-the-switch-back-to-android/

#android #g33ker #ios #iphone #samsung #samsungGalaxyA54

Pixelfed now supports importing your Insta archive, so I did just that.

Looks like the last time I posted about Pixelfed (the federated photo-microblogging platform) was (*checks notes) in 2020 – time moves quickly when flies have fun!
Since then, Pixelfed gained some more ground, some apps, plenty of finesse, a lot of users, and, for the purpose of this entry, an Instagram import feature.

It works!

All I needed to do was go to the Import page, and upload my Instagram archive:

The importer threw an error message at me about half the time, but my images were still imported. I also noticed that after importing 916 pictures, my Pixelfed profile still says I have 480 posts, so somehow the imported ones don’t count against the Pixelfed counter. Oh well, I can live with that.

Side note: Instagram is (still) a mess.

To get my Insta archive, I needed to go to Instagram. This involved logging in and requesting my archive. OK fine, although, language.

While I was waiting for my email with the archive link, I thought I’d unfollow (most) people I followed last time I browsed Instagram.

Well, after about 5 unfollows, computer says no: Instagram treats multiple unfollows unusual activity, and simply won’t do it, and you have to try later.

These little dark patterns, friction wherever you want to do something they don’t want you to do, is a big part of the reason I left.

#fediverse #g33ker #instagram #macroblog #pixelfed