It appears that an era is coming to an end. It was really nice to be able to run my own email server and even get a few people onboard with it. Unfortunately though, due to circumstances beyond my control, Free2Mail appears to be gone forever. The domain registry indicates that the domain is active on my account and the server is working perfectly, as evidenced by the fact that I run Talkabout on the same machine. But no matter what I do with the DNS nameservers, even using the registry's own servers, DNS queries return NXDOMAIN. This has been the case for 6 days now, so I am forced to abandon the project indefinitely. And no, I will not pay money to have my residential address posted all over the internet for all the world to scrape via automated whois queries, and I also refuse to pay even more money to resolve that issue. And then all the fees imposed by the U.S. Department of Commerce are entirely too much. So weighing my options carefully, I have chosen 1and1's Global Mail Exchange service to host mail for me going forward. Yeah, it's 1and1, a fairly large company, but at least it's not Google, Verizon/AOL/Yahoo/whatever, or God forbid, Apple or Microsoft, and although it's a huge hassle to get IMAP working, it's not impossible thanks to BeMyEyes, and I don't have to have the company generate a password that they know about either. So I guess of all the remaining options, 1and1/GMX is the best, at least for now, although I will take suggestions. It needs to cost nothing unless I'm running it on my own server where the server price is the only cost, and it needs to have IMAP/SMTP support. I also don't want to be limited to a few MB/month, as I need my mail to be reliable and not get cut off just because I get too many messages.

Wow look what I found! I initially heard a sample of this song ~2 years ago in my favorite artist's live. It was said to be on an upcoming album that unfortunately has still not been released. But fortunately for the world, this song was just released as a single 2 months ago. Of course I purchased the mp3 as soon as I found it. I guess if I had been monitoring my non-free social media feeds, I would have found it sooner. In any case though, here's the Youtube link to listen to it, and I know that it can be purchased from Anazon, and possibly other places as well.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=2OWCjryyCo4

Just got my wife a new Chromebook. We are a bit put off by a long-standing wifi bug that connects but says "Network unavailable," but we are impressed that it tells us how to make it speak. Thanks Google for taking a page out of the KaiOS playbook, telling us how to make a Chromebook talk immediately upon powering it on.

The U.S. auto industry apparently hasn't learned from its brush with catastrophic failure. No, I would never purchase anything that tells me it was made in 2024 when 2023 isn't even half over.

"It’s time to move on from removable batteries"
BULLSHIT! It’s time either to advance battery technology so that it is no longer the first point of failure, or to bring back the removable battery. It’s time to move on from planned obsolescence in favor of future-proofing.

My favorite #Hosting #ControlPanel just added the ability in the latest version to import #CPanel backups. This should greatly ease the migration from CPanel to a much more sane open source solution. #HestiaControlPanel continues to amaze!

Now I'm an international boss, or at least I can talk like an international boss! It's all thanks to #BOSSWireless, by the folks who gave us the @bossrevolution@twitter.com calling app. Mobile plans are $10, $20, $30 and $40 with all taxes and fees included, app not required!

The more I look at this paid domain name shit, the more I see the scam. Anything you could possibly want is either taken or is priced higher than a pastor addicted to Rolex. Anything reasonable is a subdomain that should be free. And some even tell me I can make an offer, and a professional scammer ... I mean broker will try to grab it from someone else for me. Man I sure do hope Freenom gets its new registration problems fixed. They were the only reasonable registrar available, unless you wanted something with 3 letters or less before the top level. Otherwise, the price of $0 was the same for everyone, with few exceptions. I have all my names registered through them, including kyle.tk and others, with similar names unavailable or at truly exorbitant prices anywhere else, I'm talking in the hundreds to thousands of dollars each year, more than I pay for all my servers combined, higher than my light bill and water bill, higher than all my utilities all at once, just for a namespace on the internet. #scam #ripoff #ShouldBeIllegal #DontTheyKnowBetter

It's confirmed I will never buy another carrier phone. Once bitten twice shy. @Ting Mobile told me they don't sell locked phones, but my #KaiPhone is locked to Ting by TCL. Funny they neglected to mention this on the product page for their TCL Flip.

I have purchased my last phone ever from a carrier. I inserted a #SIM into my #KaiPhone and it asked for a #CCKCode, which I have read is a carrier unlock code, but I purchased it from a carrier that told me they sell everything unlocked. Worse, no one can give me the code, as customer service has been down for a month.

"Save Over 45% per Month With the Disney Bundle" So now I can save over 45% a month by purchasing something that costs about 500% more each month than what I am currently paying. Is this some kind of a joke whose punchline I missed? #Hulu #DisneyBundle #email

Microsoft wouldn't know what ethics is if it came up to them and bit them on the bum. Saying that Microsoft laid off its ethics and society team is about the same as saying that the NBA just fired a baseball team.

Our current phone service provider's customer service has been completely down, I would say for nearly a whole month now. Initially, dialing either 611 or their listed support number both greeted us with an AI-generated voice talking about an internal system issue. Then 611 changed to a human voice a week or maybe a week and a half ago. Today, 611 still tells us in a human voice that they appreciate our patience as they work to restore their customer care systems as soon as possible, while the support line's AI-generated voice now tells us that their office is closed, and that we should call back between "6 am and 9 PM Mountain time." Yes, you read that right. It doesn't say AM, A M, like morning, it says am like I am. The worst part is that it said this at 7:15 PM Mountain Time. Not 9 PM, not 10 PM, 7:15 PM Mountain Time. They also tell me to go to www.help.ting.com if I need any help, and although help.ting.com does exist, www.help.ting.com of course does not; it shouldn't. OK yeah, maybe this is a step in the right direction ... maybe they're finally almost ready to let us talk to someone the next time something goes wrong, as has been the case a few times over the past week and a half as outgoing calls intermittently fail and incoming calls intermittently fail to ring our phones until a text message has been received. Still, the AI-generated voice needs to be replaced by a human who gets the script right, the office needs to still be open at 7:15 PM Mountain Time, the customer care line should tell us to go to help.ting.com, not www.help.ting.com, and of course, 611 and the listed support line need to both have the same greeting. Two months ago, I would have, and still did recommend this company to friends and family members who wanted good phone service at a good price with excellent customer service. But I've watched its customer service go from great to non-existent since then. It's sad to watch really.

It seems Spamhaus, one of the foremost spam blacklists on the internet, is now issuing false positives when queried for IP addresses by private email servers. Recently I have seen a lot of messages being rejected by my server for being listed at zen.spamhaus.org, but running manual queries at Spamhaus as well as an independent dnsbl check tool shows me that these IP's are blacklisted exactly nowhere. Many of the emails I missed because of this were actually important. I have solved the problem for now by removing zen.spamhaus.org from my dnsbl configuration, but will need to look for at least one other such blacklist in order to keep my inbox fairly clean. Bye-bie Spamhaus. It was nice knowing you, but you fell off the bike real quick.

What's up with this false advertising trend I see where a company will tell me how to get something free, but then tell me I have to pay for it? "Get your FREE widgit today! Just pay for something you don't want or need and we'll give you the widget you came for."

Someone told me they don't read terms of service because they are too complicated. But from the big guys right on down to the little middlemen, these companies are banking on the fact that we won't read them. A bank already got me with this, so I now know better. #IReadTheTerms

WTZZZZZ? Company X "may terminate your service agreement at any time without notice if we cease to provide service in your area." Um, If you plan to discontinue service in my area, then you better tell me so just as soon as such plans are known.

"tampering, modifying, or reprogramming your Device;" This is an unauthorized use of a device according to two companies who copy each other. But if I bring my device, it has already been modified and reprogrammed, as it was flashed with LineageOS with MicroG a year ago.

This is the third time now that I see this clause buried in a phone provider's terms that tells me that they can change my number at any time without advance notice. Do these companies actually do this, even if I'm porting from another provider?? Is this even legal?

"You consent to receiving advertising, alerts and other broadcast messages from Company or our authorized agents." Oh really? then why would I pay for that? If you're forcing me to consent to unsolicited commercial advertising, don't charge me for the service. It's that simple.

I refuse to accept terms and conditions of service by any company that says they can terminate or suspend service if I modify my device. I already run a custom ROM, which will be a violation of said terms by at least two providers I've looked at today.

Now testing the 1GB data plan from @TextNow at $9/mo all in, beating out my current plan that starts at $10/mo excluding fees with no data. Seems all that's missing is "HD voice," that good sound we love on VoLTE providers. Bonus: voicemail transcription is included!

"You agree that UNREAL Mobile plans are to be used for voice and SMS messaging only between two individuals." Well, there goes the conference feature that they themselves provide, as more than two individuals are involved. And this also means that checking my bank account balance via text message is also prohibited, since I am in fact texting a machine and receiving back an automated response. Or is that OK since it says "individuals" rather than "people?" Still, worse is yet to come.

"UNLIMITED DOES NOT MEAN UNREASONABLE USE. UNLIMITED voice services are provided solely for active live dialog between individuals. UNLIMITED voice services may not be used for monitoring services, data transmissions, transmission of or listening to broadcasts, transmission or receipt of recorded material, machine-to-machine or one-way audio applications, or other connections that do not consist of uninterrupted active, live dialog between individuals." Well, checking the voicemail they provide is also out of the question it seems, since this necessarily requires that I receive recorded material over the voice line. Well, there is visual voicemail for that, but many times I still go oldschool and dial it up. Nope, not happenin' with this company. They can disconnect my call, switch my plan to one that does not offer unlimited voice calls, even terminate my service, just for dialing up my voicemail. By this definition, leaving someone a voicemail could be construed as something that is not live, active, uninterrupted dialogue between individuals. And this doesn't even take into account being on the phone with someone, putting the phone down to answer the door or to go to the bathroom and forgetting about it. I don't do this often, but I'm sure it's a common enough scenario that they'll get someone with this. And then what of the menu tree that I'm sure they have just to talk to a customer service agent? Since this menu tree is obviously not part of live uninterrupted dialogue between individuals, in their sole discretion, the company can consider it unreasonable use and deny service in future, or even drop my call before I ever get the chance to engage in any dialogue. Oh yeah, and that annoying hold music is also a recorded transmission. Well damn.

And now here's the real kicker. A bank got me with this one because I failed to see it before I opened my account. Fortunately, in their sole discretion, they gave me two weeks to move my money. This really is in the terms I'm reading though. "Notwithstanding the foregoing, We reserve the right to deny service, deactivate or cancel existing service to anyone for any reason at any time, in our sole discretion." This means that they could cancel my service plan or even delete my account, giving me no chance in hell of porting my number anywhere else, at any time and for any reason, and they would only tell me that they're about to do it out of the kindness of their hearts, which it seems from these terms and conditions that they do not possess, neither kindness nor hearts.

They call this "Unreal Mobile." It seems there is a reason for this. With these gotchas, there's no way this could be real.

Your phone plan is designed for sending picture messages, but we don't want you sending picture messages? What kind of confusing terms of service are these? This company also has the dreaded two individuals clause, so I guess checking the voicemail they give me with my plan is also out of the question.

Our current #phone service #provider not long ago took pride in its ability to offer excellent #CustomerService. But a couple of months ago when I called them instead of hold music followed by a live #human voice, I was told by a #recorded voice to press 2. Just a month ago when I called them, I was greeted by a recorded #menu with two options followed by the required press of the number 2, and after the hold music, which fortunately did only run less than a minute, I heard a human voice whose second language is mine, already a contrast from the three to four times before that when I was greeted by a human voice who spoke my language natively. Now ... well, they are experiencing an internal system issue, but my service should not be affected. Except we just had two phones in the same house with the same provider that had to be restarted in order to make or receive calls. My attempt to call the customer service that just a few short months ago was a point of pride for the company greeted me with the "internal system issue," and a friend who has service with the same provider told me that this internal system issue has now gone unresolved for two weeks. The problem is that we need to be able to keep our bill low, and we don't want any gotchas in a provider's #TermsAndConditions or their #AcceptableUsePolicies, which actually are the things that you can't do with what you pay for, and this was one of only about two to three providers like this that I was able to find. So I guess I go #OnTheHunt again, researching just as thoroughly as I did about 6 months ago. I did say at that time when we had to leave our previous provider in order to get our costs down that I no longer had any brand loyalty at that point. Damn it to hell though, I did want to keep this one just a little longer. Everything was right ... until it wasn't. And that's how things go I guess. Back to the drawing board with the phone thing it seems. Thing is that about the only thing left to us is TextNow, and it is all in an app, and doesn't offer the high audio quality we've come to expect from #VoLTE. They also have this odd thing with #data, where they have monthly plans that include a certain fast data usage allocation, and there is no way to add to it or just purchase 1GB allocations or similar. We would pretty much have to just pick what we think we may need and get stuck with it for the month ... or just use wifi, which would of course cost us nothing. They did fix their reliability issues at least here about 4 months ago so that calls and messages all seem to come in reliably now, so there's that. But I did still want to keep using my KaiPhone, for which they have no compatible app sadly.

Making my first attempt to completely reframe a narrative:

#Blindness or #VisualImpairment is not a #disability. Rather, it is a #disperception. Imagine yourself blindfolded, put on an airplane and dropped off in a foreign land where no one speaks your #language and all the signs are in an #alphabet you have never seen. . You of course would not be able to #experience the world around you in any meaningful way without an #interpreter or a #translator. You have no disability, only a disperception, as you cannot perceive the language or the printed alphabet they are using in a meaningful way. By the same definition and the same experiences, #accessibility as it relates to blindness or vision impairment is not an #accommodation for a disability; it is instead a #translation into the #perception we can experience.

What is a #screenReader? It is simply an interpreter that takes what it finds on a device screen that we cannot see and translates it to speech, a sound that we can hear, or braille, an alphabet pattern that we can feel.

What is #Braille? Why it's nothing more than a translated alphabet that we feel rather than seeing.

What is accessibility? It's nothing more than being sure that your app, website, device, building, whatever, can reliably interpret or translate its visual cues that we cannot perceive into auditory, tactile and haptic cues that we can perceive, usually using a translation matrix that we already have available, although providing such a translation matrix can help in some cases as well.

Another aspect is navigation, where we use various methods of translation to take what would normally be visual cues from vehicles, buildings, etc and translate them to sensations that we can perceive. Still, this is simply translation, it in no way affects our ability to navigate in an environment; it is simply a translation matrix similar to a screen reader, even if it's low-tech like the staff we carry. Yes, I call it my staff, because a new friend and coworker called it that and I love it. I've got everyone at work calling it that now. Although I don't mind cane or stick or whatever, staff is my favorite word for this handy translation tool that has saved my life on more than one occasion, although it still doesn't protect my head, which I actually find more important than protecting me from the waste down. GPS is another handy translation tool, as it generally uses voice cues, and can be helped along with the aid of the screen reader, to tell us where we are, and in many cases, what is around us. The point is that these things are all translation tools, nothing more, nothing less. They translate visual cues into audible and/or tactile cues that we are able to perceive meaningfully, with or without instruction from others.

Once again, for the people in the back, I do not have a disability, which is defined as an inability to perform actions. I have a disperception, meaning that I have different experiences based on the fact that I cannot perceive visual cues, and need a translator that will take those visual cues and translate them into the #auditory and #tactile perceptions I do have.

Sad that we seem to be no closer to getting this done than we were 20 years ago. This is very important work that needs much more attention and awareness.

So Flathub plans to become a corporate entity. Yeah OK. I'll just stick with my distro's own package management system then. That's one app store I have to worry about instead of two. Anything I don't get from my distro's package manager I will try to find or build into an appImage. The lack of a centralized "app store" for appImages has to be one of the greatest strengths of the appImage specification.

I thought it was clear by now that duckduckgo is really Microsoft under a different name. Microsoft ads, Microsoft servers, everything DDG is really Microsoft. I found that searx.org works very well for search, and browsing is as private as it can get with various settings in regular Firefox and the free Chromium browsers. Brave may also be good for most things, but I don't trust their baked-in crypto wallet and this ad thing they have going on either.

Well, I must say that I'm happy with all of this. COVID vaccines were and still are a scam and have injured many people. Meanwhile, murder and mutilation should in fact be illegal.

No room for differing points of view, no room for diverse opinions. Say something I don't like and you're dead to me, blocked, unfollowed, unfriended, cancelled. This is what I love about what passes for social media. We all get to live in our own personal echo chambers.

This just goes to show that even in the #Fediverse, one man or a few can gain too much control. Many especially new #Fedizens who are immigrants from walled gardens are being marketed this idea that #Mastodon is the #Fediverse, and so they join a Mastodon server they find on joinmastodon.org. But the problem with this is that joinmastodon.org is itself somewhat of a walled garden, albeit with doors and gates into various sections. A few people control who gets listed there and who doesn't, they have terms and conditions that state that your server can be delisted if you don't moderate heavily enough and something their admins disagree with gets by your moderation, and then there's this that I share below. These combined aggravations come together to drive people right back into the walled gardens once more. For example, one major reason why people said they were leaving Twitter recently was because of their new pay structure where anyone can pay for a blue checkmark (verified account). Just one month later, there was a flood of new blue checkmarks, many of whom had been on Mastodon. I attribute this to the combined aggravations of using joinmastodon.org and server shutdowns, fear of being delisted, and various other little things that add up to a less than stellar experience for new Fedizens as well as server operators.

As Twitter continues to threaten stopping the functioning of the API that allows me to cross post with my federated account, and because I don't believe in one man controlling a whole social media platform, I am leaving Twitter for the #Fediverse. Follow me @Kyle 🎙 🎶

PSA for all new and perspective #Fedizens: #Mastodon is not the #Fediverse, and the Fediverse is not Mastodon. Mastodon is only a subset of the Fediverse, and there are other similar web applications, many of which are easier to install if you want to host your own from home or a #VPS, and many even implement the #ActivityPub protocol that actually handles the federation more fully than Mastodon. Many of these are even compatible with Mastodon API's, so the well-known Mastodon applications work with them as well. There are also media-based applications like #PeerTube and #PixelFed that you can interact with through the Fediverse, which will happily replace your #Youtube and #Instagram accounts with federating services.

T-Mobile is advertising something they call "price lock." But this is how cell companies have pretty much always done things. You sign up for a rate plan and the price stays the same as long as you don't change it. Worse though is what Verizon does now, locking in your price for only three years.

I swear I lost what little brand loyalty I had when it unfortunately became too hard on the wallet to keep our service with Figgers Wireless.

Even better, if you don't happen to like Mastodon, how difficult it may be to set up, Rails ... just sayin, the interface, the heavy-handed approach many admins take to moderation because they fear being delisted from the main public list, any reason at all, there are many other federated server applications and thousands more servers they run on, including Friendica, Pleroma, GoToSocial, Honk, many many more that I have either forgotten to mention or are still up and coming, and there will be even more as the #ActivityPub protocol matures. The good thing is that they all see each other and they all talk to each other, and in most cases, we the people who run this true social network of social media sites, not one man or a board, control what we see of the decentralized network. This is true social networking, as it really is a network of many sites running different but compatible software, not a comparatively small walled garden platform controlled by one or a few.

The article cites "financial experts," but this is one person, likely a shill for a too-big-to-fail bank or credit card issuer. Actually, you want your purchases to come directly from your checking account immediately, as this allows you to know always how much money you have. And if you see an unauthorized transaction on your bank account, you will see it immediately, whereas on a credit card, it can take longer before you even see that a purchase you didn't authorize was made. Yes, excessive preauthorizations are a thing, but credit cards will usually allow the purchase despite the excessive hold, but will charge a fee when the preauthorization puts you over your credit limit. Debit cards simply decline if you can't cover the transaction; no fee is charged. Also, never forget that the credit card issuers want their 30% or higher interest rate, so they will do all they can to get it. Debit cards on the other hand are tied directly to your account, so it's all based on money you have, not money that the bank is allowing you to borrow. My advice if you are that worried about excessive holds, identity theft, etc, is to get an alternative debit card, i.e. with CashApp, PayPal/Venmo, or even a secondary bank account e.g. with Chime or similar and load money onto that card or account. This is also money you have, rather than money you borrow, and you will never get hit with fees for going over your credit limit due to excessive holds or preauthorizations, as your debit card is always declined when you don't have enough money; it is never charged despite holds and extra over-limit fees tacked on.

Microsoft can keep it all. I don't want to learn anything from them, even if they tell me it's free. IoT, AI, all that stuff, all runs on Linux anyway, so there are much better qualified people I can learn from. Thanks, but no thanks.

"You have exceeded the number of allowed requests without creating an account. Sign-up for free to use all of our tools."

Create an account? FOr what? So you can track me or sell whatever data I put in? If I can use your tools 5 to 10 times without an account to track me, then I should be able to use them as much as I want. #bubbye

And this is what too many people, even open source developers support. Time for self-hosted #Gitea or #Forgejo, or even self-hosted #GitLab at this point. It really doesn't cost a ton to run a git server, a Matrix server and a #Fediverse server all at once. Throw in mail to round out the perfect setup and you really get your money's worth.