I just crossposted something using Thunder and another user let me know that my crosspost did not show that the other post was the original.

See here: https://lemmy.ca/comment/11901004

Not sure how that can happen but seems like a bug in Thunder then?

I am just impressed by the idea and execution. Just wow. Too bad he took it too far.

I am using hd-idle (see link) to spin down my one external hard drive on my RPI server. It is not used for large parts of the day and night so it has been quite useful to set up hd-idle, which spins down the drive after an hour or so of no activity.

Now hd-idle can generate a log file where it notes down some data, e.g. when the drive was spun down, how long it was running, what time it spun down.

You can read the file to get an impression how well it works, but I'd like to see the data visualised or analysed in some way. Seeing the past month of how often per day the drive was spun down, or average length of long it was running and so on.

Searching online I couldn't really find anything. Maybe anybody here knows more? Or what ways of recording and looking at this type of data are you using?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18159531

Updated! Updates are shown in quote text like this.

An Apps Experiment

Introduction

This is an experiment I performed out of curiosity, and I have a few big disclaimers at the bottom. Basically, I've seen a lot of comments recently about one app or another not displaying something right. Lemmy has been around for a while now and can no longer be considered an experimental platform.

Lemmy and the apps that people use to access the platform have become an important part of people’s lives. Whether you are checking the app weekly or daily, and whether you use it to stay up on the news or to stay connected to your hobby, it’s important that it works. I hope that this helps people to see the extent of the challenge, and encourages developers to improve their apps, too.

How I did it

I wanted to investigate objectively how accurately each app displays text of posts and comments using the standard Lemmy markdown. Markdown is a standard part of the Lemmy platform, but not all apps handle it the same. It is basically what gives text useful formatting.

I used the latest release of each app, but did not include pre-releases. I only included apps that have released an update in the last 6 months, which should include most apps in active development. ~~I was unable to test iOS-exclusive apps, so they are not included either. In all, 16 apps met the inclusion criteria.~~

I also added Eternity, which is in active development, although it has not had a recent update. I was able to include several iOS apps thanks to testing from @[email protected] – Thanks, Jordan! This made for 21 apps that were tested.

Each app was rated in 5 categories: Text, Format, Spoilers, Links, and Images. I chose these mostly based on the wonderful Markdown Guide from @[email protected], which was posted about a year ago in [email protected] (here).

I checked whether each app correctly displayed each category, then took the overall average. Each category was weighted equally. Text includes italic, bold, strong, strikethrough, superscript, and subscript. Format includes block quotes, lists, code (block and inline), tables, and dividers. Spoilers includes display of hidden, expandable spoilers. Links includes external links, username links, and community links. Images included embedded images, image references, and inline images.

Thanks to input from others, I also added a test to see if lemmy hyperlinks opened in-app. There was a problem with using the SFFA Community Guide that caused some apps to be essentially penalized twice because there was formatting inside formatting, so I created this TEST POST to more clearly and fairly measure each app.

In each case, I checked whether the display was correct based on the rules for Lemmy Markdown, and consistent with the author’s intent. In cases where the app recognized the tag correctly but did not display it accurately, that was treated as a fail.

Results

Out of a possible perfect 10, only 3 apps displayed all markdown correctly:

Jerboa (Official Android client) - 10.0

Alexandrite - 10.0

Voyager - 10.0

Summit - 9.7

Photon - 9.3

Arctic - 9.3 (pending)

Interstellar - 9.1

Lemmy-UI - 9.0

Thunder - 8.9

Tesseract - 8.6

Quiblr - 8.1

mlmym - 8.0

Lemmios - 8.0 (pending)

Mlem - 7.5 (pending)

Boost - 7.3

Eternity - 7.0

Sync - 6.9

Connect - 6.7

Lemmynade - 6.1

Avelon - 5.7 (pending)

More details of testing here

Disclaimers

Disclaimers

I Love Lemmy Apps (and their devs)

Lemmy apps devs work very hard, and invest a lot in the platform. Lemmy is better because they are doing the work that they do. Like, a LOT better. Everyone who uses the platform has to access it through one app or another. Apps are the face of the entire platform. Whether an app is a FOSS passion project, underwritten by a grant, or generating income through sales or ads, no one is getting rich by making their app. It is for the benefit of the community.

This is not meant to be a rating of the quality or functionality of any app. An app may have a high rating here but be missing other features that users want, or users may love an app that has a lower rating. This is just about how well apps handle markdown.

This is pretty unscientific

You’ll see my methodology above. I’m not a scientist. There is probably a much better way to do this, and I probably have biases in terms of how I went about it. I think it’s interesting and probably has some valuable information. If you think it’s interesting, let me know. If you think of a better way, PM me and I’d be happy to share what I have so you don’t have to start from scratch.

My only goal is to help the community

I do think that accurately displaying markdown should be a standard expectation of a finished app. I hope that devs use this as an opportunity to shore up the areas that are lagging, and that they have a set of standards to aim for.

~~I don’t have any Apple things~~

~~Sorry. This is just Android and Web review. If someone would like to see how iOS apps are doing, please reach out and I’ll share how we can work together to include them.~~

See the test comment in the comment section of the original post (this is just a cross-post). Thunder is doing pretty well but has a few things not showing entirely correct.

Just installed Bazzite and it seems to work well so far.

Then I added a second standard user to the system and thought they'd have access to all software I just installed for the main user. But that doesn't seem the case, Bazzite prompted me to install all those again for the second user.

Is that just a thing with immutable distros or did I do this in a wrong way? I tried looking this question up, but I couldn't find any info on multi user setups with immutable distros.

I have a small self hosted setup at home with a RaspberryPi and an external HDD, just enough for what I need.

Some time ago I found a pretty sweet app which from the name implies its mostly working when you use a RPI OS, to monitor the RPI from your android phone: https://github.com/eidottermihi/rpicheck

Its called RaspiCheck (picture in the post is the one from github), and unfortunately it is seriously outdated and development ceased. It is still working on my current phone but I am well aware that's not going to last.

So I am wondering what else is out there that could fill the gap it would leave.

I am using it for 2 things mostly:

1. monitor system stats, like simply seeing the system is running (I know, like ping), but at the same time also showing memory, average load, temperature and so on.
2. sending SSH commands, and this is where the app really shines. Using a terminal on the phone is not impossible, but boy is it annoying. In RaspiCheck you can define commands, with placeholders, which allows you to send those to the RPI just by tapping them. So for example I got my backup set up that I can mount the backup drive with one tap, a second tap runs the right backup script (I have several I can choose from by filling the placeholder I leave in that command) and then unmount with a third tap.

I got other commands I like to reuse a lot set up in it and its really useful to me, let's me manage the RPI from my phone in an easy way.

So back to the question at hand, is there anything else like this out there for Android? If possible one app, FOSS preferred. I am pretty sure there are browser-based solutions, if there is no dedicated app other than this, then I guess that's the next best thing. What are you using in your setup that you can recommend?

I have been planning to install Kinoite on my laptop, dual booting with Windows.

However depending on what I read online, it is either not possible, not recommended, tricky to setup or it is just a matter of setting partitions up before installing Kinoite. Broad range of opinions and no good "tutorial" how to do it.

Anyone having direct experience with that?

I guess most people know about the movie web app site, which pulls videos from various sources.

Recently they added a request to download an extension to your browser, for optimal perfomance and better quality.

It is featured on the firefox android extensions site from Mozilla, it has a github page. What I read online is that it seems the extension wants access to everything you do in your browser, which seems kind of sketchy.

What do people here think about it? Anyone installed it and can say more?

Edit: thanks for all the comments, looks like less people knew about this than I thought.

Is there any good FOSS app that could record the phone GPS location, but keep the data locally on the same phone, no dialing out?

Like the Google Maps location history, just not sharing it with Google services.

I need some help with some new suggestions for what I want from my tiny homeserver, made up by a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB (passive cooling case) and an external hard drive. That server will not be reachable from outside my home network, if that makes a difference for suggestions.

I am looking for an easy solution that works well on the limited resources of the Rpi. What I mostly need is an app I can self-host that has a nice and well performing gallery function, I got tons of old photos from when I still used digital cameras a lot. Those are already sorted in folders, and I want that app to not mess with that at all, just read them basically.

What I also need is for that app to be able to auto-upload new photos from my phone regularly, so I can include them more easily in backups of my server. I also do not want them to be weirdly hidden in some strange folder structures, so that they remain accessible if I want to change apps again down the road.

Here is what I tried already: Photoprism - loved it in general, but all the indexing was super slow on the Rpi of course. I didn't really need the AI features of it either. It also made quite big thumbnails for the image analysis so it would really add a huge requirement of a ton more storage space just for features I did not want to use, I understand those could be downscaled but the process seemed tedious and resource-intensive. Overall wasn't practical for the Rpi, if I had a stronger server I'd try again.

Nextcloud - thats the current solution I am looking at, since it got all I want. Auto-upload, easy access, no resource-heavy features I don't need. But overall, it is pretty slow on the Rpi for scrolling through photo libraries. I found today the NC Photos app on Google Play Store, which seems to work better than the Nextcloud App to look at galleries, but still seems slow.

Aside from that I found out about Immich, but cannot test it right now since my Rpi runs on 32bit. But it sounded to me like a lighter type of Photoprism app, maybe not fair to say, I know its supposed to be like Google Photos. But the stuff it does for face recognition and what else makes it sound again like a choice I won't enjoy using on the Rpi. Maybe that is an unfair view? I see recently the feature that allows external libraries in it, was added, so that fits my needs.

Anyway, thanks for reading all this, I will end with the question, are there any other solutions that I haven't considered so far?