Libb

Not 100% sure it's the right place to post this but it also feels a lot like it 100% belongs here. So, let me know what you think ;)

I don’t know about you but when I decided I've had enough of the big bloated web, it was not just to get back to a Web that was not rotten to its core by marketing-money—and the annihilation of any notion of privacy marketing requires in order to better track everything we do so they can sell more ads. This mattered a lot to me, obviously. But it was not my sole motivation to be looking for a smaller and a more humane Web.

My other reason was to reduce my digital-waste.

Be it storage space used on the server for all the large pictures, or the energy used to make scripts run and to transmit always more volume of data between the server and the computers of any visitor.

So, without being a developer myself, I searched for ways to create a website as small and as light as possible; I searched for ways to reduce the size of the images too so they would waste less space and load faster.

It goes without saying, but to reduce waste the first thing was to refuse tracking, scripts and ads. In summary, I don't have ads at all and I don’t know who is visiting my website or what they do when they're visiting... unless that person decides to tell me by contacting me... through email, or here on Lemmy, as there is no way to publish a comment (but that's not directly related to e-waste, it's me not wanting to deal with spam ;)

Here is what I managed to get, I thought it might interest others and could be an interesting discussion:

• The website is static, it's generated through Hugo. Only the resulting HTML pages (full static, no PHP or JS) are uploaded on the server, with a really minimal CSS sheet.
• Minimalism was my objective to begin with but Hugo can do fancier stuff too. On my website there is nothing fancy, no animation and no effects. Just text and a few images (even the dark theme you can see in the first screenshot is not managed by the website: it's a FF extension called Dark Reader doing it). Also, the home page is text-only so it loads even faster (less than 14kB).
• I don’t think there is a single script running in the background but since I’m not an expert and only transformed an existing theme there may still be something hidden somewhere? All I can safely say is that the website loads very fast and that if there is a script running I honestly don't know about it.
• For optimizing the images I did quite a lot of research. Testing various approaches and compression algorithms. I ended up adopting the… AVIF video file format. Yep, a video format that works flawlessly to save static images and that also saves a lot of storage, like a lot.

To give you an idea, here is the picture I used in my last post (posted this morning). It’s a 1000x710px PNG screenshot of my desktop (879,5kB), next to it is a 700px JPEG (118,1kB) and next to it is a 700px AVIF at... 22,6 Kb. If you want ot check the actual image quality (not this poor compressed version) of the AVIF file go check the actual post.

Since AVIF can be tricky to get right, I wrote a small script that does the conversion for me using the imagemagick and the ffmepg command lines (they will need to be installed on your computer). I could only use a recent version of imagemagick (and that’s what I did when I was still using a Mac computer) but I’ve gotten better results using ffmpeg for the AVIF conversion.

#Excerpt of the full script

# resize 700 px if is larger than 700  
# add an unsharp mask (sharper image)
# Save temp file in /temp
convert "$1" -resize 700x700\> -unsharp 0x1 "/tmp/$NOW.jpg"

# convert temp file to avif using ffmpeg
ffmpeg -i "/tmp/$NOW.jpg" -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p "$DIR/optimized.avif"

Since I’m also lazy as fuck and don’t fancy myself typing complex command lines when I can avoid it, I transformed those little scripts into Nemo 'Actions' (Nemo is the file explorer that comes with my Linux Mint system, Actions are one of its nifty feature that lets it execute scripts through the contextual menu). So, now all I need to do is to right-click on whatever picture to have it converted as a jpeg, AVIF (and also a B&W version if I ever need it).

Which makes it almost immediate to get the image I need. If you have never written one, an Action looks something like that:

[Nemo Action]
Active=true
Name=Optimize AVIF
Comment=Convert to a 700px AVIF file
Icon-Name=image
Exec=<action_scripts/makeAvif.sh %F>
Selection=any
Extensions=png;PNG;jpg;jpeg;JPG;JPEG;webp;WEBP;AVIF;avif
Quote=double

If you want to reuse those scripts/Action, they’re on my codeberg Git repo.

Dislaimer: I’m not a dev and I’m not even much of a geek. So, there is no warranty it will work. All I can say is that this works well enough for me and I'm ok with the result. There is no doubt this could be improved upon a lot. If you ever feel like doing it, you’re more than welcome to but please do let me know, so I can also use your improvements.

Also, if you have suggestions, tips, ideas to optimize further my website and images, do not hesitate to share them.

Since you managed to read everything to that point, and in case you want to have a look at my website ;)

The topic everyone was impatiently waiting for, we can all agree.

Ballpoint pens and fountain pens

If you did not knew it already the Cristal Bic, the world most used ballpoint pen, is French and even though the brand is now global and have factories in many countries (including the US, among other brands they own the US Waterman), they still made part of their production in the EU, in France and Spain.

(For those like me who worries about plastic/throw away pens, you may not know that Bic has recently started selling an aluminum body that's shaped like the cristal Bic that you can insert a refill in. Also, and for much longer, they make it possible to buy refills for the cheap plastic cristal Bic by packs of 50—so, you can keep using the same single clear plastic body for much longer only replacing the ink. Alas, those refills are not as readily available as the Bic itself.)

If you're interested in Bic history, and want to know more about what they do, they have this PDF available for download.

I'm not affiliated with them, I just have been chewing on one or another of their Bic pens for well over 50 years now and I quite like them. And that is coming from a lifelong fountain pen user...

Fountain pens? One may want to consider the excellent German brand Lamy which offers both cheap and expensive models of fountain pens (and ballpoint pens too, but not as cheap as Bic). Their cheap ‘Lamy Safari’ pictured here was designed in the 80s/90s to help kids proper handwriting and is still, imho, one of the best cheap/beginner-friendly fountain pen one could buy here in Europe. Its also real sturdy while still being easy to fix if anythign was to happen to it ;)

Also, I think they look gorgeous with their bright flashy colors :p

(colored) Pencils

If you're more into pencils, may I suggest you check the German FaberCastell or the Swiss Caran d'Ache? They're very different kind of pencils but they're also both amazingly good, be it their 'cheaper' lines (say, for kids) as well as, obviously, their artist lines (much more expensive too).

Watercolors

For watercolors, I would suggest the Dutch Royal Talens. Their student-grade paint 'Van Gogh' is unbelievably good for its price, as well as their artist-grade 'Rembrandt'. Heck, even their cheapest 'ArtCreation' line is nice (and it also offers truly excellent and cheap sketchbooks)

Obviously, the English Winsor & Newton whose artist grade paints are now made in France if I'm not mistaken, as well as their Cotman student-grade—but if you go the student grade road, I would strongly suggest you give Royal Talens 'Van Gogh' a try, like really, as you may be surprised.

The French Sennelier, they have a honey-based artist-grade watercolors that are so bright <3. They also have a student grade called 'La Petite Aquarelle'.

Last but certainly not least, I would not want to forget the Ukrainian's Rosa. A recent discovery for me (a little over a year ago) which I quite like.

One should also talk about paint brushes for watercolors, and about inks for fountain pens as in both cases there are excellent EU brands, but this is already way too long ;)

Your turn! Do you know any other European brand of pens, pencils or watercolors?

Edit: updated the title from 'in the EU' to 'in Europe'

I don't know if this was already mentioned but I just saw it mentioned in the French-speaking !utilisereuropeen@jlai.lu (Use European) community and I thought it was worth talking about it, here too. So, if you don't know about ARTE TV yet, here is my take on it:

ARTE TV is the European culture TV channel (free and on demand). It is a 32 years old German-French-European public TV which is rather unique.

Unique, because there is barely any ads to watch (and the rare ones are a somewhat very recent addition, hopefully they won't add anymore).

Unique, because like its name may suggests, this TV main focus (main, not exclusive) is on art, culture and creation. They regularly air concerts (contemporary, pop, rock, orchestral/classical,...), dance festivals, theater, opera, and so on. They also have series, movies, documentaries in a wide selection of genres. Podcasts, news,... The content is available in French and/or in German. Foreign movies are often aired or streamed in their original language, with subtitles.

Unique because, being a public television it's free access. There is no subscription, no login required either. It's entirely paid by French and German tax-payers money (you're welcome)

Is it worth it?

My spouse and I have not owned a TV for more than twenty years and ARTE could easily be the one reason we would want to own one but we don't even have to since a lot of their content is available through their website/Replay: arte.tv (not all content is available. Many film won't but a lot still are).

In recent years, we have noticed their documentaries morphing into the over-dramatized docu-fiction types, something my spouse and I consider of little value compared to more traditional type of documentaries (a lot more time is being spend on dramatization itself instead of actual information sharing/discussion). Therefore, we barely watch any of their new type of documentaries but if you're more into that type of content than we are, I would say it's probably worth checking.

They regularly have an excellent selection of films. Like, really. Things other TV would seldom dare to air. and like I said, there is no fucking ad-breaks either.

I don't know how easy it is to access ARTE from foreign countries, but worse case one would need to use a VPN and pick a French/German address, even probably any European address would do.

https://www.arte.tv/en/

I was wondering because I don't.

My pocket notebook (from the French Clairefontaine brand, but I will also use Rhodia) is, well, sitting in one pocket or another in my coat or in my bag, when it's not in my jeans back pocket. It is sat on, its cover has been thorn in the first couple weeks of using it. It's scribbled upon without much care (I often write while I walk, I will let anyone write stuff in it). I will tear off pages when needed. It rains on it (no idea why, my productive long walks the ones where I write the most are often done under the rain). This notebook is a workhorse and it shows.

And for my journal—a larger sketchbook ('ArtCreation' from the Dutch Royal Talens) that sits at home—the only sun it sees is when I write on the balcony of our apartment, the only water it tastes is the one I use with my watercolors set. It is much less beaten than my pocket one but I don't take much care for it either. No one but me writes in it but it's still scribbled upon everywhere, things are crossed out, sketches are started and not finished. And so on.

Am I that messy or is it common?

Bonjour Lemmy,

C'est une bouteille à la mer que je te lance — en prenant soin de ne pas te l'envoyer directement dans la tronche. De rien, je suis gentil comme ça.

Je souhaite m'équiper d'une paire d'enceintes pour brancher sur mon ordinateur.

• Je ne suis pas audiophile, càd que je n'éprouve aucun besoin de sacrifier un rein pour offrir à mes oreilles une paire d'enceintes qui me permettraient d'entendre le pet d'un ange sans la moindre distortion. C'est sûrement très magnifique à écouter, le pêt d'un ange, mais ça m'intéresse pas.
• J'ai une préférence pour des enceintes qui ne prennent pas trop de place: mon bureau me sert à étaler mes notes de travail, pas à exhiber ma belle paire d...'enceintes.
• Je ne suis pas gamer, c'est des enceintes pour écouter de la musique, càd essentiellement classique (17e-19e, pour l'essentiel), rock, un peu de variétés voire un peu de pop à l'occasion), des films, des audiobooks, et des podcasts.
• Budget souhaité 100-150€ ou moins; Je suis OK pour plus, même beaucoup, si tant qu'il y ait une autre raison à cela que audiophile et esthétique.

J'ai fait quelques recherches mais il y a tellement de choix, qui vont de 20€ pour une paire à plusieurs centaines d'euros pour une seule enceinte, que je ne sais pas du tout vers quoi me tourner.

Du coup, si quelqu'un(e) aurait des suggestions basées sur son expérience personnelle je serais plus qu'enchanté d'en savoir plus :)

Pour vous donner una ordre d'idée du range d'enceintes que je considère:

• Dans le genre pas cher du tout: Pebble 3 de Creative, ou encore leur T60 pour quelques euros de plus.
• Moins bon marché: Edifier MR4.
• Edifier MR60, qui me plaisaient bien mais je préfère un bouton de volume devant, et sans app sur le téléphone.
• En plus cher, j'ai noté les PreSonus Eris 3.5BT Gen 2.
• Encore plus cher: IK Multimedia iLoud Micro Monitor Speaker. Mais là aussi je voudrais le bouton de volume à l'avant, pas caché dans le dos de l'enceinte.
• Après, les prix deviennent plutôt du genre rigolos et, même si j'ai le sens de l'humour, je ne veux pas payer tout ça pour seulement une qualité de son 'audiophile' ou un design à couper le souffle.

Merci d'avoir lu cette bouteille à la mer. Bon WE ;)

Just noticed that post on our Simple Living cousin from Reddit and I was wondering if that was even an option to most of us?

Alas, the OP doesn’t share much context on why and how they did it, how they manage their daily activities without using any email.

I know I could not.

I mean, I can live without social networks (the only one I use being Lemmy, it was reddit before that) but I could not not use email.

I would even go as far as to say that removing email from my toolbox would make my life a more complicated and for what gain?

The OP mention not receiving spam. I don’t see much spam, simply because I use a spam filter. They also mention having better conversations than through email. Sure, I can understand that. But I can also have both without any issue. I never discussed much through email—save maybe in the early 90s, when I started really using email and quickly quit using snail mail in which, back then, people used to heave discussion that could go on for... years. With email I do things like create online accounts and stuff like that. I don’t exchange idea, I don’t even chat much. But while I do use email I can still discuss with people by other means.

Maybe email for me is a bit like the smartphone? I seldom use mine and only for practical purpose.

Like, there is no social, no games, no YT, not even… email is configured on my phone. It’s merely more than a phone (to pass and receive phone calls, I don't message) with a big screen and the very few apps I’m expected to be able to get access to (passwords, 2FA, finances, IDs), and that’s it. But as limited as my use case is not using that phone would make things uselessly and much more complicated for me.

What about you? Can you imagine going email free?

Si ça se confirmait (on va attendre de voir, avant de réclamer des têtes), il semblerait que nous ne pourrons (très bientôt) plus télécharger nos ebooks sur ordi pour les transférer par USB : Amazon’s killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books (merci linuxfr.org).

Ça change quoi? Ça change que vous ne pourrez plus les archiver (edit: plus aussi facilement, car ils supprimeraient la seule façon 'officielle' et simple de le faire, mais ça restera possible pour les bidouilleurs) sur le support de votre choix (genre une clé USB, un DD externe,...) et que Amazon pourra à nouveau décider de les supprimer de votre liseuse, comme elle l'a déjà fait par le passé.

Ça ne me concerne plus vraiment personnellement car ça fait bien plus d'un an que je n'ai plus acheté un seul ebook sur Amazon (et que la montagne d'ebooks que j'ai acheté chez eux est à l'abri de ce genre de caprice), mais ça me semble intéressant à partager comme info.

Ça me confirme aussi dans mon choix de me barrer loin, le plus loin possible, des grosses librairies en ligne et revenir au livre papier, quand c'est encore possible.

D'ailleurs, si ça vous intéresse et que vous avez pas peur de vous farcir la prose d'un Frenchie qui écrit in English, j'explique plus en détails mes motivations sur mon blog perso. Le lien est dans mon profil Lemmy.

So much this (link to Reddit).

Don't worry about not looking great, or clever, or whatever you consider a flattering image of yourself when you read back your journal in a few days, months, years, or decades—yep, I'm that old.

That's fine. No, that's great.

Believe me, no matter what, as long as you wrote honestly about it (not in the sense of writing some supposed indisputable deep truth, in the sense of honestly writing what you were thinking and feeling back then, at that time, no matter how silly) it's worth it and it will be worth reading back.

You have no idea how dearly I miss my old journals were I wrote about my first true love, as a little boy, and later about my second true love, as a young teen. And also, no matter how unflattering it is for me, all I may have written about my many crushes and my countless failed attempt at flirting. Thinking about it, I must have been in love every single day at that time and it must have been a real pain for my best friend who endured all of it—we're still best friends all those years later ;)

Some forty+ years later, I still remember V. wonderful blue eyes and how she smiled and her eyes too, and how badly I wanted to impress her. And how fucking terrorized and excited I was the day I rang her door, completely out of the blue, because it was the last opportunity I could ask her out. I was 14, I had long hair, flowers in one hand (like, really) and my face was tomato red. I still remember how stupidly I smiled when the door opened to let her dad out. He was about to leave for his job, wearing his... cop uniform. He looked at me for more or less an eternity, and the more he looked at me the more I was dying inside.

You can believe me when I tell you that, he was not happy to meet me, and that V. and I did not end up getting married :P

The question doesn’t mean much if you're a digital journaler as you probably already have a synced copy available on your phone. But for the analog journalers out there this can mean mean the difference between having a journaling and having... lost our journal. Every single page of it.

There is no such thing as syncing and rarely any backup of our notebooks. So, carrying it everywhere we go is a real risk.

I don’t carry my journal with me because I know I will lose it. That's a scientific fact based on personal experiences (way too many of them) of losing a lot of things, from my keys and countless umbrellas, up to a brand new laptop (yeah, that's me, and would you believe it when I went back to get the laptop back it was not there anymore) as well as, you guessed it, my journal.

So, my journal stays at home.

What I do carry everywhere I go, outside as well as from one room to another in our apartment, is a pocket notebook of some sort and a pen where I quickly write stuff down. I don’t try to write great literature not even full sentences, it’s merely a few key words and symbols that have zero meaning to anyone but me and that work (wonders) as a reminder when I’m back at my desk and I write whatever I was thinking about when I jotted those down in that pocket notebook. And that small notebook, I don’t care much losing it.

For years, I used to get those free but real handy small notebooks with a tiny but decent ballpoint pen attached to it, from the pharmacy next street. It was their gift around New Year, knowing I quite enjoyed them, they would let me pick a bunch of them (not enough for a whole year but still, that was nice. This year, they gave me a... pencil pouch. It's an odd pharmacy, I suppose ;)

Je ne suis pas sûr que ça me fasse plaisir qu'une seule nuit (ok, c'est quatre nuits) par an soit dédiée à la lecture, mais ça me fait toujours plaisir qu'on encourage à lire ;)

C'est bientôt: du 23 au 26 janvier 2025 et cette année le thème c’est le patrimoine.

Pour plus d'infos et pour trouver si des événements sont organisés près de chez vous.

I never kept a journal consistently because writing my thoughts felt like giving anyone access to them, and thus, I felt pressured to write like an eloquent Socratic philosopher just in case anyone DID read it.

An interesting discussion on r/journaling about being honest, or not, in one's journal. And how the OP found it to be tiring.

What do you think?

And do you lie or simply make yourself look better in your journal, just in case some would read it?

I tend to agree with the OP. But, I also understand that desire to please and to be liked (and to not be judged) just in case someone would read that journal, even without our consent.

I also think that when one stops being honest in their journal there is a very real risk to lose interest in journaling altogether. Which I would not want to happen.

I did lie for a while in y journal, openly I mean. I called that being 'hypocritical' but it was only me lying to myself and to that hypothetical and very unwelcome reader. It did not last long, it was during a very challenging time with a lot of self-doubt... not that long ago as a matter of fact. I stopped doing that soon after I started as it was exhausting and not very helpful. And not fun at all.

Also, there are much simpler way to tell lies to an audience. Being an actor or a politician are two obvious ways of doing it. Or be a writer and write (or sketch) stories in which you lie. Not all stories are lies, but many are and that's perfectly OK.

Stories are great as in them one can pretend absolutely anything. And they're also much simpler to share than a journal, if that's what you're wanting to do. I mean, beside traditional publishing in books or magazines there are many places and communities one could share their ~~lies~~ stories to an audience more willing to believe them ;)

This year, I wanted to start keeping a reading journal.

That’s certainly not a revolutionary idea, but I still managed to get stuck on a simple technical consideration: should I use a dedicated journal? Or write them in my existing journal, next to my usual entries? But then, how would I be able to easily spot my reading entries and distinguish them from the journal entries?

In the end, I decided I would do everything in my existing journal but that I would write reading entries in a different color from standard journal entries. It’s simple enough while still making it very easy to instantly tell them apart.

What would you do?