Here is an artists rendering

I respect the proactive move to just assume appeal level communication from the OP.

OK, here’s a somewhat famous case of email that could only be sent within something over 500 miles, but no further: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

Thank you for sharing this!

I don’t see why not. Again, the resource footprint is so tiny that you can just throw in Mumble anywhere. You can make it tinier still if you limit sending pictures via that chat and allocate a maximum bandwidth via the config.

If pi zero, you’re serving 12 users low latency over wifi? Does it route the actual audio?

Yes, it’s sufficient. I wouldn’t advise it due to the extra overhead of wireless packet loss, but it’s absolutely technically possible. Don’t overestimate how little bandwidth voice chat really needs. It’s like 10-50kB/s per person and you’re unlikely to ever have more than 2 or 3 people talking at a time.

Wait unti you have to upgrade Zorin to a new release. I still haven’t gotten mine to work. Stick with Mint or Bazzite if you want a Windows alternate

I wouldn’t exactly put up Mint as an example for a smooth upgrading experience…
Maybe I lack the technical understanding, but it’s absolutely baffling to me, why one has to download mintupgrade. It’s a reasonable setup wizard once it’s running, but why on earth is that not part of the whole Update tool interface in the first place and gets downloaded automatically?

So, I’ve been having issues with voice chat on Discord and I’m looking for alternatives. In my search, I came across Mumble, here. Does anyone here have experience, or information regarding Mumble, or a better alternative to Discord with better latency? Is it relatively easy to set up? Is it safe? Any advice and help is greatly appreciated.

Been running a server for my friends for over a decade now. Can recommend. It’s just one apt-get to set up, runs on a Pi Zero for a dozen people, has clients available for pretty much any platform and doesn’t really require any maintenance. Latency will depend on the routing between you and your friends’ ISPs, of course, but the whole purpose of the software itself was to provide a low-latency voicechat server for gaming.

But: That’s it. You don’t get anything else. It’s a barebones voice chat server. You can set up rooms and have basic text-functionality, but you don’t get any fancy user management, no full-fledged chatrooms, no persistence beyond the room setup and only limited backend options. Keep that in mind.

Yeah, but the binary of the program won’t be platform-agnostic, that’s what I meant!

Ah, I see. No, that’s not the kind of use case I had envisioned. I don’t think my suggestion is relevant to your problem then, sorry. Maybe one of the many calendar applications has a portable version that can entirely live in a Syncthing directory…? But then that wouldn’t be platform-agnostic. Hm.

I have no way to gainfully apply this in my life but I am glad you made it!

If it could just store all calendar content in 1 local file, then that could be so easily auto-synced across devices with !syncthing@programming.dev. Does anyone have any leads?

Isn’t calendar syncing a solved problem? If you set up your own CalDAV server you can pretty much use most any mainstream calendar app you want without having to rely on 3rd party services. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding your request?

I do a presentation of the Fediverse to my college students and will soon be giving short workshops to organization as well. I realize that a viable, decentralized altenative to Facebook is IMO the biggest missing piece of the puzzle. We need something that offers some kind of central platform for networking, events, groups

Well if you want decentralised solutions, there’s Mattermost and there’s just a plain old Matrix server. Both are better-suited to collaboration projects than Facebook ever was. I’d argue the only reason it ever morphed into that role in the first place was because everyone was on there, it had little to do with features.

Fedora: I have it on my PC and since I will be the first person to be asked, I thought it would be best if I know the distro well

I think that’s the most important consideration here. It’s your recommendation after all, so you have to be comfortable with it.

Basically what the title says. I know online providers like GPTzero exist, but when dealing with sensitive documents, I would prefer to keep it in-house. A lot of people like to talk big about open source models for generating stuff, but the detection side is not as discussed I feel.
I wonder if this kind of local capability can be stitched into a browser plugin. Hell, doesn’t even need to be a locally hosted service on my home network. Local app on-machine should be fine. But being able to host it as a service to use from other machines would be interesting.
I’m currently not able to give it a proper search but the first glance results are either for people trying to evade these detectors or people trying to locally host language models.

In general it’s a fool’s errand, I’m afraid. What’s the specific context in which you’re trying to apply this?

Well, I’ll be darned - I hope it works out!

I would like to move away from using spotify for music. Are there any torrenting sites where I can torrent music with high quality audio (~320kbps) tagged properly?

I strongly suggest to always tag your own music. I think expecting to always finding every album tagged to your own (or you media center’s) specifications and preferences in one place is a fantasy. At least it’s one that I’ve given up on more than a decade ago. Your music will always come from multiple different sources and I don’t think there is (or ever can be) one golden goose.

So yeah, +1 for Musicbrainz Picard. I’ll throw in Puddletag for small manual corrections.

I read about OLLAMA, but it’s all unclear to me.

There’s really nothing more to it than the initial instructions tell you. Literally just a “curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh”. Then you’re just a “ollama run qwen3:14b” away from having a chat with the model in your terminal.
That’s the “chat with it”-part done.

After that you can make it more involved by serving the model via API, manually adding .gguf quantizations (usually smaller or special-purpose modified bootleg versions of big published models) to your Ollama library with a modelcard, ditching Ollama altogether for a different environment or, the big upgrade, giving your chats a shiny frontend in the form of Open-WebUI.

that is a very cool idea! but then how to counter the fact that money is needed to produce these things such as art, books etc Like dont we pay artists ? directly?

while digital property is really debated even believed that copyright for physical goods being copied to digital is no fair

so i could dig into digital intellectual property i will see what i can find

Excellent thinking! You can of course directly transition into discussions about things like basic income and the requirements of society to cater to the basic needs of all its members before anything like economic growth can even be allowed, but it might be more useful to ask the following questions:

1. If we removed all art - all paintings, all books, all music, all movies, all games, all installations, that were not commercially produced or commercially produced at a loss - from existence, wouldn’t that still leave more than could ever be consumed in hundreds of human lifetimes? And if so, why do we even need commercial art?
2. Or more nuanced: How much commercial art does the world need?

Because once you answer that question you know roughly how much public funds to allocate to art production. Depending on who you ask the answer might even be zero or close to zero.

Immediately go for the jugular and question the very existence of intellectual property as a concept.

"You are given this magical horn of plenty. It can feed any person anywhere in the world at any time! Do you not use it, avoiding the inevitable collapse of the global food production and distribution sector or do you use it so… you know, nobody will ever be hungry again? Is there a right and a wrong decision here?

You are also given the magical ability to copy and distribute any digital information infinitely and at no added cost…"

Nothing beats skipping from Bach to TMNT theme tune

I agree with that sentiment, but that’s not what happens at all. It’s especially funny since you excplicitly mention Bach. My damn “Bach, Johann Sebastian” artist folder contains 226 different albums. Albums, not songs. And boy, that guy wrote some stinkers, too.

I mean, I guess I could roughly see the system working if you have the same amount of songs for every artist, that would somewhat balance it. Otherwise your playlist will always be dominated by the prolific writers and you’ll get a few dozen Händel concertos and a handful of random Zelda dungeon sounds before the next TMNT theme tune plays.

What kind of mad person shuffles their whole collection? Do you preemptively purge all albums/artists of the songs you don’t like before adding them to your collection? 😮