Rudism

I've been paying for Premium for a while, but I was behind a VPN when I signed up and apparently they charge you the rate for the country that your IP address resolves to instead of the country your account is actually associated with for some reason. I got an email just a couple days ago though saying that they're canceling my account since my payment method isn't also issued from that country (why they couldn't detect that when I first signed up is anyone's guess). I probably won't bother re-subscribing though. I've started self-hosting an Invidious instance instead, which not only strips Google's ads, but also has the Playlet app on my Rokus, which supports SponsorBlock to auto-skip sponsored ad reads in the videos themselves.

For a few years I've been running a couple self-hosted instances of Uptime Kuma from two different locations (a Raspberry Pi at my house and on my VPS) which monitor a few things I care about plus each other, and haven't had any problems.

Due to their app store monopoly, Apple is probably one of the few companies whose version of enshittification often involves enshittifying the products and services of other companies.

It's too bad the author didn't think to restore the factory RAM before shipping it. My unrelenting cynicism always makes me very careful to hide any evidence of tinkering on the rare occasions when I need to send a tech product off for warranty repairs.

I think the answer to your first point is easily explained by the fact that the major news orgs typically have paywalls that check the user's IP, cookies, and so forth to decide whether they're allowed to see the full article for free or if they have to pony up first. There's no way to really incorporate that functionality into RSS feeds so they're just pushing out the bare minimum as a Hail Mary to drive their dwindling RSS user base back to the website. Smaller personal blogs that don't rely on advertising or paid membership revenue to stay afloat are far more likely to provide full article content on their RSS feeds (since there's no reason not to).

Some feed readers have "scraping" support where they request each article's URL internally and figure out how (or can be configured with CSS selectors) to extract the article's text content and display it in the reader, though it can be pretty hit or miss whether that can work for a given site.

As for formatting, there are a couple possible explanations--the reader could be ignoring or mangling HTML tags in the content when it's displaying it, or the site itself may be generating its RSS feeds with mangled or missing formatting elements. In my experience both possibilities are equally likely.

> If an email has a rich, HTML view; it should be required to come with a text-only, non-HTML copy of the body as well; for accessibility, compatibility, and privacy reasons.

I can't imagine this working. The plain text section would probably something like "Upgrade your email client to view this message" 90% of the time and be completely pointless.

Maybe it's an unpopular opinion but if I were rebooting email I'd forego HTML entirely and either say it's strictly plain-text, or use some Markdown-like formatting spec that looks fine even when viewed as plain text (email clients could provide WYSIWYG editors for less technically-inclined email authors). The evils of HTML in email (phishing, impersonating companies, and other scams) far outweigh the benefits (none, as far as I'm concerned).

The thing I'm most confused about is I thought xkcd was one guy named Randall's webcomic, but this post makes it sound like there are several people involved in creating the comics. Is that the case? Does Randall still draw them or is it like a company with a whole creative team now?

Individuals choosing to live an energy-conscious life is commendable, and if enough people did it it might even ripple some small effects upwards, but ultimately I don't think that would ever be enough to actually solve anything. It has to be a top-down solution where lawmakers force the big corporations to be energy/environment conscious, but of course with the politicians (in the U.S. at least) being in the pocket of those very companies that's a tall order.

Another killer feature for me is its built-in support for Wallabag. I host my own server and routinely save longer articles to it so that I can download and read them on my Kobo later.

A while ago my wife applied for a home equity loan. At some point I got a call from someone claiming to be from the bank she had applied through (I forget which one), calling to make sure I approved the loan since the home is in both our names. He asked for my name, which I gave him, and then the last four digits of my social security number, which I also gave him. He then proceeded to ask for my full social security number, at which point alarms started going off in my head and I started sweating about even giving the last four digits to a stranger who had called me out of the blue. I told him I wouldn't do that, and was there a number on the bank's website I could call in order to get back to him, in order to verify that he actually worked for the bank. The guy started acting really annoyed, and said he didn't think there was any number on the bank's website that could reach him, and that if I didn't give him my full social security number he would be forced to reject the loan application. I told him I didn't feel comfortable giving that information to someone who had phoned me, and if there was no way for me to call him back through an official bank phone number then the call was over. He hung up angrily.

Turns out he actually was from the bank and he did cancel the loan application.