Henry Fisher

Just days away @techlore@social.lol from launching the biggest update to our privacy tools ever, and I want a few more eyes on it before we ship 👀

If you're new: These are free tools designed to help anyone, not just you technical folk, take real steps toward protecting themselves online. Whether you're just starting out or already running an open source operating system!

🧠 SPA Quiz: Find your personal threat model. Not "how private are you" but "what kind of user are you," and "are your habits actually aligned with your goals?" You get an archetype, a score, and a personal link to track your progress over time. No accounts, no data collected.

🔍 SPA Tools: A searchable, filterable resource library with a selection of tools designed for different people. Looking for an open source E2EE messenger that works on iOS? A data broker removal service? Browser? Just filter or search for it. No more scrolling forever.

📡 VPN Finder: Our classic VPN chart reimagined! Proper dark mode, rebuilt backend, compare up to 4 VPNs side by side, and community submissions built right in. No more GitHub PRs to add or correct data.

📄 Wiki: Coming at launch, ties everything together.

Our Techlorian community has had internal beta access and left great feedback which is already shipped. HUGE shoutout to them for making these tools better before public eyes see them 🙏

Public beta links are live now if you want to poke around before launch:

🧠 Quiz: https://v2026-05.techlore-website.pages.dev/quiz/
🔍 Tools: https://v2026-05.techlore-website.pages.dev/tools/
📡 VPN Finder: https://v2026-05.techlore-website.pages.dev/vpn/

Enjoy them, and please drop anything obvious in the replies...bugs, confusion, things that don't make sense. Full launch coming soon 🚀

Beautifully stated in last week's @comfortzone@mastodon.macstories.net from @nileane@nileane.fr — Paraphrasing:

Who's to blame when children are on TikTok in school all day? The kids, or the tech companies exploiting them?

Obviously the latter, so then why are kids being punished with social media bans, phone bans, and isolation from some legitimately useful technology?

We need to be going after the root problem. Politicians once again trying to put out a fire by looking the other way.

Honestly, I've found LLMs to be *fantastic* at troubleshooting technical issues I'm dealing with.

But I have been thinking to myself, when I fix a new problem with an LLM, it never ends up on the internet to help others. Obviously an issue for other people who may have the same issue, but ironically it's an issue for the LLMs too. Future problems won't be solvable with nobody to report solutions to the public.

Has this problem been discussed at all? Proposed solutions? Only thing I can think of is try to make it our responsibility to post about solutions we find to issues online.

The DaVinci Resolve macOS installer is so funny every time there's an update. Here's what it looks like:

1. Download .zip from their site
2. Extract .zip on your computer
3. You're given a .dmg of about equal size
4. You open .dmg
5. Inside the .dmg is a .pkg installer that will then install Resolve on your system.

I understand this in many ways violates the philosophy of Signal, but I do wish there was a choice to still enable disappearing messages that were not chat-wide.

I have some family members who are more sentimental about our chats than I am, so it'd be cool to allow them to keep our history while I delete it. Though again I understand why Signal doesn't want to open this can of worms.

Come to think of it, has any messenger done this before? The choice to have messages disappear for both parties or just you? I know iMessage has a 'disappearing' messages feature but it is ONLY for your end, no choice in the matter.

Peak originality incoming

I have joined the Obsidian cul...er...club :neobread_fingerguns_cool:

I am, in fact, my own worst enemy when it comes to PeerTube federation.

If you follow @techlore, your subscription may have been broken....perhaps permanently? Hard to know with federation. The counter resets on my end but that may not reflect actual subscriptions.

Can any of you all let me know if you are still getting notified for new content? Just published our newest video there.

https://birchtree.me/blog/chapterpod-is-out-now/
@matt_birchler@mastodon.social thank you for building this. The current options are quite horrible to work with. I know our audio listeners for my two podcasts are going to really appreciate this tool existing too! (Even if they don’t realize why timestamps + cover art + etc. are improved)