What’s more fun than a trip to Bozeman, MT on First Contact Day? What’s more satisfying than a plate of salmon on Federation Day? What’s deeper than self-reflection on the sands of Vulcan? That’s right, it’s the Star Trek community over at startrek.website!

If you are a Star Trek fan, this is the community for you. It’s very active and full of high-quality content. Here you can read about the behind-the-scenes details of any show in the franchise. The sidebar helpfully lists the shows that are in development, production, and release. Really, anything that is Star Trek-related is talked about here. So go refill your Romulan ale and drop by for a visit!

Just a quick bug report for Lemmy 0.18.3:

Today I received a reply from a bot account. I have the setting set to not show bot accounts enabled for my account. I still got a notification that I had a reply from it (next to the notification icon), but there was no way to mark the notification as “read” because it doesn’t appear in the inbox. The only workaround was to check the “Show Bot Accounts” setting and then visit the inbox to clear the notification.

It’s almost 11:00 AM, and I’m still exhausted. I can barely keep my eyes open. This seems like the perfect time to do a community spotlight for Espresso. Operated by our friends at infosec.pub, this community caters to lovers of espresso and the art of making it. It was created in response to the Reddit exodus, hoping to make a new home for espresso lovers here in the Fediverse.

It’s always a pleasure to find these smaller, niche communities on Lemmy. The moderators have thoughtfully migrated the wiki from the original Reddit community, and have filled out their sidebar with a ton of useful information. (All of that information is included in the bubble above this post. I feel a little guilty writing a spotlight article that’s shorter than the destination community’s sidebar!)

My only wish is that there was some sort of button that could deliver an espresso to me right now so that I could wake up the rest of the way. Oh, well. Maybe I should buy one of the espresso machines they’re recommending over there.

Until next time!

So here's my situation. I've been looking for a long time for a self-hosted photo library. I have pretty low requirements: I just want it to be able to show the videos and images I have stored on my NAS in a random order, and to support a slideshow of those files, also in a random order.

I thought I had finally found what I was looking for with PiGallery2 -- it supports a hidden file that triggers the random order sorting -- but it's not stable. It works for a while and then takes ages and ages to refresh the album.

Synology Photos would have been perfect, but it can't randomize!

Any suggestions? I'm looking to host this on Debian.

I'm back after a week hiatus where I was helping lemmy.ninja manage a large influx of new users. And that means it's time for a new Community Spotlight! Today I bring you Pitch A Youtuber, a community whose sole purpose is to spread the word about extraordinary youtube artists. I'm not much of a youtube-watcher myself, but I have to admit that there are some incredibly good offerings out there.

So today only, I'm going to give you a two-for-one deal. First you get this community spotlight telling you about the Pitch A Youtuber community! As an added bonus, I'm going to give you not one but two great Youtube channels that you should check out.

First there's Professor of Rock, a channel I only discovered last week when I watched the incredible Rick Roll episode. I'm not really a fan of rock culture, or music history. Sure, I loves me some techno, and I listen to all kinds of music; I just have never had that much of an interest in it. But there's such a level of quality in the Professor of Rock content that I couldn't put it down! I mean, have you seen my community spotlight posts? I have the attention span of a goldfish with dementia. And yet I watched that episode (and one or two others) from start to finish. Great content!

And for your other free gift, I present the irreverent but surprisingly insightful Red Letter Media. I'm an enormous film and television fan, having worked in the entertainment industry for a while and having seen probably every movie in existence. I love the horror genre, and I'm also a huge Star Trek fan. Put those together and you get the content of the Red Letter Media channel. There's a lot of snark, but so much more deeply informed content about the industry that I find myself coming back to this channel again and again. You'll have to watch a few to decide what you think. I don't really have a specific video to recommend. But I will say it was very interesting to see them come around on their opinions of Star Trek Picard.

So there you have it. My longest community spotlight post, with added bonuses. If you like content like this, head over to Pitch A Youtuber and contribute!

Netflix has announced this morning that “Castlevania: Nocturne” will premiere on September 28, 2023, with the first teaser trailer being promised for tomorrow, July 27.

As many tinnitus sufferers like myself know, the never-ending ringing in your ears can become unbearable at times. Sometimes white noise can help by making it harder to distinguish the ringing from other sounds. I know I've run fans in my bedroom while falling asleep to help distract me, for example.

You can use the iPhone's Background Sounds feature to generate this noise for you. And with Airpods Pro, you can deliver the sound directly to a single ear and let external sounds in so you can still hear what's going on around you.

Here's how you do it.

1. On your iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Background Sounds
2. Turn on Background Sounds
3. Select the sound you want to hear. I like balanced noise for tinnitus relief.
4. Insert your Airpods Pro to get them to connect to your phone.
5. Activate transparency mode on the Airpods Pro to let environmental sounds through.

The background sounds will play continuously, but will be suspended for announcements from Siri and phone calls. ~~Interestingly, background sounds are just reduced in volume by about 90% when you start playing Apple Music~~. There's a setting in the Background Sounds pane that will disable the background noise while media is playing. Otherwise it will continue playing but will be reduced in volume. Background sounds resume normally after stopping any of those activities.

This morning I was forced to ban about 18 users for being obvious spambots. That deleted their content on my instance. Are they now banned on other instances, too? I'm just trying to figure out what the best process is for eliminating these spambots for good before they flood all of our feeds.

If you're looking for NSFW communities, Lemmyverse.net now provides a Show NSFW checkbox to help filter your search. Unlike a regular checkbox, however, this checkbox has three states.

By default when you visit Lemmyverse.net, the checkbox is unchecked. That means that any search you perform will exclude any community marked as NSFW.

Figure 1: The Show NSFW checkbox is unchecked, so no NSFW communities will be shown.

Clicking the checkbox once changes the filter to include both NSFW and SFW communities in the search result. This is indicated by a hyphen in the checkbox with a yellow background, as well as a tooltip if you over over it.

Figure 2: After clicking the Show NSFW checkbox once, NSFW communities will be included in search results alongside SFW communities.

Clicking the checkbox again will set the filter to display only NSFW communities. This is indicated by a checkmark in the checkbox with a red background. As before, a tooltip will also indicate the state of the filter.

Figure 3: After clicking the Show NSFW checkbox a second time, search results will be limited to displaying only NSFW communities.

As you may have guessed, you can click the checkbox again to uncheck the box and display only SFW communities again.

In closing, here is a note about NSFW communities on Lemmy. If you are using the Lemmy UI on desktop or mobile, there is a Show NSFW Content setting in your profile. You will need to have this setting enabled before you can view the posts in the NSFW communities you subscribe to. If you've had this setting turned off, just be aware that your Lemmy experience could dramatically change when you enable it, especially if you spend a lot of time on the All timeline on a busy Lemmy server.

INXS, Porno for Pyros, Presidents of the United States, The Primitives.... These are just a few of the large (large!) number of Alternative Rock offerings at Alternative Nation. This is a genuinely busy place, folks, with 287 posts so far, growing by a dozen a day! It even has its own Spotify playlist, which I'm not even going to link to because I think you should visit this community that much!

This community clearly has dedicated mods who love the content and work hard to curate and present it with quality. Drop in, subscribe, and be sure to post!

Today we’re bringing attention to lemmy.ninja’s own Team Red, a community all about AMD and their products. Maybe you switched to AMD when NVidia’s video cards were impossible to find outside of a scalper’s den. Maybe you bailed on Intel and their space heater processors, opting for a Ryzen Threadripper. Or maybe you’ve been in AMD’s ecosystem for years. No matter your circumstances, this community is here to cater to you!

Come on in and show us your build. Share a benchmark! Ask a question and get some help from your colleagues. It’s all welcome at Team Red!

For today's spotlight, I present Australia. The most active and subscribed community of aussie.zone, this community boasts a whopping 246 users per week. So many, in fact, that I almost feel like writing this spotlight is moot, because everyone already seems to know about it! Then again, there's always someone whose Lemmy journey is just beginning, and who could benefit from learning about the popular destinations of the platform.

If Australia is too broad, aussie.zone has communities for various cities and regions of Australia for a more local discussion. And, in a particularly neighborly fashion, they have even listed the other Australia-related communities in their sidebar.