piezoelectron

I'm going to be camping for 4 days at a location without easy access to fire (hence no boiled water). As such, I'm going to be packing a bunch of canned stuff for my daily meals. The place is in England, where we're expecting a few hot days this week and maybe some rain over the weekend.

However, I have some free time before the trip to cook food. But I'm not sure if there's any good foods I could bring along that could keep for 3-4 days without a fridge. I guess that crosses out most meat dishes.

Some ideas I had were: falafel, fritters, bread, calzones, pasties. Have you tried taking such foods camping and if so, did they last a few days without spoiling? Are there any other foods you'd recommend? Thank you so much!

I'm trying to set up a Linux laptop for a friend who lives in another city. They have only ever used Windows, and likely won't have easy access to fix issues (not that I'm an expert).

First off, is it a good idea to give them a Linux PC at all? Have others had good/bad experiences giving technophobes Linux?

Secondly, if I go ahead with it, what's a good, stable, "safe" OS for a beginner? I'm shy of anything that's a rolling release (e.g. Arch, Manjaro etc) as "bleeding edge" can break things more often than not. I'm leaning towards Debian or something Debian based. But I've also heard good things about Fedora.

If I was the one using the PC, I'd have installed Fedora, as I've heard it's well-maintained. Then again there's been some good buzz about Debian 12. What would your advice be? Thanks!

Native Alpha is an Android app that lets you easily create PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) of your favourite websites. Basically, it's a way to make a website look and work like an app in a matter of seconds.

I've mostly used it to access websites that are effectively spyware (Instagram, Facebook etc) but still somewhat necessary to visit every now and then. This is because Native Alpha also has the added benefit of sandboxing PWAs from the rest of your phone. You can tailor each PWA to your needs (block ads, disable cookies etc).

But with Lemmy, I've actually enjoyed using Native Alpha for its primary purpose (easy PWAs) instead of secondary one (privacy).

Here's how you can set up Lemmy on Native Alpha:

• Download & install Native Alpha from F-Droid or the Play Store
• From the main screen, click the "+" icon from the bottom right
• Input the URL of your Lemmy instance
• Tweak the rest of the settings, or leave them unchanged. Personally, I like to allow the PWA to open links in my browser. I'm not too worried about the privacy risks of this, but YMMV of course.
• You'll now have the option to create an app icon on the home screen if you'd like. Completely up to you.
• All set! Access the PWA from your homescreen or Native Alpha, login, and you've got your very own Lemmy "app" in basically <1 minute

You can stop reading now, but some extra thoughts. Pros of this approach:

• Unlike Jerboa, you can now create communities and search posts (not just communities) from your new Lemmy "app"
• Unlike Jerboa, you can now mark messages read from you inbox
• Jerboa is obviously not invasive, but you save some space on your phone, and prevent any potential additional tracking that would've come from installing an extra app

Some cons:

• You still can't open links to other instances within the app. I'm sure there's an easy workaround for this, I'm just not sure what that is.
• Native Alpha is a bit glitchy with opening links within a PWA. This is why I chose to open links in my external browser above.
• Some UI gestures are unintuitive. To reload, you need to swipe down with two fingers. But if you also enable the "pinch to zoom" option from your PWA settings, you lose the reload functionality for some reason.

Have you already used Native Alpha? Your thoughts on the experience?

If there's interest, I can also share a quick recording of the Lemmy experience on my phone.

For context, I have no idea on how to take care of plants, but I'd like these three baby plants I bought to thrive.

I'd also love to snip them every now and then when I'm cooking, making a salad or a tea etc.

Right now each plant is quite young and in small plastic pots. The chocolate mint is already about 8-12 inches tall. The lemon balm and orange thyme are both less than 5 inches tall.

My questions where I'd love your advice are:

• How often should I water these plants?
• They're all newly bought and in disposable plastic containers. When I repot them, will it be dangerous to mix their current soil and the generic store bought soil I'm planning to get?
• How fast do these plants grow? Should I be optimistic and already buy semi-large pots, even though they're quite tiny right now?
• Any other general tips to care for these plants?

Appreciate your advice, whether it's plant-specific or applies to all the three plants. Thanks in advance!

For me it's either Punchup at a Wedding ('you had to piss on our parade .... you had to ruin it for all concerned') or Bodysnatchers ('your mouth only moves with someone's hand up your ass', re-the Spez AMA). How about you?