I've noticed this issue for a few weeks now, but hoped that it is just a bug and will be fixed soon.
Sadly, this doesn't seem to be the case, so I decided to post this issue here to find solutions.

When I play a YouTube video for example, it shows me everything that's playing right now, and the current status (paused/ playing).
Sadly, I can't manually stop or resume it with my phone, which sucks because I then have to get my lazy ass up the couch and pause it on my laptop a few meters away :D
Or, I have to unlock the phone and use the remote input feature, which is annoying too...

I already checked the Flatpak permissions, the settings in KDE Connect (both on my PC and phone) and looked up on the internet for that problem, where I found both too much and nothing at the same time.

I think it's because of Firefox, because if I play a song on Spotify for example, it works fine.

Do you experience this issue too? How could I fix it?
It appeared out of nowhere, probably due to a update, I didn't do anything that might have broken it.

Before you say "Just give it some fertilizer", please look at my post about that plant before.

It started flowering a few weeks ago, and the roots are growing back very healthy, but slowly.
I think those two factors are what contributed to the plant consuming itself, as you can see on the pictures where the lower leafes start yellowing quite significantly.

If they continue to do so, I will loose them, and that would suck.
My question is: What can I do to mitigate that, so I can prevent the leafes from dying off completely?

I already cut off the flower spike to redirect the resources, but I fear this isn't enough.

There's a shit load of fertilizer in the substrate now too. I grow it hydroponically, and started with an EC of just 1 mS, because that's what's recommended for orchids, but I quickly realised that this isn't enough, and increased it to 1,5-2 mS. Right now it sits at about 2-2,5 mS, which is objectively on the higher side for other plants, but very high for orchids from what I know.
But on the other hand... it needs to grow a lot of plant matter.

The problem is, that there are probably not enough roots to support this growth, and the nutrient uptake is limited because of that.

Still, I don't want to loose the leafs. Would foliar fertilizing help? Or is it too late?

Here are root pictures my other two orchids that I rescued too at the same time. They don't show signs of a deficiency, but also regenerated a lot of roots. Maybe this helps?

You've already seen duckweed, I know that.
It's ubiquitous and literally a pest in some areas.
Also known as "water lentils", they can cover ponds in just a matter of days. They are also one of the fastest growing and replicating plants ever.

Why is that relevant you may ask?

Well, Wolffia sp. could be the most nutrient packed superfood you'll ever eat.

I found a study where scientists analyzed the nutritional value of it, and holy fuck!
Not only is it a extremely good source of protein (up to 40% dry weight), but also contains omega 3 fatty acids in a very favourable ratio. And a lot of minerals, like iron and calcium. Especially for vegans too this might be perfect.

This sounds very similar to algae, right? Right!

But there are a few benefits compared to Spirulina and those like:

• It can grow literally EVERYWHERE. It's a weed, just like the name implies. You don't need any fancy glass tubes, pumps and whatever shit you need for algae farming, no. Just a puddle and optional trace elements. It's also not a "fancy algae strain" you have to order somewhere, you can just go to a local pond, scoop a hand full out of it, and then place it on your balcony or whatever and it will spread by itself.
• It doesn't need (even tolerate) lots of light. Algae are known for their high light requirements, sometimes even needing artificial lights, but this one grows in ponds on the forest floor and will not be happy if you leave it unshaded.
• It will come back after each winter
• AND: It's a viable plant source of vitamin B12!

It's almost impossible to find natural vegan B12 sources, because neither plants, nor animals or fungi, but bacteria, produce it.

Those duckweeds are known to live in symbiosis with those bacteria, and the B12 is then stored inside the plants, not the bacteria! So if you wash it, it still has the same nutritional content.

Also, similar to legumes, they can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, which is why you can find them everywhere.

I still have to back the claims up by real sources, because right now, most of that stuff is just "I read it somewhere on the internet", but here on Medium is another article about that.

This post is mainly there to spread the information that it exists in the first place, so maybe some facts are not entirely true, idk.

What will I do now?

I will try to find it outside and then try to grow it on my balcony to see how well it performs and tastes.

I can feed it with my depleted hydroponic nutrient solution that would land in the drain anyway, but still contains a lot of trace minerals and stuff.

And hey, even if it tastes like shit, which I doubt, because it's claimed to be taste neutral, I can turn it into an organic fertilizer :)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/18068633

I had a really bad slug infestation on my balcony garden last year.

Because they were eating on everything, and were in the thousands almost, I had to resort to "poison" bait.
Not one of the toxic ones, because I have cats, but ones based on Iron phosphate.

Still, it resulted in another pest: all those slimy slugs crawled under the floor cover and died there. Disgusting. Everything was full of flies and stank. But mainly, it was mentally horrifying.

This year, I want to do it differently. Instead of killing them, I want prevention.

I already looked up online, but all "natural predators" are bigger ones, like ducks and toads, but of course that isn't viable on my small balcony.

So, I thought about already killing them in the egg stage.

What natural killers, like nematodes or bugs, do they have in this life stage?
What can I do to attract them?
How is that regulared by natural balance?

Anyway, I got outside and dug up some soil samples from different locations and spreaded them in the pots, hoping that there are some eggs or critters in there that are currently hibernating and then improve the natural balance in the summer.

It was only one hand full of dirt per big pot, but that should be enough I believe. It's only the catalyst/ starter culture after all.

Btw, I'm currently building up the soil for the following season.
Last year has been absolutely great with organic living soil, and I want to improve on that.

The new soil, consisting of spent mushroom blocks, some soil, leaf matter, and more:

And the old one from a few months ago, when I harvested my hemp tree:

I plan to reuse it of course! No-till, a shit ton of organic matter, very well aerated with deep roots from the decaying plant that was previously in there. Extremely healthy dirt 🤌👌

Those are Maranta leuconora, which are supposed to be very hard to grow from what I've heard.

The mother plant also grew this fast, so I made a few cuttings to propagate her.

That's how she looks now:

I can't stop them from flowering...

The only issue so far has been that I've simultaneously both over-fertilized AND let them run dry while having extremely low air humidity. Like extremely low. This resulted in all existing tips burning, but this hasn't happened yet again on the new growth and hopefully never will.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/17801651

Hey all,

I've been using my fertilizer now for a year, and it's the only one I've used up until now, because I alway was satisfied with it, because it's both very inexpensive and well formulated imo.

I'm using the Masterblend set, with the solutions pre-mixed for short term use.

I have mixed two "stock solution" bottles, which last me a few months in winter (only for houseplants and my small indoor grow tent) and a few weeks in summer (balcony gardening + house plants).

You can see the ingredients on the bottles on the picture:

They are always stored in complete darkness.

And then I have a diluted solution, with an EC of about 3-4 mS and a low pH, which I adapted to exactly match my tap water and houseplants when diluted to ~1/3. This pre-mix lasts me a few days maximum.

I've already noticed a few floaters in summer here and there, but didn't mind them too much. They looked like small jellyfish or something floating around, but I thought that they might be some precipitation from minerals or whatever.

They got a bit more after some time, and a few weeks ago, I soaked everything in hot bleach water and mixed everything from scratch, because I already had the feeling that those might be amoebae or other microorganisms.

But now, everything is way worse. Just take a look:

Those specs are even in the normal nutrient solution!

A few of my plants have a reoccurring spring tail "infestation". More like constant house mates.

I even got the chance to take a picture of them fucking. I feel like a pervert now...

No wonder they have such a good time. They're probably feasting on those mold specs. They're pretty much harmless and easy to manage, so I just don't care as much.

Anyway... What I wanted to ask you: What shall I do? Desinfecting clearly doesn't work.

The root cause seems to be the water. If I wouldn't pre-dissolve everything, nothing would get moldy.

But of course, I need it to be in a liquid form for proper handling. Other fertilizer manufacturers are able to manage this too, so why can't I?

Shall I add preservatives to the concentrate, like Isothiazolinones?

Or should I just switch to another fertilizer? If so, which one would you recommend, that is also cheap?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/17758317

Here's my original post on Feddit.org, a german instance: https://photon.slrpnk.net/post/17757233

I still made quite some effort to translate it manually for you.

I bought two phalaenopsis orchids about two months ago.

A pink, and a gold one.

First the pink one. I got it from a discounter, and... well it already looked like shit when I bought it. The roots were pretty much all dead.

Now, it recovered, and even put out its' first flower spike!

It still looks a bit dehydrated/ leathery, but otherwise it's in a stable condition and recovers very well.

The other one is from a proper garden center, AND IT LOOKED EVEN WORSE!

Not only were the roots completely mush, but it also had a new buddy in its sleeve, I call him "worm buddy", my new pet.

Now, it looks like this:

It grew new flower pods and already started to bloom! How awesome is that?

On top of that, I showed the pictures a worker in the shop I bought it, and they were so embarrassed, that they gave me a voucher for a new plant, because they called it "inrecoverable". So I got this Oncidium orchid additionally for free:

This post is just a small reminder that plants can be very tolerant to anything, and with some luck and experience, you can save them.

I have a degoogled phone (GrapheneOS), and therefore, the slot that is usually taken up by Google Assistant (or whatever "AI"/ voice control your manufacturer uses) is free.

On Android, you can manually select what tool you want to activate when swiping from the edge up or holding the power button. At least on my device.

Right now, it's only Firefox (search) and Kvaesitso, my home screen, but not much more.
This means, that this system is very modular, and there can be quite a few apps around there that also have this feature!

Currently, I've set Kvaesitso as "assistant", so when I swipe up from the edge, the search opens up instantly. This enables me to instantly search and open apps, perform basic calculations, search the web, and some more. Sounds neat, but I can also achieve that by just swiping down on my home screen.

This however feels unnecessary, and I'd like to replace it by something more useful.

It doesn't need to be an alternative to Siri or whatever voice assistants you think of, it can be whatever you think is useful.
For example, a search bar, some quick access, cool tool, whatever.
I've already heard of Mycroft, but I think I don't need that tbh.

I'm also intrigued by the smart AI picker (circle whatever you see on your screen, and it tells you what it is) Google introduced, but I never tried that to begin with. It just looked cool in the ads, but that's their purpose I suppose.

My only limitation is that it's FOSS. Sure, I could just download Google Assistant or whatever myself, but I don't want to defy the progress I made with all the privacy and security implications. Those assistants often need quite a few privileges, and I don't want to give some proprietary app my screen information for example.

I'm interested in Android itself. The software. Custom ROMs, apps, security and privacy, beta reviews, upcoming features, whatever.
That's what the sidebar of this community also says.

However, my timeline is full of

"Rumors say, manufacturer XY might might bring out a new foldable, this time with a higher refresh rate display! 😳😱

or something like that.

I already have a phone. A very new one. I won't buy one in at least the next 7 years. Especially not a new fancy gimmicky toy like those ones.

Is this on purpose? Do you like what you see?

There seem to be many long term Linux users switching to Windows right now, and posts like these got me inspired to do the same and report my experience doing the transition.

I'm just done with Linux OS altogether, and I think Windows is the better choice for me.
Why?

1. Linox is too barebones for me. I accidentally left the console mode on my Asus ROG Ally recently and was overwhelmed by the amount of customisation options I had available. Before, I was a KDE user, and one single setting app just felt... lackluster.
   But then I saw, that Windows had three different ones, and I find this way more elegant. Three is three times better than one, did you know that? Checkmate, Linus 😉😎
2. The CEO of the Linux company has made some very unsettling decisions in the recent past.
   The most prominent example is making the kernel open source.
   I don't know, if you've ever heard about this weird concept before, but let me explain it to you in layman's terms. This basically means, that my laptop is now fully exposed to hackers! 😳
   Wimdows on the contrary is way more secure, because there's no hacking instruction available on file sharing sites like GitHub. I now feel way safer, knowing no one can access my search history on MS Edge 😎
   Also, speaking of, thanks to the sponsor of this post, South VPN, i am now totally safe against evil hackers!
3. I really like the recommendations in the start menu.
   On Linus, I always had trouble finding applications, but here this decision has already been made for me.
   This is how good UX works, you nerds.
   The software selection is absolutely great, especially because it usually integrates very well with my OS. Without that, I would never have discovered a neat app called "Tik Tok" for example. I wish I would have used it sooner, I've never been as politically informed and entertained before in my life!
4. The AI features are stunningly amazing. I've bought the newest Surface device, but it came with Linux pre installed and couldn't make full use of the hardware.
   There's a highly sophisticated AI chip, basically a small brain, built in, which takes a screenshot every few seconds and adds some OCR layer on top of it.
   It's really amazing how innovative this OS is!
5. Linux feels "stuck". It's basically version 6.x for over a year now, but Windows is already ahead 5 versions. Using such old software just feels wrong and is at least 1,8333 times less secure.

I could continue that forever, but I think you should just check it out for yourself. It's amazing!

The installation is really quickly done. It only took about 4 hours, some minor regedits, and another 4 hours again because I had to reinstall due to virus I got when downloading Fortnite.

I chose the Windows 11 distro instead of the Windows 10 variant, because everyone knows 11 is the bigger number and therefore superior.

I'm new to Phalaenopsis orchids.

I bought this one about one month or two ago, and when I got home and repotted it, I noticed that 90% of its roots were rotten.

I still pulled through it and now I'm in the process of saving it.

It looks better from day to day, and formed new healthy roots, and so far, it's looking fine. At least compared to how it looked in the beginning.

A week ago it started forming this small knob on the remaining flower spike I left, and now, I'm wondering, if thats just new flowers forming, or if it's a Keiki, a new baby plant that will separate from it's mother soon and can begin living on their own?

Is this a sign of severe stress ("I'll die soon, this is my last resort!") or does it tell me "Thanks for not throwing me into the trash, here's a small gift for you!"?

Whole plant:

The "thing" one week ago:

First visible air roots forming, a few weeks ago:

The plant when I got it: