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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.

Today we highlight ADHD Women, a community “for women to find support and discuss living with ADHD.” There are a lot of ADHD-related communities across Lemmy, but this is the first one I’ve seen that caters to women. It’s a recent addition to the Fediverse, with posts going back a month or so.

Here we have a venerable community for today's Community Spotlight. Linux Guides has been around since 2021, which makes it one of the oldest communities we've featured here so far. It's a community where users are encouraged to post anything they find useful in the realm of linux. So that github page about creating LXCs that you starred a few years ago that you keep referring back to? That would be a good candidate to post here!

It's not terribly active, which surprises me. It seems that every big project I do in Linux requires one or more guides to get through. So let's share our hidden treasures with the community and help it grow!

Going forward, the moderators of Community Search Tips will strongly encourage posts to use the URL of a community when linking to that community. We won't get upset at you for using the other methods; we just feel that the full URL provides the best user experience, especially for users of small instances.

This is a bit of a meta post, but please feel free to comment on it if you like.

Background

There are several ways to link to a community in Lemmy. The two most common you will see are these:

• URL Method. This involves using the URL found in your browser's address bar when you are visiting the community. For example, https://lemmy.world/c/transformers
• Shorthand Method. This method uses an exclamation point in the address, which tells Lemmy to load the remote community through the instance you are currently logged in at. For example, !transformers@lemmy.world.

We had previously thought that both methods were interchangeable, but we have since learned of some issues with each.

URL Method Drawbacks

You have probably already encountered the main drawback with the URL method. When you follow a URL to a Lemmy community, you visit that community at the remote instance. You can still see the content there, but you can't comment, upvote, downvote, or subscribe to the community from this page. To subscribe, you'd have to go back to your home instance and follow the instructions we've laid out here.

You can see an example of that below. Here I've folled the URL to https://math@lemmy.sdf.org, and I cannot subscribe to the community because there is no subscribe button present.

At most you can view the community and its content. You can still return to your instance, search for the community using the same URL, and subscribe to it there.

Shorthand Method Drawbacks

1. The Error Page

As inconvenient as the URL Method is, the shorthand method can introduce even worse problems. In Lemmy, a community isn't linked to your instance until at least one user has searched for that community on the search page. This necessary step causes a serious problem when using the shorthand method on a site where that search hasn't happened yet. If you try to follow a link that uses the shorthand method to a community that hasn't been searched for, you will receive an error response.

This is much less of a problem on sites like lemmy.world, where tens of thousands of users have searched for communities already. As you can imagine, however, smaller instances and newer instances haven't necessarily searched for the vast majority of communities out there, making this problem much more pervasive on those instances. To make matters worse, the error page is cryptic and doesn't explain what the problem is or how to solve it.

2. Incompatibilities with other services

This site is primarily focused on Lemmy, but other projects in the Fediverse, such as Mastadon, can -- and do -- interact with Lemmy communities. We can't test the shorthand method in all of these products, but we have received reports that it won't work for Mastodon users, and I suspect there are other projects out there that would run into the same problem. (Note that I did test this for kbin, and kbin can follow the shorthand method.)

Conclusion

We feel that the drawbacks of the shorthand notation have more severe consequences for user experience than the inconvenience of using the URL method. Neither approach is perfect, but a community link that leads to an error message completely defeats the purpose of the content in this community. We hope you agree.

We have confidence that the error will eventually get fixed. Until that time, please use the full URL when linking to communities when making posts to Community Search Tips. Thank you!

I found this blog post useful for explaining how to interact with Lemmy via Mastodon.