Database

Every time my websites’ database server goes down, two things cross my mind:

– Would it be worth managing the server myself so I can at least troubleshoot it?
– Would it be worth migrating two decades’ worth of WordPress blog posts to a static site generator and just ditching the DB going forward?

OK, three:

– What changed that is causing the server to go down every couple of weeks instead of once a year?

Relevant: https://indieweb.org/database-antipattern

Something I’d be interested in that I can’t seem to find

Something I’d be interested in that I can’t seem to find:

A low-powered Linux laptop with an e-ink display, that I could use for long-form writing or coding.

What I’ve found so far are mostly either
– Tablets intended for note-taking (like the ReMarkable or BOOX’s various lines)
– Higher-end where the e-ink display is an extra (like Lenovo’s swivel designs where you rotate the display to use either an OLED or e-ink).

Some of the tablets do have keyboard cases, which would be better than just hooking up a random Bluetooth keyboard, but it doesn’t look like I can just install programs on them, except for the Android ones, which aren’t going to be ideal for things like coding or running build scripts or anything like that.

The closest I found was the Modos Paper Laptop, but seems to still be in the prototype phase.

Does this form factor exist yet? Am I just having trouble finding them because of the current state of search?

#laptops #notebooks #eink #epaper
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I should add that I started looking because of the mention of the Linux-based, but still early in development PineNote in the latest Pine64 update:

https://fosstodon.org/@PINE64/112112723757342384

https://pine64.org/2024/03/17/march-update-making-waves/

Again it’s a tablet meant for handwritten note taking, but a general-purpose Linux distribution is going to be a lot more flexible
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And this is where I can tell you it’s user error!

And this is where I can tell you it’s user error!

Apparently when I was testing block and unblock back when I set up the server, I managed to leave threads.net blocked.

I unblocked it, and now I can follow a user in the web interface via @user@threads.net, but not by their profile URL, which I guess is a peculiarity of Threads that it doesn’t return any actor information from that URL.

Thanks for checking in on this, and for, you know, building the thing!
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This is interesting: In Snac, I can see a Threads

This is interesting: In Snac, I can see a Threads post boosted via a Mastodon account. It’s a post from a few days ago on the account I tried to follow earlier. And according to the timeline and API, I am following them from Snac. But they aren’t showing up on the list of people I follow.

This suggests that Snac is able to interact with Threads posts, and is able to follow Threads accounts, but runs into trouble retrieving Threads profiles.

Partial federation is a more interesting problem IMO than no federation, so now I really want to take a look at the logs!
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Image Descriptions

Reply to a thread on image descriptions. Most recent post suggested including what it is and what it looks like.

I usually try to describe what I want the image to convey.

In the waxwing case I’d definitely describe the bird, and probably add that it’s perched on a bare twig in front of a wide expanse of clear blue sky, and maybe add that only the blurred shape of the moon breaks the background.

Trying to get the mood across, since it looks like it’s intended to be an artistic photo.

On the other hand, if I was posting only to demonstrate the appearance of the bird itself, I would probably have cropped it further and would only describe the bird itself.

So I guess I use a combination of what it is, how it looks, and what it means. #

The hard part there, of course, being that not everyone is going to agree on what it means, even when the context is the same.

And even when it’s a purely informational image, I might not notice, or decide not to include, let’s say a detail in the feathers that seems inconsequential to me, but someone else is using that feather shape to identify members of two different populations of waxwings, or something like that.

I’ve run into similar issues with iNaturalist with just the images, even before descriptions come into play. For example, several times I’ve taken photos of a plant, and when I posted them it turned out that the only way to tell which of two related species it is, is to look at a pattern on the lower part of the stem, or the bottom of the leaves, or some part I didn’t think to take a photo of in the first place!

Google Photos app on Android doesn’t offer a way to mass-download

Apparently the Google Photos app on Android doesn’t offer a way to mass-download a bunch of photos to the local device (which you might want to do for, just to pull an example out of thin air, taking GPS-tagged photos with your phone for reference while walking around a park and then saving them to a tablet where you can use an OpenStreetMap editing app that will show GPS-tagged photos on the local device on the map you’re editing).

You can download local copies individually.

You can remove the local copies of a selected group.

For this batch I just downloaded them one at a time. It took less than a minute. For bigger batches, though?

Huh… I bet Nextcloud has a download-a-bunch-at-once option.
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I should also look into desktop OSM editors that’ll show GPS-tagged images. It wouldn’t surprise me if JOSM could do it.

Now I wonder if I can run Vespucci on Waydroid and copy photos to someplace it can access…

Whatever. Something to dig into after work, not just during a break.
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Re: trying to get away from using Google Photos

Same. It’s very good at pulling your data in!

I keep meaning to look into something that would work as a complete replacement, but so far I just have Nextcloud auto-uploading to S3 storage at Linode. That way I at least have an offsite/online copy I can get at through the app, web interface and DAV mounts. I think link-based sharing should work with the S3 backend. Something to test.

The main problem I have is that there isn’t a good way to sync deletes AFAIK. So every so often I have to go into those folders and clear out a bunch of temporary photos I already deleted from my phone and Google.
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Article at Reactor about the planning it took to get five years of Babylon 5 to tell a complete story, the curves thrown at i…

Article at Reactor about the planning it took to get five years of Babylon 5 to tell a complete story, the curves thrown at it by outside circumstances (actors leaving, premature cancellation, etc.), and the seat-of-the-pants swerves that sometimes worked out better, sometimes not as good as what could have been.

Babylon 5 Was the Ultimate Exercise in Plotting vs. Pantsing

In its very bones, Babylon 5 was a unique experience. It was a bold attempt to experiment with the conventional format of TV, with a serialized storyline and continuity, unlike earlier shows like Star Trek or Quantum Leap or any number of other “story of the week” style science fiction programs. Here in our current era, post-prestige TV, that kind of storytelling is common, but in the 1990s, when Babylon 5 first entered pre-production, it was nearly unheard of.

#TV #scifi #babylon5

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Fedora 40, X and Wayland

Good to know:

1. #Fedora isn’t actually removing #Xorg support yet, just dropping it from the default installer.
2. They’ve pushed that change back from Fedora 40 to 41.

https://alternativeto.net/news/2024/3/fedora-workstation-41-to-phase-out-default-gnome-x-org-session-in-favor-of-wayland/

That means I have more time before I “need” to switch to an AMD card or to a distro that still has Xorg for #LinuxGaming. I can keep an alternate X-based session around until I have a better reason to replace the current #Nvidia card. Or who knows, maybe it’ll reach the point where XWayland windows run well enough on Nvidia that I won’t need an X11 session anymore.

(Desktop apps running directly on #Wayland run just fine on here, and judging by the fan speed, use less power than the same apps running on an X11 session of the same desktop.)

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Some useful articles for configuring the

Some useful articles for configuring the #iptables #firewall on #linux — specifically #AlpineLinux using #awall:

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-set-up-a-firewall-with-awall-on-alpine-linux/
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Zero-To-Awall
https://www.zsiegel.com/2022/01/13/configuring-alpine-linux-firewall-with-docker

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