Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
Found myself thinking about way back when Instagram (before Metastasis) first introduced their Android app and the iPhone-only userbase freaked out about those people being on Instagram
https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/4/2926458/why-iphone-users-complain-instagram-android
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Wtf? I don’t need Achievements in an ebook reader. And I especially don’t need push notifications telling me how to get them.
Kobo used to have achievements, but I turned them off like 10 years ago, about 5 minutes after I bought my first book from them.
Opened the app to see if they still even have the feature, scrolled down and saw this.
You don’t say….
Reading discussions on the Fediverse about how dangerous it’ll be to federate with #Threads.
Also reading discussions on Threads* about how dangerous it’ll be to federate with the rest of the Fediverse.
*(I do not actually have a Threads account, but you can still read some public discussions without logging in.)
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“A forb or phorb is a herbaceous flowering plant that is not a graminoid”
Well, that clears it up.
I got an email today from a local conservation society that does both habitat restoration and recommendations for gardening with native plants. One of the non-native plants they mentioned was… “California Burclover.” Apparently it’s native to the Mediterranean. (No surprise that it grows well here!)
I really need to start organizing my time as a queue instead of a stack.
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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?
Declaring this June 1 to be Jean Valjean Day, as it’ll be 24-6-01
(Ok, it’s reaching a bit, but it’s the closest we’ll get for a few centuries)
Oh, that’s cool! Could probably build one with a bigger screen. I wonder if the pi 0 is strong enough to run an IDE…
The Freewrite Traveler looks really nice, though. If it wasn’t single-purpose…
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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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Kid: “That broken game?”
Me: “Wait, it’s broken?”
Kid: “Well, Let’s Game It Out Josh broke it.”
Me: “Well, that’s ANY game!”
The last couple of years have really broken my suspension of belief for Scalzi’s “Lock In.”
Brain-interface full VR internet and remotely-pilotable robot bodies for people who suffer from lock-in syndrome? Sure!
A massive effort to actually accommodate people caught up in a mass disabling event?
Not so much. #
Of course the wrangling to preserve those accommodations, the disparity between those who can afford a good VR environment and IRL caretakers vs. the ones who only afford a low-resolution home that shows them advertisements through their brain interface, etc. are still all too believable.
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. # (not visible on web)
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!
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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Normally I don’t get the loaded fries, but dammit, I biked up and down a bunch of hills this evening, so I’m going to call it retroactive carb loading.
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.
Well, the function name tells me what it does, the commit message tells me that it was intentional….but I wish I’d left a comment 4 years ago telling future me why I made that change.
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