Posts tagged "internet":

Diary

In the morning picked up one of my grandchildren from the railway station in Modi'in (one of two such drives today, because in the evening I had to pick up son). I had a meeting with the accounts department people at the office, then spent the morning doing some cleaning and laundry (but then, forgot to hang the machine till about midnight, discovering it only on my room and lights out check.)

Diary

I cut the grass and the weeds around the house this morning with the brush cutter. It took about 90 minutes. There's more to do.

Journal

Happy with the photos I took yesterday around the village, and that more of them came out well than did not; a sign that I'm getting a hang of the X10. Just one or two of them were out of focus or poorly exposed.

Trends I'm seeing

Israeli TV news reported that homophobic hate speech and attacks are up 75% since the last elections, which were a victory for religious rightwing extremists, who want to reinstate "Jewish values".

Journal

I have picked up a slight cold, as often I do when cooler weather sets in. "Cool" may be a bit misleading for folks north of here. We haven't need to turn on the heating so far, but also haven't turned on the A/C for a month at least. Since we don't need either for several months of the year, perhaps our carbon foot print is a bit lower than the results given by those websites that try to estimate one's carbon emissions. On the other hand, most Europeans don't use A/C in the summer as we do.

Instance blocking; the open web

After so many years in the Fediverse, I thought that I understood it well by now. But looking lately at the landscape, through the portal of Mastodon, I'm not so sure. What I see there is a culture where blocking becomes the solution for whatever you don't like, particularly instance blocking.

Diary

I was making Earl Grey with the quantity needed for milk tea, so it came out too bitter. Just a flat teaspoon, then three or four minutes brewing time, is enough. I still add half a teaspoon of sugar. But I'm happy to get rid of the milk (anyway it's always milk substitute in our case).

How aesthetics influences my use of software and the web

It's hard to admit it, but if I look at my consumption habits on the internet, and of my use of software in general, I am definitely influenced by the way a site or an application looks. I will tend to prefer those that look attractive to me. I can point to various examples.

Journal

I have been working at a snail's pace at the Hubzilla installation, with flagging enthusiasm as I'm not really convinced of the need for it. Zap would have been a better fit, but Hubzilla has better instructions. I just had a look at Friendica; which I once used, though never installed. I suppose that's another a candidate. There's no platform that really wows me. I have always thought that the best way to use social networks would be a desktop client like pidgin. Android clients exist, but I see nothing similar in Linux. Anyhow, I still need a server.

2022-07-05 - SPIP CMS

Am having problems with another of the web sites for which I am responsible. It works on the SPIP CMS. I like SPIP, but there is always a problem with updates. I was a bit behind, so I did one update that broke the menus. That's something that I was reasonably sure I could fix, so I did the next update, and that one nuked the entire site.There's a PHP extension called sodium, that my web host, Hostgator, doesn't permit on their shared plan.It would be necessary to upgrade to one of their VPS plans, but their prices aren't really competitive for that.

2022-07-02-new-server

After my recent problems with the phone company's new fiber network and its restrictive modem, I decided to look for a VPS for my hosting needs.

2022-06-23 Home Server Woes

Well, unfortunately I did not succeed to use our phone company's infrastructure for properly hosting my website from home. Their fiber modem comes with various cyber protections and although it claims not to be operating under a firewall, it still seems to be. I was able to almost get NGINX to serve my pages without https, but the service seemed wonky, hit-or-miss and did not stabilize for the first 24 hours, at least. I don't want to give too much time to this, having already spent many hours getting things up and running with the old modem. Fiber is still a little new around here. Bezeq, the phone company, is trying its best to seal people in to its own service and does not allow one to use a non-Bezeq modem without using an adapter. Eventually I will probably find a freer ISP because there are competitors.

2022-06-22 Fiber | Israel-Palestine

Yesterday we were connected to the fiber infrastructure and, hopefully will receive more robust internet connection, though that flimsy wire hanging flapping about among the bushes, leaves me feeling rather doubtful. In the newer section of the village, the cables are buried; in the older section where we live, we depend on wires and poles, which occasionally get hit and pulled down by passing trucks. The phone company technicians are known for their resourcefulness. For years, our connection was dependent on cables twisted together inside an old coke bottle on our roof. I suppose the technician didn't have a proper connection box handy on his several visits.

2022-06-01 NGINX

Continuing my server odyssey, I managed to set up NGINX, eventually, after looking at several options for alternatives to Apache. Although I was drawn to Hiawatha (mentioned in yesterday's post), there were no current binaries available for Debian (the directory and repository came up blank). It would have been possible to compile it from source, but the instructions were long and complicated and its own documentation "strongly advises" using a binary.

20-05-31 Server again

I began the installation of Dokuwiki but had some difficulties along the way. The instructions seem to assume that one has set up a site for it under Apache, so I went about enabling that. But then, before I was able to proceed further, Apache began to give errors, which affected the server as a whole. I wasn't able to solve that problem so quickly, so I transfered the server content over to my Fastmail file storage, and changed the domain DNS to point there.

2022-05-30 Wikis and web servers

I've been looking again at several aspects of the site. On the weekend I spent several hours trying to set up Epicyon, which is intended to be a simple social networking application based on the activity pub protocol, created by Bob Mottram. I previously had partial success setting up Epicyon, under Mottram's Freedombone (now called Libraserver, I think). It didn't work very well, then, but there is reason to hope that it is more mature now. Be that as it may, I failed in my attempts. Not because of Epicyon but because the instructions for setting it up are geared for the NGINX web server, and what I have installed is Apache. There's a method of installing NGINX as a reverse proxy for Apache, and that's what I was trying. By the end of several hours what I had was a server that served neither through NGINX nor Apache. So I shrugged my shoulders and disabled NGINX. Now the blog works again, happily.

2022-04-22 - Hubzilla | state of the web

I haven't had much time for blogging lately, but, in my free time I have been tidying up my Hubzilla site and making various improvements. One intended improvement resulted in the accidental deletion of one of my wikis, but it was not such a significant loss. After going back and forth on the question of how to collect web links - such as for comment in blogging. Hubzilla's bookmarks module looks like it still needs some work, though it is very easy to share bookmarks to it, via a browser bookmarklet. See my channel timeline for a discussion on the pros and cons of the system. In the meantime, I will be using another Hubzilla module.

2022-03-08 - Photos | Big Tech | Registration Walls | Telegram

I posted a new photo album from our walk last Saturday.

The web itself

We had a discussion with Christopher Titmuss the other day, in which he talked about community. Someone raised the issue of “virtual community”, implying that his focus on real community might be a little backward-looking in the light of the advent of virtual communities. They gave the example of people in need being helped by crowd-funding. Titmus in his response focused on the surveillance capitalism aspects of Facebook and popular platforms. He said this was a poor substitute for real community, and that we should not delude ourselves into believing that there is any real community to be found in platforms intended only for the gain of their owners. He said that if he uses these platforms it is only to send announcements.