Posts tagged "software":

Standards

Blogging, Tech Simplicity

Someone directed my attention to a piece on blogging by Joan Westenberg. She/they (I'm not sure aout the preferred pronoun) consistently writes such excellent articles.

I agree with her about the annoying trend (I guess it began too long ago to be called a trend) to abandon blogs and limit oneself to social media. However, I would want to include some other considerations to that article.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-blogging-in-the-ruins/

First, for those who never had blogs, never written anything for online publication, maybe never thought they could write at all, social media opened the door a crack, and then opened it really wide. It got many people writing, participating in discussions, honing their skills in compostion and other creative fields too. It's just a pity that that's where many people got stuck, and where others who were already creating joined them. So a lot of creativity and serious thinking have been sucked into a black hole.

Second, a blog does not necessarily adopt the model of an essay. Some blogs are simply web logs - they may include careful thinking on various subjects, but they may also be simply a journal, or an attempt to process the traversal through life, sometimes including comments on stories in the news, on films or TV shows seen, or be a travelogue, etc. One of the longest-running blogs is that of Steve Winer at scripting.com. He writes about matters that interest him and about his life, all in an unstructured conversational tone that is quite different from an essay.

What I aspire to do with my blog is to include some of the short posts that would otherwise appear only on social media, alongside longer form writings. Sometimes ideas for posts begin in my paper notebook, and sometimes in short posts or discussions in which I have taken part in the fediverse.

Third, as many people have pointed out, a blog, arranged in reverse chronological order as is usually the case, is not necessarily the best vehicle for catalogueing serious thoughts or subjects. This can sometimes be alleviated by devices such as tags and categories. But there are wikis and other " digital garden" formats that are better adapted to this.

However it may be organized, a personal website might ideally include short, medium and long posts that span the interests of a writer, along with discussion.

Here, in this currently org-static-blog and cherry-tree notes generated site, I don't really have a means of including discussion. I allow that to happen in the Fediverse, but hope to include in the blog interesting comments when they are made.

I've written a wiki style piece on my experience with blogging:

https://vikshepa.com/wikis/blogging-systems/

Journal

Successfully upgraded MX Linux to 21-3 (currently the newest version). I used the previous version for about four years without upgrading it (and I see that it is supported till 2024). But Debian 10 was becoming a little problematic. I had to use several backports, app-images, flatpaks, etc., so when my VPN stopped supporting Debian 10, it was definitely time to upgrade.

Keep software simple

In the early 2000s when I began to use Linux, a lot of things seemed a bit experimental and iffy. I would install and reinstall distros and software. Nowadays I feel that it is generally more stable, and there are long periods when everything works just as it should.

But occasionally things still go wrong. After installing a new version of Darktable photo editing software in a flatpak, the application started to crash. The problem was with the database - I hate databases; they so often seem to be a source of problems. I've now gone back to an earlier version of Darktable and hope that it will be quiet.

In between, I learned a bit about another photo editing program, Lightzone, which seems to be simpler and doesn't have a database - a plus, from my point of view. But still something wasn't right - there's always a learning curve.

I think a better solution to these matters could be not to require elaborate photo editing software at all - my new old Fujifilm X10 is capable of producing good results that do not need editing - other than cropping and rescaling - which I can do adequately and easily in XnView.

I have been having other software issues as well, with both the fediverse servers I use. Epicyon didn't work for a couple of days, and now the site won't open again. Hubzilla has suddenly stopped allowing me to add photos to albums that I create - probably a file authorization problem that has come since upgrading to a new version.

I think the solutions to these problems are probably not too difficult - but they will take time to identify, and I ask myself whether this is something I want to continue dealing with. My blogging software is so much more simple and trouble-free. "Simple and trouble-free" is irresistably attractive. Social media software is better for repeating or linking to posts and images that have already been published in my blog, while following others who have interesting posts. I'm not sure that I really need to run a server at all for that.

My current blogging software is a simple Lisp program created in and employing emacs. The photo gallery software is another small php program that doesn't depend on a database. I didn't create either of these programs, but the possibilities for something to go wrong are slight, and the system is fairly secure, since anyway the whole caboodle is uploaded from local files. Still something went wrong the other day, after a Chromium update. The blog began to use a wrong font. I solved the error by changing the font's file-name from a *.woff to a *.woff2, if I remember rightly. That wasn't too painful.

Diary: software, blogging, estrangement

Bits and bats

Shifting as I do between Markdown, BBCode, Orgmode, SPIP PHP tags and plain HTML there's a tendency to get a bit mixed up sometimes. Bill Gates would say that the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them.

Lately I haven't found the inspiration to write in my blog, but, on the other hand, I've written lots of little things in various other places, so I'll collect a couple of them here.

fediverse thoughts again

I've been thinking that from a practical point of view, there is probably something wrong with my conception that decentralization should be as fine-grained as a universe of individual servers in communication with one-another. I've had this conception for the last twenty years at least, so it's hard to shake. But recent posts I've seen about the Fediverse seem to demonstrate that this conception is expensive in terms of resources: at least, with regard to the way that federation of instances works: the more instances, it seems, the more expense.

There are other arguments as well for a federation that would be built on communities; professional, by interest, geographical, linguistic, whatever. Human beings are tribal by nature. And yet, if this is the basis for division and affiliation, there will always be a choice to make, because we live in more than one world. Do we choose an instance based on locality, or upon profession, for example? Outside of Mastodon, this choice is mitigated by the existence of groups that one can join, regardless of the instance. Groups have been around since at least GnuSocial and Friendica I believe, and have worked quite well.

I hope that the Fediverse will be built upon co-ops and volunteers, rather than on companies. Yesterday I discovered Chatons.org, which enables one to find small servers that are not established on a profit motive. Internet co-ops have always been popular in France. I first hosted my blog on Ouvaton, an early co-op that still exists today. And disroot.org in Holland is similarly based on voluntary effort and good will. My other Fediverse instance is with them.

I still think that for websites, decentralization can exist at the level of the individual household, but there too, it is more practical to gang together and host a few websites on a single server; preferably one that uses renewable energy and has a low carbon footprint. If I didn't have a personal interest in doing things myself, I would probably go with something like that. I still might, if I find a good offer.

Epicyon, meanwhile, has as its underlying philosophy the concept of small groups of no more than 10 people. Except for families and maybe small housing cooperatives, that's probably too few. A hundred or two would probably make more sense - maybe larger, if one wants to establish a community server. For example, if we would create a Mastodon server for every member of our smallish community, we would need a few hundred accounts.

Pleroma and Streams

Maybe my last post was a little harsh. I modified it slightly afterwards. Anyway, I felt an urge not to be directly on the social network that everyone's currently talking about. Disroot's instance runs on Pleroma. (Update: or rather "Soapbox". Is Soapbox still a front-end for Pleroma or a fork of it? - it isn't so clear). Anyway, for now, I'm squatting there. Yesterday I also read about Mike McGirvin's new effort, Streams, about which he says

From day one the question was how to build a federated/decentralised communication stack that provides more control over your privacy, and respects all people and cultures - including those which have a different political bias; while allowing them to all co-exist in the same space (and without killing each other).

and:

The current name of this repository [Streams] implies fluidity. As a brand or product it technically does not exist. This is also intentional.

This implies openness; the openness of the open web, and I like that. Human beings are clannish. That's always going to be the case. I dislike this quality when we gather around meeting points such as nationhood, religion, party politics, gender… and also social network brands.

The way it plays out is exemplified in the current gathering around Mastodon. Mastodon did not invent the idea of federated social networks. There existed StatusNet and GnuSocial (based on the StatusNet protocol), Friendica and Red Matrix. Then came the ActivityPub protocol and Mastodon (which initially also supported GnuSocial). Since Mastodon had the flavour and the brand identity that people were looking for, it proved to be a greater success. The above narrative leaves out developments such as Diaspora, SSB and other networks that do not easily federate with each other.

Social networking should be something as generic and white-label as email and XMPP. It should be possible to read and participate through various means, such as commercial networks, community websites and phone and desktop applications.

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.

SeaMonkey browser has a very good solution to RSS news feeds. It's easy to subscribe, and it arranges them like email messages under separate folders. It's easy, quick and responsive to skim through news feeds. Yet although SeaMonkey's presentation is not what you would call ugly - and there are worse examples of feed aggregators - I have to force myself to go there and start reading. Back when I was using Google Reader and Feedly, it was easier.

Similarly, Thunderbird, which derives from SeaMonkey, is an excellent email client, but, try as I might, I find myself steering towards webmail clients such as Fastmail's (and Gmail's for the office). I often read mail in the webmail client, then compose the replies in Thunderbird, which gives me more control.

Wikis are sometimes a better solution for building websites than blogs. Material is arranged by subject rather than chronology for one thing. Yet when I try to read articles produced in Dokuwiki and Mediawiki, for example, I am often put off by the way they look. They are just too boringly plain for me, I suppose.

LibreOffice is a fine wordprocessor, and for me just as good as, and easier to use, than its commercial competitors. But, when I write text, I will usually prefer a simple text editor. I think I'm put off by all those tool bars, rows of icons and the menu system.

My taste is not necessarily dictated by what's considered slick. I dislike many modern websites, with their oversized graphics, animation and glitzy formatting. Similarly many shopping sites are attrocious (could that be the real reason why I cancelled my Amazon account?). But I often like simple blogs that use attractive fonts, good proportions between the sizes of titles and texts, and nice use of graphics. And news media sites are usually fine for me (though I'm usually seeing them ad-free).

I like to think of myself as uninfluenced by style (Lao Tzu: "The sage is for the belly, not for the eye") and free software is often more drab than its commercial equivalents. But the truth is that my tendency to use software or visit websites is quite affected by appearance, even if the selection is not always conscious.

I once read that all of us weigh up and unconsciously evaluate a website within a few seconds of landing on its home page. And just as surely, our sense of aesthetics is influenced by trends and the conditioning derived from what we have seen before. It's a bit like cars. What makes the latest models look attractive to us, while those of a few years ago seem dated and old-fashioned? There's nothing intrinsically better about the new designs. A visitor from another planet would not necessarily choose the new design over the model of a decade ago.

Journal

I just noticed that there are many blog posts, mostly from last year, that I haven't moved over into this blog. When I find some time I will do that.

Today I decided to try KDE Plasma Desktop - which I had held off on a long while because I thought it was too "heavy". Well, I have to say that I'm loving it. Over the years since I last tried, it, it has grown into a very polished desktop environment. It has what I liked about Budgie, but so much more. If there are no problems with it, I will surely keep it.

My demands are not very high actually. I could have stayed with MX's native XFCE, but it was giving me some difficulties by not waking up after suspending the computer. In addition, I was irritated by its inability to pin applications to the panel like any modern desktop. So I drifted to Budgie, and now Plasma.

2022-06-05-Wordpress

I spent most of the day improving a WordPress website that I manage voluntarily. For that site and another, I use the flexible theme Weaver. The theme developer tries his best to keep up with WordPress's changes, but maybe it's a losing battle. It seems to me that at a certain stage Autommatic lost the plot. In the attempt to make everything simpler, they keep making it harder. I've tried a few times to adopt their block editor but each time gave up and went back to the classic editor, which itself is sufficiently cumbersome and unfriendly. I try to do some of the editing in html but Wordpress usually messes it up.

Today I tried to include a simple html accordion (the details, summary css solution), but Wordpress wouldn't let me use it properly, due also to RTL-LTR issues. I looked online for a solution, but the only one offered is with plugins - either the old or the new kind that take advantage of the block editor. The writer recommended the latter, and, in particular the Kadence block plugin. So I installed that, and re-initialized the block editor. The result was a horrible mess. Besides Wordpress's native block editor, I now had a button for Kadence blocks, in addition to another unusable button fo Extendify blocks. The latter is a form of malware. It somehow insinuated its way into the system without my asking for it, and provides options that don't work unless you purchase the plugin. In any case, I was unable to get the accordion working properly.

After more search engine research and failed attempts to get rid of Extendify and after disabling Kadence, I went back to the classic editor, where I soon discovered I already had a working system for accordions and had simply forgotten about it. That's another thing that happens with WP - it encourages you to download loads of ridulous plugins that you later forget about, so they just sit there slowing down the site. This was also my experience after initializing the block editor: Slowness happened after I'd initialized the block editor: the editing slowed to a snail's pace (in Vivaldi: it won't work at all in SeaMonkey - you just get a blank page).

But those problems were only the beginning. The majority of my time was spent in WP's customize module, where I tried, and eventually succeeded. to move and resize the site logo and adjust various spacing issues. Weaver has, besides the "customizer" module, an older classic theme editor, and I have often used these together. But this time I discovered that the classic theme editor will sometimes undermine the changes made with the customizer module, so it can no longer be trusted.

The attempt to put html editing into a GUI is understandable in modern web development because the underlying infrastructure grows ever more complex.

But for my limited needs, it is usually quicker and more satisfying to edit html and CSS directly. Moving the earlier mentioned site logo in the Customizer was a nightmare in WP's customizer, and there's a feeling of surrending control to the whims of a system that seems to "have its own mind," or at least its own quirks.

The further you get away from the code, the greater the feeling of helplessness. Coding can be exasperating too, but the frustration is more honest - I don't find myself screaming at the screen and cursing the developers - there's only myself to blame when something doesn't work out right.

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.

The advantage with Fastmail is that this is a trivial task. The disadvantage is that the Fastmail server is very limited in what it can handle. For example, the Novagallery software depends upon .htaccess redirects. They don't function under Fastmail. However, with a few more clicks I enabled Fastmail to display those photo albums instead. It doesn't seem to be possible to add a "home" button in the Fastmail photo galleries, so I will set the html target to open them in a separate browser tab.

The limitedness of Fastmail's server reminded me why I want to keep the system really simple. Perhaps, instead of installing Dokuwiki, I will create a homespun system of my own, that is even more simple, specifically geared to my modest needs, and which works on Fastmail and any other simple server.

In the meantime, while the files are being served from Fastmail, I will try to find a simpler and lighter solution for the web server than what Apache offers.

A couple of months ago, Fastmail dropped support for FTP upload. Now we must rely upon either webdav or the in-browser file manager. Neither of these are as convenient as being able to use something like rsync. So eventually I may want to find another solution for a backup web server.

2022-05-20-Diary

2022-05-15 - Server software

I've been looking at my various options regarding the home server; whether to try to restore my old Hubzilla installation, or something new. I have several old laptops lying around that could be used. I thought again to try to use Bob Mottram's freedombone/libreserver installation. It doesn't have Hubzilla, but does have another Zot/Nomad based platform called Roadhouse. But I instantly got stuck with that because his basic instruction for installation does not work, and the directions are unclear.

It may or may not be possible to restore the old installation, depending on how much damage there is to the disk. I'm afraid that I will plod through all the steps of using dd or ddrescue, only to find that it won't go anywhere.

I think the simplest will be to set up a new Debian system with Apache or other server software. For my needs, I don't even need MySQL or PHP, because I want to keep everything as simple as possible. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty with stuff but I feel tech-weary. And I'm also unwilling to follow someone's instructions to set up a system that I would never be capable of understanding myself.

When I was growing up there was a Sci-Fi TV series in which an alien civilization requires earthlings to create a machine of such complexity and advanced tech that no one understands what they are actually building. It could save the earth or destroy it. I don't think I watched the series to the end, but it was a great concept, and I often think of that when I'm attempting to do things that go way beyond my comprehension.

For my blog, working either with simple html or the Bastion Bechtold's emacs org-mode system I feel reasonably comfortable. (When I have the time, I would enjoy learning the basics of Lisp programming too.) For now, I know that the output is simple html files that I can save, serve and move almost anywhere, such as on my Fastmail cloud server. The same with photos and other features that I would like to include. But I would like also to add a simple social networking system too. The easiest seems to be Bob Mottram's Epicyon, which uses the ActivityPub protocol, but has no database or javascript. The last time I tried it, I couldn't get it to work properly; but maybe now it's more stable. I hope so.

I was going through my newsfeeds yesterday and read a fairly negative review of Genesis. I had a similar intuition regarding it. He claims that it is "solutionism" - whatever that means. But I think he is saying that it tries to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. We can choose to keep things simple if we want to: for ordinary html and CSS based websites we don't need fancy Javascript frameworks, web applications and all the wizardry that modern commercial sites use. We can dumb things down to the level that we feel comfortable with, and spend our time writing and creating beautiful websites that rely upon simple code, instead of either delving into multiple layers of technology or deploying platforms through scripts that work well but leave us floundering when something goes wrong.

Being dependent upon technology that is beyond our reasonable ability to understand it, without specialization, is as bad as depending upon platforms like Facebook, in that we surrender control to someone else. I want to be go my own way, and be independent both of the big companies and complex technologies.

Tech problems | stress

Just before an enormously busy period at work, my home server crashed. I'd had problems with the internet connection, rebooted the router a few times, and turned off the power, without shutting down the server, as a result of which it seems to have damaged the disk. FSCK gets stuck. It's going to take me a while to get back to normal, so, for now, have moved the blog back to my fastmail storage. It's easy enough to do with a simple static blog like this one. I just haven't been able to bring back all the photos yet. For now, there's a way to blog again.

Actually, I feel lazy about re-establishing Hubzilla, and I wonder if I actually need the hassle of managing a complex php mysql system when I can blog so easily in simple html, and know exactly what I'm doing. People can do awe-inspiring, wonderful things with the web, but I'm a Luddite. Lud is actually just down the road from here.

It was amusing trying to manage with my primitive technological interface when attempting to pick up people from the airport this week. The only way to communicate with them was WhatsApp, but I refuse to use that, so had to rely on someone relaying the back and forth between us. This happened on two occasions. But somehow it eventually did work, and I was able to pick them up.

Now I have a problem with presentations. One guy did his in Canva, an online presentation platform. I told him I'm not gonna sign up for the service, so he'd better download it in some other format. He didn't know how to do that, so I've sent him a video clip on how it's done. Another woman did her presentation on yet another online presentation platform, Emaze. I'm not signing up for that one either, and asked her to download it for me. She's probably just as clueless.

The truth is, I can manage with all these services better than most people, but the time when I would agree to use them is past. I'm gradually receding into my little Luddite low-stress paradise, and if people want something from me they will eventually have to come down to my level.

Yesterday it dawned on me how I am at once the calmest person in the world, but also among the most irritable. Ninety-percent of the time I'm guilelessly peaceful, but occasionally do get irate. It's because I choose a life-style that is peaceful, and not that I'm inherently calm. Take me out of my artificially concocted environment, and I'm peaceful no longer. I don't cope very well with adverse or challenging situations, and my threshold is fairly low at times. Probably what stresses me out differs from what stresses most other people out, because I would say that I'm also unusually patient.

That I'm easily stressed does not mean that I'm living with stress, and suffering its harmful effects. Yesterday I met someone who, at the age of 63, was advised to retire. He had been living such a stressful life and working such long hours that his heart and respiratory system were failing. He quickly had three bypass surgeries and indeed retired. Now, he looks peaceful. I didn't need my health to go down hill before deciding to live peacefully, fortunately.

writing in html - imagining a better future

2022-04-25 - bookmarking | music | dream

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

2022-04-13 A walk | the blog | browsers | Signal messenger | links

I have been feeling a need for a bit of seclusion lately. Maybe because in Israel-Palestine the holiday season with its seasonal tensions is on us again. I went for a walk in the woods and fields today and ran into a battalion of boy/girl scouts. One of them - maybe their security detail - was waiting for me as I approached, with questions about where I lived, whether I was Jewish, how relations are between Jews and Arabs there - he got mostly a stony silence from me as I marched through. Luckily I'm harmless.

Then I found a quiet spot to read Ibn Arabi and do a bit of writing. It's a lovely season and was a beautiful day; the wild chrysanthemums are blooming and the thistles are starting to flower too. Unfortunately I didn't have a camera or a phone. Blogging

I have accumulated several issues to handle in the blog, when I find time/feel like doing something about it. I already mentioned making the font sizes larger. Yesterday I found a couple more articles on static blogs, and one of these mentioned Google Lighthouse - a Chrome extension which is an even greater stickler than the tests that I have been using. It discovered a couple of things to improve. the SEO rating - where my blog suffers most - does not interest me, and could never be very high when I have included "No Index, No follow" meta, but there are a couple of other things to take care of. Regarding RSS, either I will learn to write my own, or I will depend on WP, which I have been using for archiving in any case. There may even be a way of using WP solely for RSS, with no front-end blog interface - I will have to check that.

I was looking again at Genesis in Lagrange. Because it is solely text-based, habitually lacklustre textual blogs seem even less inspiring to me when viewed in Genesis. One day I might decide to use it, but not now. Although I'm not a particularly graphic-oriented person, I do find that the likelihood of my reading a blog is somewhat influenced by appearances, and I have an unproven hunch that this is true of many people.

"My stack will outlive yours" https://blog.steren.fr/2020/my-stack-will-outlive-yours/

"My Static Blog Publishing Setup and an Apology to RSS Subscribers" https://tdarb.org/blog/my-static-blog-publishing-setup.html

2022-04-05 Hubzilla | Deezer | Gardening

I updated my hubzilla to 7.2, which was painless, except I discovered that PhpMyAdmin had stopped working. Shrug. Not sure why; hoping it will fix itself through Debian updates. I normally use it to make backups, so I had to do a backup independently.

I have cancelled my Deezer subscription, because I found that I rarely used it. Although Deezer's audio-quality is superior, I found that SoundCloud does a better job of guessing my musical tastes. Surveillance has its benefits. Here in Israel-Palestine it is impossible to take out a paid subscription to SoundCloud, though for some reason I have never encountered an ad on the service. I use it quite a lot, but hardly ever listen to music that would be regarded as mainstream, at least not in western countries. My wife subscribes to Spotify, but doesn't listen to it much.

We are having hot weather all week (around 33 C today), as a result of the phenomenon known as hamsin. But fortunately the house is still cool from the winter, so, if we don't open the windows, it's nice inside. Outside, the citrus trees are in flower, with their characteristic fragrance. Yesterday I took the brush cutter to the winter weeds, trying to avoid cyclamen and a couple of other flowers. Soon it will be snake season.

2022-03-27 Updating Thunderbird, growing the root partition

I managed to update Thunderbird from version 78, which was from the MX Testing repository, to version 91, which I found as a flatpak. Transfering the old profile was not so easy, but when it worked, it worked painlessly.

Along the way, I had to grow the size of the root partition on my my hard drive, by skimping on the swap directory, but that also worked easily. It turns out that you can grow an ext4 partition to the right, even when it is mounted.

With the help of SoundCloud I continue my exploration of mainly MENA Music. It just turns out somehow that one thing leads to another and almost all the tracks and the musicians I follow end up being from there.

True Sorry, by Ibrahim Maalouf https://soundcloud.com/adham-safena/ibrahim-maalouf-true-sorry

"Ibrahim Maalouf is a trumpeter who is also a composer and arranger for trumpet. He also teaches trumpet. He was born on December 5, 1980 in Beirut, Lebanon, but now lives in France.

He is the son of trumpeter Nassim Maalouf and pianist Nada Maalouf, a nephew of the writer Amin Maalouf, and the grandson of journalist, poet and musicologist Rushdi Maalouf. He is currently the only trumpet player in the world to play Arabic music with the trumpet in fourth tones, using a technique his father invented in the 1960s. Ibrahim is also the winner of some of the greatest classical trumpet competitions in the world."

2022-03-26 Mail servers and providers

I don't have the courage to run my own mail server. First, there's the difficulty with getting the security right. Second, there's the problem that my home server goes down whenever there's a problem with the electricity (I will get a UPS one day). Third, there's the likelihood of getting blacklisted by the big companies.

I mainly use Fastmail for my personal email. Fastmail has a tiered accounts system. I pay $25 a year for 2GB mail storage; my wife pays $45 for 30GB mail storage. The cost is a bit higher for new users. Only the higher-priced plan permits the use of a personal domain but, because we have a shared plan, I can use it too, as well as having Fastmail manage also a couple of other domains. The cheaper plan also provides a gigabyte of file storage, which is handy.

I will never run out of mail storage, because I can use Fastmail offline and store the mail on my own computer. Today I realized that since I have stopped using email on my phone, I may as well archive all of it locally. I will continue to use IMAP, rather than POP3 in case I am travelling without a computer and wish to reinstate the account on my phone.

Using Fastmail (or another service) locally in this way ensures that mail is not left on the server for a hacker to snoop on, and it is possible to set up PGP so the email provider is unable to read encrypted email at any point.

If it were not for the shared plan, and the awkwardness of asking my wife to move herself (and our domain name) to a different service, I would probably replace Fastmail with Disroot.org, which suits my ideals better. Although it lacks Fastmail's superior webmail experience, it would be ample for my needs. Links of the day

Crows possess higher intelligence long thought primarily human https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/24/crows-possess-higher-intelligence-long-thought-primarily-human/

Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source https://opensource.org/blog/open-source-protestware-harms-open-source

Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes, whistleblower alleges https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22995144/microsoft-foreign-corrupt-practices-bribery-whistleblower-contracting

In India, Modi’s vindictive Hindu nationalists have a new target https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-in-india-modi-s-vindictive-hindu-nationalists-have-a-new-target-the-hijab-1.10693069

What Le Corbusier got wrong (and right) in his design of Chandigarh https://scroll.in/magazine/1019474/what-le-corbusier-got-wrong-and-right-in-his-design-of-chandigarh

EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants https://www.politico.eu/article/eus-digital-markets-act-adopted/

EU officials have agreed on landmark rules clamping down on anti-competitive abuses by the world’s largest technology platforms, in a move that will set the standard for leveling the playing field across global digital markets.

In an agreement brokered Thursday evening, negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council reached a political agreement on the Digital Markets Act, which establishes a series of prohibitions and obligations for companies including Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon, and a number of smaller platforms. It is likely to include accommodation platform Booking and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

The new rules for so-called gatekeeper platforms, derived from years of antitrust enforcement in the digital economy, include restrictions on combining personal data from different sources, mandates to allow users to install apps from third-party platforms, prohibitions on bundling services, and a prohibition on self-preferencing practices.

Parliament also succeeded in convincing the Council of interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms. For group chats, this requirement will be rolled out over a period of four years.

2022-03-19 Auntie Alice's recipe book - opml files - SeaMonkey - Hubzilla Cards - Zelensky

When we moved from Yorkshire to Virginia in 1969, my Auntie Alice gave my mom a handwritten notebook of her cake and dessert recipes.

My mom treasured the book and used it a lot - it had everything from her syrup sponge puddings to her Christmas cakes. When I was there one time I scanned the notebook and have now collected all together into a 20-page PDF[1] which I have placed in Hubzilla's file storage.

If I would use it I'd want to substitute for ingredients like eggs and suet in some of them, but it's a nice thing to pass down to future generations. I tried in various ways to get the PDF size down, eventually settling on a batch conversion in XnView. Finally I got it down from 162 MB to just under 15.

On the way, I have added a wiki post [4] describing what I like about SeaMonkey.

2022-03-17 Hubzilla menus in mobile view - guest access tokens - PDF editing

In the morning we were busy with a guest. In the afternoon I had another look at a couple of things that have been bothering me regarding Hubzilla.

1: Menu system in Hubzilla mobile view. It is possible to create a custom menu that can be displayed on every page. However, the menu is not shown in the mobile version of the site; only the default menu is shown. For me, this means that, when giving a link to friends, it is better to send them directly to my blog, which is a website under Hubzilla's cloud file system. Here, I now have a responsive menu, which displays a "hamburger" menu on phones. (I have written how this is done in my technology wiki).

2: Access tokens. I find Hubzilla "dropbox style" guest access (which involves using links that contain access-tokens) a bit hit-or-miss. Today, when testing in a private browsing window, I found that the access token had stopped working completely, though it had been set to never expire. I went through the motions of saving the token again, and then the link did allow access - no idea why. But it worked for one private photo album, and not for another.

There is a separate problem that whereas the access token guest access seems to survive clicks across several Hubzilla pages, it does not survive the passage between my blog and the rest of Hubzilla. So if, as mentioned above, I use my blog as my primary give-out link, it does not help that I include there an access token. My conclusion is that, since most of my Hubzilla assets are public, this is important mainly for items like family photo albums. It is therefore better to keep those elsewhere, such as in my Fastmail storage. Although the links would be "public", they are hard to find without obtaining a direct link; for example, Google is not going to crawl those photo albums if there are no links to them from another website. Basically it means that when I have personal-type photos that I wish to share with the family or friends who lack login credentials, I will share these somewhere else.

There are, very occasionally, bits of text that I do not want to share publicly or get into search engines. These should not be included in the blog, but can be included in Hubzilla Articles then shared privately. There is an example in this current post.

The upshot of these reflections is that I can use the link to my blog in places like my email signature. This has a mobile view from which my other Hubzilla assets can easily be reached. And I will no longer worry about access tokens. When I wish to share a family album, I will place it elsewhere and share the link directly through email.

2022-03-10 - Phone messaging | Int'l Rescuers Day | Diaspora connections

After hearing from Ivan Zlax about Telegram and its founder Pavel Durov, I felt that it may be time to ditch the program from my phone. He dug up an old bio about him in the Internet Archive that has the following:

In 2005, Pavel completed his training at the Faculty of Military Studies of St. Petersburg State University with a specialization in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare. While training with the Faculty of Military Studies, he served as Platoon Commander of the Philology Department. Upon completion, he was awarded the title of Lieutenant of the Reserve Force.[2]

There have been numerous articles by Moxie and others regarding the security of Telegram, but this is the first time that I heard these details of Durov's past. I don't get the feeling from reading his posts on Telegram that he is turning over user data to three-letter agencies, but I also don't feel like he is being sufficiently open about things.

I have been looking at replacements for Telegram. One thing I considered was Delta Chat [3]. It has the advantage that one does not need to worry about not being able to communicate with existing contacts who do not use Delta Chat, because it simply repurposes email protocols. It sets up PGP automatically so that one can communicate securely with those who are on Delta Chat. This is a little like Signal, which uses ordinary SMS to send and receive messages for those who do not have Signal.

Parallel to my interest in privacy I have an interest in simplifying and minimizing interaction with my phone. This is also in line with recommendations for good operational security, because the less applications (and data) are on the phone, the smaller the attack surface. Some weeks ago I removed both email and NextCloud from the device. If one doesn't intend to use a dumb-phone (which are considered to be very insecure due to their reliance on old-fashioned protocols), the best thing is to bring the use of a smartphone closer to the level of a dumb-phone.

For now I have left Signal on the phone, and use it as an SMS replacement. A few of my contacts have Signal and do the same. But i don't feel inspired to recommend Signal to others. For one thing, it uses Amazon servers. If there were a decentralized messaging app that could also replace SMS as the phone's default messaging service, I might use that instead, but I haven't found one. I think it is possible to bridge between Signal and Matrix, but that defeats my purpose of minimalism.

Meanwhile, I continue to use Telegram on my computer as our family group is quite heavily invested in it (tons of family photos and videos, etc.) International Rescuers Day ceremony

Today we had the International Rescuers Day ceremony near the Spiritual Center. This emulates the event promoted around the world by the GARIWO organization. They actually refer to it as the "Int'l Day of the Righteous" but Prof. Auron, who initiated our local event, prefers the term "rescuer" to "righteous" due to the latter's possible religious connotations.

This year the village awarded the prize (which has no monetary value) to the Ta'ayush organization [4] and to the Afghan journalist and feminist activist Atefa Ghafoory, who wasn't present - she lives with her child in Sweden these days, after suffering quite badly at the hands of the Taliban. The annual event takes place in a dedicated area under the olive trees below the spiritual center, and we were lucky this year with the weather.

I was happy to hear from the Ta'ayush founder afterwards that David Shulman is still active in their activities and is writing a new book about these. His earlier short book, "Dark Hope" is excellent.

Int'l rescuers day

Einat, the new director of the spiritual center, invited a professional photographer for the event, which, though I haven't seen the results so far, was a good idea as an olive grove has its challenges for photography: under the blotchy sunlight, many of my photos had areas that were either too dark or overexposed. I didn't find a good way, in darktable to deal with the overexposed areas, though one article did at least address the issue.

I liked a photo that Manuel had posted on Hubzilla, so I thought to follow the photographer. She is on Diaspora, on which I currently have no current connections. I enabled the diaspora protocol in Hubzilla's admin and added the add-on in the applications panel, but still no luck with adding her.

My solution for people in non-compatible social networks like Twitter and Facebook is a bookmark tool bar folder that I check occasionally. Works fine for me.

2022-02-12: Revenge of the non-nerds

The fediverse and blogosphere are full of super-intelligent people who write code using JavaScript runtimes and web application frameworks in trying to find alternatives to the proprietary platforms of surveillance capitalism. I'm not a programmer or a developer, but I have sometimes tried to implement their solutions, which invariably claim to be even faster than WordPress's famous 5-minute install, and have mostly failed miserably. There are static blogs like Jekyll and Hugo and Pelican, and there are a bunch of alternative social media platforms out there. There are others who are attempting to ease the process of setting up home servers. With the latter, I tried to install YunoHost and FreedomBone (which now has a new name), but eventually found it easier to install a server "the hard way".

The truth is, WordPress and Hubzilla were not too difficult to set up. But there is so much happening in the background with elaborate systems like these that I know that without the help of experts, when something goes wrong I'm at the mercy of the nerds. So I keep looking for the simplest possible solutions that even I can get my head around. HTML and simple CSS are within the range of my comprehension, and when I can't solve a problem, there are others who have had the same problem and found a solution.

The static platforms that have worked for me have been the fairly simple ones, like Blazeblogger and org-static-blog. The other day I discovered the html collapsible text element and remembered that I had previously used a slightly more complicated CSS feature to produce a one-page blog: a single webpage that contains all the code and the blog itself, without JavaScript or anything complicated. Adding a new post can be as simple as using the html tags for details and summary. I've added an anchor link too, though that isn't strictly necessary.

As for uploading the blog, I can edit the file via WebDav, so that by saving, it's instantly online.

The result is an installation-free simple blogging system that doesn't require any programming skills and is easy to maintain. It can be hosted at home or on my Fastmail file storage. To make it a bit prettier I have also stored a couple of fonts on the server, so it isn't necessary to send people to a remote font server.

The elements that are missing from a traditional blog are an RSS/atom feed (I haven't looked for a solution so far) and a discussion forum. I could use something like Discus for that, but don't want to.

2022-02-10: Adventures with OsmAnd

I had a journey to a local town today, so I decided to do it with OsmAnd. I already knew the route, so nothing much could go wrong.

There's a lot to configure in that app. I finally got the navigation working so that the orientation works like Google Maps or Waze, with the direction changing with the movement of the car, rather than according to the compass direction (arrow always pointing towards the top of the screen).

I had the main map source as Microsoft maps, which was probably my main mistake. It should have been OsmAnd. Also, for the alphabet I should have chosen Hebrew, because the Latin transliteration of the Hebrew street names proved to be unintelligible.

The wrong choice of the map source may have resulted in some of the mistakes that the application made. A couple of its inventions were really wild and undo-able. Altogether there were about 5 such mistakes along the route there and back. Since I already knew the route, I ignored the wrong directions.

A second class of mistakes were in the audio directions. When it would want me, for example, to leave Route 3 and get on to Route 1, it says something like "Stay right on Route 3). Then when I got on Route 1, it would say "continue 17 kilometers to Route 1). The map itself knew that i was already on Route 1, of course. There were a couple of odd phrasings like this: if I hadn't been listening to the audio, it would have been fine, because the directions shown where OK (except for the earlier mentioned unaccountable errors). Next time I follow that route I will see if changing the map source has made a difference.

My OsmAnd speaks to me in Indian-accented English. That probably a result of a choice I made somewhere else in the phone. I actually prefer it to the American voice I hear on Google Maps, though it's not that I'm against American accents in general. I read somewhere that it is possible, in Google Maps or Waze to purchase celebrity voices such as the voice of Morgan Freeman. But since OsmAnd is attempting to synthesize street names from transliterated gobbledygook, nothing would improve that.

2022-01-27

I think the tiredness and weirdness I feel today may be a result of the 2nd booster shot that I had yesterday. It just occurred to me that that may be the cause. I hope it's the vaccination and not the virus itself.

Yesterday evening the storm struck out power to the village - they only fixed it at around 10:00 this morning. I watched an episode of The Expanse and went to bed.

2021-11-22-news-feeds-paywalls-books

Gradually importing my Wordpress blog

I've made a bit of progress in importing my Wordpress blog, though I must admit it is quite a struggle. Although I'm using Emacs for the blog, I'm very new to Emacs. As someone has said, it isn't so much an editor as an engine for the LISP programming language, with many arcane functionalities. You basically program Emacs to work in whatever way you want and do the things that you want. But I'm not a programmer and don't know LISP, so that means trying to figure out what other people have programmed for it and incorporating the useful parts.

Someone had suggested using a piece of Pelican - another static-blog generator - as a middleman for importing the blog from Wordpress. I tried that, unsuccessfully. One problem was that in installing the necessary files I filled my Linux root partition to 100% and basically had to abandon that whole Linux installation. This meant taking some of the generous space I had assigned to a Swap partition, creating a new Linux root partition, downloading and installing a new version of my Linux distribution (MX Linux) to there and reusing the home partition. It wasn't so bad - the actual re-installation took about an hour. Having learned the hard way that 12 Gigabytes isn't enough for a modern Linux system (though it used to be), I assigned 20 Gigabytes this time.

But the Pelican importer wouldn't work for me. It depended on various elements for Python that seemed to be incompatible one with the other. I gave up with that and started looking for different options. One was to try to edit the XML download file containing all my blog posts from Wordpress. I imported it in Libreoffice as a 1,000 page file and started searching and replacing all the extraneous parts. But that was ridiculous, and eventually the program crashed. I gave up on that.

I looked into various feed readers that I might use instead. If I could download the posts as an RSS news feed, that would halfway serve my purpose. So I discovered that Emacs itself has the potentiality to work as a feedreader. It relies upon a component called Elfeed. That works very well in fact. Again, it was a bit of struggle, during which I learned various new things about Emacs. For example, I learned that the configuration for the whole Emacs system is properly donxe through going into a command known as Customize (Alt-x: “customize” and then searching for the correct component to change). I also learned how to install new functionalities to Emacs without relying only on what the Debian package manager offers.

Eventually I ended up with a nice RSS newsfeed that looked very similar to the flat plain text files that I would need to generate in the Emacs static blog program in order to produce the blog. It would be easy to transfer them over into the blog. The only problem was that the feedreader was importing only a few blog posts, rather than the approximately 700 that I desired. Was this a result of some limitation in the feedreader, or in the RSS file produced by Wordpress.com? It turned out to be the latter more than the former. By default, Wordpress adds only about 10 posts to the feed. But you can change that easily in its Settings, under Reading. It is true that the maximum is still only 150. But that's a starter. I can, I think, import 150, then turn those posts into WP Private posts or drafts, and then continue - if I ever get that far.

The latter is a real question, because the process is still rather time consuming. Smarter people than me would easily write a program to complete the whole process quickly. But I'm still somehow doubtful that it would go well. In my experience, importers are rarely perfect. The import process involves changing various things and a program wouldn't be able to do that so well. So, in my own way, I'm proceeding slowly, and, in the meantime, learning various things about Emacs and the static blog engine under Org-mode.

Writing a static blog, even with the semi-automation, is never going to be quite as comfortable as writing in a Content Management system such as Wordpress offers. You make a simple mistake in a date or in incorporating a link or an image, and something goes wrong. But I have worked with static blogs before, and this system is actually easier than the ones that I've used, It's a huge plus to end up with perfectly readable plain text files that are not held in some database. I understood a while back that plain text files that sit in folders, without any dependency on some program to make them accessible, is the best way to work. Linux has various diary systems like Redbook but I don't like these. Contradicting myself again, I'm actually writing this in Cherrytree notes. I do like Cherrytree. I mostly use it for keeping a knowledge base for all the things I need to do on the computer. There's no way I could remember them, and Cherrytree is an easy way of rediscovering something I learned 5 years ago about Libreoffice or Wordpress. I write everything down. For example, with regard to my work on Emacs. Instead of having to remember the definitions for importing an image, I can copy that line of code into Cherrytree and go back to it.

Emacs Org-mode offers the possibility to entirely replace Cherrytree - in fact notekeeping and ToDo lists are the most common use for it. But normally, in that process, one ends up with huge files. It would be possible to separate those into separate files later, but Cherrytree has much easier ways of importing and exporting to and from just about everything, in addition to rich text formatting and various other niceties. In my experience, I'm liking to go with the simplest option, rather than the smartest, as long as autonomy isn't compromised. Autonomy is crucial. Digitalization constantly offers us so many shortcuts. Using Wordpress is a such a shortcut. Using something like Facebook would be another, much much worse, option. But the shortcuts end up making you work harder to recuperate what you want, and you end up, years later, doing what you should have done from the beginning, and taking charge of your own material. And this is also a matter of proficiency. A programmer has a higher level of ability with regard to software use than a person without programming skills. As someone with only middling capabilities, I'm obviously going to seek options that I can wrap my head around. If the solution appears to be too complicated, I'm going to opt for something simpler.

Because I'm not a computer genius, and lack many skills, I look for simple ways of doing stuff. Simplicity and autonomy are always my aim, even if the ways there are often convoluted. But it's a worthwhile effort. In a century, I imagine, it will still be possible to work with plain text files that don't rely on any proprietary system or complex databases. This Emacs Org Static Blog outputs plain text files that are kept in sync with nice looking web pages. Using such a system is worth the little extra effort. There are probably various other ways to achieve something similar with less energy. There were Posterous and Scriptogram, for example, which allowed one to post from email or from Dropbox. Services like these eventually run out of money and are discontinued. The same may happen to Medium, Tumblr (currently owned by Wordpress), Facebook and all the rest. Plain text files are the way to go. Cheap and best; future-proof, as much as something can be.

Linux on My Thinkpad

I am pleased with the transition I made from Windows to MX Linux on my Lenovo Thinkpad T470p. It’s a beautiful machine, but much better now that I no longer have to use Windows 10 in it. I am back in the operating environment that I know and love and don’t need to make any compromises. I have used MX Linux previously, on lower-powered and older machines, but although I know that I could easily run a fancier distro under my 32 GB RAM, I wanted something that I already knew would be stable and that I would probably stay with. Initially I tried installing MX with the Gnome 3 and KDE Plasma desktops, then reinstalled and tried Budgie. I liked Budgie best, but it’s a bit buggy, so I’ve gone back to XFCE. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with any of the others, but XFCE is the desktop that MX Linux comes with, and MX seems to play best with it.

Regarding software, as usual, I have added the tools that I use: Cherrytree Notes, Bluefish, Filezilla, KeepassXC, Osmo, Scribus, Calibre, for now. All of these are multi-platform and available also for Windows, so even for the few months I was working under Windows, I was able to use almost exclusively free open source software.

I installed XnView as a photo manager, but then I had a pleasant surprise when I found that GThumb has grown into a program that can handle most of my everyday needs, such as cropping, resizing, color correcting. Last time I checked, this was not so, and I’ve reluctantly used XnView for years since. Though it is free, and very nice, it is still proprietary software. On Windows there is FastStone, which is under a GPL3 license.

For my cloud needs, I have NextCloud for personal files. This works fine (though it doesn’t start up automatically, for some reason). For the office, I unfortunately have to use Google Drive. Here there is a problem, because Google provide no native system for synchronization on Linux. (They initially promised, and people have been screaming at them for years in the Google forums, but it hasn’t helped – it just ain’t gonna happen.) I tried to use the Gnome 3 and KDE Google Drive solutions (which was the reason for my mentioned experimentation with these desktop environments). The verdict: Gnome’s Online Accounts is still too slow to be of much use. KDE’s Google Drive synchronization is currently disallowed from authenticating by Google. I tried next to use a proprietary solution, Expandrive, because it is supposed to work like Google Drive File Stream. But, for Linux at least, this is completely Beta software (and expensive). I had an email from the developer, but he didn’t reply to my feedback. So I’m using InSync, but just for a single folder where I keep some active files. My hard drive is not large enough to contain all of the files we have on our Google Drive, and previously Insync somehow made a horrible mess, mixing some of our personal home documents in public folders – it took hours and hours to correct the mess and I don’t want to go there again.

Regarding support under Linux for the Thinkpad T470p, as far as I can see, everything is supported, almost out of the box. For battery management, there is a specific external module for the TPL battery management system that I needed to add (acpi-call-dkms). This keeps the battery charged up to a certain threshold in order to help preserve the life of the battery. The machine still seems to drain the battery more quickly than under Windows, however. The only thing that I have not yet installed is the drivers for the finger print reader.

Be careful with the WP plugin “Advanced Excerpt”

I wish I’d avoided this. It removed “read more” links on some posts with more to read, and created other problems. Disabling & deleting did not remove some of the mischief it had produced.