Posts tagged "software":

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.

Diary: software, blogging, estrangement

The new woman who is set to replace me when I retire in a couple of months seemed a little surprised today. First of all there was a screaming match going on in the next room over the submission of a fundraising proposal. I wasn't paying much attention to it as I was busy trying to explain some things about the job (maybe that surprised her too). Then, when I got into explaining about Piwigo (the photo gallery software we use), and kept praising the recent changes introduced by the "developer", she asked me what I meant by "a developer." She is used to big companies with hundreds of developers, not free open source software. She said she didn't feel safe otherwise because "What would happen if the developer goes away?"

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

2022-05-20-Diary

I decided to join D for part of her planned trip to Plum Village, so I'll be there for her "Lamp Transmission" ceremony. That meant booking flights. There are less options today, following the pandemic, and many trips to Bordeaux involve travel of 20 - 30 hours or more. I struggled for a couple of hours with Expedia, trying to find something cheap and convenient, but eventually gave up. D came to the rescue with E-Dreams, which, in this case, seemed to have more options with the cheapo companies like Veuling, Wiz and whatever. She was able to find a cheaper flight, which I eventually booked.

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.

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.

writing in html - imagining a better future

One thing that I like about this composing this blog in Bluefish editor is that I am writing it in the actual html used to publish it online. Not in BBCode, Markdown, some sort of WYSIWYG view, or a word processor. It's somehow liberating to use the actual code, even if I do find occasional validation errors afterwards. That's also why I want the code to be as clean and easy to read as possible. For example, I shift long html anchor links to the end of the post.

2022-04-25 - bookmarking | music | dream

I haven't completely given up on Hubzilla bookmarks, because it is so easy to drop them in through the bookmarklet. So now I have two parallel systems of dealing with links, each fighting to assert its supremacy.

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.

2022-04-13 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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".

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.

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.

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

I put some of my RSS Newsfeeds in order in Vivaldi. My idea is to use it for blogs, rather than busy news sources. For that reason I first added RMS’s political notes, and then removed it. Because if I want to use it as what Dave Winer calls “a river of news”, RMS dominates too much. But the links are good. It would be better if Vivaldi made it possible to use sub-folders for different areas (and hence sub-rivers – by being able to click on the top folder that includes each set of feeds).

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.

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.

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.