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

Browsers

I found a few interesting articles to check out on browsers. One blogger insists that Pale Moon and related UXP browsers are the way to go, for web privacy. I find that I am staying with SeaMonkey except in cases where a website patently won’t work.

Pale Moon Hardening Guide https://blackgnu.net/palemoon-hardening.htmlUXP

UXP Browser Bundle https://albusluna.com/uxp/index.html

UXP Browser https://docs.temenos.com/ndocs/Solutions/Technology/Interaction_Framework/uxp/Browser/uxp/uxp.htm

Signal

I have stopped using Signal, because I don’t trust it; but I see that Russians are trusting it more and more, among other means, to get around censorship.

How Russian citizens evade Putin’s censorship – Protocol https://www.protocol.com/russian-internet-crackdown

Here are a couple of other articles regarding Signal:

Tell HN: iOS Signal eats your disk space | Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30972546

Moxie Marlinspike has stepped down as CEO of Signal – The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/10/22876891/signal-ceo-steps-down-moxie-marlinspike-encryption-cryptocurrency Other interesting links

Leave your shoes outdoors, these scientists say – CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/11/world/shoes-home-contaminants-scn-partner/index.html

I Liked The Idea Of Carbon Offsets, Until I Tried To Explain It https://climateer.substack.com/p/avoided-emissions?s=r

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.

EPSON MFP image

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.

Zelensky and Palestine

Zelensky is to address Israel’s parliament on Sunday. (The speech will be also broadcast in Tel Aviv’s main square). The mainly Arab Joint List party may boycott it, though Mansour Abbas of the United Arab List says he will attend. He spoke on Israeli TV saying that evidently this was because they (with their communist roots) consider Russia to be a continuation of the former communist state. But Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian who self-exiles in the UK, writes in the Palestine Chronicle [6] why Palestinians might not feel so enthusiastic about Zelensky:

The Ukrainian establishment… is also disturbingly and embarrassingly pro-Israeli. One of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s first acts was to withdraw the Ukraine from the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People – the only international tribunal that makes sure the Nakba is not denied or forgotten.

The decision was initiated by the Ukrainian President; he had no sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian refugees, nor did he consider them to be victims of any crime. In his interviews after the last barbaric Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip in May 2021, he stated that the only tragedy in Gaza was the one suffered by the Israelis.

Thanks to Manuel for sharing a Spanish version of the article.

The Libre Planet conference [7] has some interesting speakers. Unfortunately my attempts to listen to it have resulted in failure so far, due to the buffering lag. Perhaps afterwards I will manage to watch/listen to the recordings. Links

  1. Recipe Book (for download)
https://www.vikshepa.com/static/auntie-alices-recipe-book.pdf
  1. SeaMonkey (in wiki)
  2. Chana Dhal (The Guardian)

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/mar/19/chana-dal-recipe-tamal-ray

  1. Navigating our Humanity: Ilan Pappé on the Four Lessons from Ukraine
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/navigating-our-humanity-ilan-pappe-on-the-four-lessons-from-ukraine/
  1. LibrePlanet conference

https://libreplanet.org/2022/live/

Each Firefox download has a unique identifier https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/17/each-firefox-download-has-a-unique-identifier/

Google gives Black workers lower-level jobs and pays them less, suit claims https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/18/google-black-employees-lawsuit-racial-bias

Life imitates art as seven charged over robbery from Lupin set https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/18/seven-charged-in-france-over-daylight-robbery-on-lupin-set-omar-sy

Spanish driver who ate hash cakes claims diplomatic immunity from non-existent state https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/18/spanish-driver-hash-cakes-claims-diplomatic-immunity-menda-lerenda

Nicholas Johnson: Why I do not use a pseudonym Inspiring. https://nicksphere.ch/2022/02/28/why-i-dont-use-a-pseudonym/

Managing browser bookmarks

I use many browsers and don’t know of any service or addon that permits me to keep bookmarks in sync between one browser and another.   There are online bookmark managers and I have an account at Pinboard.in, but that does not really solve the problem for day to day use.

But there are some points of light.  It used to be that browsers were less standard in the way they handled bookmarks.  I remember being able to import bookmarks into Opera, but not export them.  There were even different formats for saving bookmarks.  Perhaps there still are – I haven’t used Microsoft’s browser for many years. There were browsers that had folders in the bookmarks bar and those that didn’t.

Fortunately all the browsers that I use now permit the import and export of bookmarks as an html file, and all have bookmark bars with folders.  So it’s easy to create a standard usage for bookmarks, back them up frequently and then import the backup file every time I start to use a new browser.  To keep things tidy, I first delete any  previous bookmarks, so I always have only the most up to date version of my bookmarks stash.

Because it’s so easy to maintain bookmarks now, it also makes sense to invest a little time in organizing them.  So all my bookmarks are under folders and subfolders that I keep in the bookmarks bar itself.  I have master folders for News, Email, Services, Forums, Social Networks, etc. and then subfolders of those.  I don’t claim to have perfected the perfect organization yet, and of course it depends on my personal use case, but I can say that I’m a lot more organized than before, and it’s thanks to the fact that browsers themselves are more standardized in the way they handle bookmarks.

I still use Pinboard.in, but mainly for individual news articles that interest me, and to which I may like to refer later for one reason or another.

I don’t so much use sync between browsers on different devices.  Mainly because I don’t really need that and partly because it means creating a cloud copy of everything and then trusting the browser company to safeguard that information.