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Boris Mann

Open Source. Community. Decentralized Web. Building dev tools at Fission. Cooks & eats.

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Wednesday, March 3, 2021

• 1:27pm

  I have to do some more [[Webfinger]] research.

  I added a file to this site at .well-known/webfinger to try out delegating a [[remotestorage]] account, and it worked!

  More details on the Fission forum, working with @rosano.

  What else speaks Webfinger and can be delegated like this? It’s very [[IndieWeb]] feeling.

• 3:49pm

  🔖 Bookmarked: Dogehouse

  An open source [[Drop in Audio]] server. User logins are via Twitter or GitHub account. Built in [[Elixir]] and [[React]].

  Built by @benawad

Monday, March 1, 2021

• 1:33am

  🔖 Bookmarked: git-notify

  Communicate important updates to your team via git commit messages.

  Currently optimized for JavaScript / npm / yarn based apps, uses husky by default with [[Git Hooks]].

  via @jevakallio, who is also the creator.

• 3:17pm

  🔖 Bookmarked: Co-op Cloud

  “ Co-op Cloud aims to make hosting libre software applications simple for small providers. It uses the latest container technologies and innovations and configurations are shared into the commons for the benefit of all. The project is intended for small service providers such as tech co-operatives who are looking to standardise around an open, transparent and scalable infrastructure. &rdq... more »

• 4:48pm

  Nothing on fire that can’t just burn until morning.

Sunday, February 28, 2021

• 12:45pm

  🔖 Bookmarked: uMap

  “lets you create maps with [[OpenStreetMap]] layers in a minute and embed them in your site.”

  Open source under [[WTFPL License]], runs on [[Django]] and [[Leaflet]].

  Via Mastodon

• 5:20pm

  The UX of selecting time zones in Apple & Google is horrible. Mostly, filtered search as you type in country or city name seems the most workable.

  Particularly relevant as we are living in a more online, more distributed world.

  via @derrickreimer

Saturday, February 27, 2021

• 8:59am

  Chatting with @flancian who was wondering if he should support the [[Simply Jekyll]] margin note syntax in [[Anagora]].

  Specifically “what do you call this freak of nature???” when he saw the markup 😅

  I’ll do a search and replace at some point to convert everything to [[Littlefoot]] which is probably worth a write up [[TO DO]] [[Implementing Littlefoot for footnotes]].

  The install was completed right at the end of my birthday.

• 6:11pm

  🔖 Bookmarked: RecipeRadar

  RecipeRadar is a free recipe search engine and meal planner that respects your time, privacy, and ability to contribute feedback and improvements.

  Open source under [[AGPL License]]. Registered as a Community Interest Company in the UK.

  One of my life goals is to commit to a project like this and build out open recipes.

• 9:49pm

  Gurlic looks interesting: “ Gurlic is an experiment in building a new/old kind of internet community. It is primarily a place for discovering and sharing technology, science, culture and the arts. ” That’s from the about page, which continues with principles that make for an important and inspiring read. The one about domains stands out: “ Every resource (user, community, publ... more »

Friday, February 26, 2021

• 9:02am

  I’m having one of those days. Reserved a car from Avis. Show up at 8am. I have a paper temporary driver’s license because I just renewed it. “Policy” is to have picture ID, even though I’m on file, I always rent from this location, and the desk clerk and manager both recognize me. So: do I complete this rental and then never rent from Avis again, after 20 years? Probably. It’s policy after all.

• 4:05pm

  via @kemitchell’s blog, Jerome Saltzer’s “The Origin of the [[MIT License]]” in the IEEE Annals of Computer History. PDF

• 4:14pm

  Catching up on @kemitchell’s Artless Devices forum where he linked to duallicensing.com. Yup, that’s a pretty fantastic resource for [[dual licensing]].

Thursday, February 25, 2021

• 3:55pm

  I have been sharing a number of @genmon’s posts from his blog. Mostly, I just say, you should go read this: Let’s invent new interfaces, not new products. Yes I will read anything which links to [[Brett Victor]] and his [[Dynamicland]] project: “ a physical environment of smart light, human writeable code, and a social interaction with the computer. ” I can already tell that having ... more »

• 6:01pm

  7 hours of video calls is too many hours of video calls.

  There were fun humans on the other side of a number of those hours, but it’s just a lot of screen time.

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

• 7:19am

  Helder is starting a public monologue channel on the Fission Discourse. Monologue channels are something we developed for Fission’s internal Discord chat spaces that seem to have worked out well for people, so Helder is trying it in public.

  It’s been fun to evolve how we work as a distributed team.

• 9:05am

  Woo hoo! I am so stoked!

  I now have this site auto-publishing using [[Github Actions for Jekyll]], with a [[Fission Publish]] Github Action at the end.

  I used the nicely commented limjh16/jekyll-action-ts and then just added fission publish at the end.

• 11:04am

  Main thing I need to do to complete the rollout of these new journal logs – other than pagination – is to truncate long posts and strip HTML from them.

  For short posts, I should not truncate, and actually render markdown.

  Probably something like, if the content is bigger than 500 characters, strip_html and show 250 chars with a read more link. If less than 500, display the content.

  For reference, this post is about 480 characters without HTML tags.

• 6:03pm

  🔖 Bookmarked: Chiffre

  Privacy focused analytics with end to end encryption [[e2ee]]

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

• 2:30pm

  The metaphors around apps vs windows vs tabs — especially in a mobile context vs a desktop context — are becoming increasingly blurry.

  via Michael Tsai pointing at Nick Heer on unified MS Office App for iPad

• 8:46pm

  Via Roland, Tom MacWright wonders if the future of programming is more common data types: “ What if a simpler programming language had first-class representations of a lot more than strings and arrays? ” “ But if the aim is ease of use and giving power to people who otherwise wouldn’t be doing programming, type-rich systems with lots of assumptions seem like a logical first st... more »

Monday, February 22, 2021

• 12:03am

  It’s my birthday. I’m 46 today. Up late tinkering with my blog. And now I’m going to bed. Good night!

• 9:15am

  🔖 Bookmarked: HuJSON

  [[JSON]] for Humans (comments and trailing commas)

  Built by [[Tailscale]]. Found via nigeltao’s write up on JSON with Commas and Comments

• 9:15pm

  Like @vgr, I created a [[Clubhouse]] account so that I didn’t have to keep turning down invites.

• 9:52pm

  🔖 Bookmarked: Create a self-hosted chat service with your own Matrix server, Victoria Drake

  [[Dendrite]] is a [[Matrix]] server written in [[GoLang]]. This article walks through setting up on an inexpensive VPS.

• 10:10pm

  🔖 Bookmarked: High Lotek - Gemini and the Small Internet

  A good overview of [[Gemini]] by Andrew Roach.

  It’s a protocol partway between gopher and the web, without tracking, with encryption by default, respectful of users above all else.

  I like a lot of the principles, and I understand the push back against, shall we say, the “complicated web”. There’s probably some [[content web vs app web]] feelings going on here too.

• 10:14pm

  🔖 Bookmarked: Why I Still Use RSS

  However it wasn’t until I began working from home and everything in my life moved online that I really began to notice how beneficial RSS could be with relation to Digital Wellbeing. By selecting only the sites, blogs, creators etc. that I had a serious interest in, I could effectively remove the negative effects of social media and excessive online usage from my life.

  via Robin Rendle who in turn has some very interesting thoughts in their post.

• 10:56pm

  🔖 Bookmarked: A personal reader for Drupal, swentel

  “ I’m happy to announce that the personal reader project I’ve been writing for Drupal is now available for download! You can install it on your website, and as a PWA on your phone or tablet. No more third party applications, just pure HTML, css and the power of Drupal. The layout is heavily influenced by the Mastodon project, but needs more tweaks to fix the responsive behavior. ” C... more »

• 11:59pm

  Major surgery on the site, nicely celebrated from almost 24 hours ago :) Yes, working on my blog on my birthday has got to be tradition by now.

  What was Journals all got dumped into logs. Which is a collection in [[Jekyll]] but I’m going to call them all Journals: more granular daily notes and bookmark postings via [[IndieKit]]. The Journal page groups things by day.

  Somewhere in there, implemented [[Littlefoot]] for footnotes, and will mostly remove the [[Simply Jekyll]] specific syntax for margin notes, except for design reasons like the home page.

Sunday, February 21, 2021

• 12:27am

  Another test of the [[Logs]] functionality. A small x should give us Unix timestamps. You can check the current timestamp.

• 12:34am

  And this. This is the note that will go forth and timestamp appropriately in the [[Logs]] directory.

• 12:37am

  A final note. To bid farewell. At night. When it is late. And the timestamps are flowing into a git repo.

• 1:22pm

  I’m spending some time working on [[Moa Party]] today. I created a new [[Mastodon]] account for the project to complete the setup of all of the social accounts for the project. We were thinking that we might run our own Mastodon server at some point, but accounts can be moved pretty easily within Mastodon, so I went ahead and chose the [[Fosstodon]] server to create an account on. From the Foss... more »

• 2:41pm

  I get excited when I have a chance to try new software and…it just works!1 That was the case with [[git-bug]]. It’s a bug tracker that is fully embedded in git. You use the same git repo that you are using for code development to track and update bugs and issues. On [[MacOS]], brew install git-bug and you’re up and running. git bug user create will setup your local user. It will read from your ... more »

• 10:28pm

  Tinkering with the site, getting the logs section working. This page on group_by in Liquid is useful. Covers posts grouped by year and month, among other expressions.

• 11:13pm

  🔖 Bookmarked: IDGAF Takeout Roulette

  Can’t decide what to eat and you just don’t give a…? We’ll place a $20 takeout order and have it delivered to you!

  Seen via @IanColdWater

Saturday, February 20, 2021

• 12:28pm

  I decided that remote publishing of notes would be useful. So, back to setting up [[IndieKit]]. It has changed quite a bit since I last looked at it – for the better! The actual server you deploy into [[Heroku]] is one index.js file. Here’s mine bmann/indiekit-bmcgarden, which in turn is really just a copy of paulrobertlloyd/paulrobertlloyd-indiekit. I deleted everything except for Articles (wh... more »

• 4:28pm

  I have been meaning to tinker with [[OpenFaas]], specifically the non-Kubernetes [[faasd]]. This article – Bring a lightweight Serverless experience to DigitalOcean with Terraform and faasd – walks you through using [[Terraform]] and [[Digital Ocean]] to set things up. I’ve been looking for an open source [[serverless]] function runner to work with [[Fission]]. I think this could then also run ... more »

• 10:28pm

  Well, everything is working, but need to figure a few things out. I used [[iA Writer]] to post to the site and it works! I’ve made Article post types into what I call Notes here, the main post type. Posting from [[Quill]] as an Article isn’t going to work1, since it turns everything into HTML and escapes the square brackets in [[wikilinks]]. For the (Micropub) Notes post type, I’ve created a ne... more »

• 10:28pm

  A post from 2-20 to see what it looks like

Sunday, February 14, 2021

• 12:00am

  As I was finishing up my [[Drop in Audio]] blog post, [[Jam]], an open source [[Clubhouse]]-like system debuted on ProductHunt. I took a quick look at the code and it requires a few moving pieces and Docker, but it’s a great little starting point. After a good discussion with @flancian, I added a section to the [[Git Siphon for Moa Party]] to focus on post-per-file. We discovered that we need t... more »

Saturday, February 13, 2021

• 12:00am

  Starting last night, I seriously started using my new [[reMarkable]] paper tablet. I read @arcalinea’s [[Decentralized Social Ecosystem Review]] and highlighted sections and scribbled notes on it. Then, this morning, as I posted, I wrote out 6 pages of a blog post at the breakfast table, my [[Drop in Audio]] post. Lots of questions in the Twitter thread, which I’ll capture on the [[reMarkable]]... more »

Wednesday, February 10, 2021

• 12:00am

  Unfortunately, I have to tag this with Feb 10th, since it just rolled past midnight, but “today” is mainly the 9th when I talk about it in this post! “ Learned a very relatable term today: “報復性熬夜” (revenge bedtime procrastination), a phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late nig... more »

Sunday, January 24, 2021

• 12:00am

  I would apologize for some of the jargon in this, but in fact that is partially the point of this post. I am writing up notes from a discussion with @Flancian. We have been “chatting” on Twitter and Mastodon about various topics, and ended up booking a time to speak in person last Wednesday, [[January 20th, 2021]]. Very quickly on the call it was clear we were “pushing” context into each others... more »

Sunday, January 10, 2021

• 12:00am

  Marfa Theme Edits Doing some work on the [[Marfa Theme]] for my [[Micro.blog]] site. Running [[Hugo]] locally is really fast! I still have about 200 orphaned posts that I’d like to import into Mb at some point, which I use for testing, and with Hugo it’s pretty instantaneous. I’m stuck in the dark with Hugo a little bit, as I can’t prototype locally because how to structure this for Mb isn’t re... more »

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

• 12:00am

  Christmas Flu I’ve been sick with a horrendous flu since Christmas Day. TLDR, it was “just” a bad flu. I called the BC public health line at 811 on the 3rd evening of being sick, the nurse recommended that I get a COVID test. The next morning (yesterday) I went to the drive through at VCC and got tested with the saline mouth gargle. They didn’t test Rachael because she didn’t have symptoms. Thi... more »

Saturday, December 19, 2020

• 12:00am

  Microblog Sidebar Got the [[Micro.blog]] sidebar installed on the front page. Yeah, my username is boris, even though Boris Jabes has the boris.micro.blog blog name :) Hmm. Not really usable. It doesn’t include permalinks to the entries. Going to embed it on the [[Micro.blog]] page as an example, along with requests for what I’d like to see. PostHog Also installed [[PostHog]] which I’m going to... more »

Sunday, December 6, 2020

• 12:00am

  OK, so I am continuing working on this from yesterdayjournal.md I thought I’d actually install [[Hugo]] and get it working locally before I attempt to upload it into [[Micro.blog]]. brew install hugo and you’re done, which is great. Looking at hugo --help showed me that Hugo has a [[Jekyll]] import function. Since I had those social posts that I eventually want to get into Mb, this ended up per... more »

Saturday, December 5, 2020

• 12:00am

  Instacart Near and Far We’re talking to Rachael’s family back in Ontario, and looking at supporting her mom and helping out so that R’s sister Kathy doesn’t have to do everything. We’re doing a test grocery delivery using Instacart to see if that works for them. The large stores all have their own delivery, but all of the systems are terrible. Instacart is slightly better in that it is has one ... more »

Sunday, November 29, 2020

• 12:00am

  Went for a social distanced walk around Stanley Park with @seanlynch. Really great discussion! I mentioned [[When Tailwinds Vanish: The Internet in the 2020s]] as I do to all people building Internet businesses these days. Sean mentioned [[DBT]], which he described as “Jinja templates for SQL” – basically, a way to make SQL more modular and more maintainable, without having to have an abstracti... more »

Saturday, November 28, 2020

• 12:00am

  Flancian’s Anagora

  I’ve been having a conversation with Flancian about their [[Anagora]] project: a meta / multi-user knowledge garden. They have implemented [[Roam Research]], [[Foam]], and [[Obsidian]] adapters so far.

  Since I’m working on a [[Simply Jekyll Template]] repo that is less customized than my site here, I can use that to see about connecting into Anagora.

Friday, November 27, 2020

• 12:00am

  Lots of catching up with people this week. It’s Thursday night / Friday “morning” and I’m reflecting. Today (Thursday, that is), I met up with DH for coffee, which had me reflect back to [[Finhaven]] and the path that has lead here to [[Fission]]. Had a call with Amanda K one morning, sent her a link to [[When Tailwinds Vanish: The Internet in the 2020s]]. She was interested in my blog layout h... more »

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

• 12:00am

  Following up on researching external drives, I biked over to [[Memory Express]] to buy an external NVMe enclosure and a 2TB NVMe drive. The enclosure and drive I had researched before weren’t available and because of the pandemic they aren’t really allowing browsing. So, I had the sales person look up the different options for me. I ended up with the Vantec USB 3.1 NVMe Enclosure and a 2TB Cor... more »

Friday, November 20, 2020

• 12:00am

  I had a call today with Claire and Nandini of Check My Ads and Andrea. Check My Ads currently runs the BRANDED newsletter on Substack and were interested in [[Ghost]]. Andrea is starting a new business and communicating with a lot of people on a lot of different platforms, and was looking at a newsletter option of [[Substack]] vs [[Ghost]] and generally owning her content. I demo’d the Ghost ed... more »

Saturday, November 14, 2020

• 12:00am

  Art Gallery and Downtown Rachael and I actually slept in a bit (for us) and had breakfast at home, and then went out to the Vancouver Art Gallery. I spent a lot of the week only being indoors, on way too many Zoom calls. You need to book an appointment ahead of time, and have to wear a mask in the gallery. There were maybe 4 other people we encountered wandering around during our booking slot. ... more »

Sunday, November 8, 2020

• 12:00am

  Went for a bike ride in the morning. Super sunny day, but also cold. Vancouver winters have been getting brighter – but also colder. Need a balaclava as the final piece of my biking gear, to cover my ears and neck. Just spent 30 minutes setting up a UPS Payment Account in order to attempt to pay a bill online for customs brokerage fees. There is a 10-digit account number on the invoice, but of ... more »

Saturday, November 7, 2020

• 12:00am

  OK, I clicked the buttons and made what I think are all my final purchases for my Mac Mini, other than external storage. But first: I bought an [[Asus VG289Q Monitor]] at Best Buy earlier this week. Got it home and the screen wouldn’t stay on? At first I thought the wimpy Mac Mini maybe couldn’t drive it through HDMI and I needed a USB-C to DisplayPort adapter, but those adapters don’t really e... more »

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

• 12:00am

  Both Mac Mini and OWC Memory Upgrade kit arrived today. Don’t have a monitor yet, going to temporarily use the 15” portable screen that R uses for her second monitor. Following the OWC Memory Upgrade video, step two is having a torx screwdriver. Hmmm. Sounds like a T4, T5, and T10 needed. OK, looks like Canadian Tire has a complete overkill 66 piece Mastercraft Specialty Precision Electronics B... more »

Sunday, October 11, 2020

• 12:00am

  Ugh. Went to go for a bike ride first thing this morning and my tire was flat again. It pumped right up again and we went for a 25km ride to Burnaby Lake and back, but it’s clear that the root cause here isn’t fixed yet. I’m going to have to write this all down for Rad and get it fixed properly.

Saturday, October 10, 2020

• 12:00am

  Rachael’s [[Rad Mini]] arrived yesterday. So now we have two [[Rad Power Bikes]]. The [[Rad Runner]] is a bit too big for Rachael, especially with the center console blocking the “step through”. It was raining, so other than up and down the street a little, we didn’t use it much. Today we got her out on the bike and she got used to riding it around the park, and then went off to go up and down ... more »

Thursday, October 8, 2020

• 12:00am

  So I confirmed this morning that my [[Rad Runner]] bike wheel tubes are sold out even on the Rad website. I guess this weekend I need to get a patch kit and learn how to fix it myself. Set up my [[Social Co-op]] [[Mastodon]] account last night. You can find me at @bmann@social.coop. And yeah, I didn’t manage to get boris as a username! I’ll write a full blog post about this. New to me: /nick ... more »

Monday, October 5, 2020

• 12:00am

  Great lunch with @allbombs. He reminded me about the show [[Halt and Catch Fire]], which many people have told me about but I haven’t watched yet. Rather than doom scrolling for an hour, I am going to try and watch an episode before bed to chill out. Flat tire afterwards was less great. I’ve actually had a number of flats with my [[Radrunner]]. This time, I found the shard of rock or ceramic an... more »

Saturday, October 3, 2020

• 12:00am

  I did end up ordering a [[Mac Mini]] as a new home desktop PC, so now I need to order RAM. I had previously looked up OWC RAM, and I can order direct from them. Are there local places in Vancouver? Listed as resellers, dmac don’t list the 2018/2020 Mac Mini and Simply doesn’t seem to list the right RAM either.[[Why don’t small businesses keep their websites up to date???::rmn]] OK, guess I orde... more »

Thursday, October 1, 2020

• 12:00am

  I had just “one more thing” to add to the site last night, and so ended up staying up way too late again. I’m now trying out [[Obsidian]] for working with these notes. Again, the nice thing about “files” and some commonality around Markdown. And it generates an impressive looking graph! It doesn’t fully understand Jekyll markdown notes – I guess the spelling for wiki links has to be exact. New... more »

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

• 12:00am

  Reading [[Zeynep Tufekci]]’s article in [[The Atlantic]] This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic - It’s not R. Finally actually read some of the [[Foam]] stuff, which I did have installed in my VSCode. The [[Markdown Notes]] extension I’ve now configured to properly create new notes, which is great. Ironically, the way the actual Foam extension generates Link References at the bott... more »

Monday, September 28, 2020

• 12:00am

  The tiny mention of [[Simply Jekyll]] in yesterday’s journal turned into pouring all of my content into that template instead. Since I had to go into [[Cloudflare]] to update the IPNS link[[Documented in the Fission Guide::rsn]], I fixed my blog SSL issue. blog.bmannconsulting.com is still running on Netlify, and something with the Netlify certificate and the Cloudflare stuff changed. Cloudflar... more »

Sunday, September 27, 2020

• 12:00am

  Both Stream and Garden @ton asked: “ What could a site look like if it was neither a blog or wiki, but had both those types of content (both stream and garden, so to speak)? Any good examples you know of? https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/09/15034/ ” Well, that’s basically what I’m exploring here! I think notes == wiki and journal == blog, although journals are much more of a mix. F... more »

Saturday, September 26, 2020

• 12:00am

  Thinking about a desktop PC The iMac I have at home I inherited from Rachael. It’s not the fastest, especially since it still has a spinning rust hard drive. If I’m going to experiment with [[Filecoin]] mining to any degree (and assuming that it is at all feasible from home), I’m going to need something more powerful. I priced out a [[System76]]. I priced out the smallest of their Thelio deskto... more »

Friday, September 25, 2020

• 12:00am

  Self rendering Markdown I compiled all the Javascript Markdown scripts into a test deploy on [[Fission]] at https://petite-junior-angular-llama.fission.app. @-mentions as key network signifier Had a good call with [[Rabble]] talking about [[UCAN]], [[Planetary]], and the “discovery” problem in social networks. Specifically, mapping unique identifiers like a hash or a key to a username. And, tha... more »

Thursday, September 24, 2020

• 12:00am

  Hiring Software Engineers Bumped into @JasonMcLaren while out getting coffee from @Coho and had the exact same discussion around jobs and where to post them that isn’t LinkedIn (which is pretty pointless for software jobs). The question about what network or platform to post to comes up all the time when I challenge people on wasting their time with LI. @AngelList is still the one where I get t... more »

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

• 12:00am

  End of day notes and article links Thanks @elty and @expede for deep meaningful conversations today. Pointers to some of the links and articles we talked about: I’m still working on my [[Garden and the Gazebo]] post here talking about public / private notes. My [[Second Brain]] explanation is also WIP I was importing old posts and looked at [[Tomi Ahonen: app stores are tiny compared to global... more »

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

• 12:00am

  Sept 21, 2020 Progress in [[Vancouver CLT]] Jacob invited me to the [[Embassy Network]] Slack, which we’re going to use as our community gathering space for collaborators for now. There was a relevant post on a proforma for a house in Maine that can form part of the financial aspects of a CLT. I shared [[CLT Vancouver]], I need to see about going in and introducing myself, and finding out more ... more »